A New Chapter for HashiCorp

Today is an incredibly exciting day for HashiCorp: we have officially entered the public markets.

Nine years ago, we started with a literal blank piece of paper and sketched out the plan for a portfolio of tools, together forming an ecosystem aimed at solving the many different challenges involved in building and managing modern cloud infrastructure. As former operators, we felt the painful gap in tooling and decided to start HashiCorp to scratch our own itch.

If the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, then our journey of hundreds of millions of downloads started with the first commit. From its inception, HashiCorp was built in the open source community. That community was critical to helping us validate our ideas, drive the product direction, hire our earliest employees, and create a passionate user base that has continued to grow and contribute back. As we celebrate this day, we are surrounded by people we first met through mailing lists, GitHub issues, IRC rooms, and conference hallways.

We’d like to give an enormous thank you to everyone who helped us get here. Firstly to our community, for all their support and passionate engagement over the years. We fondly remember the first meetups we spoke at, where fewer than a dozen people came to hear about the first software we wrote. In 2015, a few years later, we held our first HashiConf, when we were unsure if 100 people would show up in Portland to nerd out about DevOps, and eventually had to turn off ticketing because we’d reached the 350-person limit at the venue. So many of the people we first met at that event have attended every HashiConf since, and we now welcome thousands of attendees at each HashiConf event.

Our community is built around our products, and ultimately those are built, maintained, documented, sold, and supported by the many employees of HashiCorp. A huge thank you to everybody at the company, both current and former employees, who were part of the journey and whose hard work and dedication got us here. One of the absolute highlights of our jobs is working alongside the incredible people here, who continue to bring a passion for the products and technology while representing the principles of HashiCorp in their everyday interactions. The problems will change, the products will evolve, but the culture we’ve built will be the foundation for years to come.

What has enabled us to grow rapidly over the past few years has been the immense trust placed in us by our commercial customers. Our products underpin mission-critical applications and infrastructure, and we take that responsibility seriously. Years ago as a small startup, our first set of customers made a bet on us as their long term partners, which allowed us to scale and grow to continue to meet their needs. Thank you to those early customers who took that bet, and to the new customers who continue to place their trust in us.

Lastly, we know that infrastructure tooling does not exist in a vacuum. Today we have thousands of technology, reseller, training, and integration partners around the world. We are deeply appreciative of all the work that has enabled our technologies to be deeply integrated and the services that enable our joint customers to be successful on their cloud adoption journeys.

Today’s IPO represents a huge milestone for the company. We are now over 1,650 employees, with nearly 2,400 customers. What started as a few sketches on a notepad is now a portfolio of software that powers some of the most innovative and large-scale applications in the world. We are excited to celebrate the progress with our community, employees, customers, and partners but we are far from considering the mission complete.

As we enter this new chapter for HashiCorp, we are just as excited about the original mission now as we were nine years ago. We continue to build new products for new challenges, such as HashiCorp Boundary and Waypoint, which were open sourced at HashiConf 2020. As users increasingly expect cloud-delivered solutions, we are deeply invested in delivering a world-class experience with our HashiCorp Cloud Platform. This year we launched HCP Packer, building a new cloud workflow around the Packer project for image management.

As the pace of cloud adoption grows and innovation continues around new cloud services, application platforms, and architecture patterns, there is a growing sense of complexity and fragmentation. The Tao of HashiCorp has always focused us on solving for user workflows and integrating the many technologies of the modern landscape, while building the simplicity, modularity, and composability our users have come to expect. We will continue to do what we do best: solving problems and focusing on our end users. We hope you’ll continue to join us for this next chapter.