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Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

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Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#131

Post by pjmlp »

dasil003 wrote: post #129
pjmlp wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the survivor of vertical integration on consumer computing, the PC clones were the exception from everyone else in the market. Apple is now having that aura, only because they got really really lucky before the money collectors shown up at the door.

Sure. What's your point with regards to Oxide?

The point was it being compared to Apple.

Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#133

Post by dasil003 »

pjmlp wrote: post #131
dasil003 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. What's your point with regards to Oxide?

The point was it being compared to Apple. Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?

The basis of my comparison was nothing to do with business circumstance, but just that Apple and Oxide both were known for having taste in software (in Apple's case faded but still apparent in the DNA), and they build their own hardware to express that taste.

I think perhaps Solaris had a bit of that under Sun but I can't imagine that being the case under Oracle. And I'm not really an enterprise infra guy so can't really speak to IBM or Unisys offerings.

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#134

Post by [deleted] »

tyre wrote: post #88
shofetim wrote: post #17

Woot!, they are on a tear: 2023: Series A 44 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c... 2025: Series B 100 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b 2026: Series C 200 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c 2026: Series D 445 Million https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1795071/000179507126...

I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success. Also interesting from their Series C press release from earlier this year: > With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.

[deleted]

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#135

Post by xyzzy123 »

dasil003 wrote: post #133
pjmlp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was it being compared to Apple. Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?

The basis of my comparison was nothing to do with business circumstance, but just that Apple and Oxide both were known for having taste in software (in Apple's case faded but still apparent in the DNA), and they build their own hardware to express that taste. I think perhaps Solaris had a bit of that under Sun but I can't imagine that being the case under Oracle. And I'm not really an enterprise infra guy so can't re…

I do feel like Oxide are qualitatively different from the others pjlmp mentioned because they're staying commodity in key interfaces like CPU ISA / OS / ecosystem (thing with big network effects) and mainly focused on fixing the control plane / management / architecture mess.

The others suffered "ecosystem collapse". With Oxide you won't be stuck on a "burning platform", your main risk is that the value prop for the hardware & management experience doesn't play out.

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#136

Post by throwaway2037 »

apimade wrote: post #45
bithavoc wrote: post #6

(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge my request. crazy stuff.

They work with HFT/quant firms. Look at some of their former engineers who are now at matX. Intel/Barefoot Tofino 2, VHDL/SystemVerilog, FPGA, QSFP28 (100GbE networking), P4 programming. Their buyers don’t have customer stories. They don’t sell to SaaS companies.

    > They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
Is this true? If so, how do you know? I have listened to almost of their podcasts. I don't recall them saying there are any type of customer they refuse to sell to. They told a funny story about a sales call with a US national laboratory. They went into the call assuming they would be asking for supercomputer. Instead, they learned they need a bunch of regular rack compute, not all supercomputers.

Also, the OP did not say they are a SaaS company. They only said they spend 900K USD per year with AWS.

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#137

Post by esseph »

Nextgrid wrote: post #43
Alien1Being wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logical. They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.

Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware . I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage ha…

Complete hardware and software and firmware BOM. You won't get that anywhere.

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#138

Post by jononor »

sneak wrote: post #97
tyre wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success. Also interesting from their Series C press release from earlier this year: > With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.

It’s success compared to the other possibility: not raising money and going out of business. We still cheer when a rocket separates from the first stage and ignites the next. Things going as planned during a risky and challenging endeavor is still a good thing.

And it is not success compared to another possibility, earning enough money to not need further fundraising. Of course some businesses are more capital intensive and have longer time-to-money timelines due to factors outside the control of the company, and in that case fundraising is an essential tool for a long time.

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#139

Post by esseph »

XorNot wrote: post #80
joshuamorton wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware. There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its th…

Which only matters to consumers. Businesses at scale have teams doing this stuff and costs matter. I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.

> I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.

You may not have heard, but the US government just prints money.

Banks make a lot of it, too.

Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

#140

Post by esseph »

steveklabnik wrote: post #61
Nextgrid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error). Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.

(Former Oxide) An in-house team is most likely competing with something like Dell or VMware, not really Oxide. A significant part of Oxide’s value proposition is that you’re buying hardware and software purpose built for each other. Unless you’re also going to go so far as to do all of that, which companies like Google do, of course, it’s not really the same thing. This matters when your various vendors start pointin…

The more I read responses on here, the more I realize how much marketing work oxide needs to do even for the HN segment, which is very bizarre to me.

For me, Oxide is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the computing market in a long time.

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