There aren't great book resources across the board. There is a great Terraform book (google "Terraform book"). The best way to learn though is our new learn platform: https://learn.hashicorp.com More content is being added all the time and if you look a year from now I think you'll find it dramatically different cause its getting so much attention right now.

Thank you! My entrepreneurial journey started very early. I started trying to make some money for myself back in middle/high school by building little programs I'd sell people. I sold a program that did algebra for example. I did some other things. I don't really know why I did that. My parents took good care of me and provided everything I needed, and I didn't really want for much. But still, I thought money added some tangible success factor to what I was doing and I liked that. Building tools for developers can be rough. They're highly critical of the work and there can sometimes be an attitude of "I could've done a way better job than you." That's not fun. Further, monetizing developers is difficult because of similar attitudes: why pay for something you can build yourself? To be fair, I've been like this in the past too, I think it's natural. But, that's being quite critical. Developers are also great because in open source they're much more willing and able to contribute! They are patient early adopters because they understand that software has bugs. Etc.

I've made a lot of mistakes! I'll bring up a few. Misidentifying our target market. Our original commercial product we built ultimately fell hard for a lot of reasons, but one big one was we were trying to build something that individuals would like and large Global 2K companies. That might be possible but its really hard. When we decided to focus in on Global 2K and "enterprise," we were much more successful. This mistake though ended up costing us years of engineering time. Not solidifying processes quick enough. It may seem crazy, but its better to start thinking about and implementing consistent processes to product development and so on earlier than later. We didn't do it in earnest until we had maybe 50 people in product/engineering. We're still digging ourselves out of that hole. Before then we just kind of jumped around and worked on what needed to be worked on. That's productive for awhile but breaks down eventually! I'll just leave it at that... but its always a bumpy road!

Sorry I haven't answered this, this is a really big question and difficult to answer without just typing for hours and hours. I've learned a lot of lessons, I've made numerous mistakes. It's hard to pinpoint them in the moment also because there is so much context around them. I think my one tip I'd give, and I mentioned this in detail in another answer so for full detail check that out: starting a company of any form is so much more than the technical bits. For me, the technical bits were easy, a given. But you still need to build out support, sales, marketing, etc. And each of those is just as hard in their own way as the core product and technology. It is a big undertaking. I don't want to discourage people from starting companies though! It has been very rewarding, I had no idea what I was doing going into it, and I am doing okay. You can too. But I also didn't realize how hard it would actually be.

I think process is important. I think breaking things down into smaller chunks is important. I'm not particularly religious about specific methodologies, but at a certain size of company its definitely important to have a consistent process and you should reflect on that process to determine if it can be more efficient.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Will you sell the company and join a VC firm ha ha. Hah! I think HashiCorp will be independently successful (not be sold). I don't know what my day to day would be like but in 10 years I plan to have taken a considerable step back (though, not anytime soon!). I don't think I'll be a VC. 😬 How do you plan to scale your firm from 400 to 4000 employees and $2 to $20 billion without turning into IBM? "IBM" in what sense? From a business perspective, I think we have a great roadmap and great opportunity to build a solid software portfolio that can get us to those valuation numbers. We're effectively 4 companies in one (we monetize Vault, Consul, Terraform, Nomad, which are 4 distinct categories). From a culture perspective, we have to just keep "banging that drum" so to speak and living our principles as we do today. I tell every new employee I get a chance to talk to that its their responsibility, their burden to ensure that those who work around them stay true to our culture. No single individual can carry the full weight. How do you build such good tools with such a high degree of usability compared to alot of other tools out there? Well, I like to think that there is a degree of art to it. Just as some artists are better at painting landscapes vs portraits, I think that for whatever reason I and a number of our engineers are particularly good at building tools in our space. Also, just like art, there is quite lot of subjectivity to it. But concretely, I build tools that I'm a primary user of. I eat my own dog food. I think this makes for a really tight feedback loop and helps me build good tools out of the gate because I can judge very accurately if they're "good" or not. So much of corporate IT around the world is like 20 years behind the best practice of leading tech companies like facebook, netflix google etc how can they at least stop getting even further behind in the future? We work primarily with the G2K and I think they have the right intentions. I think a pure tech-focused company will always be a decade ahead. But many companies will get there! I am optimistic. Some companies won't of course, and they'll probably just go out of business. Security and devops seems to be at odds with each other and how can security be introduced without reducing agility of devops? I think security is quickly coming around. There is a big movement outside of HashiCorp to think about this specifically. We're doing our best too by building Vault, a tool specifically designed to help with this! I actually think the bigger elephant in the room of a traditional group that is somewhat at odds right now is networking...

What kinds of products are missing in 2019 and are going to get a lot bigger? (Not limited to infrastructure) I recently picked up an iPad Pro (2018 model). Before owning one, I thought of it as "just another iOS device." I've owned other iPad models in the past. But this iPad Pro in particular is different: it represents a huge opportunity to shift day to day workloads to it. It's so much closer to just being a computer in the... useful sense. I think iPad Pro-focused software will grow. I don't necessarily think that 2019 will be huge for it, but I think a lot more people will pick up on this trend. What do you credit for the success of your open source projects like Vagrant? A lot of things. A lot of people! I think the early adopters that help shape the products, take the risk in using an unstable product, etc. are a huge part of that success. What other open source projects are you a fan of? Besides the big obvious ones like Vim (I'm a vim user)... I've really loved watching the serverless stuff take off. I think a lot of it has major issues still but its definitely a radical way of thinking and I give a lot of credit to the "crazies" trying to make it a real thing (I'm not saying it won't be). What steps would you recommend to an early-career developer to position themselves to work on successful large-scale, well-designed software projects? I explain in other answers, but be more than just a good coder: be good at communication, be kind, be pragmatic, etc. From there, work on some products and continually shift towards what you want to do.

Blockchain. It is a solution looking for a problem. There is a company in every category claiming blockchain solves some major problem or literally just makes something better thats working perfectly fine. I think its a great technology and there are useful applications, but they aren't world changing. I want to disclaim right now that there are some very valid and legit companies using Blockchain, so don't take my statements as a blanket. But I truly believe that over 95% of "blockchain"-related initiatives are scams. At best, money is moving from one pocket to another, probably with some fraud thrown in, and that's about it.

Oh whoops just saw this one: How do you think AI will affect virtualization, cloud and infrastructure? I think basic AI concepts will start making their way into it. We announced "Vault Advisor" at HashiConf last year (a paid feature) that is basic AI. It watches access patterns to Vault along with the way you've configured your policies and recommends improvements. I think for AI to be useful, we need to have a firm grasp of the underlying layers and I don't think we're quite there yet, but closer than we've ever been for sure.

How do you recommend anyone who wants to start a startup in open source as solo developer and want to monetize? I answered this elsewhere! Check that out. How do you keep up with Work and Life balance? Create a schedule and be disciplined to stick to it. For example, I only accept recurring meetings on Mondays and Fridays (with a couple exceptions for good reason). If another recurring meeting needs to be scheduled, another one has to go. I use T - Th for one-off meetings and to focus on other work. Also, I have a mandatory policy for myself (and I highly encourage it for others) to take a 1 hour lunch break. I have a calendar block so no meetings can be scheduled during that break. Of course, I'm practical and make exceptions once in awhile, but I'll just shift my 1 hour. I almost always take a full 1 hour break every day. I built a home gym for myself. It wasn't cheap, but can you really place a price on personal health (for money that would be spent on non-necessities anyways)? This means I can interrupt my day to work out for 30 or 45 minutes, and I don't have to commute to a gym. I can shower at home right when I'm done. It is very efficient and I work out much more because of it.