HashiCorp Co-Founder Departs, Planned ‘For A Long Time’

‘My departure from HashiCorp is something I’ve been thinking about and planning for a long time,” Michael Hashimoto said.

Mitchell Hashimoto has left HashiCorp, the cloud automation and lifecycle management software vendor he co-founded in 2012.

Hashimoto posted about his departure Thursday on the San Francisco-based vendor’s website. In his departure note, he said he “couldn't have asked for a better way to spend” 11 years of his life.

“My departure from HashiCorp is something I’ve been thinking about and planning for a long time,” Hashimoto said. “Ever since founding HashiCorp, I've felt it's important to build a company where I'm not required for day-to-day operations and where other leaders can carry the torch over time.”

CRN has reached out to HashiCorp for comment. HashiCorp has more than 900 partners worldwide, according to the vendor.

According to a transcript of HashiCorp’s latest quarterly earnings call – held Dec. 7 for the quarter ended Nov. 30 – CEO Dave McJannet told listeners that HashiCorp is “working ever closer with the global system integrators,” putting the number of GSI partners in the hundreds worldwide.

However, he said the primary focus is growing a deeper relationship with cloud vendors including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

“On the system integrator side, our focus is around the skills gap that exists for the deployment and adoption of cloud technologies,” he said.

HashiCorp Co-Founder Grew Company

Hashimoto did not say what his next plans are. However, he has been working on Ghostty, a cross-platform, graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated terminal emulator, on the side since 2021, according to the project’s website.

The co-founder acted as CEO from 2012 to 2016, growing the vendor to more than 40 employees and seven figures of revenue, according to his LinkedIn account.

In 2016, Hashimoto switched to co-chief technology officer alongside co-founder Armon Dadgar. Current CEO David McJannet took over the top role.

The vendor grew to about 1,500 employees and 1,700 enterprise customers. Product downloads hit more than 100 million a year.

In a post Thursday on X, formerly Twitter, McJannet said thank you to Hashimoto. “I have immensely enjoyed the last ~8 years working together to build a company that has created value for so many users and organizations that use these products every single day,” he wrote.

Five years later, HashiCorp went public and raised $1.2 billion, according to Reuters. Hashimoto left the co-CTO role to become an individual contributor to the vendor, according to his LinkedIn account. Dadgar continues to hold the CTO title.

This year, HashiCorp wasn’t immune to the moderated tech spending by businesses, laying off8 percent of its workforce in June.

In August, HashiCorp switched Terraform from the open source Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) it’s operated under since 2014 to Business Source License (BSL) v1.1, according to The New Stack. The move led to the Terraform community starting an open source version called OpenTF.

In his departure letter, Hashimoto said he’s been “happiest” in this role “as a full-time, hands-on engineer.”

“The controversial worldviews such as multi-cloud that we founded this company on are now mainstream and broadly accepted,” he wrote. “The software that I helped start is used industry-wide from hobbyists to professionals at the world's largest companies. And, most recently, the GitHub Octoverse report found that HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) has once again emerged as one of the top languages used in open source projects.”

He continued: “These are just some of the examples that show the impact, growth, and promising future HashiCorp continues to have in the industry. This is all beyond what I could've hoped for, and I'm leaving proud of the small role I played in making this happen.”