Reporting by XinZhiyuan
Edit: David
This month, the open source cloud service platform HashiCorp completed its IPO, and the company's founder Mitchell Hashimoto held more than $1.3 billion. But the young billionaire, who quit ceo 5 years ago and chose to be a programmer, said that only solving engineering problems was his happiest moment.
Against the backdrop of a high global COVID-19 risk, cloud services and platforms have become an indispensable tool for enterprises and individuals to collaborate remotely.
Earlier this month, HashiCorp, another open source cloud services infrastructure platform, went public on the NASDAQ.
HashiCorp shares closed at $85.19 on the first day of trading, up 6.5% from the IPO price, and HashiCorp's market capitalization increased to about $15 billion.
This brought a considerable fortune to two of the company's young executives.
The company's founder, Mitchell Hashimoto, now has a net worth of $1.3 billion, while CTO Armon Dadgar's total holdings are worth $1.6 billion.
CEO Entrepreneurial Legend: 13-year-old developed game plug-ins, and made $500,000 a year in college
As can be seen from the name "HashiCorp", this company has been deeply branded by Hashimoto personally.
In fact, Hashimoto, who is in his early 30s this year, has been an idle person since he was a child.
A passion for programming since childhood, he founded his first company at the age of 13, which was actually engaged in providing customers with game cheating services for $25 a month.
Even the popular game Neopts at the time became Hashimoto's "target".
In an interview in 2014, Hashimoto recalled, "I remember receiving a warning and notification email with a suspension."
"I was 13 years old. I thought I had messed up, and I remember I was so scared that I was sweating all over my body. My parents thought I was just playing video games. Later, when they received the warning letter, they found out that they finally knew what I was doing after school."
Later, Hashimoto entered the University of Washington. He wrote a software that automatically selected courses for students, and this software was paid, and in this way, Hashimoto gained the first large number of paying users.
With this software, Hashimoto earned nearly $500,000 a year.
At the University of Washington, Hashimoto met Armon Dadgar and later became his startup partner as co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp.
Hashimoto and Dadgar were like-minded and began working together on open source software projects. The two co-founded an open source software development tool called Vagrant. Cloud computing was an emerging hot technology at the time, and what they thought at the time was to make cloud computing technology available to scientists.
So, in 2012, HashiCorp was founded to turn the technology into a business. The following year, Dadgar joined him as the company's co-founder.
HashiCorp is favored by investment institutions. In 2014, Mayfield, GGV Capital and True Ventures raised $10.2 million in Series A funding. Big companies like the BBC, Mozilla and Nokia are their customers.
For the first few years, Hashimoto served as CEO of HashiCorp. But in 2016, he stepped down as CEO and the company hired Dave McJannet for the position.
Hashimoto said that although the company has been around one title after another since its inception, he has been CEO and CTO, but in his bones, he is still the programmer who loves to write code.
"In terms of technology strategy, I can tell you what we want in five years. And in terms of business strategy, I struggled even more." Hashimoto said in a 2018 interview.
"When I start working again and again on specific engineering problems, that's when I enjoy it the most."
By 2021, HashiCorp has raised nearly $350 million from investors and institutions. At the same time, Hashimoto is considering exiting top management altogether and spending more time on programming than on travel and customer meetings.
In July, he announced that he was stepping down as co-CTO and becoming a "personal contributor" to HashiCorp, reporting to Dadgar, the company's sole CTO.
Earlier this month, HashiCorp successfully IPO, the company's market capitalization reached $15 billion after the first trading day, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Hashimoto owns more than 8% of the company. Valued at over $1.3 billion. His startup partner, Armon Dadgar, holds more than $1.6 billion.
Armon Dadgar sighed a lot about this. He said that when he started a business with Hashimoto, he didn't expect today.
"When we both started our business nine years ago, we didn't anticipate this moment — far from it. In many ways, we felt like two dogs clutching a car."
Resources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mitchell-hashimoto-hashicorp-ceo-made-500000-a-year-in-college-2014-12
https://www.businessinsider.com/hashicorp-open-source-ipo-mitchell-hashimoto-billionaire#with-technical-strategy-i-can-tell-you-what-were-building-five-years-from-now-with-business-strategy-i-struggle-a-bit-more-hashimoto-told-insiders-rosalie-chan-in-2018-10
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2021/12/09/hashicorp-shares-rise-in-latest-open-source-ipo-minting-new-billionaire/?sh=7f6a508c25d7