[HN Gopher] HashiCorp IPO today
___________________________________________________________________
HashiCorp IPO today
Author : colemorrison
Score : 227 points
Date : 2021-12-09 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hashicorp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hashicorp.com)
| redisman wrote:
| Other then cashing in equity has anyone found that a IPO has made
| a place better or worse for the employees? Big fan of Hashicorp
| products btw
| gpm wrote:
| I've seen the opposite, lack of a long promised IPO causing
| morale problems amongst employees...
| bri3d wrote:
| I bet most answers to this question will conflate IPO problems
| with simple growth problems, and the two are hard to separate.
| After all, a constant drive for growth combined with
| accountability to a public board usually makes strong
| leadership and strategy challenging - it's easier IMO for
| public companies to fall into "we must do what is easy to hit
| our numbers now."
|
| On the flip side of the same coin, the ability to offer liquid
| equity and essentially pay employees using the company's
| projected growth (RSU issuance) is often financially lucrative
| for employees old and new and if done correctly, can attract a
| different group of really strong people who aren't in a place
| to take the startup gamble.
| throwaway1492 wrote:
| Hopefully for their RSU awardees the leadership team doesn't
| hire a bunch of sales/marketing types, thereby increasing
| operating costs, and tank the stock price. Mostly the market
| expects to see continued organic growth in these types of
| companies. Does anyone have experience here? I've only seen
| it twice.
| [deleted]
| nemo44x wrote:
| Better for your wallet, but worse for the job. The company
| changes. The type of people it attracts to leadership roles are
| not the kind of people you'd start a company with. They bring
| their "processes and methods" that they promise will scale the
| company and then they insulate themselves by hiring their
| friends to report to them. The culture is corrupt at this point
| and the technologists that built the company begin moving on to
| new challenges and you see an accelerating attrition. But the
| new leadership doesn't mind as it removes credible threats to
| their questionable abilities. And they can backfill with more
| friends/lackies loyal to them.
|
| Within a few years post IPO the Composition of the company will
| have totally changed. The special place becomes a regular
| corporation. The hyenas will try to move on to the next Prize.
| ghaff wrote:
| That seems... cynical. The sorts of processes and. Management
| needed for a larger company are different than those at a
| small one. You _need_ more process. There's no way around it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The sorts of processes and. Management needed for a
| larger company are different than those at a small one. You
| need more process. There's no way around it.
|
| There is: _don 't go public or issue stocks_. In Germany,
| we are famous for non-public companies: the "Mittelstand"
| is largely owned by the founders or their descendants,
| which frees them from a lot of external influences - for
| better (companies can focus on long term goals instead of
| phony quarterly/activist investor-driven "KPI/OKR" goals,
| companies save on a lot of the bureaucracy that the law
| mandates for public/share-issuing companies) or worse
| (we're notorious for a lack of digitalization and progress
| as well as inheritance squabbles).
|
| An example are the retail chains ALDI and LIDL or
| manufacturers Bosch and Heraeus - all tens to hundreds of
| thousands of employees and many billions of net worth, but
| it's rare to even find somewhat reliable numbers on them.
| ghaff wrote:
| You don't have some of the compliance requirements then
| but you absolutely still need a lot of process if you
| have 10s to 100s of thousands of employees.
| V99 wrote:
| It may be cynical but it's also totally true.. I've
| personally gone through this whole cycle two separate times
| from smallish company -> private sale -> IPO shortly after.
| (~30th engineer in one and 11yrs, then day-one for the
| other and 7yrs).
|
| Say you joined a company relatively early. If you're still
| around years later by an IPO, you probably liked that early
| environment where you had low-to-no management overhead,
| large direct impact, and everybody was personally invested
| in getting shit done. For most employees that environment
| was already slipping away pre-IPO, but you know you're
| close to the finish line and can't get off now. What
| remains is quickly going to be gone post-IPO.
|
| The early employees get major cash-outs; some probably
| don't need to work at all anymore, so those that treat
| their job as a means-to-an-end and not their identity leave
| immediately. Maybe there's big incentives to stay for a few
| years, paid out annually, hung over your head so you don't
| quit immediately. But after a year of more managers and TPS
| reports and public company corporate governance you get
| your payout... That annual bonus structure practically
| forces you to decide if you want to leave now, or signup
| for a whole 'nother year of this, so a wave of people
| leave. After a 2nd year of this they're mostly gone to
| greener pastures.
