Building a Vibrant Open Source Community with Armon Dadgar

HashiCorp’s Co-Founder and CTO, Armon Dadgar, joins me for a conversation on Cloud Native Startup.

In this episode, we focus on open source and how it serves as the core to HashiCorp’s identity. We also explore Armon’s journey towards founding HashiCorp with Mitchell Hashimoto and what the future holds as they both lean into their respective passions. Learn a few keys to cultivating a successful open source community, why some companies don’t rely on this success, his lessons learned, and more.

Highlights:

  • A look at Armon’s role as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer and what sparked the decision to build HashiCorp alongside Mitchell Hashimoto. (00:13)

  • Armon shares why HashiCorp began as open source and how that developed into a company. (4:46)

  • How an open source community compares to a paid community - and Armon’s take on bootstraping an open source company. (11:23)

  • Why creating an open source project directly from a closed source project is not the best strategy. (14:43)

  • Keys to building a successful open source community and why this is vital to HashiCorp.(18:14)

  • Armon shares lessons learned during the early days of HashiCorp - and his thoughts on the complexities of being a founder. (23:15)

  • How Mitchell’s decision to step back as an individual contributor allows him to focus on his passion - and more on why they chose to monetize HashiCorp. (29:30)

Links:

Armon

HashiCorp

Chris Hill