Phones down, brooms up: HashiCorp co-founder lectures business hopefuls

HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto took to X this week to unveil the secret of workplace success: stay off your phone, sweep the floor, and clean the machines after that.

Hashimoto co-founded HashiCorp in 2012, acting as CEO for four years before becoming CTO, then stepping back from the corporation in 2021. During that time, HashiCorp launched infrastructure-as-code tool Terraform, as well as other products central to the cloud-native wave.

The business was then sold to IBM in 2024, by which time Hashimoto was devoting himself to other coding projects, primarily terminal emulator Ghostty. And flying planes.

So life is good. But not perfect, as he told the X sphere this week.

"Appalled when I see workers on their phones. My dad used to always say 'there's always something to do.' No customers? Sweep the floor. Floor swept? Clean the machines. Machines clean? Organize stock. Organized? Clean again. Insane that ...