I think it's ok to tell this story now. Long long time ago when I was still at DO, I tried to buy HashiCorp. Well, I use "tried to buy" very loosely. It was when we were both pretty small startups, Joonas our Dir. Eng at the time was really into their tooling, thought it was very good plus Armon and Mitch are fantastic engineers. So I flew out from NYC to SF to meet with them "to talk". Well, I had no idea how to go about trying to buy a company and they didn't really seem that interested in joining us, so we stood around a grocery store parking lot shuffling our feet talking about how great Mitch and Armon are at building stuff and then I flew home. I think that's about as loosely as it gets when it comes to buying a company. Probably would have been a cool combo tho, who knows. Either way, they're great guys, super proud of them. <3
I was in a similar position in a company that _might_ have been able to make a good enough offer, but never could convince the brass how amazing a company it is and I never got any traction.
Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…
When I got back to NYC I said to my boss (our CEO) "we should probably buy HashiCorp" and he said "Yeah, probably" and then we never spoke of it again. We both knew the problem, even if we could have got it together to make an offer and had they been interested, we were growing considerably too quickly to integrate another business. It was a fun idea, and we had a good time entertaining it, but it wouldn't have worked.
My shopping list during those years was NPM, Deis, Hashi and BitBalloon (now Netlify). These days: I generally think startups should do more M&A!
