Backing Mitchell Hashimoto Again, 12 Years Later

Today, Mitchell Hashimoto announced he's going back to the terminal with Superlogical, and I'm proud that Notable Capital is leading the seed round.

Back in 2014, I met a 24-year-old who wanted to spend an hour talking about the parts of building software that most irritated him.

Mitchell was fixated on automating away toil and got fired up talking about the repetitive manual work that sits between a developer and the thing they are actually trying to build. He talked about the experience of using software with remarkable specificity: where the friction lived, which keystroke was one too many, and what a tool ought to feel like in the hand.

At the time, HashiCorp was five people and had no revenue, and there was no clear category to slot it into. But by the time I left that meeting, I knew I wanted to be part of it. We wrote a Series A check, and I took a seat on the board, a decision I have made many times over my career and have rarely made with so little evidence in hand and yet so much conviction. Mitchell and his co-founder, Armon Dadgar, reached a conclusion about where infrastructure was headed well before the rest of the industry got there.

Over the next decade, we worked together through five rounds of funding, A through E, and sat in at least 30 board meetings together. Five people who could comfortably fit in a single conference room became more than 2,000 employees. Zero revenue became more than $600M annualized. More than a hundred Fortune 500 companies became customers. HashiCorp achieved a successful IPO on the NASDAQ in December 2021, and sold three years later to IBM for nearly $8B.

It was a remarkable ride, but when I think back on that time, what comes to mind about Mitchell is quieter. He voraciously read and responded personally to user feedback, long past the point where anyone would have expected him to. He still fixated on pixels and argued about defaults. Although he’s too humble to admit it, Mitchell was a true developer tastemaker roughly a decade before anyone in technology started using that word as a compliment.

Very few founders build things developers truly admire and that stand the test of time. Similarly, very few founders build products that create large commercial businesses. In my thirty years of venture investing, I have met only a very small number of people who accomplish both of these feats at once. Mitchell is one of them.

After HashiCorp, Mitchell could have done anything. In addition to learning to fly airplanes, he launched Ghostty, a terminal emulator, as an open project with no business attached, and grew it to more than a million users. He built it because he wanted it to exist and because the existing options annoyed him; echoing many of his reasons for starting Hashicorp.

The starting point for Superlogical is a terminal multiplexer. If that sounds narrow, it’s meant to. Mitchell has written his own document about where this goes and I would rather you read his version than mine. But the short version is that the work of building and running software now spans local machines, remote hosts, sandboxes, CI, production systems, and increasingly agents working in parallel, while the tools developers use treat all of these as separate worlds. Superlogical is a bet that the missing layer is a durable session wrapped around the work itself. One that survives you closing your laptop, that a person or a piece of software can drive, and that stays visible and controllable by the human either way.

He’s building it with Jack Pearkes , the very first engineering hire at HashiCorp, and two other HashiCorp veterans, Alasdair M. and Hector Simpson. Armon is an investor, as are Patrick Collison, Tobias Lütke, Guillermo Rauch, Aaron Levie, and other impressive angels. These are the people behind Stripe, Shopify, Vercel, Box, which is to say the people who have spent their careers on the tools developers actually reach for, and who understand exactly how hard the narrow, unglamorous developer experience layer is to get right

Twelve years ago I backed a 24-year-old who wanted to remove the friction between developers and their work. I got to watch him grow into a company leader alongside HashiCorp's own rise. I also got to watch him build a life: I was thrilled to attend Mitchell’s lovely wedding to his even more wonderful wife, Amy, and I’ve gotten to pass along a few bits of parenting advice when he became a father.

These days I’m also fortunate to collaborate with him on the Vercel board, where he’s having a tremendous impact on another incredible company with the inimitable Guillermo Rauch at the helm.

Writing another first check for Mitchell is one of the things I’m most proud of in my own investing career, and I hope it is the start of another decade or more of building together.