Congratulations to the Oxide team! It's a tough market out there :)! I'm still personally frustrated that I don't get to play with the hardware (too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers), but I'm excited to see that they're successful and hopefully they'll come around to my use case eventually :). In the meantime, I appreciate that they're building largely in the open - every once in a while I'll glance at their issue tracker for light bedtime reading. Just recently we had some fun internally throwing our controls software at their thermal loop as a usage example - it's often hard to find compelling real-world systems to use as openly sharable examples (of course we have interesting customer problems, but that's all NDA'd), so having companies build real stuff in the open is fantastic. Great company, wish them the best.
> too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers
You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.
What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.
I always thought a company like Railway would be an Oxide customer. But Railway is building their own servers in their own datacenters. So I am really curious who is small enough to buy Oxide, but large enough to need Oxide?
Of topic, but where the hell did Nutanix come from? I've never heard of them until recently and all of a sudden, they are being marketed as a serious competitor to VMware etc.
What's interesting about this raise is the framing: 'we didn't need to raise capital to support the business.' That's remarkably rare for a hardware company, especially pre-IPO.
The real thesis validation here isn't just product-market fit - it's that integrated hardware/software infrastructure can have better unit economics than the traditional model of 'Dell boxes + VMware licenses + storage vendor + network vendor + 3 years of integration work.' When you own the full stack from firmware to hypervisor, you can make tradeoffs that commodity integrators can't.
This mirrors what hyperscalers learned 15+ years ago: custom silicon (Google TPUs, AWS Nitro, Azure smart NICs) exists because known integration points let you optimize globally. Oxide is essentially selling that capability to enterprises stuck between 'can't use public cloud' and 'can't afford a hyperscaler-style infrastructure team.'
The $200M from existing investors only is notable because it signals the business metrics actually support the vision. Most infra startups at this stage are still hunting for product-market fit.
Oxide is the only company where I check the careers page hoping that they have a position which I can apply to.
Happy to see their success. Especially so if you've been following their journey through their podcasts (easily the best tech podcast out there if you care about your craft; no filler, all killer).
I actually did apply, The mere application takes hours upon hours, and for what a generic rejection email.
This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an interview with another startup company, and after six interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little bit to stay employed.
Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time.
Things are looking up though, I'm starting a job soon and the entire interview process was more or less a 30 minute phone call with the technical manager. That's it, two days later or so I had a verbal offer. I don't need to change the world, I need to pay my rent.
If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes. If it’s any comfort that means you did pretty well.
The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason you didn’t get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know that it’s seen as a pretty bad signal. The general expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a candidate doesn’t commit to their jobs, or that they don’t do well at their jobs and are getting let go.
Okay, but if my resume is a concern let's talk about in the first interview. I can't exactly rest and vest for 2 years when the company is running out of money. I had the bad luck of this happening 3 times in a row.
Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half, switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most of us.
I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3 years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to do quality work, you really should just stay there instead of chasing slightly more money.
After my dates of employment I will parethetically add (bankrupt) or (shutdown) to indicate that it wasn't related to me personally. My best job was 18 months.
Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short stints on my resume while I was interviewing for DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't dedicated or trustworthy.
He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives doing the layoffs got removed by the board.
So I left and got to add another short stint at a company run by craven morons to my resume :)
I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with any assertion that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.
There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.
If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may have spent 15 minutes on it.
Please take this in the spirit in which I’m writing it (i.e. please recognize the occupational disease of “bugs everywhere” and only mock it in moderation; I do appreciate the post itself):
- The Firefox browser on my Android tablet is close enough to a desktop one that I have no problem reading your blog post. The nag feels unnecessary, especially given it obscures part of the header. For what it’s worth, the tablet’s screen is 1600 real pixels wide @ 260 ppi, and Firefox for Android tells the CSS that the viewport is 800 “pixels” wide—if “pixels” were 1/96", then it would be somewhat below 600 “pixels”, so I don’t know where it’s getting that value from.
(And now I can’t stop thinking if I could make a thing in CSS that would look like a plain-text RFC on a desktop screen but gracefully reflow on a narrower screen.)
- The lightweight-markup parser seems to have gotten confused around the phrase “tests and whiteboarding”.
Excessive amounts of interviews is more likely they were not enthusiastic about him but didnt have anybody else better and were stringing him along until they found somebody else.
I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time. Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable to the company.
Yeah, I've seen someone get strung along and then finally hired. What happened was that it was a bit of a downturn so there was a limit to the hiring. Another dept somehow convinced the division head that their role was more urgent, so our department was left without approval even though we wanted the guy. It was a poor job market so he didn't land anywhere else even though it was a few months before the approval finally arrived. Everyone felt kind of shit about it. The guy was quite jittery to start with.
That sounds like it was a terrible place, but it was a good department in a somewhat hard nosed company. He ended up staying there 10 years.
> If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes.
Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would have specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's time putting them through full rounds of interviews?
if you were an experienced/mature tech employee you should probably know that there are real HR reasons why companies are strongly advised not to give too much information in a rejection email. there is only ever downside. your reaction here is a potential red flag.
i'm sympathetic to you, it sucks, why cant we all be nice to each other, and my answer to that all is lawyers.
A friend of mine (in an entirely different industry) went through five rounds of interviews with a company and got passed over for someone internal.
A little while later, the same company reached out and encouraged him to apply again. Five rounds later, and he got passed over a second time.
Fast forward two years and they reached out to him a third time. He's basically convinced that because he's black he's their token DEI interview candidate to make them feel better about themselves while internally promoting the people they actually want, but of course they wouldn't actually say that.
This is my favorite response in the thread. We aren't talking about getting a job at doctors across borders or something, we just want to manipulate bits of silicon to increase our networth.
When you say "we aren't" I hope you realize you aren't speaking for everyone. Even doctors across borders probably needs an IT person. There are jobs available for less pay that are fulfilling in other ways. I know I have taken them and am better off for it.
Yea agree, I worked at a bank during covid and helped do some work that tangentially helped relief/social security payments go through. Warmed me heart it did
A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.
Hiring is incredibly complicated when done well. If 'limited fuzzy Boolean windows' over 'complex interpersonal dynamics' is vibes, then we will need to accept vibes.
They aren't explicitly, but, if you ever find yourself in a position where you're part of the hiring decision, it's best to categorize vibes as protected for anything written or otherwise recorded.
SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
For some people, the 'wrong vibes' are often proxies for cultural things - all kinds of body language contribute to vibes and it's easy to accidentally (or on purpose...) discriminate against a whole categories based on vibes. If you tell a candidate "Hey we just didn't like your vibes as much as this other guy", it could affect your exposure to claims that you discriminated against them based on their race.
> SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
This was probably wrong, both in terms of interpreting the existing law and as a statement of what the law should be. Sometimes bad facts correlate with race; that should not be a reason to deny using the measure for e.g. hiring or lending.
Do "vibes" really matter all that much when you're going to be working 100% remotely? Maybe we should be moving to fully blind auditions for such jobs, where the interview might still be proctored in some way to prevent outright cheating, but the people who make the hiring decision aren't even put in a position where they might "vibe" with the candidate.
> SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
I realise it may be somewhat beside your point, but that was a Kennedy+liberals vs conservatives ruling in 2015 - so the current SCOTUS would likely have ruled the other way, and decent odds they overrule it sooner or later. Scalia’s dissent was objecting to the entire idea of disparate impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act, so more likely that gets overruled than this specific application of that idea.
This was a statutory interpretation case though, so if SCOTUS overturns the decision, Congress could reverse that with ordinary legislation, no constitutional amendment required. But who knows whether that will turn out to be politically feasible.
Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process.
It's a contractor life for me, I work for money, not "purpose" or anything else.
Hell my Facebook (technically a fully owned subsidiary to be fair) interview loop was easier. I didn't get the job that time either, but at least it was straight up.
> Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process.
In previous HN threads they said something to the effect that they expect their applicants to have read what’s online about their equal base salary. Equity is not equally applied though.
Eh. I've been on a bunch of hiring committees. It hasn't been personality or looks. But a combination of things that we probably didn't all agree on and that may not have been able to fully articulate in a short message.
Don't underestimate the importance of timing, for both the company you're applying at and the industry/economy as a whole.
As they say, you can't get blood from a turnip.
Writing this comment reminded me of a personal experience, story time:
Many moons ago I interviewed at a mature startup in silicon valley, they shipped a tiered storage appliance and were in the process of pivoting to a new storage medium (think transitioning from spinning rust to SSDs, something like that).
This was in-person, and everything went swimmingly well, before departing they stated an intention to make an offer and I should expect an email w/offer attached within a week. I got an offer letter, and accepted immediately, as I was super excited about the stack I'd be playing with.
A week before the start date I get a call from a founder, they said I couldn't start because their funding round didn't come through. The economy was going through some sort of financial crisis and it was one of the many blood baths where silicon valley startups shuttered by the hundreds overnight. So in essence, this was a job I got fired from before I could even start, wee!
What followed was a pretty frustrating few months of interviewing and not getting anywhere.
But there is a silver lining to this story, that founder who called me sat on the board of other storage startups. One of them managed to get some water in this funding desert, and its founders reached out to me at his recommendation. I ended up building some great stuff over 4-5 years at that company.
I appreciate their treatment of the current AI boom cycle. Just last night they had Evan Ratliff on from the Shell Game podcast[1], and it was a great episode. They're not breathlessly hyping AI and trying to make a quick buck off it, instead it seems they're taking an honest, rigorous look at it (which is sadly pretty rare) and talking about the successes as well as the failures. Personally I don't always agree with their takes, I'm more firmly in Ed Zitron's camp that this is all a massive financial scam, isn't really good for much, and will do a lot more harm than good in the long run. They're less negatively biased than that, which is fine.
Has the audio quality / recording method for Oxide and Friends gotten better?
I have this horrible "completionist" tendency and I got stuck on a 2021 episode where the audio needed post-processing and I just never got around to it.
I loved On the Metal and it was a bummer to fall behind on the new show.
There's absolutely no shame in "falling behind" on a podcast when even the audio itself is subpar, your time and attention is way more valuable than that. If the hosts have problems with that, they can provide sensible extra aids such as high-quality transcripts, to help viewers catch up on what they've missed without placing undue demands on their time.
I really tried to like the podcast. It’s been a few years, so maybe it’s improved.
The topics were good. The guests were great.
But Bryan Cantrill was just terrible at letting his guests actually talk.
Bryan, if you’re listening, please let your guests talk. We have a large amount of content on YouTube if we want to hear the Bryan Cantrill take on, well, anything and everything. And it’s often amusing and sometimes right.
People don’t tune in to a podcast with guests to hear the host pontificate. They tune in to hear the guest, and sometimes the guest/host dynamic. When the host talks over the guest, you don’t get either.
After the Jonathon Blow episode, I gave up. Dude had interesting things to say about C, C++, and Rust, but most of what we got was Bryan talking about Rust. I guarantee anyone tuning into the Oxide podcast knows Bryan Cantrill’s opinions about Rust. And firmware. And Oracle. And Linux. Etc. etc.
Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0] was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I had to interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that evening with my family for Christmas (which I damned near did) -- and I have no doubt that I was not at my best!
I do try to get better at this stuff, and I re-listen to our episodes to improve as an interviewer. If it's been "a few years", maybe you haven't listen too much to Oxide and Friends? I think we've had some wonderful guests and great conversations over the span of the podcast -- though I also have no doubt that it's imperfect, for which you have my profound apologies!
I appreciate the reply and that it's been a while; I will give your podcast another listen.
It wasn't just the Jonathon Blow episode; that was just the point where I said "this is frustrating." For what it's worth, frustration came from knowing that this could be really good: your perspective is valuable, your topics were interesting, and your guests were excellent.
