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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#321

Post by tgtweak »

sailfast wrote: post #308

Is this a government run VC firm? Next gen In-Q-Tel? Makes sense for highly classified workloads on-prem and there’s a lot of demand for that. Could be a need for unclassified workloads also… but curious if this is a defense and Intel community venture fund backing this next round with my tax dollars.

Likely government-adjacent and with high portfolio use case match. These orgs are less and less keen on shifting sensitive workloads to public clouds - even "gov clouds". Let's not forget that the best access control is to have no access, and that obscurity is actually a form of security especially in a world where effort put on vulnerability searching is proportionate to popularity. The odds of someone discovering and exploiting your obscurely coded and privately hosted oxide stack are orders of magnitude smaller than someone compromising your public cloud.

USIT > U.S. Innovative Technology (“USIT”) is an investment firm that backs growth-stage commercial companies with critical technologies relevant to the national interest, including, artificial intelligence, future of compute, new industry, space & communications, bio & healthcare, and defense tech. USIT was founded by American technologist and visionary investor Thomas Tull.

joined by: Riot Ventures, Eclipse, Jane Street

Re: Our $100M Series B

#322

Post by throwanem »

steveklabnik wrote: post #320
throwanem wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish to do so. Why should I not seek involvement in staff work that determines so much of my future? Why should I not make myself responsible for the conduct of the business within the scope of my role, rather than just the parts which I happen to like and enjoy? And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide, I really can't see…

> I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish to do so. Okay, sure. I am also not a "I only want to put my head down and code" person either. > And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide, Not formally, no. Because there are no levels, no corresponding salary bands, there's no need to have a formal process, with all of the justification work that has to go in from…

> Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our salary.

And some of "us" have an ownership stake, and some of "us" do not. But "we" like to talk about how everyone's working on a level playing field, anyway.

You're quite right. It isn't an environment for me.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#323

Post by jeffbee »

steveklabnik wrote: post #314
jeffbee wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So, to dig into (and maybe stretch) one of your analogies a little bit: > Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home. This is because at home, you have an elastic need for tomatoes. One week you need a few, the next week you need none, the next week you need a lot. In that case, yes, growing your own tomatoes would be very silly. (This part of the analog…

My comment wasn't really about Oxide, it's about the fallacy. A person can't succeed in life thinking they can do something cheaper on the sole basis that the other guy makes a profit. The much more likely explanation is that the other guy makes their profit by being much, much better than you.

To stretch the metaphor to a grotesque extent, I think Oxide stands in the middle between the home-grown and the industrial tomato. Your average corporate IT installation has the same economics as home-grown. Even if they have 1000 potted plants, they are still potted plants, and they are still $100 tomatoes. EC2 is a 5000-acre California tomato grower where the fields have been leveled using lasers and the fruits are harvested by robots driving themselves using on-board GPUs. Their tomatoes cost 5¢. An Oxide computer is like having a 1-acre kitchen garden where the tomatoes are in rows. These are more like $1 each. The economics are undoubtedly better.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#324

Post by stavros »

steveklabnik wrote: post #277
throwpup666 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still dont get it. If someone else's software is running the hardware, what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite?

> If someone else's software is running the hardware Our stack is open source. > what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite? The difference is not where it runs, it's that you own our racks, rather than rent them. In the traditional cloud, you're renting. Other vendors who sell you hardware will still have you paying software licensing fees, so it never feels like you truly own it. We don't have any licen…

I like you. Are you guys hiring?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#325

Post by yencabulator »

abxyz wrote: post #76
ArnoVW wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One exception, for sales. I don't see how they could have done it differently. We have a "one rate per level" rule. The rates are published, and so are the definitions of the levels, and everyone's level (i.e. indirectly you can know everyone's salary) Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't work. They only know incentive-based schemes. So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the sales,…

I argued this in the previous discussion about oxide’s compensation structure: I disagree that sales must be commission based. Yes, finding sales staff that are willing to work for a salary and equity shrinks the pool but the same is true of engineers willing to work for a flat rate across the company. Sales might seem mystical and magical to engineers but it isn’t. A small company with a small sales team can absolut…

> Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts.

