Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have salary and equity, no bonuses. Salary is identical, equity is not. I certainly agree with you that that kind of shenanigans can be annoying; I had a former employer who hired people with "oh it's a bonus but you always get 100% of it" and then, we did not get 100% of it.
> Salary is identical, equity is not. Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an answer for.
Our $100M Series B
351–360 of 522 posts
Re: Our $100M Series B
#352I'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…
Re: Our $100M Series B
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is not any different than the "blade" form factor that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel. It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware e…
Re: Our $100M Series B
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is not any different than the "blade" form factor that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel. It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware e…
Yes, "just".
Re: Our $100M Series B
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
What percentage of enterprise IT compute has not moved to a public cloud?
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/cloud-revenue...
Re: Our $100M Series B
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
That they're instead focused on standardizing employee salary, or promoting their company through niche political websites. These are decisions that the CEO is making, which means they're distracted. This is fine when you've received nearly 200 million in total funding, but won't work once you're expected to add the same level of value while being profitable.
> promoting their company through niche political websites. Just to be clear, you mean that we have a BlueSky account, in addition to X? I struggle to think of what you mean. Generally speaking, advertising on a wide array of platforms is considered a good thing, as you reach different audiences.
This feels the same as past startups where I thought I hit a pmf because of how excited "potential" customers got when I mentioned politics. We built out "political" features, came back, and none of them converted but the excitement grew stronger. Politics is a trap because it adds no value, drives away potential real customer bases, but you will get enormous positive reinforcement because people are excited you're pushing their brand of politics. In my mind, there's a risk you start creating teams to manage "corporate culture" and brand outreach, and if politics sneaks into management they'll actively steer the company in the wrong direction.
Also I'm sorry, if you're actually an executive at oxide I don't mean to be harsh, I thought I was speaking into the void. I've witnessed this destroy companies I've worked on and been involved with, and doing something like only listing a bluesky account is exactly the kind of thing that's a distraction which costs potential real customers.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#357I see no mention of GPUs in their platform?
#1: Don't expect to see it until after AMD or someone else makes a product that actually manages to compete against Nvidia. Nvidia is pretty hostile to not running their low-level software stack, and Oxide is all about the legacy of Solaris.
#2: AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future server motherboards (not a separate PCI card). Simultaneously, the boundary between "CPU vector processing" and "GPU used for transformers" will blur, and the chipsets will slowly merge into chiplets in one package.
#3: AMD MI400 and such AI accelerators will be primarily sold as full racks with its own custom "networking" (UALink switch), and the actual host CPU on those devices will be lower specs and mostly relegated to setup and metrics of the AI work, much like storage and networking appliances are built, AI workload will not even pass through the host CPU. I'm not sure Oxide can compete in that world. The "business logic CPUs" will reside in a different rack.
Re: Our $100M Series B
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just doesn't exist here. By the way, I received every rating from Greatly Exceeds (including an additional equity grant) down to Meets Most, and the rating I got overall had very little correlation with either effort or impact. I got Meets Most for some of the…
> I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just doesn't exist here. The culture difference between Meta and any startup will be night and day. People who are self interested min-maxxers don't join startups. Not dealing with "corporate politics" has to be in the top 5 reasons anyone leaves FAANG to joi…
Re: Our $100M Series B
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> promoting their company through niche political websites. Just to be clear, you mean that we have a BlueSky account, in addition to X? I struggle to think of what you mean. Generally speaking, advertising on a wide array of platforms is considered a good thing, as you reach different audiences.
Only your bluesky is listed on your website, which is what people see when they go to your site. This feels the same as past startups where I thought I hit a pmf because of how excited "potential" customers got when I mentioned politics. We built out "political" features, came back, and none of them converted but the excitement grew stronger. Politics is a trap because it adds no value, drives away potential real cus…
I agree that it's difficult to balance features customers say they want vs the ones they'll actually convert over in an early stage company.
I just don't think "has a BlueSky" means that that is what happens.