|
| Less-early employees still get significant cash-outs in a
| large event like this. Maybe they use it to take some time
| off, it's been a long few years. Once you're out for a
| while, why not look at what else is out there on the
| market. Some of them find out they liked this new big-
| company stuff and want more of it, so they'll probably stay
| for years. Others are like the early employees and want the
| good-old days back, they have to go find it somewhere else.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The golden handcuffs can be pure torture. Your soul is
| being ripped out daily as the new leaders destroy
| anything that was great about the place. You go to an
| event and you can't even recognize the place anymore;
| interlopers everywhere and you're the outsider. You smile
| and cheerfully agree with them about "how amazing the
| culture is here" even though they've ruined it already.
|
| But you're 2 months away from an early RSU grant from
| vesting you a few hundred thousands dollars on top of the
| ISO's you haven't cashed out yet. But eventually the
| right opportunity comes your way and everyone is shocked
| you're leaving like you were when a legendary person left
| 6 months earlier. You take a pay cut and probably worse
| benefits and more ISO's than you could imagine to join
| that series a or b startup you connected with as
| soulmates and it's going to be OK.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure we're disagreeing. Yes larger public
| companies are different from startups both because of the
| larger part and the public part. I haven't gone through
| an IPO but I have gone through significant growth as a
| public companies. A lot of things change. Not necessarily
| for the worse. But it's different.
| V99 wrote:
| That is totally true and those may be great for the
| growth of the company. But as the parent was saying they
| are generally worse for the day-to-day job of the old-
| guard employees, and that's why most of them leave soon
| after.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| I really would like to challenge this. There's many times
| no need, but busywork have to feed busywork.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| And a lot of it is driven by compliance obligations as a
| public company. If you don't want SOX work and processes,
| don't go public (or work at a startup that's about to go
| public). If you don't want SOC2 work, don't go after large
| companies.
| zaphar wrote:
| SOX work can be such a shock to a company the first time
| around. Because many of the systems have not had to meet
| these obligations before they typically aren't built in a
| way to control scope and SOX tends to bleed into places
| where it seems like it really shouldn't.
|
| Those systems and processes are critical to staying out
| of trouble with the law after going public.
| ghaff wrote:
| SOX is one thing. But you also probably get your sales
| systems and management, demand generation, sales
| enablement, expense control, etc. etc. better
| systematized. And yes it changes things. A lot of people
| who like small companies don't like larger ones because
| things have to operate differently.
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| I mean, Jeff Bezos's company became somewhat large while
| being managed like a startup on its first day.
| wittycardio wrote:
| And working for a company with lots of process kind of
| sucks that's also just true
| Moto7451 wrote:
| For what it's worth the same people with the same sales pitch
| came in several years pre-IPO at my work. Ultimately they
| will come anywhere there is a lot of money to be made. Their
| replacements have their own processes and methods for
| scaling. Once those people move on the replacements will
| bring in a third round of this and so on.
| quartz wrote:
| I was at Facebook when the IPO happened and it was a pretty
| positive experience overall.
|
| We had an all-night hackathon the night before (one of the
| hacks was to wire into the "Nasdaq bell" button to post an
| opengraph story) and the whole company was mostly in a "stay
| focused and keep shipping" mode.
|
| The leadership team shared a few funny jokes each week at the
| all-hands events leading up to it talking about the roadshow
| but prep work for the IPO was mostly framed as "this thing
| we've got to do" and not as some kind of goal. The company was
| overwhelming focused on the work at hand.
|
| Overall the IPO was cool and I'm sure for many momentus, but as
| a somewhat newly acquired employee it was mostly a non-event
| and no one made me feel like I'd missed out by not joining
| earlier. Everyone was really just starting to feel comfortable
| at the newish physical HQ and morale was generally high. Most
| if not all the internal chatter was around the idea that "this
| journey is 1% finished" and at least everyone I knew there was
| in "let's do this and move on" mode.
|
| Mark had publicly committed to not selling any shares for at
| least a year so no one thought he was going to bail or
| anything.
|
| The stock price then proceeded to fall from $30's to the $10's
| and despite the on-paper financial hit for many of us it was
| kind of validating that "those silly people in wallstreet still
| don't get it" and that we weren't at the end of anything, we
| were still at the beginning.
|
| As FB then consistently grew for the next 9 years to nearly
| $400/share there was still plenty of upside so there wasn't
| much of a pre-IPO vs. post-IPO tribal thing going on either.
|
| In short, the culture was never built around "let's get this
| thing to IPO" so it wasn't really impacted negatively by
| reaching that milestone.
