Nowadays, the world of the internet is a vast expanse. Everything that people do work on, create, and see, has either been created in “the cloud” or has a backup version on it.

The future really has arrived, hasn’t it?

Indeed it has, but for some companies, organizations, or individuals, it may have arrived a bit too fast. Adapting to the new cyber-landscape isn’t always easy for everyone. This is why technical help with navigating the cloud is more than welcome.

Luckily, this is precisely where a company like HashiCorp excels. Constantly producing different open-source software tools, HashiCorp’s ultimate goal is to help automatize struggling businesses and organizations.

HashiCorp is, quite literally, the host that welcomes people in the cloud. Its founders and CEOs, Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, created HashiCorp hoping to provide groundbreaking innovation in the field of software infrastructure.

By helping organizations operate the cloud successfully, Mitchell and Armon are genuine harbingers of the future. Their story is worth telling.

The Technological Prodigies

Born and raised in the USA to families from mixed ethnical backgrounds, both Mitchell (1989) and Armon (1991) were children of the modern age, through and through.

Easily recognizable by their overwhelming curiosity, these two prodigies had always gravitated around the internet and video games. As if they knew exactly what they were going to do in the future.

Of course, they didn’t get to know each other until much later. Still, seen in retrospect, their early journeys seem parallel, almost as if they were destined to meet. Things didn’t always run smoothly, of course.

Mitchell, for example, had a very strict Japanese-American family who couldn’t understand his fascination with video game cheats, especially since he was just 12 at the time.

When he graduated from high school, he had to choose between two alternatives. Either medical studies, financially covered by his parents, or studies in his desired field - computer science - which he’d have to pay for on his own.

Of course, he went for the latter option.

By helping the college register students automatically on their website and doing extra programming work at the mere age of 18, he had already become a professional.

But he was soon to meet Armon, who would change his life.

A Fated Encounter

Mitchell and Armon met at the University of Washington in 2008 while they were both doing a B.S. in Computer Science. Collaborating on a cloud-related research project developed by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they sensed how big this technology could get in the coming years.

They had the future at their grasp and decided to go for it. Armon texted Mitchell one night, proposing that they make their own company. They had their first meeting the very next day.

Of course, the company didn’t magically spring to life in a week. They tried to launch it under the name Amped, but it wasn’t meant to be, and they put the whole project on hold.

They finished their studies and went to work on other projects. Armon worked as a software development intern for Amazon, as an assistant at the University for Washington, and as a software engineer for Kiip.

Mitchell was a developer at CitrusByte and an operations engineer at Kiip, all the while working on his software-development tool Vagrant. Vagrant would, eventually, be the first tool in HashiCorp’s extensive line of software infrastructure technologies.

They happened to move to San Francisco at the same time and to be coworkers at the same company - Kiip. Obviously, the Amped failure wasn’t the end of their partnership. It was just the inciting incident for their real success.

At the beginning, things went rather slow. Armon and Mitchell kept in touch for years and were following each others’ careers until, finally, in November 2012, Mitchell launched HashiCorp, Inc. on his own.

Armon was quick to join as a co-founder in July 2013 and the rest is history.

A Blend of Integrity and Elegance - HashiCorp

Ever since its starting days, HashiCorp’s mission was to prove that in a world increasingly populated by technology, the core of all internet-related matters still remains with the people and the ties connecting them.

The cloud is all about connections - connections between people, but also between technologies, companies, countries. Establishing a world with fluid communication had been HashiCorp’s true aim all along.

Vouching for that fluidity is precisely HashiCorp’s niche - they produce specific tools and technologies meant to aid through every step of a company’s integration onto the cloud, while simultaneously automatizing and simplifying as many steps of this process as possible.

Physical limitations are obsolete.

This is best illustrated by the fact that it has been remote oriented since its founding. The first people to be successfully united by HashiCorp’s internet cloud services would be its own founders and employees.

These hard workers are developing complex and unique, yet elegant software infrastructures which help companies and organizations of all kinds better integrate themselves into the cloud.

HashiCorp has always been an open-source and “freemium” type of company, which enables anyone and everyone to use its products. Cooperation builds growth, growth builds progress, progress unites people and ushers in the future.

As such, it takes pride in being an exponentially growing company that is welcoming to diverse groups of people from all walks of life, as well as being a forward-thinking endeavor. But it mostly takes pride in it’s 9 main principles: vision, communication, kindness, humility, integrity, pragmatism, reflection, execution, and “beauty works better”.

Only a company rooted in its firm principles can build a successful future. And the numbers can prove that. HashiCorp’s first, Series A funding round from 2014 raised $10.2 million, while the 2020 Series E funding round raised a whopping $175 million, with a $5.1 billion post-money valuation.

Talk about success, huh? Mitchell and Armon really knew what they were doing. Hailed as the new genius billionaires of the 21st century, they don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

The Mammoth is Gaining Momentum: HashiCorp Today

With customers such as eBay, PayPal, Disney, and almost every US bank, HashiCorp is gaining momentum each day. As of late November 2021, they set an IPO with the value of $13 billion, with $68-$72 per each of the 15.3 million shares.

With hundreds of acknowledgments, among which are the Forbes Cloud 100 Companies list, and their partnerships with Microsoft and Google, HashiCorp keeps proving that success and profit sometimes do rely on talent and altruism. Based in San Francisco since day one, HashiCorp has only strengthened its principles and morals.

They currently offer an extremely wide variety of service-oriented products, all of them open-source. The most popular ones include Mitchell’s passion project Vagrant (established in 2010), which builds and maintains software environments through virtualization, the 2013 virtual-machine image-builder tool Packer, as well as 2014’s Terraform and Consul.

All the others, such as Nomad, Serf, Sentinel, Vault, Waypoint, and Boundary, just prove how increasingly complex and well-developed their infrastructure-establishing services have become.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the cloud wouldn’t be what it is today, if it isn’t for HashiCorp. With huge investors, such as Franklin Templeton, GGV Capital, Mayfield Fund, and IVP, to name a few, and a total of $349 million funding raised until now, the money can testify to it.

Nowadays, HashiCorp has more than 1,500 employees, several hundred customers out of the Global 2000, as well as an overall community of tens of thousands customers. All of their open source softwares get approximately one hundred million downloads per year, proving that a business which gives to the people, will get as much in return.

Through HashiCorp both Mitchell and Armon have made their dream come true. They’ve turned a passion project into the embodiment of the future.