Wish I could have heard back about my job application there. It looks like a really exciting place to work.
Same, especially given how long that app specifically takes.
Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
171–180 of 203 posts
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get a fully auditable hardware and software BOM, and you get an air-gapped, API-driven, on-prem cloud. You still have a fairly large up front cost ($600k base in 2023ish numbers, probably over $1M now?), and an ongoing support subscription.
I think it’s fair to assume the idea is for it to eventually be more cost effective than other solutions as they scale up.
I've never been under the impression that is the case.
They are filling a niche no one else is for a small pool of fish with virtually endless pockets.
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
tbf they are probably looking for customers with cloud spend ending in 'm'
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.
Its not about bare metal, its about owning the whole stack and giving visibility into every nook and corner, and then supporting that open sourced code. Every network switch, every interconnect, every piece or firmware or software they can attest to because they built it themselves, and that is worth its weight in gold to high criticality industries and governments. They can give you the provenance for every single hardware and software component. Every chip.
If you can roll around those possibilities in your head, you start to see how absolutely unique this is and why these extremely sensitive and important customers and industries want this.
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#174Earlier 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.
VC or private equity fueled companies are weird. At my place we are spending 8 figures a year just in AWS, and it's not like they planning to move to bare metal but, they're in fact removing stuff from their old datacenter. And that bill doesn't include some of the other SaaS like Mongo or Elastic. With bills of that magnitude, each time I do a little house cleaning and delete some old data, change storage classes, o…
That's just any company with serious money.
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is worth the exercise to honestly assess the maintenance, initial costs, ongoing costs, etc etc for owning your own. I did this at a company for a single server to let the ml group test fine tuning frameworks/throw crazy ideas at before spending real money on a training run and it paid for itself in like 3 months. Sometimes the math is overwhelmingly positive, sometimes it isn't. In general, the smaller/earlier yo…
It’s always a spreadsheet decision. Seems like people missed the end of what I wrote though. We run some bare metal but do not physically handle it. There’s many companies who will rent huge boxes with good connectivity in a data center. DataPacket is the best we have found for price and reliability. Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
> Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
CISA has identified 16 US industries where they have noted that companies should be able to operate indefinitely without internet access. See the Water Plant hack stories coming through right now across more than 19 states, for example. Water, electricity, internet access / telecom, military, chemical, logistics, transportation, etc.
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's true. Oracle just came in with clearly higher price then anybody else was willing to even consider. They could also have fired a lot of people and likely survived. But the CEO clearly had no interest in that path.
One great thing about historical fact is that anyone is able to check them, including interviews with key figures. I am using computers since 1986.
Ironically, not only are you entirely wrong on the facts themselves, but the historical record in this case is incredibly (and unusually) crisp: the Merger Proxy Statement that Sun had to file with the SEC[0] has, in accordance with Delaware law, the full narrative of the acquisition.
In the "Background of the Merger" section of that document, there is an incredibly detailed (and interesting!) story of three companies: Party A, Party B, and Oracle. (As was well-known at the time, Party A is IBM and Party B is HP.) As that narrative makes clear (and contrary to your assertion), it was Sun that rejected IBM's definitive agreement, not the other way around. You can certainly argue that IBM's acquisition of Sun would have failed to complete for other reasons (regulatory and so on) -- but your assertion that "IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn" is simply (and demonstrably) wrong.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709519/0001193125091...
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#177I've seen posts about Oxide for years now, but do they actually ship hardware? I've never seen images, or posts about companies with their new Oxide Thingamajig™
Furthermore, do they ship only to the US or can those racks be bought elsewhere too?
Elsewhere! We’re completing compliance testing to deliver to Europe.
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The problems are 1) money is flowing so freely that you can't use the raise here as a signal of anything meaningful and 2) the industry (especially hardware) is in massive flux right now.
So what might look like success in this environment might look very different if the bubble pops.
Obviously Oxide has a ton of experience on its side but it's so opaque where any of this goes that even they can't read the tea leaves.
Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#179Re: Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 al…
More like the rack isn't viable for SaaS.