I find this a common mistake that people with strong opinions have when doing interview/guest style podcasts or shows. There's really an art to it; it's not easy to engage guests, keep the show interesting, and let the talk move in interesting ways. That's why Terry Gross and Howard Stern, in very different ways, have had such long and storied careers.
But it's something that people definitely get better at, and I have no doubt that you have. Again, I'll give it another listen.
Is this only based on On the Metal? (If so, those are all from six years ago -- even the ones that were released a mere five years ago.) Please do check out Oxide and Friends[0] -- and feedback always welcome!
These sort of transparent answers are what make oxide and the people behind it such a fantastic company. Thank you for your wonderful contributions to the software and hardware community!
I disagree. I found the 'On the Metal' to be great balance between the guest and the hosts. And Oxide and Friends I would expect Oxide to be big part of it.
> I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4 hours overlap with PST which excludes Europe
Wouldn't that depend less on where you are and more about your sleeping schedule? I generally go to bed around 04:00Z, up around 11:30Z sometime, seems that would work regardless of location, no?
Unless the position *strictly* requires the overlap (e.g. Manufacturing or Program Management), you can apply. The required overlap is the expected team commitment you should abide to, the logistics are up to you to make it work.
If that sounds encouraging, please apply!
You just need to find the right family it sounds like ;) We both have the same sleeping schedule so works out for us, and we hang out more than ever. But YMMV.
Working for them would be cool, but just getting to work with their gear would be great. I am so tired of commodity Dell x86 servers (and garbage drivers, management hardware, etc) and support technicians who have no resources to actually support the hardware (beyond telling me to update the firmware and pray).
Can you name some people who are working there and who you look up to? I need some new idols after the old idols all went up in MAGA and Epstein files .
Well one, don't look up to people you personally don't know. Parasocial relationships are not healthy. Look into your local community for people to be mentors or help you.
That said I like Bryan Cantrill as an engineer and leader, but I would never put him on a pedestal.
One dichotomy categorisation I personally look for in people is: * likes heirachy versus * dislikes heirachy.
I suspect heroes are mostly relevant if you are a heirachy lover? I also believe that heirachy lovers are more likely to believe in evil puppetmaster conspiracies (anti-heroes if you will).
It is a lot harder to find heroes if you dislike authority because your heroes are more likely to avoid heirachical status ladders?
This is a child mindset, people don't need heroes. They need leaders that care about them and want to better their communities; these leaders are found within your literal neighbors, friends, and family.
It's best to avoid idolizing folks. It can give you a skewed set of expectations and lead you to resent them when inevitably they cannot live up those those expectations (which is unfair to them), and possibly lower your own self esteem if you cannot meet those same standards yourself.
Tip that will work forever, even when the ones you replace your old idols with get replaced: Don't have any idols.
Listen to the words, don't follow "personalities", don't listen to specific individuals just because of their status. Not a single time have I been disappointed by an idol, because I've made the conscious choice of not having following any. Bunch of smart people say smart stuff all the time, until they don't. I read everything as if I don't know the author, I think more people should do this and less celebrity worship would make the entire ecosystem better. We need less of it, not more.
no, but still being super impressive. CEO of a company rebuilding a CAD rendering engine because they put an LLM on top of it. So you describe the mechanical specs of the part you want and it models it. Takes all the tedium out of modeling stuff. Super cool and many applications.
I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really good too.
I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I skilled enough that I could work at Oxide?". Hope more companies follow suit in putting the people forward!!
After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision.
I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.
For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.
>Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
My experience with flat structure is the most stubborn opinionated people end up making all the decisions because they dont budge and get to escape all responsibility for bad calls. Better to have a designated lead.
Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.
Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.
This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it being normal to have an incompetent boss.
That's because flat structures are often, or often turn into, "flat-in-name-only" structures.
I don't think the Tyranny of Structurelessness is arguing in favour of hierarchy, or against other forms of organization than hierarchy.
I don't think it's arguing against "flat" or "anarchy" style organizations either.
In essence, I think it's asking us to do whatever we're doing better, more honestly, more effectively, and less stressfully. By acknowledging, clarifying, communicating, and seeking to understand the real operating structures, what's really going on. And then to improve them, using that understanding.
An actually flat organization might be good, I don't know. I've never seen one. I've been in some that claimed to be flat, and became stressful places to work, for the same usual reasons hierarchies can be unpleasant, including incompetent bosses (not called bosses). But I've also had some pleasant experiences in flat organizations, and I prefer it that way, if it's designed and run well.
You don't need strict hierarchies, necessarily (in fact I don't believe 'traditional' hierarchies are in practice ever actually ironclad: the org chart is only ever an approximation of the real power structure). It's more that you should plan your power structure carefully (many forms are possible!), and ideally make it as transparent as possible, as pretending that you won't have one at all is merely an illusion (you will never completely succeed! Firstly because power structures are, in their full glory, ludicrously complex and ever-shifting, but also because hidden information is itself a form of power)
the argument isn't that flat organizations don't work, but that they're even more insidious than actual hierarchies. Zizek gives two great examples of the startup and the modern family. In the startup your boss is still your boss, except officially he's your friend, so you can't even hold him accountable, because there are no bosses. (political analog, traditional socialist parties, we're all comrades so better don't think anything wrong)
In the non-hierarchical family you aren't just ordered to dress up and go see grandma, you're guilt tripped into feeling bad about not seeing grandma, until you do it out of "your own volition". In the non-hierarchy you're not just supposed to be outwardly obedient but free on the inside, you're supposed to be obedient on the inside too. They work well, really well. Unlike the traditional hierarchy the tyranny is absolute because it has no borders and doesn't have to acknowledge itself.
>However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known
exactly, because they're visible. Valve, despite its utopian conditions, is weirdly enough, very secretive
This is my first time hearing of Oxide, but I had the same initial thought after reading this blog post then poking through their site. The degree of careful thought put into their policies and culture is really impressive, at least from the outside. Good for them, I hope they continue to be in a position to have that luxury (genuinely).
I say this every time Oxide comes up, and I know that I will never get my wish, but if they ever ventured into the "homelab" market with smaller products, they can have all my money.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be profitable for them, but I feel like having some vendor sell a ‘reference machine’ that they know could run the core OS well would be a good in between. Someone like Framework selling a workstation looking desktop in a specific reference config couldn’t be too bad. Feels like just enough to get a community started. Most tasks really don’t need bleeding edge hardware anymore, the thing could go years without hardware changes.
Could someone explains to me what the secret is here? Apart from the fancy marketing, is it the full integration? The hardware? It took me a while to find an actual picture of one of the modules.
They’re players in a newish market segment called “hyperconverged,” basically “you buy a rack and it runs your workload, you don’t worry about individual systems/interconnect/networking etc because we handled it.”
Oxide seem to be the best and most thorough in their space because they have chosen to own the stack from the firmware upwards. For someone who cares in that dimension they are a clear leader already on that basis alone, for other buyers who don’t, hopefully it also makes their product superior to use as well.
Microsoft and Nutanix have had a hyperconverged architecture for over a decade. Oxide is mostly an alternative to Nutanix or other soup-to-nuts private clouds.
Oxide is a really nice platform. I keep trying to manipulate things at work to justify the buy in (I really want to play wiht their stuff), but they aren't going for it.
The first attempts at hyperconverged were very hardware focused and kinda meh. Nutanix is the best example - they pioneered hyperconverged hardware but the firmware/software was extremely average. Oxide are the first to say "it should just feel like cloud, except you own it" and building for that.
I'm a bit puzzled because this seems backwards from what I thought had been the evolution of things.
Didn't companies historically own their own compute? And then started offloading to so-called cloud providers? I thought this was a cost-cutting measure/entry/temporary solution.
Or is this targeting a scale well beyond the typical HPC cluster (few dozen to few hundred nodes)? I ask because those are found in most engineering companies as far as I know (that do serious numerical work) as well as labs or universities (that can't afford the engineers and technicians companies can).
Also, what is the meaning of calling an on-prem machine "cloud" anymore? I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just got resources on demand over the network. Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters. And then if the machine is designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?
> Didn't companies historically own their own compute?
As group-of-cats racks, usually, which is a totally different thing. Way "back in the day" you'd have an IT closet with a bunch of individually hand-managed servers running your infrastructure, and then if you were selling really oldschool software, your customers would all have these too, and you'd have some badly made remote access solution but a lot of the time your IT Person would call the customer's IT Person and they'd hash things out.
Way, way, way back in the day you'd have a leased mainframe or minicomputer and any concerns would be handled by the support tech.
> I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just got resources on demand over the network.
This idea does that, but in an appliance box that you own.
> And then if the machine is designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?
The system is designed by a third party to be trivially set up and maintained by the customer, that's where the differentiation lies.
In the moderately oldschool way: pallets of computers arrive, maybe separate pallets of SAN hosts arrive, pallets of switches and routers arrive. You have to unbox, rack, wire, and provision them, configure the switches, integrate everything. If your system gets big enough you have to build an engineering team to deal with all kinds of nasty problems - networking, SAN/storage, and so on.
In the other really oldschool way: An opaque box with a wizard arrives and sometimes you call the wizard.
In this model: you buy a Fancy Box, but there's no wizard. You turn on the Fancy Box and log into the Deploy a Container Portal and deploy containers. Ideally, and supposedly, you never have to worry about anything else unless the Big Status Light turns red and you get a notification saying "please replace Disk 11.2 for me." So it's a totally different model.
> Didn't companies historically own their own compute?
Historically, companies got their compute needs supplied by mainframe vendors like IBM and others. The gear might have sat on premises in a computer room/data center, but they didn't really own it in any real sense.
> Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters.
Is it really a cluster when the whole machine is an integrated rack and workloads are automatically migrated within the rack so that any impending failure doesn't disrupt operation? That's a lot closer to a single node.
Rack scale computing, on both the software and hardware side. That means building custom network switching, power management, etc, in a turn key solution that drops in to a customer's data center. Unbox it, plugin a few connections, make a few configuration settings, and start deploying. It's the on-prem response to the cloud for companies running things at scale.
Companies spend an eye watering amount of money on AWS relative the underlying hardware cost. There's definitely a market for something like a mainframe that runs K8s, Postgres, Redis, and the like where you buy once and then run forever.
I don't know if it's true or not but it seems like our AWS bill is something like paying the full purchase price of the underlying hardware every month.
It's not really a mainframe because the RAS story (Reliability, Availability, Servicing) story is sorely lacking compared to what a true mainframe gives you. So a midrange machine like AS/400 is probably a better comparison.
An AS/400 has a similar RAS story to mainframes than to Oxide/Dell. Oxide is closer to Dell (Oxide RAS is effectively the same as any sled hyperconverged) than they want to admit.
When the AS/400 came out circa 1989 or whatever, you could replace an entire mainframe with a box not much bigger than a mini fridge. The hardware is built for high reliability, and the OS and application software stack have a lot of integration. If Unix is "everything is a file" then AS/400 is "everything is a persistent object in a flat 64 bit address space."
The result is a system that can handle years of operation with no downtime. The platform got very popular with huge retailers for this reason.
Then in later years the platform got the ability to run Linux or Windows VMs, so that they could benefit from the reliability features.
I don’t know who they see as competitors in market positioning (ie, who is selling against them on their target buyer’s calendar). But the space is called hyperconverged computing and there are a few other players like Scale Computing building “racks you buy that run your VMs.”
More like Nutanix, Xen, IBM, Kubernetes... private cloud, colo, on-premise... etc. There's a ton of stuff (I'd bet the majority) of compute workload in business that is local/colo and not cloud.
From the podcasts they talk a little about their clients. It's people who want something like AWS Outpost but fully disconnected and independent from any cloud and running 100% local.
I don't think that is the 'main' competitor. But its certaintly 'a' competitor for companies that already have put a lot of their eggs into the AWS basket.
The selling point, from the looks of it, is an on-prem cloud where you own the hardware.