I don't even know if we can.

Yes, you can measure the number of deals signed they called dibs on. But:

1. You don't know if the salesperson earned it, or the whole product. There's a baseline demand driven by the whole company. This is the whole old argument that nobody can prove that ads work; you just can't pinpoint the purchase decision to exposure to an ad. So yeah I guess you can make your salespeople compete against each other and reward the one who stochastically floats to the top while punishing others. Sounds like such a fun workplace, I thought everyone agreed Microsoft's rank system sucked.

2. Several times I have witnessed salespeople selling non-existent, non-planned, functionality and forcing the rest of the company into crunch mode to not have a major client semi-publicly end the contract early. You're often just rewarding the biggest liar while everyone else has to cover up for their shit. Once again, sounds like such a fun workplace.

It comes down to, competitive sales is a cancer, and you're choosing to have it.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#326

Post by steveklabnik »

ksec wrote: post #305

I am wondering what they have on Roadmap and if Zen 6 will come. Their AMD EPYC™ 7713P is 4+ years old already. Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came with it? In 2027 - 2030, We will have 256 Core Zen 7 CPU with PCIe 6.0 or 7.0 SSD and Network. If Liquid Cooling ever come to Oxide we are looking at 5 - 10x the compute power of its current hardware. Somewhere along the line a Sin…

> Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came with it?

It's more of that we're a young company, so we can only do so much, so quickly. Plus, because we do so much custom work, that all takes time. As we grow and scale up, we'll be able to move forward more quickly on updates on the hardware front.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#327

Post by steveklabnik »

stavros wrote: post #324
steveklabnik wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone else's software is running the hardware Our stack is open source. > what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite? The difference is not where it runs, it's that you own our racks, rather than rent them. In the traditional cloud, you're renting. Other vendors who sell you hardware will still have you paying software licensing fees, so it never feels like you truly own it. We don't have any licen…

I like you. Are you guys hiring?

We are! https://oxide.computer/careers

Re: Our $100M Series B

#328

Post by yencabulator »

tock wrote: post #89
abxyz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argued this in the previous discussion about oxide’s compensation structure: I disagree that sales must be commission based. Yes, finding sales staff that are willing to work for a salary and equity shrinks the pool but the same is true of engineers willing to work for a flat rate across the company. Sales might seem mystical and magical to engineers but it isn’t. A small company with a small sales team can absolut…

> Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts. This is the fairest form of compensation. It's unfortunate that engineering contribution cannot be measured the same way. If we could engineers would all be getting a nice pay hike.

Only if the salesperson also implements & supports the things they sell. Selling false promises of something the rest of the organization has to fulfill is not fair -- but that's the way to the biggest commission!

Re: Our $100M Series B

#329

Post by steveklabnik »

throwanem wrote: post #322
steveklabnik wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish to do so. Okay, sure. I am also not a "I only want to put my head down and code" person either. > And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide, Not formally, no. Because there are no levels, no corresponding salary bands, there's no need to have a formal process, with all of the justification work that has to go in from…

> Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our salary. And some of "us" have an ownership stake, and some of "us" do not. But "we" like to talk about how everyone's working on a level playing field, anyway. You're quite right. It isn't an environment for me.

Small nit, everyone has an ownership stake, it's that some are larger than others.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#330

Post by bcantrill »

throwanem wrote: post #274
growse wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I'm really good at my job How good you think you are at your job is pretty meaningless if some manager above you wants to weaponise the company's perf policy against you.

I'm good enough at my job to see that when it's happening. That's one reason why I didn't say 'I think.' Another is because I know the way to bet is that, with this weapon forbidden, others will be found to replace it. Why go into any of that without even the promise of hazard pay? I'd rather just do honest work.

This "job" that you speak of, that you are so good at. Are you... at it now?
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