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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. I don't get it.
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!
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.
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 $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
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.
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)!
> ...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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're not changing the world either way, you would just be working for a more demanding guy. Fuck em.
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.
> 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.
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/
I love the new podcast but miss on the metal so much. It should be quarterly at least
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.
And lawnmowers.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
Bryan Cantrill
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.
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
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.
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.
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
> The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy.
See perhaps Le Guin's novel:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
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
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.
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.
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.
Related question: Are services like AWS Outpost from public clouds the main competitor for Oxide?
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. I don't get it.
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!
Can they re-raise it in Series Rust?
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.
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 $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
If I had millions in my bank, instead of buying fancy cars, I would definitely buy an Oxide rack just for the lols
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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?
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.
How much money do you have to raise to buy a decent mic?
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.
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.
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.
What led you to believe that this is a SaaS offering? It's not.
I speculate this is to help them pass the vendor business risk assessment process at larger customers.
I suspect it’s because VCs have trouble finding decent places to put all their money.
Another happy couple!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Modern infrastructure is shifting from Cloud-First to Cloud-Smart.
Where Oxide provides the hardware ownership.
There are tools to automates the delivery ( CI/CD deployment ), and manages the multi-cloud cost arbitrage.