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Oxide raises $200M Series C

oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#161

Post by jcgrillo »

bubblethink wrote: post #153
jeffrallen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er) school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks. "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really, really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked at was just exceptionally good at computers?

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#162

Post by bcantrill »

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…

Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0] was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I had to interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that evening with my family for Christmas (which I damned near did) -- and I have no doubt that I was not at my best!

I do try to get better at this stuff, and I re-listen to our episodes to improve as an interviewer. If it's been "a few years", maybe you haven't listen too much to Oxide and Friends? I think we've had some wonderful guests and great conversations over the span of the podcast -- though I also have no doubt that it's imperfect, for which you have my profound apologies!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#163

Post by pengaru »

999900000999 wrote: post #67
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 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…

Don't underestimate the importance of timing, for both the company you're applying at and the industry/economy as a whole.

As they say, you can't get blood from a turnip.

Writing this comment reminded me of a personal experience, story time:

Many moons ago I interviewed at a mature startup in silicon valley, they shipped a tiered storage appliance and were in the process of pivoting to a new storage medium (think transitioning from spinning rust to SSDs, something like that).

This was in-person, and everything went swimmingly well, before departing they stated an intention to make an offer and I should expect an email w/offer attached within a week. I got an offer letter, and accepted immediately, as I was super excited about the stack I'd be playing with.

A week before the start date I get a call from a founder, they said I couldn't start because their funding round didn't come through. The economy was going through some sort of financial crisis and it was one of the many blood baths where silicon valley startups shuttered by the hundreds overnight. So in essence, this was a job I got fired from before I could even start, wee!

What followed was a pretty frustrating few months of interviewing and not getting anywhere.

But there is a silver lining to this story, that founder who called me sat on the board of other storage startups. One of them managed to get some water in this funding desert, and its founders reached out to me at his recommendation. I ended up building some great stuff over 4-5 years at that company.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#164

Post by db48x »

Aurornis wrote: post #71
db48x wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think https://oxide.computer/product/specifications makes it pretty clear: 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 lb…

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.

Not really super relevant given that the question was “Do they sell hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.”

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#165

Post by kevinrineer »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #101
zozbot234 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agreed. Its more reminiscent of Cloudstack or Openstack from what I gather. I'm thinking of Jetstream2, but for you buy it rather than rent some of it with an NSF budget.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#166

Post by Eldt »

oconnor663 wrote: post #111
shimman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heroes like Spiderman and Batman? Or strangers that put on a mask, and whose public image is maintained by PR firms?

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#167

Post by warunsl »

pfraze wrote: post #134
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…

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…

> If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes.

Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would have specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's time putting them through full rounds of interviews?

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#169

Post by moregrist »

bcantrill wrote: post #162
moregrist wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0] was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I had to interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that…

I appreciate the reply and that it's been a while; I will give your podcast another listen.

It wasn't just the Jonathon Blow episode; that was just the point where I said "this is frustrating." For what it's worth, frustration came from knowing that this could be really good: your perspective is valuable, your topics were interesting, and your guests were excellent.

I find this a common mistake that people with strong opinions have when doing interview/guest style podcasts or shows. There's really an art to it; it's not easy to engage guests, keep the show interesting, and let the talk move in interesting ways. That's why Terry Gross and Howard Stern, in very different ways, have had such long and storied careers.

But it's something that people definitely get better at, and I have no doubt that you have. Again, I'll give it another listen.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#170

Post by kevinrineer »

cyberpunk wrote: post #155
jeffrallen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean you don't have that issue anymore? I'm jealous.
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