EP 102: Armon Dadgar (Co-Founder, HashiCorp) Reflects 48-Hours After Selling to IBM

**Logan Bartlett** (0:04)
Welcome to The Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're gonna hear is a conversation I have with Armon Dadgar, co-founder of HashiCorp. HashiCorp just announced a sale to IBM. Armon and I talk about that acquisition, as well as the inputs that went into selling from his side, including who he counseled on the decision, what it was like communicating with the employees, who all he heard from on the day that it was announced, among a number of other things.
Armon and I also talk about the journey of HashiCorp, and a number of the unconventional things that they did along the way, including launching initially with six separate products, and how that led to HashiCorp's success. We also talked about him and his co-founder, Michel Hashimoto's desire to not be the CEO, including them swapping back and forth on a monthly basis, before ultimately making the decision to bring in an outside CEO and Dave McJanet. We also talk about their principles for scaling culture.
Some of the things related to enterprise selling that were not intuitive and his observation that it is easier to get divorced from a spouse than it is to get separated from a board member. A really fun conversation that you'll hear with Armon now. Armon, thanks for doing this.

**Armon Dadgar** (1:18)
Yeah, thanks so much for hosting.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:20)
So, maybe just to start, can you give a brief layman's definition to someone that probably isn't familiar with HashiCorp or your product suite? What it is that HashiCorp does?

**Armon Dadgar** (1:36)
This is the explain to my mom what we actually do.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:39)
That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Armon Dadgar** (1:41)
Which is always difficult, given how technical the company is, but.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:44)
Your mom's probably familiar with it, maybe my mom, unless familiar with it at this point.

**Armon Dadgar** (1:49)
Yeah, so the way I like to describe it to people is if you think about, obviously there's this massive shift happening to about the cloud, right? So people are moving out of data centers, they're going to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et cetera.
Our view is that if you take any large enterprise, right? Think banks, insurance companies, governments, et cetera, they're not going to be in one cloud. They're too big for that. They do mergers and acquisitions. They have too big of an infrastructure. So fundamentally, they're going to be multi-cloud, meaning they're going to have some workload in their own data center, some in Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, et cetera.
So their challenge becomes, okay, how do I do that in a way that's going to be both efficient and cost effective, right? Because I don't want to have five different ways of managing one for my data center, one for Amazon, et cetera. I want one way that can support my whole multi-cloud environment. That's effectively the layer we sit at. So we're kind of sitting at that point, enabling enterprises to adopt the cloud and do multi-cloud in a consistent way.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:41)
So across all those different clouds, there's a suite of products and considerations, infrastructure, kind of middleware, if you will, that is repeatable processes that have been codified and turned into software by you all that allows this to have a common lingua franca across all the different clouds, all the different services, anything you want to spin up, anything you want to do, all that.

**Armon Dadgar** (3:07)
Exactly, yeah, so it turns into a portfolio of about nine or 10 products today, depending on how you want to count. So each of those portfolio products solve sort of a different point problem, but yeah, it's exactly that. Each of these is sort of fundamentally a multi-cloud problem. So you're going to have multiple tools, but the overall solution is looking at, hey, I'm a customer, I'm going multi-cloud, what are all the different problems I have to solve?

**Logan Bartlett** (3:26)
Makes sense. So you've had a big recent week, I guess, with a notable acquisition. So first congrats on that, or an announced acquisition, I guess it's expected to close end of this year per IBM statement.

**Armon Dadgar** (3:42)
Yeah, we're expecting it to close this year, but yeah, a bunch of, you know, there's always the kind of classic regulatory uncertainty in there.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:48)
Yes, yes. It seems like that stuff tends to go longer and longer. I guess maybe take me through the emotions you feel this week. I assume there's some like validation, some part of the journey's over in some way or different. It's going to be different than it was before. And so I imagine it's both validating and bittersweet at the same time. Is that fair?