On the occasion of HashiCorp’s eleventh anniversary, company co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto sent a farewell letter to all employees and the community, Announced his departure from HashiCorp.
“I recently celebrated HashiCorp’s 11th anniversary, and looking back on the past ten years, I can’t think of a better way to spend this part of my life.”
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 by Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar (currently CTO). The current CEO is Dave McJannet, who joined the company in 2016 and previously held positions at Hortonworks, VMware and Microsoft.
Armon, Mitchell and Dave
Hashimoto revealed that leaving HashiCorp was something he had been thinking about and planning for a long time. His vision has always been to build a company where he would not be responsible for day-to-day operations and where other leaders could take over. As a result, he resigned as CEO in 2016 and left the leadership team and board of directors in 2021.
He welcomed his first child in September this year, which was what prompted him to make the decision to leave HashiCorp. “The world of cloud automation and infrastructure tools is still full of opportunity and growth, but after nearly 15 years working exclusively on tools in this area, I’m ready to branch out into something new.”
Hashimoto reflected on HashiCorp’s journey and paid tribute to McJannet and Dadgar. The GitHub 2023 State of the Octoverse report notes that adoption of the HashiCorp configuration language continues to grow, with a 36% year-over-year increase.
The outside world has various speculations about Hashimoto’s departure. In recent times, the company has caused a lot of disputes over changes to its licensing agreements. One industry insider believes that the founder's name is part of the company's brand, and his departure rarely heralds some positive development. HashiCorp declined to comment.
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