TiEcon 2022: Dadgar of HashiCorps discusses company structure and transparency

Ritu Jha-

The IndUS Entrepreneurs(TiE) Silicon Valley seems to be opting for the young and restless over the tried and tested, picking young entrepreneurs over high-profile industry personalities for its opening grand keynotes.

At its annual TiEcon 2022 conference, TiE SV called on first-time entrepreneur Armon Dadgar, 30, co-founder and CTO, HashiCorp, a multibillion-dollar company that trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol HCP.

TiEcon 2022 co- convener Kamal Anand told indica, “He [Dadgar] and his co-founder have built a considerable company – not only with regards to market cap (over 10B) but [also] culture. They are a great inspiration for first-time entrepreneurs and others – both young and old.”

AGK Karunakaran, the TiE SV president, said he was pleased to exceed last year’s record of 31,000 registrations, with 47,000 this year. The three days conference all virtual started May 5 and concludes May 7.

Navin Chaddha(left) with Armon Dadgar at TiEcon 2022.

The keynote was moderated by Navin Chaddha, managing director, Mayfield Fund, who has been recognized as Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. His investments have over $60 billion in equity value and have created over 40,000 jobs. He has invested in HashiCorp as well.

Speaking with Chaddha, Dadgar said he started HashiCorp not to become an entrepreneur but to solve a problem. Dadgar said that after college he was a software development intern at Amazon, where he learned about company culture and leadership. He said that he felt that there was insufficient innovation in the cloud domain to address its needs and demands.

Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto, his co-founder, first met at the University of Washington in 2008. In 2012 they co-founded HashiCorp, According to a Wikipedia entry, it makes open-source tools and commercial products for developers, operators and security professionals working on cloud-computing infrastructure.

“We started HashiCorp to be our own first customer and really build the tools – products that we would want to use to solve these problems,” said Dadgar. “So we focus on a very simple goal, which is enabling the application to efficiently deliver applications in a cloud environment.”

He says that while superficially simple, the founders dealt with many hurdles – how to manage the underlying cloud infrastructure; how to secure assets and confidential data, how to address networking challenges, etc.

“We didn’t start a company saying, let’s start the company and then figure out what our idea is,” Dadgar said. “We really started with a problem.” It seems to have worked. Now the company based in San Francisco has over 2,000 employees.

Dadgar told Chaddha that for him it scared him when people picked a co-founder after a 30-minute meeting.

“For me and Mitchell, it started from a deep friendship first,” he said. “We spent many, many years together as undergrads, and then as colleagues working side by side before we became co-founders… We have deep mutual trust and respect… I think what makes it so powerful for us is our ability to set our egos aside…, trying to come up with the best answer for the company…, the best idea or the best product.

“The startup … is like a roller coaster. You have your great days where you’re riding high and you feel, like, indestructible, and you have your lows… I think your ability to sort of ride both of those out really depends on the strength of that relationship with your partner.”

Dadgar spoke of what he learned at Amazon,

“There was this notion about their leadership principles, and they have a very document-driven culture, the famous Amazon six pager,” he said. “So there was a lot of those aspects that we actually borrowed from organizations like Amazon – in terms of the written culture being very explicit and very intentional.”

He also brought up the example of Ray Dalio of the Bridgewater group, which believes in radical transparency and has a published book on corporate principles.

Dadgar also spoke about the flattening of the organization in concrete terms.

“The question was, what’s more, important for us,” he asked. “To hold the title of CEO or that the company succeeds?”