HashiCorp

“IBM is still around because they went and bought Red Hat and HashiCorp, and now they're buying Confluent.”

“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.”

“In B to B after HashiCorp, there was only one IPO, which was Klaviyo in e-commerce last year.”

“They're the only SAS IPO of the last two years. The only SaaS IPO since Hashi Corp in December of 2021.”

“Yeah, those should be twenty billion dollar companies, Harry. They should be twenty billion dollar companies.”

“I think it was like the 25 K turned into something like 30, thirty five million bucks.”

“There's something magical about the thirty million dollar number, in my experience. When we can get products with thirty million dollars, they'll get to a hundred, right? So that thirty million dollar number really is important to us.”

“A company is comprised of four distinct plans and we draw it like this. It is in this order too. A company is both on a financial plan that then drives the people plan, that then drives the product plan, that drives the go-to-market plan, and that reinforms th…”

“So actually your whole company decomposes into these four categories, whether you like it or not. And understanding that there is no unified set of objectives across all of them, but rather actually objectives across all four of the core wheels of your car is …”

“It probably wasn't until we got to about a hundred million dollars in revenue that I fully relinquished some aspects of this. Hey, you're running finance. I trust you to do this. It wasn't until we hit much, much larger than that, that I was willing to relinqu…”

“Management structures are about laddered time horizons. So if I'm an individual contributor sales rep, like we give them six month quotas, they are only focused on six months, I can assure you. If you're a developer, you're focused on the next six months, the …”

“It is systems thinkers, not experience that wins. If you can think about how we architect that system, your job in the leadership team is not to pick the market. It is to re-architect the systems regularly. That is something that can be learned. Systems thinke…”

“And these companies are worth an impressive two hundred and sixty seven billion dollars and include some companies that Bessemer is really proud to work with, such as Procore, Toast, HashiCorp, and Canva.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”