EP29 The HashiCorp Story in 90 Minutes With Mitchell Hashimoto

In this episode, Grant sits down with Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp. The two dive deep into the history of HashiCorp, its products, its go-to-market, its success, and many of the challenges it faced along the way.

Mitchell provides a candid view into the company’s inner workings, starting with how he and his co-founder, Armon Dadgar, transitioned to become enterprise software founders. Their journey is rooted in technology, product, and customer needs, but they eventually realized they needed to transition to the enterprise. They knew the product requirements and recruited excellent leadership, including a CEO with extensive enterprise software experience.

Mitchell details the process of defining a framework to differentiate between features for the enterprise vs. features for the free and open-source versions of their software. The conversation turns to early designer partners/customers and introduces what Mitchell refers to, amusingly, as “hipster enterprises.”

With the news of the recent HashiCorp IPO, we can’t help but reflect on Mitchell’s words from this episode and celebrate just how far the company has come. As Mitchell says, “The HashiCorp mission still stands. We want to be that important piece of infrastructure that every company has.”

This episode is filled with great lessons for technical founders or anyone working on specialized products. We hope you enjoy it!

Mitchell Hashimoto is the founder and CTO of HashiCorp. He also created Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad.