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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#181

Post by epicureanideal »

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…

I completely agree.

Note that according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 200k in 2025 is equivalent to about 160k in 2020 when the pandemic began, and 160k would've been on the low end for an experienced software engineer at a Series A or B startup at that time, in the SF Bay Area.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#182

Post by throwanem »

steveklabnik wrote: post #169
Aurornis wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It’s also important to know that they support remote work, so these salaries really are not bad at all. For someone in a non-tech city who doesn’t want to move this would be a great startup job. My only reservation is that I’ve interviewed with or worked for multiple companies that made some claim about paying everyone the same and there was always some loophole: The company might have a fixed base pay but t…

We have salary and equity, no bonuses. Salary is identical, equity is not. I certainly agree with you that that kind of shenanigans can be annoying; I had a former employer who hired people with "oh it's a bonus but you always get 100% of it" and then, we did not get 100% of it.

It's bullshit to talk about salary equality as though that mattered when equity is the real upside, and you know it. The claim to strive for a "generational company" is just "we're a family here" in other terms. Congrats on the raise.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#183

Post by ghaff »

tock wrote: post #160
ghaff wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but sales reps have very specific targets and sales managers have no problem routinely letting people go if they miss those targets. It really is a somewhat different situation from engineering--although projects, for example, certainly get canceled and teams let go. There's a more direct correlation to quarterly revenue/margin input in the case of sales.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#184

Post by throwup238 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #77
siliconc0w wrote: post #26

Pretty bullish, anyone who has tried to setup and manage their own compute knows the pain they're solving. Plus I predict more companies will exit the cloud once they realize how thick the margins have become or want better guarantees over sovereignty.

I actually think that having more cloud providers might deflate a lot of the pricing. If you think about it, companies like Amazon buy server hardware and then rent it out by the vcpu (with throttling if they can get away with it) per month. Add memory and IO and you are looking at bills that pay for the server in mere months/weeks several tenants carving up all the hardware and each paying tens/hundreds per month. T…

I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize just how bad the pricing spread can be until I started dealing with the GPU instances (8x A100 or H100 pods). Last I checked the on-demand pricing was $40/hr and the 1-year reserved instances were $25/hr. That’s over $200k/yr for the reserved instances so within two years I’d spend enough to buy my own 8x H100 pod (based on LambdaLabs pricing) plus enough to pay an engineer to babysit five pods at a time. It’s insane.

With on-demand pricing the pod would pay for itself (and the cost to manage it) within a year.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#185

Post by mkeeter »

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.

The server and switch hardware is designed in-house (from the PCBs on up), though we do source DRAM / SSDs / CPUs / ASICs from the usual vendors.

The "secret sauce management layer" is available at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron, released under the MPLv2 license.

(I work at Oxide)

Re: Our $100M Series B

#186

Post by turnsout »

steveklabnik wrote: post #146
turnsout wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run my own servers for over 20 years now, but I guess I don't understand the pain point. Can you elaborate? They write: > Our system delivers all the hardware and software you need to run cloud… To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs? I'm literally so old that I write programs that run on…

> To "run cloud?" I agree that's a bit awkwardly phrased, let me send in a patch for that. > Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs? Not exactly any of that. We let you treat an entire rack as a single pool of resources, spinning up virtual machines that our control plane manages for you. Think "VPS provider…

That's helpful, thanks!

Re: Our $100M Series B

#187

Post by steveklabnik »

throwanem wrote: post #182
steveklabnik wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have salary and equity, no bonuses. Salary is identical, equity is not. I certainly agree with you that that kind of shenanigans can be annoying; I had a former employer who hired people with "oh it's a bonus but you always get 100% of it" and then, we did not get 100% of it.

It's bullshit to talk about salary equality as though that mattered when equity is the real upside, and you know it. The claim to strive for a "generational company" is just "we're a family here" in other terms. Congrats on the raise.

I think there are tremendous benefits to having a flat salary structure, regardless of upside. My other friends in tech are envious of the lack of having to waste time doing perf, for example.

> Congrats on the raise.

Thank you.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#188

Post by skybrian »

turnsout wrote: post #75
siliconc0w wrote: post #26

Pretty bullish, anyone who has tried to setup and manage their own compute knows the pain they're solving. Plus I predict more companies will exit the cloud once they realize how thick the margins have become or want better guarantees over sovereignty.

I've run my own servers for over 20 years now, but I guess I don't understand the pain point. Can you elaborate? They write: > Our system delivers all the hardware and software you need to run cloud… To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs? I'm literally so old that I write programs that run on…

No GPU’s yet, so it’s not good for LLM’s. But they have a lot of funding now, so perhaps that will change?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#189

Post by krelian »

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…

>public company

Why does it have to be a public company though?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#190

Post by tock »

ghaff wrote: post #183
tock wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but sales reps have very specific targets and sales managers have no problem routinely letting people go if they miss those targets. It really is a somewhat different situation from engineering--although projects, for example, certainly get canceled and teams let go. There's a more direct correlation to quarterly revenue/margin input in the case of sales.

But its a more transparent system. Right now no-one has any idea if they get laid off or if they are being underpaid. I think the overall compensation would likely go up if you are good at your job.
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