For the business guys they're focusing on price and sovereignty. Owning your business. For technical people they are focusing on quality. Not having to deal with integration bugs.
I get the whole x CPUs y RAM story (it's akin to how clouds sell) and that often makes sense in the cloud, but when managing my datacenter operations a big constraining point is compute / kW. At 30 A / 208 V at 85% efficiency I've got 5 kW to work with per cabinet. If I'm putting in low core density slow machines I've got to do a lot more management than if I'm using my Epyc 9755 based servers. This is a practical constraint not just a theoretical "oh I want the latest and greatest". It's just that I can't really justify using up 4U and a kW on an Epyc 7003 series. The compute density just isn't there for the power use. The old chips are practically deadweight.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear of the raise because the team seems exceptional (judging by the posts you guys write and they have written prior to the company) and I love work in this area that simplifies hardware management. Good stuff, good luck, and congratulations!
Having worked in the space, 6kVA is the norm from 10-15 years ago, 12kVA is the standard for regular compute workloads. With HPC/AI all bets are off though.
No, your expectations are not wrong. I'm a small business. A fully stacked AI/GPU cabinet is multiples of this. A single GH200 based server will have 2x2.7 kW power supplies in a 1U form factor. As you can imagine, I am not running a cabinet full of such servers. But you don't need AI power requirements to do normal software. And there's lots of normal software to do!
I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.
Their engineered power and cooling solutions are all for rack-scaled hardware, doing a NUC wouldn't make sense. Now a silent and efficiently cooled studio-sized rack with enough hardware (including AMD GPUs) for reasonably quick AI inference with the latest local models, that's something that they could do and be quite popular.
I'm not saying they should put their software stack on a Celeron (or whatever Intel calls their cheap CPUs now). But no racks, please. I just can't get with the "rack in my house" crowd. If you have a basement, then fine I guess. But I live in an apartment, and I don't have the space or patience for a computer that's the size of a mini fridge, and sounds like a jet engine.
Many homelab users are actually building things out in an effort to learn tooling that they will then use at work. Or just out of intellectual interest.
Yeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their product material.
If they can scale down the hardware to something close to homelab-ish in price, would be great marketing and way to build expertise to have their big boy solution promoted at workplaces. Probably not a priority at their stage though.
Hah, that might be slightly above what I'm ready to pay for a at-home server yes :) But given the right specifications and software integration, I'd probably be ready to pony up up to somewhere around 10K for a complete solution if it could replace all my existing hardware, even if it was more expensive than other options with worse tradeoffs.
I'll say: You made the right call striking while the iron is hot. My employer did one of those "Didn't need to but did it anyway" rounds and it was critical for a successful exit that came years later.
God, i am so glad to see these guys succeeding. The sun may have burned out, but the sky is still bright thanks to them. May they be so successful that i can eventually buy workstation versions of their minicomputers, sort of like how they made CoaL for triton.
Love Oxide and what they're building, but I'm not sure raising even more VC money is the way to build a generational company. Quite the opposite? With money you don't need, you're trading faster growth for more dependencies on third parties that will seek a ROI eventually?
Hardware businesses are capital intensive. They need the money.
They also need to grow and iterate faster. Their software stack is great, but their hardware is quite dated in a fast moving industry. This limits them to domains that value their software and security but don’t need the latest hardware for performance and aren’t necessarily concerned with performance per dollar, which is a small market.
> ...it's not uncommon for us to be asked directly: "How do I know you won’t be bought?"
Raising ~infinite runway from investors who are already known quantities signals that you can safely buy into their product knowing they're not getting snapped up by $megacorp anytime soon. That's where the faster growth comes from--customers who feel secure in the knowledge that the company isn't going anywhere.
Not necessarily. Supply chains and vendor management into scale is very difficult and very very expensive, I think we prob spend north of $200MM to get to $150MM ARR, but the economics started to shake out thereafter based on CAGR. To do this without owning 0% of the company while still recognizing needing a lot of cash in the system to keep everything lubricated, (for example Michael Dell might be fine personally extending a $500MM line of credit to the business, if the business has $50MM in venture funds on some predictable growth rate) - basically you use true risk capital via the smallest amount of equity you can give to de-risk downstream capital requirements. I don't know anything about how Oxide is growing their business so this could be total nonsense in their case, but it's how we built a generational business (digitalocean)!
Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making the call that this is a better time to be raising money than the years to come.
I don't think any Oxide racks come with GPU's at present, and the power density of modern GPU-centric AI compute is on a rather unprecedented level. Oxide racks are very well cooled but are no match for the racks in an AI datacenter that's literally burning a full gigawatt of power.
I wonder how Oxide's basic value proposition changes with the very recent growth in rack-scale and multi-rack (datacenter-wide) compute for AI. Surely these other vendors have tech (particularly around network interconnect) that can be repurposed effectively for the more general private cloud workloads Oxide is focusing on.
Conversely, has Oxide discussed in depth how they see GPU compute?
I’m guessing for their current target market of existing enterprise software it doesn’t matter, but the ownership and economics stories are at least as compelling for matmul code.
I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special about it apart from that?
Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability, and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point fingers at another vendor.
I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving
While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API.
Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.
> Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in Proxmox.
Proxmox isn't quite there yet for scalibility and hyperconverged but it is getting there really fast. It's more of a competitor to Microsoft HyperV HCI.
Agreed. Its more reminiscent of Cloudstack or Openstack from what I gather. I'm thinking of Jetstream2, but for you buy it rather than rent some of it with an NSF budget.
Proxmox is nice and getting there but what you simply can't replicate is the lower level firmware and managing layer. Proxmox on commodity hardware will always be limited by that. Same goes for deep integration with the switch that Oxide can do.
It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking and all that, integrated and with unified management.
There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.
A stack of 38x 1U and a switch does not a cloud make.
Slightly less pithy: they're selling rack-scale systems, with power, hardware, network, and control plane software all integrated. Something that presents to the user as something more like API to interact with than a pile of servers to be managed.
Think "AWS in a box", with the high level features you’d get there. API, Terraform, "managed" products like load balancers, database, etc. You get all that in a turnkey rack delivered to the datacenter or office doorstep.
It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.
I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it.
API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.
So while most of the software is open source rather than proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers pay for support (as they do with most enterprise products). One could theoretically use the product without first-party software updates, managing the open source oneself... but that would have practical impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product).
Two points about your last point. First, software improvements benefit all customers; as the business grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also, most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The sustainability of investments into the software (and the product generally) is on solid ground.
Back in the 90s and 00s, lots of companies churned out software products that were sold once, supported forever. It was a sort of Ponzi scheme, supporting old customers with money from new customers. Which was okay during a period of high growth. But sooner or later the market matured, growth plateaued, and the cost of ongoing maintenance became a much bigger problem.
Right now you're growing fast and swimming in VC money, so this is probably not an issue. At some point, though, you might find that even hardware depreciation cycles don't provide as much of a safety cushion as you hope they will. In an economic downturn, people might suddenly realize that Oxide hardware actually remains serviceable much longer than they expected. :)
If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal.
If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.
All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.
There are plenty of old-school companies in Europe still working on moving to the cloud. Now that there is a burgeoning movement towards avoiding American cloud providers, Oxide could have an opportunity to sell "private cloud" servers instead. If they play their cards right, they could make significant inroads in European markets.
> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here
Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is delivering.
If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting.
Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking because the bad economics of cloud are becoming increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends such as making computing more local, not letting US companies control everything.
> You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro.
Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended up being such a loser.
I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming for that is somehow not worth doing.
>Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess.
For a startup, if the thesis is to take market share away from those two, it's actually not such a good story. You need a product that is 10x better than the competition, and I'm not convinced that the enhancements to firmware, reliability etc. amount to a 10x jump in business value prop. You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.
The claim that you need a 10x better product to win any market share is simply incorrect, both logically and historically.
Maybe if people that bought Dell had a deep love for Dell products and were deeply integrated unable to move, but even then 10x is a waste exaggeration.
But if you have any serious academic literature that underlies this 10x claim I'm happy to take a look.
> You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.
And neither does Dell and they are worth 80 billion $. And AMD doesn't make semiconductors, so they relay on other people IP. And TSMC doesn't make their lithographic machines or many other things, relaying on other people's IP. And all those materials relay on other people IP to be brought to market in the first place.
This is just a silly argument that for some reason puts CPU design companies as 'the real deal' and everybody else is somehow not good enough.
Historically good systems companies make just as good margin as most CPU design companies, specially those that don't have near monopolies.
> it's actually not such a good story
They are making inroads in a market that is 100s of billion $ large and people invested 300M$+ in them because they see costumer demand. If that's not good enough for you then I don't know what to tell you. I wish any of the starups I have worked at that kind of opportunity.
It seems to me you operate in a sense where anybody that doesn't go for a monopoly in a 5 trillion $ market is somehow not 'worthy' of being a startup. That just a very strange perspective on reality.
Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market.
There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons.
For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments, and last time I was in a company that could use that the only major breaker was lack of ability to ship a raw VLAN to a VM, to enable direct replacement of existing vmware stack. But if it's not already fixed, it is not particularly hard to fix.
Proxmox is fine if your vmware deployment was quite small. Single oxide rack at max density is going to similar values as official scaling sizes for proxmox, and very much isn't limit of what we did with vsphere.
And Oxide sells a complete hardware + software solution, including virtualization and SDN - essentially it's a physical equivalent of up to 32 node virtualization cluster per rack, with builtin SDN and SD-SAN, that already has features to combine for more.
Is this about limits to what the Proxmox folks will officially provide support services for, or perhaps what can be comfortably managed in the Web UI? These are very valid concerns either way, but the Proxmox VE software itself does provide a comprehensive API and that should scale quite a bit higher.
I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?
Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted it’s in the $500K to $1mm range.
Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.
Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course for any server hardware that's put in production, this is not a gaming PC build. Hopefully they're working on bringing their hardware up to date, since efficiency is a key consideration for the class of workloads they're aiming at.
> Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course for any server hardware that's put in production
No it’s not. Normally if you’re buying server hardware you don’t start with a CPU that’s already 5 years old and last-generation RAM that isn’t even manufactured at scale any more.
CPUs have advanced a lot in recent years. The jump from Zen 3 to Zen 5 is very substantial.
I just talk about some comments I read some time ago, so take this with a grain of salt. It was my understanding that if you were spending about $300k-$500k a year in cloud services, it would make sense this type of solution, so the expected price would be something between $500k-$1M depending on the configuration
Congratulations to the team. Oxide & Friends, Bryan, Adam & Team are such a valuable resource to our community. Their podcast is amazing, the problems they encounter, and their willingness to share with the rest of us is not taken for granted!
importantly, you don't pay for it as a service, you buy it and it's yours. like buying a cloud in a box, instead of having to build it yourself with various server, storage, networking, and software vendors it all comes ready to use.
And, interestingly for Oxide, rack scale solutions from HW vendors might not be suited for your company's workload. Their solution isn't all-in on AI, from what I understand.
I don't know how it works for Oxide, but this isn't a new concept, IBM has been doing it since the 1950s. Own the mainframe, pay for the required service contract.
I guess there's two ways of looking at this, way (1) is leaning heavily into what seems at least seems to be top of cycle in a cyclical business, which is likely to be highly problematic when they hit downturn, or (2) doing an Amazon and getting lucky by having a massive war chest to survive the next down turn.
Their website is so nice and smooth even on my shitty computer, not like the other announcement pages of major companies that only work on state of the art macbooks.
The website looks good but it is very hard to know what they do exactly and what they sell, if you can be their customer or not just browsing the website. If you don't know them before.
Like do they sell a service or a product. Do they sell hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.
