Our $100M Series B • Hacker News Board

Re: Our $100M Series B

#221

Post by bambax » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

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.

At the (very) low end it's pretty easy to build your own "cloud" with a NAS, containers, and reverse proxies and tunnels to the outside world. And this will get you suprisingly far.

But at the high end, I think the market is litterally infinite. Every large company should want this, and want it now. Cloud providers are extremely expensive and, outside of the 1-tier where prices are really outrageous, they perform poorly and often offer little support.

This really feels like the future.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#222

Post by benreesman » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #203

benreesman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I said, you know that's not what I said. I said people who talk like that on HN are doing so from an unrelated personal experience. This sub-thread is about the habits of speech that make a certain breed of armchair public policy economist jump out like a lump on plate glass. Get Patek in here and we could start a convention.

> you know that's not what I said. Okay, just so you know, I did not understand that you were speaking in generalities whatsoever.

Fair enough, this is a topic with a high and asymmetrical charge quotient and misunderstandings are a fact of life in such.

I also regret any degree to which I've singled you out for a generally regrettable trend among the long-time community members: it's very easy to see the world through the lens of one's own experience and I've been as guilty as anyone of doing just that on plenty of occasions.

We should all strive for empathy and understanding, that goes double for people like you and me (and Thomas) who have been around forever.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#223

Post by jhickok » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

guywithahat wrote: post #101

The company leadership of oxide concerns me. My biggest mistakes in my (not successful) startup were when I got distracted and chased politics or some corporate goal instead of solving my customers real problems. Giving all employees the same pay or advertising social media links to small, political sites makes me worried they've taken the 100 million and are about to crowd the market with a product that's not focuse…

Huh, what I read and hear leads me to believe that they will succeed because of their leadership.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#224

Post by checker659 » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

7e wrote: post #218

Investors are likely betting there is an AI play buried deeply in here somewhere. The founders are uber geeks but have never done anything successful on their own. I predict this company will be another zombie.

I predict not. There.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#225

Post by Aurornis » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #140

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales works that way in every industry. A top salesman can make more than the CEO from commission. Many top salespeople have a zero base salary. The pressure is pretty crazy, though. I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.

I do know that (I myself also worked in sales for a short stint, unrelated to software though), what I don't understand how these magical "sales people" apparently can't work for a fixed salary when literally everyone else can. Apparently the rest of us can do high quality work without being paid for each feature/bug fixed, yet these individuals cannot? > Many top salespeople have a zero base salary. Hmm, probably tr…

> Hmm, probably true in some places, but here (Spain) that wouldn't even be legal. When I worked in sales we had minimum wage + commission, but I'm sure the salary would be 0 if they were allowed to set it up like that.

In the United States having "zero base bay" is hypothetical. If a full-time employee had no commission payouts they'd be compensated minimum wage as necessary to comply with laws.

Sales jobs often come with a warm-up period with either a higher base salary or they get paid part of their commission target for a number of months regardless of how many sales they make.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#226

Post by kortilla » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

mrcwinn wrote: post #13

Everyone at Oxide makes the same salary: >We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. [ https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... ] Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

This has been the biggest red flag to me about oxide since these blogs came out. You don’t join a startup for salary and every startup I’ve been at that emphasizes fair salaries is doing that to intentionally discourage people from pushing on total compensation.

Employees apart from the very early ones are likely really getting fucked on equity because oxide explicitly treats candidates asking about equity as a red flag.

Companies structured like this end up turning into a combination of rich people who don’t need money and are just interested in the problem space and then mediocre people who can’t get a better offer. (If you are good, remote work with high TC is definitely available.)

Unless Oxide is giving out huge equity bonuses for good perf (which would make their comp post hypocritical), it’s going to have a continuous talent decline as it grows. There aren’t enough independently wealthy high performers interested in what Oxide is doing to sustain a talent pool.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#227

Post by revskill » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

I don't understand what this is after reading the homepage.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#228

Post by cestith » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

Quarrel wrote: post #105

sofixa wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because sales people are used to work on incentives, including going over and getting rewarded for it. If they have a fixed salary with a high objective to "make it" (e.g. if you sell less than $X, you get fired), lots of sales folks will skip on it because they can't go over, and most probably prefer to have a quarter or two or year at e.g. 70% salary while working on longer term deals, rather than losing their job…

FWIW, it seems like nowhere is this truer than SF/SV. Outside the bubble, it isn't always the case, or the structure can be a bit different, but salespeople in the Valley (as it were) are a different breed.

Ask a local real estate agent or real estate broker how much base pay they make. Or, heck, a car salesperson or an ad salesperson at your local TV or radio station. It’s all commission-based. In some of these fields in the US the norm is 100% commission-based with no base pay. In others someone might make one to three times minimum wage, but will end up being some of the highest-paid people in the company based on commissions of anywhere from 1% to 50%, depending on the industry.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#229

Post by fsckboy » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

>Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all computing

just want to give a shout out to my old boss from the mid 80's who had researched it (mgt consultant) and told me at that time that cloud computing was the future of all computing because the economics were inescapable.

RIP.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#230

Post by Aurornis » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #120

darren0 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty fundamental to the personality of people in sales to be driven by getting the sale and getting compensated based on the deal size. If you remove that carrot, it just doesn't work. Some sales people will make millions, some will make nothing.

> If you remove that carrot, it just doesn't work How come it works for basically every other job on this planet? Developers aren't paid per feature implemented/bug fixed, and we still do those things, how come sales people are unable to do things for a fixed monthly salary?

Sales is unique because the monetary benefit to the company is mostly objective: If someone closes a $10 million sales contract, that becomes $10 million in revenue.

If a team of developers work together to fix a bug, how would you calculate the revenue value of the bug and how would you distribute that to the team that solved it? Technically the value of a bug is negative because it costs the company, so do you subtract that from the pay of the engineers he worked on it? If 5 people implement a feature that uses a library developed by 5 other people, which was built on the platform team's infrastructure, how do you divide up the commission? It doesn't work.