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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#251

Post by naikrovek »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #82
jvanderbot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxide's blogs talk about cooling _a lot_, apparently their stack runs very cool b/c they've reorganized the whole thing around efficiency, and written all the firmware to support that goal.

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

maybe you're not familiar with just how stupidly written most code is.

you're right that there are efficiency limits, but not once in my career have I ever seen anyone even attempt to write their code so that it is efficient to run, outside of gaming.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#252

Post by steveklabnik »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #239
steveklabnik wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We agree that we don't know what the future holds, and what makes sense for early stage companies may not make sense for later ones. When anything stops working, we'll make changes. You can see this already with the secondary structure for sales. We have a while before we need to worry about that, though :)

Re: Our $100M Series B

#253

Post by sneak »

no_wizard wrote: post #107
sneak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn’t a snarky position; early employees in high output orgs like this generally work just as much as founders do. The founders aren’t really taking on that much more risk than the rest of the early team; it’s the VC’s money, not theirs. I absolutely don’t agree with the idea that employees deserve the same upside as founders (because I think initiative and persistence against adversity/inertia is insanely rare…

>rewarded immensely Let’s define this. Let’s say 1:25? 1:50? What ratio is appropriate?

We don’t need to define it; employees define it by who they choose to work for given the equity granted to them by the founders.

If they didn’t like the deal, they would become founders themselves, or choose a company that offers a better deal.

It turns out that leadership drive and the compulsion to bring something new into existence from scratch is actually quite rare.

Your figures seem to be roughly in line with what the employment market has settled on, although price discovery could be better (most employees don’t get to see the cap table during hiring negotiation, which, IMO, is wrong).

Re: Our $100M Series B

#254

Post by anomaloustho »

If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even do so? It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise sales. The only other option is just using them as your AWS replacement.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#255

Post by zozbot234 »

ipdashc wrote: post #68
dijit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I think it brings an interesting point actually. "Who will buy these", the obvious answer is anyone with a need, but the "standard pizzabox" server is ubiquitous for the same reason that x86 and miniPC's outcompeted mainframes. ((controversial take warning)) Mainframes are objectively better at high uptime and high throughput than rube-golderging a bunch of semi-reliable x86 boxes together, yet, the ubiquity of…

A great point regarding mainframes, but isn't it somewhat irrelevant given that Oxide's computer is x86 and mainly (...only?) intended as a VM host? And I assume most people are running things in VMs nowadays, so you can "just" migrate over images to the new system (I know it's not that simple, but it's also not quite as complicated as, I imagine, porting something from a bunch of bare-metal x86 boxen to a mainframe)…

Mainframes are the original VM host. Oxide racks seem closer to midrange computers from a RAS (Reliability, Availability, Servicing) perspective, but that's pretty much to be expected to begin with. They also have a lot of scope for improvement and are kind of a natural candidate for eventually intruding on that market.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#256

Post by subarctic »

drdrek wrote: post #60

God why do startup sites suck so much? Why do I need ChatGPT to cut through the marketing speak to understand what they are actually selling? I literally spent 5 minutes in the site trying to understand before giving up and asking GPT... Cool 1999 aesthetics though

They make giant rack scale computers for data centers, i think that's the best way to explain it quickly to someone with my background who's never been in a data center but has an imaginary idea of what they look like.

And then as a follow up you have to explain that

- they sell an entire rack full of servers

- they're the only ones that do this. Normally you have to buy all the pieces and put it together yourself, or pay someone to put it together for you but all the parts are kind of designed on their own by different companies so it's kind of a mess. Oxide makes one big rack with like 16-32 servers and it's all designed by them and just works, so you just plug it in and you have servers you can put a bunch of vms on. Oh and they're huge, each one literally costs like a million dollars

Re: Our $100M Series B

#257

Post by boricj »

bambax wrote: post #221
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 poo…

> 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.

Anyone can throw together a bunch of parts and software to run Internet-facing services from a closet. That doesn't mean that you're safe from issues that Oxide aims to solve, especially at that small scale.

My homelab (which hosts my blog and a couple of other things) runs off a Topton N17 micro-ATX motherboard ordered on AliExpress, featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS. Yes, that's a mobile CPU shoehorned onto a desktop platform with a funky mounting bracket to take AM4/AM5 coolers.

Anyways, I wanted to run SmartOS on it, but this system is so janky that the Illumos kernel couldn't find any PCIe devices at all. After spending an afternoon reconfiguring PCIe bridges by hand with the kernel debugger in an attempt to troubleshoot PCIe initialization, I gave up and installed Proxmox.

Admittedly, as far as janky hardware this takes the cake, but the point stands. To paraphrase Bryan, buggy firmware is the sysadmin's worst enemy.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#258

Post by steveklabnik »

anomaloustho wrote: post #254

If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even do so? It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise sales. The only other option is just using them as your AWS replacement.

> If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even do so?

https://oxide.computer/remote-access

> It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise sales.

Since we sell half or full racks at a time, it's true that we're geared towards larger companies, as small shops just don't need that much computer.

> The only other option is just using them as your AWS replacement.

That's the use case, yep!

Re: Our $100M Series B

#259

Post by cestith »

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.

Do hardware integrators usually build their own BMC, their own power supply, their own backplane, their own firmware, their own motherboards, their own switches, their own SDN, their own hypervisor, their own OS, their own rack design, their own blade / sled design, their own management API, and build it all in coordination with each other to produce a comprehensively new computing platform?

In my mind they’re much more like an SGI, Sun, IBM, DEC, or Apple type of play than merely an integrator.

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