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Armon Dadgar

Co-Founder and CTO, HashiCorp · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@armon ↗LinkedIn ↗armondadgar.com ↗

Armon Dadgar co-founded HashiCorp with Mitchell Hashimoto in 2012, helping create essential multi-cloud infrastructure and DevOps tools such as Terraform, Vault, and Consul. He guided the company through a multi-billion-dollar IPO in 2021 and its eventual acquisition by IBM.

16statements → 3claims → 0claims resolved → 3.88/5average certainty → 2.06/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 3said about them ↓

3 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 assertions · 3 opinions · 6 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Armon argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

259 words/min while actually speaking · 4.9 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Armon Dadgar: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 28 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,658 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Armon Dadgar is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 65%

Everything Armon Dadgar said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Dadgar: Professional services create a moral hazard against improving software usability
“Professional services are dangerous for sort of two different reasons. I think one side, as you put it, is that, you know, have this margin issue, right, which is the margin you're going to generate on professional services is not great, and that business does…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 10:33 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dadgar: HashiCorp delayed commercialization until completing six core open-source tools
“The promise we made with our investors was, if we're going to raise our Series A at the time, you know, I don't want to focus on commercialization until we've had a chance to complete our open source vision, and I think so at the time when we were sort of fund…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 8:20 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Disclosure
Dadgar: Global 2000 Revenue Subsidizes HashiCorp's Free Tools
“The commercial side of the business really focuses on the global 2000, but then the amazing part of open source is it lets us service sort of the rest of the market, you know, with a free tool. So in some sense, that's the nice thing, is we end up in this posi…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 9:48 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Opinion
Dadgar: Major cloud providers prioritize cheap scale over best-quality software
“What you tend to get from cloud scale is they're not there to build the best version of a thing. They're there to build, you know, the cheap thing that goes to scale.”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 11:59 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Insight
Dadgar: Hiring external CEOs fails when founders refuse to delegate authority
“I think what I've seen fail is People who are like, okay, I want to bring in a CEO, but I don't want to give up anything. I want to still be involved with all aspects of the business. And you're like, okay, so in effect, you still want to be CEO. You just want…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 21:05 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Opinion
Dadgar: Silicon Valley VC prioritizes high valuations over capital efficiency
“I think people have forgot what capital efficiency means, so I think To me, it's not impressive if you spend four hundred million building a hundred million dollar a year business relative to the same group spent a hundred million to build that thing, right? A…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 24:40 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Opinion
Dadgar: Top Silicon Valley talent is wasted on trivial startup concepts
“The other thing is solving hard and or interesting problems. It's like the number of Fitbit for dogs and Uber for Ikea assembly is, you know, disheartening. This is what the best and brightest is working on.”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 24:55 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Disclosure
Dadgar: HashiCorp originally created tools for themselves, not the market
“In some sense, for me and Mitchell, these aren't products we started off creating for the market. It was products we were creating for ourselves.”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 5:10 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Disclosure
Dadgar: HashiCorp missed the mark on several open-source products
“We didn't get all of the tools right. There's at least a few that I feel like we sort of missed the mark.”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 6:00 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Insight
Dadgar: Open-source tool adoption follows flatline, linear, and exponential phases
“What you'll look at with all of our tools is they kind of look, they have three phases of their adoption, right? They're sort of phase one, which is, you know, if you look at download numbers or any other metric, it looks like it's on life support. And for man…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 6:30 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Disclosure
HashiCorp persisted through two years of flatline adoption for Terraform
“Probably the tool we held on to the longest was Terraform. You know, I think Terraform going on a year and a half, two years was probably still in that flat line period, but we felt so strongly about it. That we weren't willing to sort of abandon it, and I thi…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 7:37 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dadgar: Cloud providers will only build infrastructure for their own platforms
“All of these clouds are going to build infrastructure that are tailored for Their own platforms.”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 12:41 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dadgar: Cloud provisioning problems guaranteed to co-occur with secret management challenges
“If I have a problem provisioning infrastructure in the cloud, it's a 100% likelihood that I also have problems doing secret management in the cloud. And it's also a 100% likelihood that I have problems deploying my applications, right? So these problems aren't…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 16:39 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Insight
Dadgar: Founders retaining product ownership should not hire product-focused CEOs
“If you want to hold on to product as your strength, don't go find a product CEO.”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 22:14 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Insight
Dadgar: Growing a company shifts founder work from coding to talking
“As you go from sort of a two-person company, what you spend most of your time doing is typing silently. As the business grows, you know, now I find myself rarely typing, but talking frequently.”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 22:47 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp
Insight
Dadgar: Edit long-form writing down to one page to build succinct communication skills
“Another thing that I find very helpful is writing. So actually saying, okay, I'm going to write a blog post, or I'm going to write a white paper that tries to convey this idea. And my first pass is 10 pages. Okay, well, how do I get this down to five pages? Ho…”
Armon Dadgar Aug 10, 2018 ▶ 23:35 20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The 3 Core Phases to Product Adoption and Why Valuation Obsession Must Change In The Valley with Armon Dadgar, Founder & CTO @ Hashicorp

The other half of the tape: Armon Dadgar's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2Tom Loverro 1

Every mention by year

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Why Founding Your First Company Is Like Learning Through A Thousand Paper Cuts, The Aug 10, 2018 19m
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