When we first met Mitch and Armon, the founders of HashiCorp, their open source products had already been downloaded millions of times. They had codified their motivations and intentions in The Tao of HashiCorp. They had a clear and bold vision of building an infrastructure platform for the multi-cloud era. We led their Series A and today HashiCorp is valued at $1.9 billion and serves hundreds of enterprise customers with industry-leading products in Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad. We have been proud partners of HashiCorp to become the market leader and its been an honor to serve on their BOD.
When we met the founders of DEV (dev.to), Peter Ben and Jess (or “PBJ” as they are often known), we were struck by the many similarities. They too had already built a runaway successful network – the fastest-growing inclusive social network for the developer community with 5.5 M unique visitors a month – while bringing transparency and trust to the social web. They too have a clear and bold vision – that of leading the wave of inclusive social networks, by bringing open source to the masses and solving the problems of centralization and consolidation in social media. We are honored to lead their Series A funding and look forward to the journey ahead.
DEV members get together to share ideas, participate in discussions, find opportunities, and engage with their fellow programmers from all around the world. It is a platform established on trust and transparency that does not track users, centralize control, or otherwise hoard user data. As an open-source platform (with 11.2 K GitHub stars), every line of code is auditable by the community itself. PBJ are also passionate about ensuring that the gate keeping, and harassment that is so deeply ingrained in other programming communities never takes roots on DEV. To ensure that DEV remains inclusive to all community members, regardless of background or experience level, PBJ have created a diverse moderator pool who work together to ensure that constructive dialogue is emphasized above pedantic exchanges.
We are firm believers in the power of community and the power of authentic founders to serve them. Some recent examples from our portfolio include Lyft with its community of riders and drivers; Poshmark with its community of seller stylists and buyers; Grove Collaborative with its community of sustainability-minded consumers; and Outreach.io with its community of sales professionals.
We are excited that Peter, Ben and Jess have chosen to work with us, and we are confident that they will continue to serve their community to achieve their collective goals (Future of Dev). PBJ and DEV team welcome to the Mayfield family.
Originally published on LinkedIn.