Compute Sleds (Total) 16, 24, or 32
CPU Cores 1024–2048
Memory (DRAM) 8–32 TiB
Storage 465.75–931.5 TiB
Network Switches 2
Switching Capacity 12.8 Tbit/s
Power Shelves Up to 2
Power Supplies per Shelf 6 (5+1 or 3+3)
Typical / Max Power Draw 12 / 15 kW
Dimensions H × W × D 2354mm (92.7”) × 600mm (23.7”) × 1060mm (41.8”)
Weight Up to ~2,518 lbs (~1,145 kg)
Max Thermal Output 61,416 BTU/hr
Airflow Requirements 145.8 × kVA CFM
If you need a rack full of computers that are managed programmatically via an API then this is the machine for you.
Unfortunately you have to read further down in the specs to see the actual hardware details. They’re on older generation hardware, so going by cores and RAM alone isn’t enough to tell you about the speed of those cores and the DDR4 RAM.
Hopefully raising money helps them iterate faster on their hardware so they’re not so far behind.
DDR4 is not being manufactured at scale any more so it’s becoming very expensive too.
> if they had gone with DDR5 it would have doubled
They charge a premium for their hardware due to the software. They have plenty of room for RAM price fluctuations. It would nowhere near double the price.
> Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based option.
I know you’re joking, but anything DDR3 based is really slow and power inefficient relative to current gen hardware.
They are already selling the next generation, its just not public. I assume they are focusing on existing costumer and larger orders. While for now in public they still sell the older version. That is at least my guess.
We're working on making this easier to understand. Stay tuned! We know the last decade or so of using public cloud providers has made people forget that hardware and software are things you can own and run successfully. Oxide is exactly that. Hardware and software designed together to give you the public cloud experience on-premises.
I'm the undergrad who commented earlier. I’ve been poking around the Hubris source code and it’s exactly the kind of stack I want to work on. I'm actually doing the Redox Summer of Code this year, focused on implementing an EEVDF scheduler and a performance testing harness for the kernel.
From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of hardware/software co-design so high that you really just need a few decades of experience to be effective? I'd love a reality check on whether I should keep Oxide as a long-term 10-year goal or if there’s a path for people starting out.
Wow, amazing. That some serious money. Everybody gets a raise hopefully. Congrats everybody.
What to do with so much money?
An AI product is of course the 'no-brainer', I would love to see them partner with Tenstorrent for the CPU/AI part. I think Bryan described this as Door 3 'doing something crazy'.
A product around AMD APU was talked about, but in a recent talk Brain said AMD doesn't seem to care about that product.
OpenTitan is now getting ready for production uses, maybe makes sense to switch to that in the future. Moving Hubris onto that shouldn't be to big of a lift.
A conventional server without DC bus bar maybe? Not talking about homelab server but something in a class where you can't have a whole rack and the bus bar. The main seller would be the fireware and software ontop to get people into the control plane ecosystem. And you could make Linux boot on it too for more market reach potentially. I'm not sure how much such a platform could share with current system.
An SSD or NIC with open fireware would be great, but not sure if you can develop that only for your own product or if you would want to sell it separatly to make sense. But that would be big departure from the current All-in-One product.
Amazing what you can do when all you try to do is make podcast. Maybe now they have money to bring back 'On the Metal'. I enjoyed the more structured interview style podcast about history of computing quite a bit. That said the more discussion oriented 'Oxide and Friends' is also nice.
I'm confused and saddened on why Oxide has to keep raising money (in substitute for growth) and keep entrenching their business with VCs and letting them control business and ownership.
> "So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it."
From this of course the VCs will back and support Oxide (they are mentally thinking that Oxide will move into supplying hardware for AI datacenters) eventually want their money back at many many multiples and the pressure is there to achieve this.
Can you even invest in Oxide?
I just wish Oxide wouldn't have to keep getting owned by VCs which would inevitably lead to enshittification to pay back the VCs.
If Oxide followed the model of Valve (100% founder and employee ownership, profitable, vast unlikelihood of enshittification or pressure to get acquired or IPO) then it would be a different situation.
How could a massively capex business like Oxide scale in the same manner that Valve did based on the current market movement of the industry that Oxide is addressing? I personally cannot see how that is at all possible. The cash required to back downstream capital in a business like this as it scales without it falling flat is surly well in excess of $6/700MM, if they manage to get by with with only selling 300/400 million of equity, that will be a great outcome for the founders.
Unfortunately since they already took VC money they have to keep doing it and each time they do it they do it the VCs would own more and more and would control the business.
I predict in less than 10 years Oxide exits by way of being acquired or an IPO. The enshittification would have already begun by then.
> You seem very sure of yourself in how business works! I'm curious now, how did you create your $100MM++ revenue hardware business? I'd love to learn from you. [deleted]
You don't need to create a $100MM++ revenue hardware business to know how this ends when you get into bed too many times with VCs.
We already know it is a huge capex spend (which is why they keep going to VCs) the question is, how many times does Oxide need to go back to VCs to keep raising (even though they said they didn't need to raise?)
I hope they become immensely profitable enough to buy out the VCs stakes and get control back and become independent.
But I am doubtful that Oxide will do that if they keep raising and they will just be sold down the river in less than 10 years.
K, well I was on the first/founding team of digitalocean and owned strategy there from zero to just before IPO, we took a bunch of venture, heck if you'd seen our covenants in our lease lines, they made our venture debt look like kittens, yet we IPO'd, and I don't think very many in the digitalocean story are particularly unhappy? VCs do not try to "own companies" they try to exit businesses at a gain.
> VCs do not try to "own companies" they try to exit businesses at a gain.
They do both as they need many multiples to return the fund.
And it also sounds very predatory to me and not aligning with any startup's mission other than for the VCs to pressure Oxide to get acquired for over $20BN+ or go to the public markets.
Not even Hetzner did this. DigitalOcean could have followed Hetzner, but I guess VC money is very attractive and now DigitalOcean is now the slave of Wall St.
Going into deals with VCs and IPO'ing to Wall St. always leads to enshittification.
Another $200M for a company whose product most developers will never touch. VCs continue to confuse "hardware that sounds cool" with "business that makes money". This ends one of two ways: acqui-hire or Chapter 11.
It's been six years and they still won't say "it's Nutanix but better". Is it not better? Does the "we akshually don't have competitors" approach work with customers?
I don't think we'd ever go with the "we don't have competitors" line, it's not serious. The competition is more AWS, GCP, and Azure than it is Nutnaix though, they can't provide a similar experience or economic value when they don't make or control their own hardware. That doesn't mean we never see Nutnaix, but it's not the most apt comparison. As Alan Kay famously said, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" - otherwise you'll be stuck at the intersection of support and scaling pains long term.
What company specifically mentions its competitors in its advertisements? Do you expect the homepage of the company to be a list of links to its competitors? What is this absurd expectation?
Congratulations to the Oxide team! It's a tough market out there :)! I'm still personally frustrated that I don't get to play with the hardware (too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers), but I'm excited to see that they're successful and hopefully they'll come around to my use case eventually :). In the meantime, I appreciate that they're building largely in the open - every once in a while I'll glance at their issue tracker for light bedtime reading. Just recently we had some fun internally throwing our controls software at their thermal loop as a usage example - it's often hard to find compelling real-world systems to use as openly sharable examples (of course we have interesting customer problems, but that's all NDA'd), so having companies build real stuff in the open is fantastic. Great company, wish them the best.
Yeah, me too. I know that they have already explained why they can't, but I'd love for them to build a mini box that we could try it out on.
> too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers
You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how many other potential customers feel that way too.
What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive for most enterprises to adopt.
I always thought a company like Railway would be an Oxide customer. But Railway is building their own servers in their own datacenters. So I am really curious who is small enough to buy Oxide, but large enough to need Oxide?
how does it compare to Nutanix?
Of topic, but where the hell did Nutanix come from? I've never heard of them until recently and all of a sudden, they are being marketed as a serious competitor to VMware etc.
What's interesting about this raise is the framing: 'we didn't need to raise capital to support the business.' That's remarkably rare for a hardware company, especially pre-IPO.
The real thesis validation here isn't just product-market fit - it's that integrated hardware/software infrastructure can have better unit economics than the traditional model of 'Dell boxes + VMware licenses + storage vendor + network vendor + 3 years of integration work.' When you own the full stack from firmware to hypervisor, you can make tradeoffs that commodity integrators can't.
This mirrors what hyperscalers learned 15+ years ago: custom silicon (Google TPUs, AWS Nitro, Azure smart NICs) exists because known integration points let you optimize globally. Oxide is essentially selling that capability to enterprises stuck between 'can't use public cloud' and 'can't afford a hyperscaler-style infrastructure team.'
The $200M from existing investors only is notable because it signals the business metrics actually support the vision. Most infra startups at this stage are still hunting for product-market fit.
Oxide is the only company where I check the careers page hoping that they have a position which I can apply to.
Happy to see their success. Especially so if you've been following their journey through their podcasts (easily the best tech podcast out there if you care about your craft; no filler, all killer).
I actually did apply, The mere application takes hours upon hours, and for what a generic rejection email.
This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an interview with another startup company, and after six interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little bit to stay employed.
Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time.
Things are looking up though, I'm starting a job soon and the entire interview process was more or less a 30 minute phone call with the technical manager. That's it, two days later or so I had a verbal offer. I don't need to change the world, I need to pay my rent.
If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes. If it’s any comfort that means you did pretty well.
The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason you didn’t get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know that it’s seen as a pretty bad signal. The general expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a candidate doesn’t commit to their jobs, or that they don’t do well at their jobs and are getting let go.
Okay, but if my resume is a concern let's talk about in the first interview. I can't exactly rest and vest for 2 years when the company is running out of money. I had the bad luck of this happening 3 times in a row.
Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half, switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most of us.
I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3 years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to do quality work, you really should just stay there instead of chasing slightly more money.
After my dates of employment I will parethetically add (bankrupt) or (shutdown) to indicate that it wasn't related to me personally. My best job was 18 months.
Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short stints on my resume while I was interviewing for DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't dedicated or trustworthy.
He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives doing the layoffs got removed by the board.
So I left and got to add another short stint at a company run by craven morons to my resume :)
I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with any assertion that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.
There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.
If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may have spent 15 minutes on it.
It was actually a round with the CEO.
I don't feel disrespected or anything, just feels weird to spend that much time interviewing someone.
Reminds me of the 6 interview gauntlet I dealt with when interviewing with Hashicorp[1] years ago.
---
[1]: <https://blog.webb.page/WM-025>
Please take this in the spirit in which I’m writing it (i.e. please recognize the occupational disease of “bugs everywhere” and only mock it in moderation; I do appreciate the post itself):
- The Firefox browser on my Android tablet is close enough to a desktop one that I have no problem reading your blog post. The nag feels unnecessary, especially given it obscures part of the header. For what it’s worth, the tablet’s screen is 1600 real pixels wide @ 260 ppi, and Firefox for Android tells the CSS that the viewport is 800 “pixels” wide—if “pixels” were 1/96", then it would be somewhat below 600 “pixels”, so I don’t know where it’s getting that value from.
(And now I can’t stop thinking if I could make a thing in CSS that would look like a plain-text RFC on a desktop screen but gracefully reflow on a narrower screen.)
- The lightweight-markup parser seems to have gotten confused around the phrase “tests and whiteboarding”.
Excessive amounts of interviews is more likely they were not enthusiastic about him but didnt have anybody else better and were stringing him along until they found somebody else.
I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time. Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable to the company.
Yeah, I've seen someone get strung along and then finally hired. What happened was that it was a bit of a downturn so there was a limit to the hiring. Another dept somehow convinced the division head that their role was more urgent, so our department was left without approval even though we wanted the guy. It was a poor job market so he didn't land anywhere else even though it was a few months before the approval finally arrived. Everyone felt kind of shit about it. The guy was quite jittery to start with.
That sounds like it was a terrible place, but it was a good department in a somewhat hard nosed company. He ended up staying there 10 years.