| taf2 wrote:
| Thanks HashiCorp... it's nice to write lines like this less
| often:
|
| ``` sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmpswap bs=4096 count=1M && sudo
| chmod 0600 /tmpswap && sudo chown root:root /tmpswap && sudo
| mkswap /tmpswap && sudo swapon /tmpswap ```
| altdataseller wrote:
| Don't understand why anyone would need their cloud products. Who
| needs Terraform or Nomad or Vault as a service?
| brightball wrote:
| I really like Vault as a stand-alone architectural solution
| fwiw. Great tool.
|
| I've seen interest increasing in Nomad lately as well. More
| conversations about it.
|
| Terraform has a huge following though.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I assume this is sarcasm? If not - portability comes to mind.
| manigandham wrote:
| Same reason companies also buy cloud infrastructure and
| platforms as a service; to offload the deployment and
| operations.
| mywittyname wrote:
| There are benefits to Terraform, even at basic levels. You can
| version control infrastructure, check if manual changes have
| been made, and quickly spin up new, identical environments from
| the same configurations.
|
| Yes, there are alternative ways of accomplishing this, but
| simple config files that can be easily validated and used to
| check against current infrastructure is an ideal way to do
| this.
|
| Before Terraform, I worked on a team that built what was
| basically terraform. It's just a natural, obvious, and
| effective way of managing cloud infrastructure.
| dominotw wrote:
| i think gp is asking about 'as a service' part.
| digianarchist wrote:
| I'll pick TFE because Nomad doesn't exist as a service.
|
| Audit trails, authorization, authentication, sentry rules
| (don't allow devs to open a public port for example),
| centralized automation (plans executed in order), dedicated
| build agents.
|
| That's a few reasons why we used TFE at Capital One.
| paulgb wrote:
| Curious -- is "used" past-tense because you're no longer
| at Capital One, or because Capital One stopped using
| them?
| digianarchist wrote:
| The former!
| kache_ wrote:
| Large tech companies that are paying hashicorp oodles of money,
| who get first class support from a really great team.
| hpoe wrote:
| I can tell where I work it came down to a simple question of
| having to maintain, control, update, publish and develop TF
| modules vs just buying the dang thing and not having to worry
| about it.
| Suchos wrote:
| At my company, they don't want to deploy OSS Vault on prem.
| Apparently we need the enterprise edition, because it is easier
| for our operations team.
| ignoramous wrote:
| They're like Docker for DevOps?
|
| > _...a common confusion is multi-cloud vs. multi-vendor
| services. The latter is way more common, especially at smaller
| companies. Tools like Terraform are often touted as "multi-
| cloud" and people ask questions like "Why would I use Terraform
| if I use only AWS?" And the easy answer to that is tools like
| Terraform allow you to manage anything with an API as code. For
| example: do you want to manage DNS, or CDN, or DBs, etc. (that
| maybe aren't on AWS) as code? Terraform gives you the way to
| learn one config language/workflow to make that happen, even if
| 100% of your compute is on one provider. From a non-technical
| standpoint, this helps your organization start learning non-
| vendor-specific tooling, which better prepares you from a human
| standpoint for the future noted above._
|
| > _I think the #1 value of multi-cloud is organizational: you
| build your core infra /app lifecycle processes (dev, build,
| deploy, monitor, etc.) around a technology-agnostic stance. As
| technologies shift, other clouds become important, new
| paradigms emerge, etc. your organization is likely more
| prepared to experience that change. This is something that is
| core to our ideology at HashiCorp, its point #1 in our Tao that
| I published 4 years ago! https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/the-
| tao-of-hashicorp_
|
| -mitchellh,
| https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/91afzz/why_multiclo...
| sharken wrote:
| Multi-cloud is a nice idea, but not for everyone.
|
| Where i'm at it has been SQL Server for the last 12 years and
| now Azure for cloud services.
|
| It's highly unlikely that will change for the next 10 years.
|
| And almost equally unlikely that Terraform will be used
| instead of ARM templates and Bicep.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| It makes very little sense. I mean, sure, maybe try to
| avoid vendor specific databases and use stuff like
| rds/managed cassandra/whatever vs Bigtable or dynamodb, but
| it's _MUCH_ cheaper to lean in as hard as you can to one
| cloud provider and just pay for a month or three of
| consultants to move you if you ever actually want to than
| it is to build that in from the start.
|
| k8s is a nice way to get there, if your k8s is running on
| gcp, aws, or azure it doesn't really impact your pipelines
| or process at all.
