Our $100M Series B • Hacker News Board

Re: Our $100M Series B

#231

Post by kortilla » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

pmichaud wrote: post #207

vonneumannstan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skeptical of that. There's only so much you can do against the physics of moving electrons around at high speeds... "Bigger Fans" and "compute density" doesn't change that

I don't have any particular knowledge about oxide's cooling, but think about how bloated and inefficient literally every part of the compute stack is from metal to seeing these words on a screen. If you imagine fixing every part of it to be efficient top to bottom, I think you'll agree that we're not even in the same galaxy as the physical limitations of moving electrons around at high speeds.

But the majority of heat is going to come from the CPU and this is a product to run arbitrary customer workloads.

If the customers leave these things idle, then oxide is going to shine. But a busy rack is going to be dominated by CPU heat.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#232

Post by rtpg » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

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…

200k a year. In US dollars. American dollars.

Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things. Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It’s not poverty wages!

“I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I’m passionate about” is such a normal thing that everyone serious I know in this industry says. Or like… even just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there’s a reason online casinos pay their software engineers so much!). Not everyone makes the choice (and I get people saying no) and but in a sense I gotta imagine it’s part of the calculus for making it work. “We won’t have to pay people half a mil in total comp like meta has to, because the mission is more straightforward”. I feel like an O&F ep mentioning someone from intel expecting _triple_ the comp. 600k!

And like… people saying it’s not enough and talking about equity. You’re not paying rent with equity!

Signed: a guy who was at a small startup and who would have been very happy with the inflation/CoL equivalent of 200k instead of what I had those early leaner years

At one point “joining the scrappy startup” does involve some scrappiness. Otherwise you’re just working in a division of Google that hasn’t been integrated into the borg yet.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#233

Post by cestith » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

revskill wrote: post #227

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

A few years ago The Register described it as a rack-sized blade chassis with hardware, firmware, and software designed in-house together.

It’s a 7-foot tall rack with compute sleds, storage sleds, and network sleds. It has its own BMC design, its own power design, its own physical connectivity design, its own virtual networking design, its own hypervisor (although it’s based on Bhyve), its own OS (although it’s based on Illumos), and its own API to spin things up and configure them.

As I think of it, it’s basically a private cloud in a box and The Register wasn’t far off.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#234

Post by time0ut » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

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…

In my experience, companies seem to want to pay the cloud provider tax in order to avoid capacity planning. Sometimes it makes sense because it is hard to predict when something is going to take off. I have also worked at companies with very predictable growth paying insane amounts. I didn’t understand the logic, but they still were profitable and paid well so whatever.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#235

Post by cestith » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #5

Always refreshing to see people who actually believe in software freedoms (and not just doing open source cosplay like many big corporations) forge a pathway to big success. There are many things that suggest free software and the movement for software freedoms might be on its way to a historical footnote. This is absolutely not one of them. Hey Bryan, one day when you’re very successful market-wise (you and your tea…

It would be a good onramp into their ecosystem. Compare this to the deep educational discounts and the school-targeted platforms from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and such.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#236

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

diggan wrote: post #118

mystraline wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically. I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels. The cognitive dissonance is amazing. Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it, and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment. If I wasn…

> If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them. That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the same. When I transitioned to software development (from basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my first software job, they were all because I liked the particular product in some way or another, and what the compensation was is basically the least interesting thing for me. Of course, some level of b…

I hear you, and I've never solely chased money either. But, we unfortunately live in world driven by money, and if I'm going to pour myself into work I want to be compensated appropriately. I also have a huge issue with feeling like I'm getting taken advantage of. So, what I have done is try to find jobs where those things align somewhat.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#237

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

bcantrill wrote: post #212

chubot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's very clear and logical ... but is it really "from first principles"? I thought that Oxide was based on OpenCompute, which is basically the rack designs that Facebook open sourced, after hiring some Google employees to build their custom data centers. This project started in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project https://github.com/opencomputeproject Google definitely rebuilt the sta…

We didn't use anything from OCP. When we first started the company, we thought we might use the enclosure (and considered ourselves "OCP inspired"), but there ended up being little value in doing so (and there was a clear cost). And on the stuff that we really cared about (e.g., getting rid of the traditional BMC), we were completely at odds with OCP (where ASPEED BMCs abound!). So in the end, even the mechanical and…

Ah OK, thanks for clarifying! I'm glad to see these kinds of machines being built, especially with so much open source software

Re: Our $100M Series B

#238

Post by sethops1 » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

neom wrote: post #83

I'm a Bryan Cantrill fan so I'm glad this is working out, I was extremely skeptical of them at the beginning(on HN too), I think because I've built DCs for many years and was stuck in a mindset that served my use case, I've come around to Oxide. My main concerns originally were 2 fold: "this seems bougie", is there actually a market for this, and, is there a good interoperability story with mix and match. From what I…

I was skeptical as well, if only because just being a better product isn't enough to win the market. Everything we hear about Oxide sounds like an impressive green field implementation of a data center, but is that enough? Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if their sysadmins have better tools?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#239

Post by GoatInGrey » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #200

krelian wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>public company Why does it have to be a public company though?

It is either that or acquisition, and we would prefer an IPO.

Speaking from the experience of 8 acquisitions/IPOs, your compensation structure will not survive public ownership. It could survive a PE acquisition, but definitely not public ownership (in my experience). I would recommend petitioning for a dual-class share structure to protect founding leadership.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#240

Post by steveklabnik » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

revskill wrote: post #227

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

You buy a rack of servers from us. You wheel it into a data center, plug in power and internet, turn it on. You now have a cloud in a box that you can spin up virtual machines in.

That's the high level, happy to elaborate if you have more questions.