It’s going to blow your mind that many processes at many businesses are horribly inefficient and waste buckets of human time.
> If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes.
Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would have specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's time putting them through full rounds of interviews?
if you were an experienced/mature tech employee you should probably know that there are real HR reasons why companies are strongly advised not to give too much information in a rejection email. there is only ever downside. your reaction here is a potential red flag.
i'm sympathetic to you, it sucks, why cant we all be nice to each other, and my answer to that all is lawyers.
It could also be that they might be sued for stating the real reason so they went with something that would be dismissed if it went to court.
A friend of mine (in an entirely different industry) went through five rounds of interviews with a company and got passed over for someone internal.
A little while later, the same company reached out and encouraged him to apply again. Five rounds later, and he got passed over a second time.
Fast forward two years and they reached out to him a third time. He's basically convinced that because he's black he's their token DEI interview candidate to make them feel better about themselves while internally promoting the people they actually want, but of course they wouldn't actually say that.
This is the reason. If they make any statement you could contest it in court, so they don't make any statement
> … specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well …
Takes time away from the day job and other candidates.
You're not changing the world either way, you would just be working for a more demanding guy. Fuck em.
This is my favorite response in the thread. We aren't talking about getting a job at doctors across borders or something, we just want to manipulate bits of silicon to increase our networth.
When you say "we aren't" I hope you realize you aren't speaking for everyone. Even doctors across borders probably needs an IT person. There are jobs available for less pay that are fulfilling in other ways. I know I have taken them and am better off for it.
Yea agree, I worked at a bank during covid and helped do some work that tangentially helped relief/social security payments go through. Warmed me heart it did
I'm pretty sure VC backed companies are by and large doing it to increase the networth of the founders, and hopefully investors.
I don't lie to myself, I know why I do this.
A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.
I just reached out to them after the 4 to six weeks had passed. got my decision a few days later
Yeah. I tried that at the eight week mark, but I heard nothing back. Obviously not a process-heavy company, but that’s part of their appeal.
Usually the stated reason is not actually the real reason. They just state something generic that isn’t illegal to admit.
The real reason might be “they didn’t like your vibes” or something like that
Hiring is incredibly complicated when done well. If 'limited fuzzy Boolean windows' over 'complex interpersonal dynamics' is vibes, then we will need to accept vibes.
Vibes aren't a protected category.
They aren't explicitly, but, if you ever find yourself in a position where you're part of the hiring decision, it's best to categorize vibes as protected for anything written or otherwise recorded.
SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
For some people, the 'wrong vibes' are often proxies for cultural things - all kinds of body language contribute to vibes and it's easy to accidentally (or on purpose...) discriminate against a whole categories based on vibes. If you tell a candidate "Hey we just didn't like your vibes as much as this other guy", it could affect your exposure to claims that you discriminated against them based on their race.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Department_of_Housing_an....
> SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
This was probably wrong, both in terms of interpreting the existing law and as a statement of what the law should be. Sometimes bad facts correlate with race; that should not be a reason to deny using the measure for e.g. hiring or lending.
Do "vibes" really matter all that much when you're going to be working 100% remotely? Maybe we should be moving to fully blind auditions for such jobs, where the interview might still be proctored in some way to prevent outright cheating, but the people who make the hiring decision aren't even put in a position where they might "vibe" with the candidate.
I mean, yes. You’re still working with them even if it’s behind a computer screen.
> SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
I realise it may be somewhat beside your point, but that was a Kennedy+liberals vs conservatives ruling in 2015 - so the current SCOTUS would likely have ruled the other way, and decent odds they overrule it sooner or later. Scalia’s dissent was objecting to the entire idea of disparate impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act, so more likely that gets overruled than this specific application of that idea.
This was a statutory interpretation case though, so if SCOTUS overturns the decision, Congress could reverse that with ordinary legislation, no constitutional amendment required. But who knows whether that will turn out to be politically feasible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Department_of_Housing_an...
(Also, you need to change the last period in the URL to %2E to stop HN from mangling it.)
> Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time.
Honestly these "reasons" they give are usually BS excuses when it basically amounts to they don't like your personality or looks.
Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process.
It's a contractor life for me, I work for money, not "purpose" or anything else.
Hell my Facebook (technically a fully owned subsidiary to be fair) interview loop was easier. I didn't get the job that time either, but at least it was straight up.
> Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process.
In previous HN threads they said something to the effect that they expect their applicants to have read what’s online about their equal base salary. Equity is not equally applied though.
I'm not talking about Oxide here, this was a different company.
Eh. I've been on a bunch of hiring committees. It hasn't been personality or looks. But a combination of things that we probably didn't all agree on and that may not have been able to fully articulate in a short message.
Don't underestimate the importance of timing, for both the company you're applying at and the industry/economy as a whole.
As they say, you can't get blood from a turnip.
Writing this comment reminded me of a personal experience, story time:
Many moons ago I interviewed at a mature startup in silicon valley, they shipped a tiered storage appliance and were in the process of pivoting to a new storage medium (think transitioning from spinning rust to SSDs, something like that).
This was in-person, and everything went swimmingly well, before departing they stated an intention to make an offer and I should expect an email w/offer attached within a week. I got an offer letter, and accepted immediately, as I was super excited about the stack I'd be playing with.
A week before the start date I get a call from a founder, they said I couldn't start because their funding round didn't come through. The economy was going through some sort of financial crisis and it was one of the many blood baths where silicon valley startups shuttered by the hundreds overnight. So in essence, this was a job I got fired from before I could even start, wee!
What followed was a pretty frustrating few months of interviewing and not getting anywhere.
But there is a silver lining to this story, that founder who called me sat on the board of other storage startups. One of them managed to get some water in this funding desert, and its founders reached out to me at his recommendation. I ended up building some great stuff over 4-5 years at that company.
So basically you wanted to have it easy - joining a company with a certain prestige and be over the recruitment process in 30 minutes or less.
Oxide and Friends is the only computing podcast I listen to anymore. It's a bunch of fun and they have insights I actually value.
The original On The Metal podcast they did is incredible too. The interviews they had with computing legends are just fantastic.
I used to enjoy it much more before it became just another podcast extoiling the virtues of AI-assisted coding. I have too many of those already.
I appreciate their treatment of the current AI boom cycle. Just last night they had Evan Ratliff on from the Shell Game podcast[1], and it was a great episode. They're not breathlessly hyping AI and trying to make a quick buck off it, instead it seems they're taking an honest, rigorous look at it (which is sadly pretty rare) and talking about the successes as well as the failures. Personally I don't always agree with their takes, I'm more firmly in Ed Zitron's camp that this is all a massive financial scam, isn't really good for much, and will do a lot more harm than good in the long run. They're less negatively biased than that, which is fine.
[1] https://www.shellgame.co/
Has the audio quality / recording method for Oxide and Friends gotten better?
I have this horrible "completionist" tendency and I got stuck on a 2021 episode where the audio needed post-processing and I just never got around to it.
I loved On the Metal and it was a bummer to fall behind on the new show.
There's absolutely no shame in "falling behind" on a podcast when even the audio itself is subpar, your time and attention is way more valuable than that. If the hosts have problems with that, they can provide sensible extra aids such as high-quality transcripts, to help viewers catch up on what they've missed without placing undue demands on their time.
I love the new podcast but miss on the metal so much. It should be quarterly at least
Same here. As a teenager I dreamt about working for SUN. Oxide comes close in a way.
I already know it is out of my league, however the podcast is great to listen to.
I try to listen to the podcast the main guy's brain seems to be on overdrive can barely talk
I really tried to like the podcast. It’s been a few years, so maybe it’s improved.
The topics were good. The guests were great.
But Bryan Cantrill was just terrible at letting his guests actually talk.
Bryan, if you’re listening, please let your guests talk. We have a large amount of content on YouTube if we want to hear the Bryan Cantrill take on, well, anything and everything. And it’s often amusing and sometimes right.
People don’t tune in to a podcast with guests to hear the host pontificate. They tune in to hear the guest, and sometimes the guest/host dynamic. When the host talks over the guest, you don’t get either.
After the Jonathon Blow episode, I gave up. Dude had interesting things to say about C, C++, and Rust, but most of what we got was Bryan talking about Rust. I guarantee anyone tuning into the Oxide podcast knows Bryan Cantrill’s opinions about Rust. And firmware. And Oracle. And Linux. Etc. etc.
Let your guests talk.
Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0] was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I had to interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that evening with my family for Christmas (which I damned near did) -- and I have no doubt that I was not at my best!
I do try to get better at this stuff, and I re-listen to our episodes to improve as an interviewer. If it's been "a few years", maybe you haven't listen too much to Oxide and Friends? I think we've had some wonderful guests and great conversations over the span of the podcast -- though I also have no doubt that it's imperfect, for which you have my profound apologies!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY
I appreciate the reply and that it's been a while; I will give your podcast another listen.
It wasn't just the Jonathon Blow episode; that was just the point where I said "this is frustrating." For what it's worth, frustration came from knowing that this could be really good: your perspective is valuable, your topics were interesting, and your guests were excellent.
I find this a common mistake that people with strong opinions have when doing interview/guest style podcasts or shows. There's really an art to it; it's not easy to engage guests, keep the show interesting, and let the talk move in interesting ways. That's why Terry Gross and Howard Stern, in very different ways, have had such long and storied careers.
But it's something that people definitely get better at, and I have no doubt that you have. Again, I'll give it another listen.
Is this only based on On the Metal? (If so, those are all from six years ago -- even the ones that were released a mere five years ago.) Please do check out Oxide and Friends[0] -- and feedback always welcome!
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
These sort of transparent answers are what make oxide and the people behind it such a fantastic company. Thank you for your wonderful contributions to the software and hardware community!
I disagree. I found the 'On the Metal' to be great balance between the guest and the hosts. And Oxide and Friends I would expect Oxide to be big part of it.
And Jonathon Blow manages to talk enough ...
And lawnmowers.
I applied last year. But they had too many candidates apply to consider my application.
This is good news for them. I expect there will be more competition for positions there should any open up.
+1 for the podcast.
I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4 hours overlap with PST which excludes Europe
It doesn’t strictly exclude Europe, we have a few employees in Europe. But as the other reply says, they work slightly odd hours.
> I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4 hours overlap with PST which excludes Europe
Wouldn't that depend less on where you are and more about your sleeping schedule? I generally go to bed around 04:00Z, up around 11:30Z sometime, seems that would work regardless of location, no?
Unless the position *strictly* requires the overlap (e.g. Manufacturing or Program Management), you can apply. The required overlap is the expected team commitment you should abide to, the logistics are up to you to make it work. If that sounds encouraging, please apply!
I'm happily voluntarily unemployed, but happy to hear my reasoning was accurate regardless, cheers and good luck :)
If I were in college, that would make sense, but I like to spend evenings with my family.
You just need to find the right family it sounds like ;) We both have the same sleeping schedule so works out for us, and we hang out more than ever. But YMMV.
Working for them would be cool, but just getting to work with their gear would be great. I am so tired of commodity Dell x86 servers (and garbage drivers, management hardware, etc) and support technicians who have no resources to actually support the hardware (beyond telling me to update the firmware and pray).
As an AWS heavy user, spinning up an oxide VM really does feel so slick.
Can you name some people who are working there and who you look up to? I need some new idols after the old idols all went up in MAGA and Epstein files .
Well one, don't look up to people you personally don't know. Parasocial relationships are not healthy. Look into your local community for people to be mentors or help you.
That said I like Bryan Cantrill as an engineer and leader, but I would never put him on a pedestal.
On the other hand, it's normal to have heroes, and to need to have them.
Not really.
One dichotomy categorisation I personally look for in people is: * likes heirachy versus * dislikes heirachy.
I suspect heroes are mostly relevant if you are a heirachy lover? I also believe that heirachy lovers are more likely to believe in evil puppetmaster conspiracies (anti-heroes if you will).
