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Oxide raises $200M Series C

oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#151

Post by thaneross »

IshKebab wrote: post #102
bsaul wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#153

Post by bubblethink »

jeffrallen wrote: post #132
voidUpdate wrote: post #18

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?

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 electr…

All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#154

Post by [deleted] »

moregrist wrote: post #130
shimman wrote: post #7

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 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 r…

[deleted]

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#155

Post by cyberpunk »

jeffrallen wrote: post #132
voidUpdate wrote: post #18

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?

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 electr…

… Ancient jvm running under wine with webstart just to get to the remote console? ;) I do not miss those days.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#156

Post by treis »

wasmainiac wrote: post #6

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.

Companies spend an eye watering amount of money on AWS relative the underlying hardware cost. There's definitely a market for something like a mainframe that runs K8s, Postgres, Redis, and the like where you buy once and then run forever.

I don't know if it's true or not but it seems like our AWS bill is something like paying the full purchase price of the underlying hardware every month.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#157

Post by Traster »

I guess there's two ways of looking at this, way (1) is leaning heavily into what seems at least seems to be top of cycle in a cyclical business, which is likely to be highly problematic when they hit downturn, or (2) doing an Amazon and getting lucky by having a massive war chest to survive the next down turn.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#158

Post by Aurornis »

zozbot234 wrote: post #143
Aurornis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted it’s in the $500K to $1mm range. Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.

Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course for any server hardware that's put in production, this is not a gaming PC build. Hopefully they're working on bringing their hardware up to date, since efficiency is a key consideration for the class of workloads they're aiming at.

> Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course for any server hardware that's put in production

No it’s not. Normally if you’re buying server hardware you don’t start with a CPU that’s already 5 years old and last-generation RAM that isn’t even manufactured at scale any more.

CPUs have advanced a lot in recent years. The jump from Zen 3 to Zen 5 is very substantial.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#159

Post by mlacks »

sevensor wrote: post #118
999900000999 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emp…

A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.

I just reached out to them after the 4 to six weeks had passed. got my decision a few days later

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#160

Post by ahl »

kijin wrote: post #121
mcmcmc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it’s basically slick hyperconverged infrastructure that you can buy a rack at a time without a subscription license.

Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you go without a subscription license? If the answer is no, then you might own the hardware on paper, but you don't control any of the software that makes said hardware useful. If the answer is yes, on the other hand, then one must ask who is paying for those updates, because that can't be sustainable.

So while most of the software is open source rather than proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers pay for support (as they do with most enterprise products). One could theoretically use the product without first-party software updates, managing the open source oneself... but that would have practical impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product).

Two points about your last point. First, software improvements benefit all customers; as the business grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also, most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The sustainability of investments into the software (and the product generally) is on solid ground.

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