|
| Things are harder at the bleeding edge, I'm working atm on
| a site that's all in on aws lambda with server less
| framework and aurora, kinesis and such, to the point where
| a migration would mean a rewrite tbh.. And that's alright
| for them, they're ok with their cloud partner.. And it's
| cheap too..
| baby wrote:
| That's what I thought initially, yet I know a bunch of
| companies that do (like slack) and my ex company used to as
| well (facebook). It's not clear until you actually are faced
| with a problem at your job that this solves. The whole strategy
| of hashicorp is to make devs and infra engs life more easy
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Because putting a complete end to end self service solution
| like their managed offerings is years of man work.
| spatley wrote:
| Terrraform is declarative and describes the end state of what
| you want your system to look like. Executing terraform on
| anything other than blank slate requires that the deployment
| needs to know state of the current system. You can store that
| state yourself, or you can have HCP store it for you _as a
| service_
| cyberpunk wrote:
| ... Or you just throw it in a s3 bucket like everyone else..
| sytse wrote:
| Congratulations Mitchell, Armon, Dave, and everyone else at
| Hashicorp. We made a blog post to celebrate
| https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/12/09/congratulations-to-...
| outside1234 wrote:
| "please buy us with the money!"
| [deleted]
| 0des wrote:
| Starting to see this a lot, and it makes all the words of
| encouragement feel fake, because it is always using words
| like "we" and linking back to their own stuff. It comes off
| as hollow.
|
| nerds: stop bringing your own cake to other people's birthday
| parties.
| lflux wrote:
| Maybe with this IPO they can finally start reviewing terraform
| PRs again
| telotortium wrote:
| i.e. Hashicorp's IPO is today
| pas wrote:
| Hah, no IPO bump. Does anyone know any detail about their deal
| with their bank?
|
| https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2ah...
| bugsense wrote:
| It was a pretty bad day for growth tech stocks today. Also they
| were already richly valued.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| Could you explain what you mean by this? From their launch at
| 80, they pretty quickly went up to ~90, then dropped back to
| 83-84, which is up a few percent for the day. What sort of bump
| do you expect? (Legitimately, I'm not familiar with this sort
| of thing)
| loeg wrote:
| It is relatively common for a stock to "pop" significantly
| more than that -- like 20+%. 80.00 offering to 85.19 close is
| only 6%. E.g., https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/trends-in-ipo-
| pops-2021-03-0... .
|
| One obvious problem with a pop is that it implies your stock
| was sold too cheaply and you could have raised more money for
| the same shares. However, your IPO investors love it.
|
| Direct Listings are IPO alternatives that are sometimes
| purported to solve IPO pops.
| fragmede wrote:
| There were some companies during the original dot-com boom
| that immediately "popped" several hundred percent on opening
| day. Some of them even managed to stay there until the lockup
| period for employees was over, making them very rich.
| morepork wrote:
| 6% seems a pretty good bump to me. Enough to get people
| interested, not so high that the company left heaps of cash on
| the table.
| khazhoux wrote:
| My understanding is that an IPO bump is good for optics, and
| good for underwriters, but bad for company itself (money left
| on table). Is that right?
| manquer wrote:
| Only if the company is looking to really raise a lot of money
| in the IPO.
|
| The bump and later positive price movements benefits
| employees and founders a lot, therefore helps in retention
| and lower compensation costs for new employees etc and also
| investors who sell .
| loeg wrote:
| How does a bump help employees/founders? Don't they have
| some fixed number of shares?
| gen220 wrote:
| Employees' ISOs are computed based on the most recent
| 409A valuation / share price.
|
| If an employee joins with ISOs based on a $40 share
| price, and the market price is $35 or $15 a quarter or
| two later, it is bad for morale. A bump, even a small
| one, means everyone is "in the black", which is good for
| morale.
|
| Once employees are transitioned to RSUs, it's less of a
| concern, because they're still making money, just less
| money. It's a big concern for ISOs granted close to an
| IPO, though.
|
| This is why some companies switch to RSUs within a year
| or so of an expected IPO date.
| kevstev wrote:
| You are confusing ideas, unless I am misunderstanding
| you.
|
| Any ISO's pre-ipo will have some strike price, that is
| typically rooted in some valuation- the valuation per
| share is really just a function of the number of shares
| outstanding and this routinely gets adjusted right before
| the ipo, but the value of those ISOs or other grant types
| remains the exact same- its the same as reverse split
| where the share price doubles, or a 2 for 1 split where
| the share price halves but you have twice the number of
| shares- its financially equivalent.