It is a lot harder to find heroes if you dislike authority because your heroes are more likely to avoid heirachical status ladders?
This is a child mindset, people don't need heroes. They need leaders that care about them and want to better their communities; these leaders are found within your literal neighbors, friends, and family.
Heroes like Spiderman and Batman? Or strangers that put on a mask, and whose public image is maintained by PR firms?
Not really, that’s what leads to parasocial relationships.
Nobody is flawless and part of becoming an adult is learning to admire specific qualities rather than obsess over individuals.
It's best to avoid idolizing folks. It can give you a skewed set of expectations and lead you to resent them when inevitably they cannot live up those those expectations (which is unfair to them), and possibly lower your own self esteem if you cannot meet those same standards yourself.
Tip that will work forever, even when the ones you replace your old idols with get replaced: Don't have any idols.
Listen to the words, don't follow "personalities", don't listen to specific individuals just because of their status. Not a single time have I been disappointed by an idol, because I've made the conscious choice of not having following any. Bunch of smart people say smart stuff all the time, until they don't. I read everything as if I don't know the author, I think more people should do this and less celebrity worship would make the entire ecosystem better. We need less of it, not more.
I've seen Bryan Cantrill present at a few conferences and his talks are always the best.
A recent one (2025q4) he gave at Jane Street, "Andreessen’s Folly - The False Dichotomy of Software and Hardware":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JjG0Qfwi8
Is Jessie Frazelle still there? She is very impressive.
no, but still being super impressive. CEO of a company rebuilding a CAD rendering engine because they put an LLM on top of it. So you describe the mechanical specs of the part you want and it models it. Takes all the tedium out of modeling stuff. Super cool and many applications.
Oh cool! That looks like a super interesting product.
https://zoo.dev
They had to do CAD while working on Oxide and realized that it sucked. So she went off to solve that.
that's taking yak shaving to another level!
Bryan Cantrill
I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really good too.
I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I skilled enough that I could work at Oxide?". Hope more companies follow suit in putting the people forward!!
After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision.
Total chaos.
I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.
For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.
>Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
My experience with flat structure is the most stubborn opinionated people end up making all the decisions because they dont budge and get to escape all responsibility for bad calls. Better to have a designated lead.
FWIW there's equal pay but it's not a flat structure
Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.
Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.
[0] https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Free...
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it being normal to have an incompetent boss.
That's because flat structures are often, or often turn into, "flat-in-name-only" structures.
I don't think the Tyranny of Structurelessness is arguing in favour of hierarchy, or against other forms of organization than hierarchy.
I don't think it's arguing against "flat" or "anarchy" style organizations either.
In essence, I think it's asking us to do whatever we're doing better, more honestly, more effectively, and less stressfully. By acknowledging, clarifying, communicating, and seeking to understand the real operating structures, what's really going on. And then to improve them, using that understanding.
An actually flat organization might be good, I don't know. I've never seen one. I've been in some that claimed to be flat, and became stressful places to work, for the same usual reasons hierarchies can be unpleasant, including incompetent bosses (not called bosses). But I've also had some pleasant experiences in flat organizations, and I prefer it that way, if it's designed and run well.
You don't need strict hierarchies, necessarily (in fact I don't believe 'traditional' hierarchies are in practice ever actually ironclad: the org chart is only ever an approximation of the real power structure). It's more that you should plan your power structure carefully (many forms are possible!), and ideally make it as transparent as possible, as pretending that you won't have one at all is merely an illusion (you will never completely succeed! Firstly because power structures are, in their full glory, ludicrously complex and ever-shifting, but also because hidden information is itself a form of power)
the argument isn't that flat organizations don't work, but that they're even more insidious than actual hierarchies. Zizek gives two great examples of the startup and the modern family. In the startup your boss is still your boss, except officially he's your friend, so you can't even hold him accountable, because there are no bosses. (political analog, traditional socialist parties, we're all comrades so better don't think anything wrong)
In the non-hierarchical family you aren't just ordered to dress up and go see grandma, you're guilt tripped into feeling bad about not seeing grandma, until you do it out of "your own volition". In the non-hierarchy you're not just supposed to be outwardly obedient but free on the inside, you're supposed to be obedient on the inside too. They work well, really well. Unlike the traditional hierarchy the tyranny is absolute because it has no borders and doesn't have to acknowledge itself.
>However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known
exactly, because they're visible. Valve, despite its utopian conditions, is weirdly enough, very secretive
> The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy.
See perhaps Le Guin's novel:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
It is hard to define exactly what good management is but incredibly easy to tell when it isn't happening.
I always felt the same every since I learnt about the company. Can't think of a more rewarding place to work at.
This is my first time hearing of Oxide, but I had the same initial thought after reading this blog post then poking through their site. The degree of careful thought put into their policies and culture is really impressive, at least from the outside. Good for them, I hope they continue to be in a position to have that luxury (genuinely).
You should check out their podcast, Oxide And Friends
I say this every time Oxide comes up, and I know that I will never get my wish, but if they ever ventured into the "homelab" market with smaller products, they can have all my money.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be profitable for them, but I feel like having some vendor sell a ‘reference machine’ that they know could run the core OS well would be a good in between. Someone like Framework selling a workstation looking desktop in a specific reference config couldn’t be too bad. Feels like just enough to get a community started. Most tasks really don’t need bleeding edge hardware anymore, the thing could go years without hardware changes.
Agree 100% with this. Really want to test it out.
Could someone explains to me what the secret is here? Apart from the fancy marketing, is it the full integration? The hardware? It took me a while to find an actual picture of one of the modules.
They’re players in a newish market segment called “hyperconverged,” basically “you buy a rack and it runs your workload, you don’t worry about individual systems/interconnect/networking etc because we handled it.”
Oxide seem to be the best and most thorough in their space because they have chosen to own the stack from the firmware upwards. For someone who cares in that dimension they are a clear leader already on that basis alone, for other buyers who don’t, hopefully it also makes their product superior to use as well.
Microsoft and Nutanix have had a hyperconverged architecture for over a decade. Oxide is mostly an alternative to Nutanix or other soup-to-nuts private clouds.
Oxide is a really nice platform. I keep trying to manipulate things at work to justify the buy in (I really want to play wiht their stuff), but they aren't going for it.
Afaik nutanix doesn't sell a custom rack, running custom firmware, preloaded with their software though.
The first attempts at hyperconverged were very hardware focused and kinda meh. Nutanix is the best example - they pioneered hyperconverged hardware but the firmware/software was extremely average. Oxide are the first to say "it should just feel like cloud, except you own it" and building for that.
Oxide hardware is very well put together
I'm a bit puzzled because this seems backwards from what I thought had been the evolution of things.
Didn't companies historically own their own compute? And then started offloading to so-called cloud providers? I thought this was a cost-cutting measure/entry/temporary solution.
Or is this targeting a scale well beyond the typical HPC cluster (few dozen to few hundred nodes)? I ask because those are found in most engineering companies as far as I know (that do serious numerical work) as well as labs or universities (that can't afford the engineers and technicians companies can).
Also, what is the meaning of calling an on-prem machine "cloud" anymore? I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just got resources on demand over the network. Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters. And then if the machine is designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?
> Didn't companies historically own their own compute?
As group-of-cats racks, usually, which is a totally different thing. Way "back in the day" you'd have an IT closet with a bunch of individually hand-managed servers running your infrastructure, and then if you were selling really oldschool software, your customers would all have these too, and you'd have some badly made remote access solution but a lot of the time your IT Person would call the customer's IT Person and they'd hash things out.
Way, way, way back in the day you'd have a leased mainframe or minicomputer and any concerns would be handled by the support tech.
> I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just got resources on demand over the network.
This idea does that, but in an appliance box that you own.
> And then if the machine is designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?
The system is designed by a third party to be trivially set up and maintained by the customer, that's where the differentiation lies.
In the moderately oldschool way: pallets of computers arrive, maybe separate pallets of SAN hosts arrive, pallets of switches and routers arrive. You have to unbox, rack, wire, and provision them, configure the switches, integrate everything. If your system gets big enough you have to build an engineering team to deal with all kinds of nasty problems - networking, SAN/storage, and so on.
In the other really oldschool way: An opaque box with a wizard arrives and sometimes you call the wizard.
In this model: you buy a Fancy Box, but there's no wizard. You turn on the Fancy Box and log into the Deploy a Container Portal and deploy containers. Ideally, and supposedly, you never have to worry about anything else unless the Big Status Light turns red and you get a notification saying "please replace Disk 11.2 for me." So it's a totally different model.
> Didn't companies historically own their own compute?
Historically, companies got their compute needs supplied by mainframe vendors like IBM and others. The gear might have sat on premises in a computer room/data center, but they didn't really own it in any real sense.
> Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what people already call clusters.
Is it really a cluster when the whole machine is an integrated rack and workloads are automatically migrated within the rack so that any impending failure doesn't disrupt operation? That's a lot closer to a single node.
So a bit like SeaMicro in the 00's but with more software?
Rack scale computing, on both the software and hardware side. That means building custom network switching, power management, etc, in a turn key solution that drops in to a customer's data center. Unbox it, plugin a few connections, make a few configuration settings, and start deploying. It's the on-prem response to the cloud for companies running things at scale.
Companies spend an eye watering amount of money on AWS relative the underlying hardware cost. There's definitely a market for something like a mainframe that runs K8s, Postgres, Redis, and the like where you buy once and then run forever.
I don't know if it's true or not but it seems like our AWS bill is something like paying the full purchase price of the underlying hardware every month.
AWS supplies a significant portion (was it something like 50%?) of Amazon's overall profits.
Turn key well designed onprem private cloud.
Yes and:
IIRC, Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.
>Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.
I've heard Bryan and Co. call it a "mainframe for Zoomers," but it's much closer to what Nutanix or VxRail is/was doing than it is to an AS/400.
It's not really a mainframe because the RAS story (Reliability, Availability, Servicing) story is sorely lacking compared to what a true mainframe gives you. So a midrange machine like AS/400 is probably a better comparison.
An AS/400 has a similar RAS story to mainframes than to Oxide/Dell. Oxide is closer to Dell (Oxide RAS is effectively the same as any sled hyperconverged) than they want to admit.
For those of us who are unaware of "the value proposition" of an "IBM AS/400," could someone spell it out for us?
When the AS/400 came out circa 1989 or whatever, you could replace an entire mainframe with a box not much bigger than a mini fridge. The hardware is built for high reliability, and the OS and application software stack have a lot of integration. If Unix is "everything is a file" then AS/400 is "everything is a persistent object in a flat 64 bit address space."
The result is a system that can handle years of operation with no downtime. The platform got very popular with huge retailers for this reason.
Then in later years the platform got the ability to run Linux or Windows VMs, so that they could benefit from the reliability features.
High capacity, super reliable box that you could run your entire business stack on, if you could afford it.
The money IBM made with the AS/400 is actually completely mind blowing when you compare it to the rest of the computing industry at the time.
Related question: Are services like AWS Outpost from public clouds the main competitor for Oxide?
I don’t know who they see as competitors in market positioning (ie, who is selling against them on their target buyer’s calendar). But the space is called hyperconverged computing and there are a few other players like Scale Computing building “racks you buy that run your VMs.”
More like Nutanix, Xen, IBM, Kubernetes... private cloud, colo, on-premise... etc. There's a ton of stuff (I'd bet the majority) of compute workload in business that is local/colo and not cloud.
From the podcasts they talk a little about their clients. It's people who want something like AWS Outpost but fully disconnected and independent from any cloud and running 100% local.
I don't think that is the 'main' competitor. But its certaintly 'a' competitor for companies that already have put a lot of their eggs into the AWS basket.
The selling point, from the looks of it, is an on-prem cloud where you own the hardware.
For the business guys they're focusing on price and sovereignty. Owning your business. For technical people they are focusing on quality. Not having to deal with integration bugs.
