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Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)

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

#141

Post by nixon_why69 »

pjmlp wrote: post #128
TimTheTinker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.

Which many keep forgetting is that there was no one else wanting to acquire Sun, IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn, and that was it. Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.

Google could have bought Sun for less than they wound up paying in a decade of legal fees anyways over Android Java.

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

#142

Post by thomascountz »

huijzer wrote: post #119
Aurornis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success. You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors. Oxide raising this much money is a big accomplishment.

> You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors. I’m pretty sure the dotcom bubble had many counterexamples

If you follow Oxide (perhaps just by reading their Blog[1] and RFDs[2]), I think you'd find a more rigorous engineering and business culture than most case studies you're referring to from the 90s/00s. Of course it's not impossible that Oxide is getting themselves in trouble, but there is more evidence supporting a successful case, in my opinion.

[1]: https://oxide.computer/blog

[2]: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/

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

#143

Post by pjmlp »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #141
pjmlp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which many keep forgetting is that there was no one else wanting to acquire Sun, IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn, and that was it. Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.

Google could have bought Sun for less than they wound up paying in a decade of legal fees anyways over Android Java.

Indeed, which is why I am the opinion they had nothing to complain about.

However given their track record designing programming languages, thankfully that did not happen.

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

#144

Post by sunshowers »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #135
dasil003 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right -- customers don't have to port their stuff to a new platform or arch or anything. It's just normal x86_64 Linux/Windows VMs, or Terraform if they're so inclined.

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

#145

Post by panick21_ »

fuzztester wrote: post #94
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.

Good points. >I don’t know who needs to hear this Plenty of people on this forum need to hear it. Because they think otherwise. >but raising a ton of money is not success. Yes. It's not even an accurate predictor of future success. >With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence. Independence from whom? If they mean from everyone, they left out two i…

They mean is that they are much harder to acquire. Their goal is to become an independent public company.

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

#146

Post by fragmede »

jononor wrote: post #138
sneak wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah they're doing a hardware play, which means it's really capital intensive. That kind of cash means they can afford to do a larger production run, which gets them better economies of scale, which means more profit per unit sold. investors are being given private access to see that the demand is there to justify further investment.

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

#147

Post by panick21_ »

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?

IBM stuff is likely to expensive and optimized for different things. Same for the other Post-Mainframe stuff. You would pay for a lot of stuff you don't need, and there is a reason very few new costumers adopt it.

Oxide costumers want to run standard VM that they normally run in public cloud.

Do Oracle Solaris serves come with a horizontal scale out cloud infrastructure? As far as I know they don't.

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

#148

Post by panick21_ »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #77
rincebrain wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a…

Ok but add up a trickle of those examples, with staff to handle them, and you're still comfortably in the black. You dont even have extra organizational overhead. Every cloud first company has a head of devops sitting in the chair where head of infra would be. They somehow wind up with like half the staffing anyways compared to running bare metal.

You still need to do devops on your own infrastructure.

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

#149

Post by colesantiago »

panick21_ wrote: post #145
fuzztester wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. >I don’t know who needs to hear this Plenty of people on this forum need to hear it. Because they think otherwise. >but raising a ton of money is not success. Yes. It's not even an accurate predictor of future success. >With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence. Independence from whom? If they mean from everyone, they left out two i…

They mean is that they are much harder to acquire. Their goal is to become an independent public company.

> "independent public company"

But they are not independent though, they will be owned by Wall Street should they go public.

Instead they remain in the private markets for a long time and sell secondary shares, just like what Stripe is doing.

I hope they never go public for the reason that Wall Street would own them.

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

#150

Post by kaliszad »

treis wrote: post #54
dkbrk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the blog post on their series C [0]. It's not long, but the most relevant excepts are: > 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. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the t…

It says "they've entirely derisked capital" and now ~6 months later they raised twice as much. Lying is a strong word but that post clearly wasn't accurate at the time. They've raised a lot of money and there will be pressure for an exit sooner rather than later.

Look at how much the components cost 6 months ago and now. That may explain why some calculations shifted considerably. It may be an act of keeping up with the market and having some reserve.
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