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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#281

Post by steveklabnik »

throwanem wrote: post #204
steveklabnik wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From your perspective of course it has benefits. From mine? Getting stack ranked wasn't even in my top 10 as concerns went, but I'm really good at my job, and I keep quality notes that make it easy to recap a quarter or half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.) I don't really see what that has to do with focusing your rhetoric on 10% of startup comp as though it were 100% - especially now that your tax discount on…

> I keep quality notes that make it easy to recap a quarter or half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.)

The point is not that my friends don't do a good job, the point is that this is work that does not actually further the organization's goals directly, but is necessary in order to keep their job. They'd rather be doing the actual work they are hired to do.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#282

Post by duped »

baq wrote: post #210
duped wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's reasonable, but signalling this to a startup during hiring is going to be a negative. There are three kinds of capital they get to play with, cash, equity, and culture. Cash is the least pliable of the three to them, equity the least liquid, but culture is actually something they can control. If you have a team full of people who are just there for the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is incr…

Culture is smoke and mirrors. When investors say frog, founders jump and guess who gets the cultural shaft then. Better to be thinking in transactional terms from the get go especially in early startups, where majority of total comp is an illiquid call option.

I mean it's not smoke and mirrors, when I'm picking between jobs I'm strongly considering the people I'm spending 35-40% of my waking hours interacting with. If I cared solely about maximizing personal returns I wouldn't work for startups.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#283

Post by jeffbee »

naikrovek wrote: post #244
bambax wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

like us old assholes were saying when the cloud really started to take off: "this is nuts, it's just someone else's computer! and they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing!" Now a lot of the things that were done pre-cloud were done in bad ways, and I'm not saying that we were right about those things. Having APIs for provisioning and monitoring are far better th…

> they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing!

I hope you can see that this is a logical fallacy known as "zero-sum thinking". It is not only possible for a business to profit while lowering prices, it is universal throughout the economy. Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home. Bakeries radically undercut the cost of home baking. It is obviously cheaper to buy motor fuel at the gas station than it would be to buy crude and refine it yourself.

The main reason people think their on-prem is cheaper than cloud is that they are bad at accounting.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#284

Post by AndrewKemendo »

chrisweekly wrote: post #199
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having done web applications for oh…30 years now the key pain is network routing That’s the only thing I can tell is useful about “the cloud” I can build racks and servers easily, but the challenge is availability and getting past everyone’s firewalls So the real win is any service that allows for instant DNS table updates and availability of DNS whitelisting. This is why Google, Msft etc win in email because they ha…

+1 Insightful. I've also been doing web-related work for a living for over 25y and yours is the most spot-on take I've seen in this discussion.

Thank you :)

Re: Our $100M Series B

#285

Post by throwanem »

steveklabnik wrote: post #281
throwanem wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your perspective of course it has benefits. From mine? Getting stack ranked wasn't even in my top 10 as concerns went, but I'm really good at my job, and I keep quality notes that make it easy to recap a quarter or half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.) I don't really see what that has to do with focusing your rhetoric on 10% of startup comp as though it were 100% - especially now that your tax discount on…

> I keep quality notes that make it easy to recap a quarter or half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.) The point is not that my friends don't do a good job, the point is that this is work that does not actually further the organization's goals directly, but is necessary in order to keep their job. They'd rather be doing the actual work they are hired to do.

Oh, come on. Administrative overhead is a reality of business everywhere and at every level; the idea that to manage an organization somehow necessarily impairs it is absurd. So is purporting falsely to eliminate that overhead on behalf of others, when basic professional competence instead involves for oneself learning to minimize it - to dispose of it, not by panicking or catastrophizing or sweeping it under a rug, but instead in a fashion such as that I described ie efficiently. To claim otherwise is infantilizing nonsense. It's fundamentally dishonest, though I grant you probably have never before so directly been told as much.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#286

Post by throw0101c »

kortilla wrote: post #231
pmichaud wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to Oxide Computer, they found that going from 20mm to 80mm fans dropped their chassis power usage (efficiency is to the cube of the radius): a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans, and they were able to get down to 1.2%:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q

From their weblog post:

> Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks with 32 AMD Milan sleds and highly-available network switches using less than 15kW per rack, doubling the compute density in a typical data center. With just 16 of the alternative 1U servers and equivalent network switches, over 16kW of power is required per rack, leading to only 1,024 CPU cores vs Oxide’s 2,048.

* https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power...

Re: Our $100M Series B

#288

Post by transpute »

jeffbee wrote: post #283
naikrovek wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

like us old assholes were saying when the cloud really started to take off: "this is nuts, it's just someone else's computer! and they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing!" Now a lot of the things that were done pre-cloud were done in bad ways, and I'm not saying that we were right about those things. Having APIs for provisioning and monitoring are far better th…

> they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing! I hope you can see that this is a logical fallacy known as "zero-sum thinking". It is not only possible for a business to profit while lowering prices, it is universal throughout the economy. Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home. Bakeries radically u…

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/basec...

> [2023] 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.. [2024] update: it's more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into existing racks and power allowances.. transferring its 10 petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and have more storage available.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#289

Post by steveklabnik »

kortilla wrote: post #264

Oxide is a fully closed ecosystem. The product seems cool but it sucks from an open computing perspective. The “iPhone” of the data center.

What would you like to see open that isn't? The major thing I can think of is not opening up like, our CAD files for the hardware. But that's pretty far away from your characterization.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#290

Post by bflesch »

kensai wrote: post #6

All the best! I personally came to know Oxide for their cool RFD culture. It's worth a read: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/ Start from RFD 1 ;)

the rfd interface looks really nice. I couldn't find the github repo for it, is it proprietary?

Edit: some popup on their page links to https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd but it's a 404

Edit2: it's at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site

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