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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#151

Post by dvtkrlbs »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #51
colesantiago wrote: post #36

Lots of praise not much skepticism, so what is the exit here? $100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the total amount raised of almost $200M? Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just staying private?

I don't get it. They're a hardware integrator with a secret sauce management layer on top. I like anything on-prem but this seems a bit hyped. Slick website and appears to have a very good team though.

They created a lot of hardware and low level work. (The bullet point on the blog post)

Re: Our $100M Series B

#153

Post by steveklabnik »

chubot wrote: post #132
jvanderbot wrote: post #64

There is something so calming and pleasant about a well-structured thesis statement: > Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing; that running on-premises would remain (or become!) strategically important for many; that the entire stack — hardware and software — needed to be rethought from first principles to serve this market; and that a large, durable, public company could be built by whom…

I would say it's very clear and logical ... but is it really "from first principles"? I thought that Oxide was based on OpenCompute, which is basically the rack designs that Facebook open sourced, after hiring some Google employees to build their custom data centers. This project started in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project https://github.com/opencomputeproject Google definitely rebuilt the sta…

We initially talked about OpenCompute, yeah, but as far as I know we ended up moving away from that years ago.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#155

Post by duped »

mystraline wrote: post #141
diggan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them. That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the same. When I transitioned to software development (from basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my first software job, they were all because I liked the particular product in some way or another, and what the compensation was is basically the least interesting thing for me. Of course, some level of b…

The hypothetical situation you set up is interesting, in that past a base amount of money to survive and thrive, that you would choose the more intellectually stimulating position. And I do get that. For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the higher paying one. And then, I would create and make outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage, it could be a jump start on my own business. And, enough m…

That's reasonable, but signalling this to a startup during hiring is going to be a negative. There are three kinds of capital they get to play with, cash, equity, and culture. Cash is the least pliable of the three to them, equity the least liquid, but culture is actually something they can control.

If you have a team full of people who are just there for the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is increasing the paycheck. Which startups can't do in a crunch.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#156

Post by Aurornis »

benreesman wrote: post #150
steveklabnik wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true in the abstract, but we're talking about a salary of $207,264 in this case. You don't need to be independently wealthy to make it on our salary.

It's still a class thing. With the CoL in most SWE-heavy metros and the outright war on engineer pricing power over the last few years? Just about any engineer who isnt independently wealthy is: - recovering from layoffs and a period of unemployment at a high-COL cost structure - facing layoffs with the above salients - facing an imperative to insulate their fucking house with cash for their turn in the above crossha…

> With the CoL in most SWE-heavy metros

They’re a remote company. They’re not targeting HCOL metros.

> and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.

> "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.

Claiming that $200k is not enough to live on is rich-guy talk. The majority of the country lives on well below $200K.

I agree that a single person living in a HCOL metro like SF Bay Area would not find this compensation attractive, but that person also has nearly infinite other jobs to choose from nearby.

Jobs like this (remote work for interesting startup) do not need to pay HCOL comp.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#157

Post by voganmother42 »

drdrek wrote: post #60

God why do startup sites suck so much? Why do I need ChatGPT to cut through the marketing speak to understand what they are actually selling? I literally spent 5 minutes in the site trying to understand before giving up and asking GPT... Cool 1999 aesthetics though

The usage/meaning of “private cloud” has gotten weird

Re: Our $100M Series B

#158

Post by bpt3 »

dijit wrote: post #24
nahimn wrote: post #4

Rooting for this team -- just wish i could afford one of these racks... =)

Same. I think it brings an interesting point actually. "Who will buy these", the obvious answer is anyone with a need, but the "standard pizzabox" server is ubiquitous for the same reason that x86 and miniPC's outcompeted mainframes. ((controversial take warning)) Mainframes are objectively better at high uptime and high throughput than rube-golderging a bunch of semi-reliable x86 boxes together, yet, the ubiquity of…

The target audience as I understand it is companies that have gone cloud-only or close to it and are big enough where moving workload on-prem makes financial sense.

They can migrate to an Oxide "cloud" without too much difficultly as opposed to procuring, installing, and maintaining the rube goldberg machine you mentioned.

They also attract interest among the "we don't want to touch cloud" organizations where trying out $1M in hardware is a rounding error, but I don't know how much traction they'd end up getting.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#159

Post by steveklabnik »

mystraline wrote: post #98

I applied here. Basically anti-llm long form one-sided interview writeup. Took them 3 months before a "we're not interested" email was sent. No reasons, either. I probably should have just used an LLM to generate good sounding garbage. Probably the same chance to get even a stage 1 interview.

We do take a long time due to needing to read all of those applications, but three months is longer than we'd like, so I apologize about that.

We don't do "stage 1 interviews", we only do interviews as the very final step in the process, when we've narrowed things down to a handful of people. That initial packet is like 85% of the process.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#160

Post by tock »

ghaff wrote: post #137
tock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts. This is the fairest form of compensation. It's unfortunate that engineering contribution cannot be measured the same way. If we could engineers would all be getting a nice pay hike.

And many would be getting let go because they weren't meeting some number.

Companies already do layoffs without commissions. They are always optimising to reduce salaries and increase profit margins. And its not "some number". Its the amount of $ brought in. Thats what companies care about.
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