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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#381

Post by mwcampbell »

kortilla wrote: post #226
mrcwinn wrote: post #13

Everyone at Oxide makes the same salary: >We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. [ https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... ] Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

This has been the biggest red flag to me about oxide since these blogs came out. You don’t join a startup for salary and every startup I’ve been at that emphasizes fair salaries is doing that to intentionally discourage people from pushing on total compensation. Employees apart from the very early ones are likely really getting fucked on equity because oxide explicitly treats candidates asking about equity as a red f…

> (If you are good, remote work with high TC is definitely available.)

But how good do you have to be at things other than the work itself (edit: and how lucky as well) to land one of those jobs with higher compensation? For someone outside of high-cost-of-living tech hubs, Oxide's fixed salary could be life-changing all by itself, even with minimal equity. The fact that they take that deal doesn't necessarily mean that they're mediocre.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#382

Post by bcantrill »

yencabulator wrote: post #375
ryao wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember many Linux fans saying that monocultures were bad until Linux became so popular that Linux was the one benefiting from a monoculture. Despite that, the rationale against monocultures still applies. That said, Illumos is influential as an organ donor to many others. There are a number of awesome technologies in it.

Oh I would love to have some healthy competition to Linux, but I am not rooting for Solaris to do that, I'd rather have one of the Rust-based microkernel actually git gud. Time to shake the foundations of the age-old security and isolation models, not resuscitate a dusty old thing built on piles of C and shell on top of a large monolithic kernel and pretend everything's fine.

Well, good news: we have one of those too![0]

[0] https://oxide.computer/blog/hubris-and-humility

Re: Our $100M Series B

#383

Post by [deleted] »

bpt3 wrote: post #335
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?

Cloud computing is significantly more expensive than self-hosting for most large organizations. People are slowly figuring that out, and Oxide was a bet on the timing of that realization.

[deleted]

Re: Our $100M Series B

#384

Post by renewiltord »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #265
renewiltord wrote: post #197

They're a cool team and I like the idea so I hope it works. In our case, for the few million, we could get a hell of a lot more hardware (Epyc 9654 based machines to start with - much better operating cost / compute) so the magic must be in the software.

There is so much more than just slapping servers in racks when you reach the hundreds of thousands or millions in server hardware. Good control plane software makes a night and day difference.

Admittedly this would have been an exotic for the Bay Area but mundane for elsewhere use-case since we just needed really fast disk and fast compute because we just ran model tuning and backtesting on the machines. 90% utilization, 100G network, 4xNVMe. We only had an 8-member team so much of the management/IT-layer replacement stuff that Oxide enables wouldn't have been as high leverage across the tens of thousands of cores. We almost certainly left a lot of stuff on the table, though.

Also, is your username something interesting? It feels familiar but a quick `echo -n '' | md5sum` didn't yield anything.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#385

Post by bobsomers »

rtpg wrote: post #242
mystraline wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about compensation to be something of a negative signal because they wanted people who weren’t in it for the money, basically. I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels. The cognitive dissonance is amazing. Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it, and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment. If I wasn…

Back when my salary was shitty I cared about the money a lot. I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much. Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a year? Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some people will just ta…

> I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much.

I agree, but that number for most people is not the $207k/yr Oxide is paying.

For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if not single digit millions.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#386

Post by renewiltord »

steveklabnik wrote: post #291
renewiltord wrote: post #197

They're a cool team and I like the idea so I hope it works. In our case, for the few million, we could get a hell of a lot more hardware (Epyc 9654 based machines to start with - much better operating cost / compute) so the magic must be in the software.

It is true that because we're a young company, we currently have the initial SKU that we started selling two years ago. Like every hardware company, we'll be releasing new products with new hardware every so often. Totally hear you if the current product doesn't fit your needs though, that's just going to be the case when we're so young, but as we grow and scale, we'll be able to release more variations that could ma…

Good luck! Eager to see your later SKUs.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#387

Post by sunshowers »

jiveturkey wrote: post #372
sunshowers wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-Solaris staff. I absolutely do not have a Solaris/illumos background! The first time I ever sshed into an illumos machine was my first day on the job.

The exception proves the rule. You can't deny the deep Solaris heritage.

I wouldn't deny that, no.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#388

Post by unicornhose »

neom wrote: post #83

I'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…

I must admit that I am much more unsophisticated than this, and yet I "invested" in Oxide (by running my own projects off Oxide servers), and it is gratifying to see them continue to grow. My (naive) assessment: (a) agreed with Cantrill's opinions on software, (b) liked his willingness to put himself out there, and (c) felt the eng blogs showed a high level of (socio-)technical ability.

I think for the internet to break out of walled gardens, high-quality independent datacenters need to exist -- nobody wants to manage their own datacenters, and nobody wants to rely on Google/Amazon/Microsoft's platforms or (even worse) business products. I hope this continues.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#389

Post by bobsomers »

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #94
IncreasePosts wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is sales special? Why not just have some performance bar for that, just like all the other positions?

Because good sales staff make a ton of money through a ton of sales. Any other incentive structure is unlikely to attract high performers.

How is this not exactly the same in engineering though? Performance reviews at top tech companies are pretty much designed to identify the super high performers and shove massive bonuses and equity grants their way.

And those equity grants are effectively as good as cash, since they are publicly tradable stock.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#390

Post by sofixa »

ironhaven wrote: post #248
sofixa wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On-demand elastic resources Which is kind of wrong, because there is nothing elastic nor "on demand" about metal you buy.

Elastic as in AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (ec2). Flexible virtual machines provisioned with a web API not rubbery stretchy servers

By that metric even VMware's vSphere with its abominable excuses for APIs also count as elastic.

If you have to manage the hardware yourself, have to plan and pay for upfront for the maximum capacity you would need, and there are fixed limits you can hit and have to plan around yourself, it's not elastic.

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