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...



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