YouSaid · the spoken record

Armon Dadgar

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13
first
2018-08-10
most recent
2018-08-10
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Me and Mitchell kind of directly building the tools as it was in the early days. So I think that's kind of a fun transition.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think the way we kind of think about the next five years is how do we continue to innovate? I think in general, people tend to see Hashikorp at the forefront of a lot of what's happening in DevOps and cloud, and we want to make sure that that stays true. So there's some fun stuff in the skunk works. I think the other side of it is how do we continue to focus the open source community and our efforts around evangelism and sort of driving the ubiquity of the tooling? And then I think the third part of it is, as you said, we're relatively new to the commercial engagement. How do we invest in that and become kind of trusted partners to much more of the global 2000 than we are today? And I think it would be exciting for me would be able to sort of look back and say, you know, in five years, are we at 500 of the Fortune 500 partnering with us? So I think that'd be very exciting. I think for me personally, I think what's been fun is getting to be in more of a position where I can help grow people internally and help sponsor projects and then see sort of our internal engineering folks and internal kind of product management folks kind of grow and own that from there as opposed to necessary.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, I think many people know I'm relatively open about being gay. And I think the moment of coming out for me was actually very transformative, I think, in terms of how I live my life, which is, you know, I think I personally went through a struggle in going through that process of really understanding who I am and coming to terms with it. And I think in kind of going through that, it became very clear and sort of internalized for me that you have really only one life and don't hold back from it. Live it to kind of make it what you want it to be. And I think a lot of that sort of drives me to drove me to sort of found a company and take kind of the risks in life and knowing that it only comes around once.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “My favorite one, I think, is this too shall pass, and I think I heard a great story that it was a Persian sultan who asked the intelligentsia on the philosophers to come up with a phrase that would be true always and for everyone. And I think this too shall pass works in when you're grinding through 16-hour days for a few weeks or when you just closed a big deal and you're sort of elated. I think it's a humble reminder.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Two things. One, I think valuation obsession. I think people have forgot what capital efficiency means. So I think to me it's not impressive if you spend $400 million building $100 million a year business relative to the same group spent $100 million to build that thing, right? And I think we kind of get lost in valuation and size of round. 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 disheartening. This is what the best and brightest is working on.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Would be to the lighthouse by Virginia Wolf. And I think it's one of these books that taught me a lot about myself and what I value in life in a way that's relatively profound. I find myself still referring to passages of the book on a regular basis.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It's hard. I think usually it depends, I think, on the strength of our conviction, right? I think there's been some of our tools that probably the tool we held onto the longest was Terraform. I think Terraform going on a year and a half, two years was probably still in that flatline period. But we felt so strongly about it that we weren't willing to sort of abandon it. And I think the tool for us that was sort of the two that were faster was our SERF tool that I think was probably on the order of six to nine months before we said, you know what, we've missed the mark, let's try again.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “There is some level of project maturity, there is sort of a concrete problem that we're solving, and there's sort of this growing community. And then at some point they tick into that sort of exponential phase, right? And that's the point at which the community becomes large enough that it starts self-evangelizing. And so I think the really hard part, the sort of that period of torment is that flat line where you're never sure we're in that flat line because every one of our tools goes through this and this is the kind of the essential baking period, if you will. Or is it a flat line because we missed the mark?”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, I think it's really, really hard. And I think if you look at any of our tools, I think most people will sort of claim that they were an overnight success. But I think the reality is when you're sort of in it, 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 looked at download numbers or any other metric, it looks like it's on life support. It's the sort of flat line. And for many of our products, that sort of flatline period was anywhere from one to two years. And then they start going through their sort of linear growth phase where”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Didn't get all of the tools right. There's at least a few that I feel like we sort of miss the mark, and I think we tend to be honest with ourselves when we felt that we did miss the mark quickly, try again or sort of put the project on the shelf.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, half of it is sleight of hand. You do a good job hiding the failures. I think what it really comes down to is, in some sense, for me and Mitchell, these aren't products that started off creating for the market. It was products we were creating for ourselves. And what I mean by that is we had sort of acutely felt the pain ourselves in several prior roles. So we kind of knew what are the tools that we kind of have to use, what are the problems we have to solve, and where are the pain points of it. And I think starting from there, it became really clear to us that, okay, we know here's five or six different pain points that we greatly disliked having to use the existing tooling. And so could we do better? Could we start with that problem space and build a tool that at least we enjoyed using ourselves? And that becomes kind of the starting point for these different tools. So I think that was one side of it was having kind of a deep empathy for the end user and an understanding of the problem because we were those people. We were the end user. So I think that's one side of it. I think the other side is we.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “For us, when we first started, it was like, okay, cloud was new, it was 2007, so we expected a lack of tooling, but come 2013, we're at the ad tech company, we're still reinventing the tooling. And I think for us, it was clear that there should just be a common set of tooling in terms of how we provision our infrastructure, how we deploy our applications, how we secure them, how we do the monitoring, all that kind of good stuff. And so that kind of led to us saying, you know what? What if we started a company that just focused on this?”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, you know, I mean, I think the common thread through all of that is my good friend Mitchell Hashimoto. We actually went to University of Washington together and we're in the same computer science program. And so we ended up meeting each other fairly early in that program. And from the beginning, we were on a research project together working on sort of side projects and various, I'll call them startup lights while we were still in school. And eventually once we graduated, both of us ended up at the same mobile advertising firm where Mitchell was really focused more on the operational side of the house and I was more on application development and application architecture. And the thing that became painfully obvious to us sort of after working closely together for many years was there's this gap in the market of operational tooling, right? Whether we were doing it as part of our research project or as our own startup or as part of our day job at the advertising company, we found that we were sort of reinventing the tooling necessary to provision and manage cloud infrastructure, right? And I think what was sort of strange.”

    2018-08-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source