The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Lemkin: Only two SaaS companies have gone public since late 2021
“I'm concerned that we've only had two SaaS-ish IPOs since twenty-twenty-one. We've only had two since HashiCorp was the last one of the bubble of December of twenty-twenty-one, right? Just got bought for IBM. If only had two, we've only had Klaviyo and Rubrik.”
Shah: Haystack turned a $25k check in HashiCorp into $30M–$35M
“I think it was like the 25 K turned into something like 30, thirty five million bucks.”
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…”
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…”
True Ventures generates full fund returns from one or two investments
“In each fund, we've shown an ability to partner with one or two founders where our investment in the company over time will end up returning the entire fund. It, Duo Security, HashiCorp, Peloton.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
IBM survived by acquiring Red Hat and HashiCorp
“IBM is still around because they went and bought Red Hat and HashiCorp, and now they're buying Confluent.”
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.”
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…”