Owning instead of renting, for cost and control, without giving up the benefits of the cloud.
I get the whole x CPUs y RAM story (it's akin to how clouds sell) and that often makes sense in the cloud, but when managing my datacenter operations a big constraining point is compute / kW. At 30 A / 208 V at 85% efficiency I've got 5 kW to work with per cabinet. If I'm putting in low core density slow machines I've got to do a lot more management than if I'm using my Epyc 9755 based servers. This is a practical constraint not just a theoretical "oh I want the latest and greatest". It's just that I can't really justify using up 4U and a kW on an Epyc 7003 series. The compute density just isn't there for the power use. The old chips are practically deadweight.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear of the raise because the team seems exceptional (judging by the posts you guys write and they have written prior to the company) and I love work in this area that simplifies hardware management. Good stuff, good luck, and congratulations!
> 5 kW to work with per cabinet
have my expectations been shot by reading too much about Nvidia's latest and greatest, or does this seem quite low?
Having worked in the space, 6kVA is the norm from 10-15 years ago, 12kVA is the standard for regular compute workloads. With HPC/AI all bets are off though.
No, your expectations are not wrong. I'm a small business. A fully stacked AI/GPU cabinet is multiples of this. A single GH200 based server will have 2x2.7 kW power supplies in a 1U form factor. As you can imagine, I am not running a cabinet full of such servers. But you don't need AI power requirements to do normal software. And there's lots of normal software to do!
That’s standard practice in many data centers; but you can often pay more to get more amps delivered to your rack.
If I could use the Oxide stack in a homelab form factor, I would be so happy...
I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.
Their engineered power and cooling solutions are all for rack-scaled hardware, doing a NUC wouldn't make sense. Now a silent and efficiently cooled studio-sized rack with enough hardware (including AMD GPUs) for reasonably quick AI inference with the latest local models, that's something that they could do and be quite popular.
Framework desktop mainboards 128GB version. They even show a mini rack with 4 of them.
That's mini ITX hardware, not really rack-sized in the sense of a common studio rack.
I'm not saying they should put their software stack on a Celeron (or whatever Intel calls their cheap CPUs now). But no racks, please. I just can't get with the "rack in my house" crowd. If you have a basement, then fine I guess. But I live in an apartment, and I don't have the space or patience for a computer that's the size of a mini fridge, and sounds like a jet engine.
All of their software is open-source, including the firmware. I bet this is actually possible for a subset of their tools.
Step 1 could be to get Illumos running on a local x86-64 machine.
I'm interested, tell me more. What about Oxide attracts a homelab user?
Many homelab users are actually building things out in an effort to learn tooling that they will then use at work. Or just out of intellectual interest.
Yeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their product material.
If they can scale down the hardware to something close to homelab-ish in price, would be great marketing and way to build expertise to have their big boy solution promoted at workplaces. Probably not a priority at their stage though.
Prices start around 800k last time I heard, I don't know if that fits within what you consider a premium or not :-)
Hah, that might be slightly above what I'm ready to pay for a at-home server yes :) But given the right specifications and software integration, I'd probably be ready to pony up up to somewhere around 10K for a complete solution if it could replace all my existing hardware, even if it was more expensive than other options with worse tradeoffs.
You would need 3-phase power too. At 208V and 15kW it'll draw over 70A peak :P. If you can wire that up in your living room, I raise my glass to you!
I'll take the challenge if it gets me Oxide hardware!
You can! There are plenty of us running various minis or old equipment. The non-gimlet deploy pattern supports virtual networking with x86_64 "sleds."
Can you clarify what parts of the Oxide stack you're running? Is it the entire control plane?
I'll say: You made the right call striking while the iron is hot. My employer did one of those "Didn't need to but did it anyway" rounds and it was critical for a successful exit that came years later.
God, i am so glad to see these guys succeeding. The sun may have burned out, but the sky is still bright thanks to them. May they be so successful that i can eventually buy workstation versions of their minicomputers, sort of like how they made CoaL for triton.
Love Oxide and what they're building, but I'm not sure raising even more VC money is the way to build a generational company. Quite the opposite? With money you don't need, you're trading faster growth for more dependencies on third parties that will seek a ROI eventually?
Hardware businesses are capital intensive. They need the money.
They also need to grow and iterate faster. Their software stack is great, but their hardware is quite dated in a fast moving industry. This limits them to domains that value their software and security but don’t need the latest hardware for performance and aren’t necessarily concerned with performance per dollar, which is a small market.
If they didn't buy all the RAM they needed for their near future before the prices spiked, they probably need most of the $200M just for that.
As companies grow, their capital needs actually increase, even if they are profitable.
We can hope that this is the case for Oxide, though I don’t expect they are reliably profitable yet.
They state:
> ...it's not uncommon for us to be asked directly: "How do I know you won’t be bought?"
Raising ~infinite runway from investors who are already known quantities signals that you can safely buy into their product knowing they're not getting snapped up by $megacorp anytime soon. That's where the faster growth comes from--customers who feel secure in the knowledge that the company isn't going anywhere.
Not necessarily. Supply chains and vendor management into scale is very difficult and very very expensive, I think we prob spend north of $200MM to get to $150MM ARR, but the economics started to shake out thereafter based on CAGR. To do this without owning 0% of the company while still recognizing needing a lot of cash in the system to keep everything lubricated, (for example Michael Dell might be fine personally extending a $500MM line of credit to the business, if the business has $50MM in venture funds on some predictable growth rate) - basically you use true risk capital via the smallest amount of equity you can give to de-risk downstream capital requirements. I don't know anything about how Oxide is growing their business so this could be total nonsense in their case, but it's how we built a generational business (digitalocean)!
Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making the call that this is a better time to be raising money than the years to come.
There is a gold-rush going on. It needs plenty of compute besides GPU's, this is definitely the time to scale as quickly as possible.
I don't think any Oxide racks come with GPU's at present, and the power density of modern GPU-centric AI compute is on a rather unprecedented level. Oxide racks are very well cooled but are no match for the racks in an AI datacenter that's literally burning a full gigawatt of power.
Yeah, they're not going to go up against the nVidia NVL72, NVL144 or AMDs UAL systems
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gb200-nvl72/ https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2025/amd-delivering-open-rack-s...
> needs plenty of compute besides GPU's
Databases, K/V stores, crawlers, services, etc all still necessary besides GPU's. The closer to GPU's the better and if you have GPU's in your own DC.
I wonder how Oxide's basic value proposition changes with the very recent growth in rack-scale and multi-rack (datacenter-wide) compute for AI. Surely these other vendors have tech (particularly around network interconnect) that can be repurposed effectively for the more general private cloud workloads Oxide is focusing on.
Conversely, has Oxide discussed in depth how they see GPU compute?
I’m guessing for their current target market of existing enterprise software it doesn’t matter, but the ownership and economics stories are at least as compelling for matmul code.
I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special about it apart from that?
Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability, and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point fingers at another vendor.
I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...
While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and networking, all with a centralized management interface/API.
Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.
> Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in Proxmox.
Proxmox isn't quite there yet for scalibility and hyperconverged but it is getting there really fast. It's more of a competitor to Microsoft HyperV HCI.
Agreed. Its more reminiscent of Cloudstack or Openstack from what I gather. I'm thinking of Jetstream2, but for you buy it rather than rent some of it with an NSF budget.
Proxmox is nice and getting there but what you simply can't replicate is the lower level firmware and managing layer. Proxmox on commodity hardware will always be limited by that. Same goes for deep integration with the switch that Oxide can do.
It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking and all that, integrated and with unified management.
There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.
A stack of 38x 1U and a switch does not a cloud make.
Slightly less pithy: they're selling rack-scale systems, with power, hardware, network, and control plane software all integrated. Something that presents to the user as something more like API to interact with than a pile of servers to be managed.
Think "AWS in a box", with the high level features you’d get there. API, Terraform, "managed" products like load balancers, database, etc. You get all that in a turnkey rack delivered to the datacenter or office doorstep.
It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.
I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it.
API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.
Yep, it’s basically slick hyperconverged infrastructure that you can buy a rack at a time without a subscription license.
Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license?
If the answer is no, then you might own the hardware on paper, but you don't control any of the software that makes said hardware useful.
If the answer is yes, on the other hand, then one must ask who is paying for those updates, because that can't be sustainable.
So while most of the software is open source rather than proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers pay for support (as they do with most enterprise products). One could theoretically use the product without first-party software updates, managing the open source oneself... but that would have practical impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product).
Two points about your last point. First, software improvements benefit all customers; as the business grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also, most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The sustainability of investments into the software (and the product generally) is on solid ground.
Back in the 90s and 00s, lots of companies churned out software products that were sold once, supported forever. It was a sort of Ponzi scheme, supporting old customers with money from new customers. Which was okay during a period of high growth. But sooner or later the market matured, growth plateaued, and the cost of ongoing maintenance became a much bigger problem.
Right now you're growing fast and swimming in VC money, so this is probably not an issue. At some point, though, you might find that even hardware depreciation cycles don't provide as much of a safety cushion as you hope they will. In an economic downturn, people might suddenly realize that Oxide hardware actually remains serviceable much longer than they expected. :)
> Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license?
what proprietary software stack? they just publish it all on https://github.com/oxidecomputer/ .
The software is open source and developed in the open. You can pay for support, but there’s no software licensing cost.
If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal.
If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.
All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.
There are plenty of old-school companies in Europe still working on moving to the cloud. Now that there is a burgeoning movement towards avoiding American cloud providers, Oxide could have an opportunity to sell "private cloud" servers instead. If they play their cards right, they could make significant inroads in European markets.
> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here
Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is delivering.
If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting.
Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking because the bad economics of cloud are becoming increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends such as making computing more local, not letting US companies control everything.
> You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro.
Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended up being such a loser.
I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming for that is somehow not worth doing.
>Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess.
For a startup, if the thesis is to take market share away from those two, it's actually not such a good story. You need a product that is 10x better than the competition, and I'm not convinced that the enhancements to firmware, reliability etc. amount to a 10x jump in business value prop. You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.
The claim that you need a 10x better product to win any market share is simply incorrect, both logically and historically.
Maybe if people that bought Dell had a deep love for Dell products and were deeply integrated unable to move, but even then 10x is a waste exaggeration.
But if you have any serious academic literature that underlies this 10x claim I'm happy to take a look.
> You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.
And neither does Dell and they are worth 80 billion $. And AMD doesn't make semiconductors, so they relay on other people IP. And TSMC doesn't make their lithographic machines or many other things, relaying on other people's IP. And all those materials relay on other people IP to be brought to market in the first place.
This is just a silly argument that for some reason puts CPU design companies as 'the real deal' and everybody else is somehow not good enough.
Historically good systems companies make just as good margin as most CPU design companies, specially those that don't have near monopolies.
> it's actually not such a good story
They are making inroads in a market that is 100s of billion $ large and people invested 300M$+ in them because they see costumer demand. If that's not good enough for you then I don't know what to tell you. I wish any of the starups I have worked at that kind of opportunity.
It seems to me you operate in a sense where anybody that doesn't go for a monopoly in a 5 trillion $ market is somehow not 'worthy' of being a startup. That just a very strange perspective on reality.
I worked at Red Hat a few years ago... early 2020s. For our customers, something like 80% of our RHEL customers were still on-prem.
Yes, cloud is huge, etc. But there's a very big iceberg of on-prem.
Because cloud customers don't pay for Linux and they use Ubuntu.
Well, the monster wearing broadcom skin fucking over vmware licensees makes for a very interested market.
There's a lot of stuff that even if you put majority in the cloud, you want local deployment for security (inc. "operate when internet is out" security/reliability) and latency reasons.