|
| You are really concerned with the valuation of the
| company when your grants were given, and what the
| valuation of the company is on the open market, and in
| the case of ISOs really just where the valuation of your
| options puts you above water. The IPO price in itself has
| nothing to do with either of those things, aside from a
| very brief moment in time after the opening auction where
| the company is worth the IPO price * shares outstanding.
|
| The only way having an IPO go down on the first day
| actually hurts an employee is if they start that day or
| are granted stock or options at the IPO price, and I
| don't believe this has ever happened. Stock prices don't
| matter, total company value does.
| acchow wrote:
| The employees' shares are tax based on the IPO price, not
| the price at which shares beginning trading.
|
| So with a large bump (like 100% on Snowflake for
| example), you defer a lot of tax to the future. And if
| you hold out 1 year until selling, you change a lot of
| that gain from income into long term capital gains (which
| has a lower tax rate)
| spullara wrote:
| Any actual shares an employee owns at the IPO will not be
| taxed until they sell them. You might be referring to the
| synthetic RSUs that companies have been issuing that
| convert to real RSUs at the IPO (or acquisition) which
| does incur taxes.
| matwood wrote:
| In pure dollars leaving too much on the table is bad, but a
| nice IPO bump is free marketing for the company. A 20-30%
| bump means it'll lead in a bunch of news stories, and create
| some buzz around the company. Of course, this might be less
| important for a non-consumer oriented company.
| ralph84 wrote:
| At their valuation 20-30% is literally billions of dollars.
| You can buy a lot of ads with a billion dollars.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| did you say anything new that the above comment didn't?
| jakub_g wrote:
| Question to EU folks: do you see HCP at your stock broker?
|
| Out of curiosity, I checked the two stock brokers I have accounts
| with (Revolut and DeGiro), and it's not there yet.
|
| Do you know what EU (or French) brokers have the Nasdaq companies
| on the day of IPO?
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I just checked and found it on Schwab so bought a couple of
| share. Seems to work
| dddw wrote:
| Not on bux zero
| wirelesspotat wrote:
| HCP is on Freetrade in the UK
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Trading 212 and Interactive Brokers have it
| dandigangi wrote:
| Definitely going to be buying up shares. Love their products and
| see Vault/TF (among the other products) growing their role in
| cloud/security.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Thank you Mitchell and Armon. I essentially built my DevOps
| consulting company off the back of Packer and Terraform. I'll be
| a long term $HCP shareholder.
| nunez wrote:
| You and a bunch of other founders!
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Hi Carlos! Yes we were one of them. Hashicorp was a big part
| of our success (https://Contino.io). Hashicorp were nice to
| work with. Congrats guys.
| bugsense wrote:
| I think Hashicorp will enter monitoring next. Netdata would be a
| great fit (OSS, fat agent, huge metric granularity, deep infra
| and network insights)
| MetalMatze wrote:
| What makes you think they will enter monitoring next?
| bugsense wrote:
| They have some many parts of spinning up/change the
| infrastructure (Terraform), connect the services (Consul),
| run the apps (Nomad) but not their own way to tell you how
| well they do. Also monitoring is quite sticky and high
| margin. I think it makes sense but have no special insight.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I'm not so sure. There's very little wrong with prometheus
| or influx + Grafana. We're about due another iteration of
| logging stuff now we've all gone graylog->splunk->elk->Loki
| though. (And they all suck)
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| I'd love to see their managed platform on premise.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| I'd buy a few if they were 5 or even 30 dollars.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Yes I think they'll do quite well, might be worth investing.
| 28uwedj wrote:
| not at their current valuation.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Can someone explain the revenue declines in 2019?
| https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ
|
| Or is this a Google Fiance Bug?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| 99% sure those metrics are wrong
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Their symbol is hcp instead of hash, what a shame.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Well, it is kind of a hash of their name, no?
| digianarchist wrote:
| Their SaaS product range is called HCP
| https://www.hashicorp.com/cloud-platform
| jlmorton wrote:
| Collides with Hearst Consolidated Publications. Algorithm
| reduces entropy quite a bit, not very strong
| thinkmassive wrote:
| I would have preferred HCL
| not1ofU wrote:
| haha - thats pretty funny
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I don't know a single person who prefers HCL over literally
| anything else, but still, it's a happy day for them so I
| won't air my entitled little complaints and instead say:
| thank you hashicorp!
|
| You made life as a cloud infra beard better for a while, and
| I wish you all success going onwards.
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