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Oxide raises $200M Series C

oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#231

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #209
specialist wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and: IIRC, Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.

For those of us who are unaware of "the value proposition" of an "IBM AS/400," could someone spell it out for us?

When the AS/400 came out circa 1989 or whatever, you could replace an entire mainframe with a box not much bigger than a mini fridge. The hardware is built for high reliability, and the OS and application software stack have a lot of integration. If Unix is "everything is a file" then AS/400 is "everything is a persistent object in a flat 64 bit address space."

The result is a system that can handle years of operation with no downtime. The platform got very popular with huge retailers for this reason.

Then in later years the platform got the ability to run Linux or Windows VMs, so that they could benefit from the reliability features.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#232

Post by FireBeyond »

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 worked at Red Hat a few years ago... early 2020s. For our customers, something like 80% of our RHEL customers were still on-prem.

Yes, cloud is huge, etc. But there's a very big iceberg of on-prem.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#233

Post by panick21_ »

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…

> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here

Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is delivering.

If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting.

Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking because the bad economics of cloud are becoming increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends such as making computing more local, not letting US companies control everything.

> You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro.

Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended up being such a loser.

I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming for that is somehow not worth doing.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#234

Post by NetOpWibby »

999900000999 wrote: post #222
woooooo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may have spent 15 minutes on it.

It was actually a round with the CEO. I don't feel disrespected or anything, just feels weird to spend that much time interviewing someone.

Reminds me of the 6 interview gauntlet I dealt with when interviewing with Hashicorp[1] years ago.

---

[1]: https://blog.webb.page/WM-025>

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#235

Post by WD-42 »

999900000999 wrote: post #185
grim_io wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not changing the world either way, you would just be working for a more demanding guy. Fuck em.

This is my favorite response in the thread. We aren't talking about getting a job at doctors across borders or something, we just want to manipulate bits of silicon to increase our networth.

When you say "we aren't" I hope you realize you aren't speaking for everyone. Even doctors across borders probably needs an IT person. There are jobs available for less pay that are fulfilling in other ways. I know I have taken them and am better off for it.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#237

Post by EvanAnderson »

jjice wrote: post #25
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).

Oxide and Friends is the only computing podcast I listen to anymore. It's a bunch of fun and they have insights I actually value. The original On The Metal podcast they did is incredible too. The interviews they had with computing legends are just fantastic.

Has the audio quality / recording method for Oxide and Friends gotten better?

I have this horrible "completionist" tendency and I got stuck on a 2021 episode where the audio needed post-processing and I just never got around to it.

I loved On the Metal and it was a bummer to fall behind on the new show.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#238

Post by ryukoposting »

zozbot234 wrote: post #108
ryukoposting wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.

Their engineered power and cooling solutions are all for rack-scaled hardware, doing a NUC wouldn't make sense. Now a silent and efficiently cooled studio-sized rack with enough hardware (including AMD GPUs) for reasonably quick AI inference with the latest local models, that's something that they could do and be quite popular.

I'm not saying they should put their software stack on a Celeron (or whatever Intel calls their cheap CPUs now). But no racks, please. I just can't get with the "rack in my house" crowd. If you have a basement, then fine I guess. But I live in an apartment, and I don't have the space or patience for a computer that's the size of a mini fridge, and sounds like a jet engine.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#240

Post by bubblethink »

panick21_ wrote: post #233
bubblethink wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmwar…

>Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess.

For a startup, if the thesis is to take market share away from those two, it's actually not such a good story. You need a product that is 10x better than the competition, and I'm not convinced that the enhancements to firmware, reliability etc. amount to a 10x jump in business value prop. You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.

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