Stories behind building HashiCorp | Mitchell Hashimoto

Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp in 2012 and created many important infrastructure tools, such as Terraform, Vagrant, Packer, and Consul. In addition to being a prolific engineer, Mitchell grew HashiCorp into a multi-billion-dollar public company. We discuss:

How to structure large projects to avoid demotivation or burnout

The "A.P.P.L.E" framework for diffusing tense situations and handling trolls

How to decide what to work on
Mitchell's unconventional transitions from CEO to CTO and then back to an individual contributor (IC)
The quality that Mitchell values the most in an engineering team.


Segments:
00:00:00 - Intro highlights
00:14:19 - Impactful lessons from working at the Apple Store in college
00:22:26 - Origin story of HashiCorp
00:26:08 - College side project that turned into Mitchell’s first financial success
00:31:25 - Why infrastructure?
00:39:50 - How individual products came about
00:44:17 - Challenges of fundraising as a company with an umbrella of products
00:48:20 - Balancing being the CTO and writing code: “I didn’t want to be that CTO that just produced technical debt”
00:53:09 - Transitioning from CEO to co-CTO
00:57:26 - From CTO to Individual Contributor
01:06:03 - What’s next?


Show Notes:
Mitchell’s blog: https://mitchellh.com/writing
The “APPLE” principle that has guided Mitchell throughout his career: https://mitchellh.com/writing/apple-t...

Mitchell’s Startup Banking Story 😂: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-star...



Stay in touch:
👋 Make Ronak’s day by leaving us a review and let us know who we should talk to next! [email protected]

Music Credits: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...