For various reasons, vmware was pretty strong contender in this. Oxide racks are comparable in "sanity of mind" in deployments, and last time I was in a company that could use that the only major breaker was lack of ability to ship a raw VLAN to a VM, to enable direct replacement of existing vmware stack. But if it's not already fixed, it is not particularly hard to fix.
Surely vmware licenses are more easily replaced via Proxmox? Why would you care about Oxide, which is a hardware vendor?
Proxmox is fine if your vmware deployment was quite small. Single oxide rack at max density is going to similar values as official scaling sizes for proxmox, and very much isn't limit of what we did with vsphere.
And Oxide sells a complete hardware + software solution, including virtualization and SDN - essentially it's a physical equivalent of up to 32 node virtualization cluster per rack, with builtin SDN and SD-SAN, that already has features to combine for more.
Is this about limits to what the Proxmox folks will officially provide support services for, or perhaps what can be comfortably managed in the Web UI? These are very valid concerns either way, but the Proxmox VE software itself does provide a comprehensive API and that should scale quite a bit higher.
I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?
You're not wrong. This is old school enterprise dressed up as a start up.
Brian is trying to recreate Sun and using investor money to do so.
Good luck to them but I can't see it ending well.
… Ancient jvm running under wine with webstart just to get to the remote console? ;) I do not miss those days.
You mean you don't have that issue anymore? I'm jealous.
at least relatively – gen9s, almost 10 years old by now – modern HPE iLOs have HTML5 remote console. dell too I think.
webstart at least works if non-plugin. Flash not so much -- looking at vcflex.
Has anyone purchased/enquired about an Oxide rack or currently running one ? any info on pricing ?
Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted it’s in the $500K to $1mm range.
Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.
Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course for any server hardware that's put in production, this is not a gaming PC build. Hopefully they're working on bringing their hardware up to date, since efficiency is a key consideration for the class of workloads they're aiming at.
> Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course for any server hardware that's put in production
No it’s not. Normally if you’re buying server hardware you don’t start with a CPU that’s already 5 years old and last-generation RAM that isn’t even manufactured at scale any more.
CPUs have advanced a lot in recent years. The jump from Zen 3 to Zen 5 is very substantial.
I just talk about some comments I read some time ago, so take this with a grain of salt. It was my understanding that if you were spending about $300k-$500k a year in cloud services, it would make sense this type of solution, so the expected price would be something between $500k-$1M depending on the configuration
Prices are high. You're not buying Oxide to save money.
save money as compared to ? genuinely curious
If I had millions in my bank, instead of buying fancy cars, I would definitely buy an Oxide rack just for the lols
Same, I've wanted one of these things for years.
Congratulations to the team. Oxide & Friends, Bryan, Adam & Team are such a valuable resource to our community. Their podcast is amazing, the problems they encounter, and their willingness to share with the rest of us is not taken for granted!
I am confused. How do you own a cloud you pay for as a service.
You buy the physical rack and install it in your data centre. It is your property.
importantly, you don't pay for it as a service, you buy it and it's yours. like buying a cloud in a box, instead of having to build it yourself with various server, storage, networking, and software vendors it all comes ready to use.
And, interestingly for Oxide, rack scale solutions from HW vendors might not be suited for your company's workload. Their solution isn't all-in on AI, from what I understand.
What led you to believe that this is a SaaS offering? It's not.
I don't know how it works for Oxide, but this isn't a new concept, IBM has been doing it since the 1950s. Own the mainframe, pay for the required service contract.
I guess there's two ways of looking at this, way (1) is leaning heavily into what seems at least seems to be top of cycle in a cyclical business, which is likely to be highly problematic when they hit downturn, or (2) doing an Amazon and getting lucky by having a massive war chest to survive the next down turn.
Looking forward to the podcast! Congrats. Had to do a double take, wasn't it around summer last year they closed 100 mil. Wild
Anyone have insight into revenue or valuation? Implied $1B Val but revenue guesstimates I see put them at sub $50M?
Can't wait to own one of their racks someday...or get around to making Oxide at home.
Their website is so nice and smooth even on my shitty computer, not like the other announcement pages of major companies that only work on state of the art macbooks.
The website looks good but it is very hard to know what they do exactly and what they sell, if you can be their customer or not just browsing the website. If you don't know them before.
Like do they sell a service or a product. Do they sell hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.
I think https://oxide.computer/product/specifications makes it pretty clear:
If you need a rack full of computers that are managed programmatically via an API then this is the machine for you.Unfortunately you have to read further down in the specs to see the actual hardware details. They’re on older generation hardware, so going by cores and RAM alone isn’t enough to tell you about the speed of those cores and the DDR4 RAM.
Hopefully raising money helps them iterate faster on their hardware so they’re not so far behind.
DDR4 is the right choice in this day and age, if they had gone with DDR5 it would have doubled the cost for the whole rack.
Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based option.
DDR4 is not being manufactured at scale any more so it’s becoming very expensive too.
> if they had gone with DDR5 it would have doubled
They charge a premium for their hardware due to the software. They have plenty of room for RAM price fluctuations. It would nowhere near double the price.
> Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based option.
I know you’re joking, but anything DDR3 based is really slow and power inefficient relative to current gen hardware.
Not really super relevant given that the question was “Do they sell hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.”
They are already selling the next generation, its just not public. I assume they are focusing on existing costumer and larger orders. While for now in public they still sell the older version. That is at least my guess.
We're working on making this easier to understand. Stay tuned! We know the last decade or so of using public cloud providers has made people forget that hardware and software are things you can own and run successfully. Oxide is exactly that. Hardware and software designed together to give you the public cloud experience on-premises.
Disclaimer: I work at Oxide.
I'm the undergrad who commented earlier. I’ve been poking around the Hubris source code and it’s exactly the kind of stack I want to work on. I'm actually doing the Redox Summer of Code this year, focused on implementing an EEVDF scheduler and a performance testing harness for the kernel.
From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of hardware/software co-design so high that you really just need a few decades of experience to be effective? I'd love a reality check on whether I should keep Oxide as a long-term 10-year goal or if there’s a path for people starting out.
Congratulations Oxide, it's inspirational to see curiosity, conviction and rigor pay off.
Can they re-raise it in Series Rust?
I speculate this is to help them pass the vendor business risk assessment process at larger customers.
Do you need to speculate? The post says exactly this.
I suspect it’s because VCs have trouble finding decent places to put all their money.
Another happy couple!
How much money do you have to raise to buy a decent mic?
These comments/upvotes feel astroturfed and any negative/questioning comments are heavily downvoted.
Love the team and the podcast. Kudos to them
I like this!
Wow, amazing. That some serious money. Everybody gets a raise hopefully. Congrats everybody.
What to do with so much money?
An AI product is of course the 'no-brainer', I would love to see them partner with Tenstorrent for the CPU/AI part. I think Bryan described this as Door 3 'doing something crazy'.
A product around AMD APU was talked about, but in a recent talk Brain said AMD doesn't seem to care about that product.
OpenTitan is now getting ready for production uses, maybe makes sense to switch to that in the future. Moving Hubris onto that shouldn't be to big of a lift.
A conventional server without DC bus bar maybe? Not talking about homelab server but something in a class where you can't have a whole rack and the bus bar. The main seller would be the fireware and software ontop to get people into the control plane ecosystem. And you could make Linux boot on it too for more market reach potentially. I'm not sure how much such a platform could share with current system.
An SSD or NIC with open fireware would be great, but not sure if you can develop that only for your own product or if you would want to sell it separatly to make sense. But that would be big departure from the current All-in-One product.
Amazing what you can do when all you try to do is make podcast. Maybe now they have money to bring back 'On the Metal'. I enjoyed the more structured interview style podcast about history of computing quite a bit. That said the more discussion oriented 'Oxide and Friends' is also nice.
Amazing, and all employees literally have equal equity, just like they did for salaries! Bravo.
> and all employees literally have equal equity
In previous HN threads they said that equity was not equal for all employees.
Not equity, last I heard
I'm confused and saddened on why Oxide has to keep raising money (in substitute for growth) and keep entrenching their business with VCs and letting them control business and ownership.
> "So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it."
From this of course the VCs will back and support Oxide (they are mentally thinking that Oxide will move into supplying hardware for AI datacenters) eventually want their money back at many many multiples and the pressure is there to achieve this.
Can you even invest in Oxide?
I just wish Oxide wouldn't have to keep getting owned by VCs which would inevitably lead to enshittification to pay back the VCs.
If Oxide followed the model of Valve (100% founder and employee ownership, profitable, vast unlikelihood of enshittification or pressure to get acquired or IPO) then it would be a different situation.
How could a massively capex business like Oxide scale in the same manner that Valve did based on the current market movement of the industry that Oxide is addressing? I personally cannot see how that is at all possible. The cash required to back downstream capital in a business like this as it scales without it falling flat is surly well in excess of $6/700MM, if they manage to get by with with only selling 300/400 million of equity, that will be a great outcome for the founders.
Unfortunately since they already took VC money they have to keep doing it and each time they do it they do it the VCs would own more and more and would control the business.
I predict in less than 10 years Oxide exits by way of being acquired or an IPO. The enshittification would have already begun by then.
> You seem very sure of yourself in how business works! I'm curious now, how did you create your $100MM++ revenue hardware business? I'd love to learn from you. [deleted]
You don't need to create a $100MM++ revenue hardware business to know how this ends when you get into bed too many times with VCs.
We already know it is a huge capex spend (which is why they keep going to VCs) the question is, how many times does Oxide need to go back to VCs to keep raising (even though they said they didn't need to raise?)
I hope they become immensely profitable enough to buy out the VCs stakes and get control back and become independent.
But I am doubtful that Oxide will do that if they keep raising and they will just be sold down the river in less than 10 years.
There’s nothing confusing about it. Hardware businesses require a lot of capital to build the hardware.
I don't see Hetzner getting into bed with VCs and raising $100M or $200M?
How long until Oxide needs $2BN, $4BN or $8BN from VCs, further getting owned by them?
K, well I was on the first/founding team of digitalocean and owned strategy there from zero to just before IPO, we took a bunch of venture, heck if you'd seen our covenants in our lease lines, they made our venture debt look like kittens, yet we IPO'd, and I don't think very many in the digitalocean story are particularly unhappy? VCs do not try to "own companies" they try to exit businesses at a gain.
> VCs do not try to "own companies" they try to exit businesses at a gain.
They do both as they need many multiples to return the fund.
And it also sounds very predatory to me and not aligning with any startup's mission other than for the VCs to pressure Oxide to get acquired for over $20BN+ or go to the public markets.
Not even Hetzner did this. DigitalOcean could have followed Hetzner, but I guess VC money is very attractive and now DigitalOcean is now the slave of Wall St.
Going into deals with VCs and IPO'ing to Wall St. always leads to enshittification.
Valve is primarily a software company with zero marginal cost to a game sale.
Another $200M for a company whose product most developers will never touch. VCs continue to confuse "hardware that sounds cool" with "business that makes money". This ends one of two ways: acqui-hire or Chapter 11.
Most developers never touch a mainframe or a nvidia h200 either. So were they bad investments? Neither do most developers touch a Cisco Core Router.
Amount of developers touching a specific piece of hardware is mostly unrelated to business success.
The real question is, are there big company with lots of money that buy your product.
Most developers won't know if they're touching it or not, given their market.
It's been six years and they still won't say "it's Nutanix but better". Is it not better? Does the "we akshually don't have competitors" approach work with customers?
I don't think we'd ever go with the "we don't have competitors" line, it's not serious. The competition is more AWS, GCP, and Azure than it is Nutnaix though, they can't provide a similar experience or economic value when they don't make or control their own hardware. That doesn't mean we never see Nutnaix, but it's not the most apt comparison. As Alan Kay famously said, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" - otherwise you'll be stuck at the intersection of support and scaling pains long term.
What company specifically mentions its competitors in its advertisements? Do you expect the homepage of the company to be a list of links to its competitors? What is this absurd expectation?