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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#401

Post by Aurornis »

timerol wrote: post #378
Aurornis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant? I thought I saw this question answered in a previous thread and the answer was basically “no”, but the question has been avoided a lot. Aspects of equity compensation would inherently need to be different over time due to valuation, fundraising stage, and so on. However I always thought it was strange that they made a big deal about paying everyone the same base sa…

> Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant? > equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth. I think that paragraph answers the question pretty clearly. As an Oxide employee you will get equity. It will generally be less than the people that came before you, but more than people that come after you. So it's obviously not the…

It doesn’t answer it clearly at all.

Do two people hired at the same time get the same equity? Or is there room for one candidate to get more equity due to their experience or simply because they negotiated more?

Obviously early employees get more equity. The question is whether or not there’s room for negotiation. They heavily imply that everyone is paid the same, but all of those claims are about base salary.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#402

Post by Aurornis »

mwcampbell wrote: post #381
kortilla wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> For someone outside of high-cost-of-living tech hubs, Oxide's fixed salary could be life-changing all by itself,

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at compensation tables and reference data. $200K is definitely good salary, but I wouldn’t call it “life changing” relative to what someone qualified to work at Oxide could earn in an average non-tech hub metro area.

The type of candidate who qualifies to work at Oxide has numerous options for high paying remote work, and probably well paying local work too.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#403

Post by abustamam »

bobsomers wrote: post #385
rtpg wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to think (like 10 years ago) that $100k a year was all the money in the world and I'd be able to own a nice house and drive a nice car in Cali.

Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla), and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still paycheck to paycheck.

I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but it's not to the "worry not about money."

$200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest? That person can probably retire early in a few years.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#404

Post by zozbot234 »

yencabulator wrote: post #357
esafak wrote: post #97

I see no mention of GPUs in their platform?

My personal predictions: #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 vec…

> 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.

Isn't this just an iGPU? They generally have much lower performance than GPU's sitting on a dedicated card.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#405

Post by Aurornis »

jvanderbot wrote: post #67
throw0101c wrote: post #63

Meta: Oxide has talked about the designs of their cooling [1][2][3], so I'm curious to know if they ever start offering GPUs how they'd handle that. Folks seem to be moving toward liquid cooling[4] either to the rack/chassis[5] or even to the chip[6]. [1] https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVXClXVuzE [3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hTJYY_Y1H9Q [4] h…

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.

Oxide is doing some great things, but there’s only so much you can do with firmware tweaks. A CPU running any load at all is going to completely eclipse the power usage of everything else in the system.

Incremental improvements from things like more efficient fans and reducing the number of power conversions is great, but the power drawn by the CPUs or GPUs is on another level.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#406

Post by Aurornis »

throw0101c wrote: post #286
kortilla wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

20mm fans aren’t used in server cooling applications. You must be thinking of 40mm fans.

Going from 40mm fans to 80mm fans will not take energy usage from 25% to 1-2%. They must have taken an extreme example to compare against. What they’re doing is cool, but this is a marketing exaggeration targeted at people who aren’t familiar with the space.

Oxide also isn’t the only vendor using form factors other than 1U or focusing on high density configurations. Using DC power distribution is also an increasingly common technique.

To be honest, a lot of this feels like Apple-esque marketing where they show incredible performance improvements, but the baseline used is something arbitrary.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#407

Post by everfrustrated »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #396
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…

First let me say I really like this part of your guys narrative: you have really strong opinions about how infrastructure and IT should work at many levels, like technically and aesthetically, that seems real and nice and likable. Focusing on just this financial narrative you're weaving, what stops a bank from selling "virtual racks" that work financially the same as owning an Oxide rack, but it's just AWS? $1m buys…

I wish them all the best but yeah I can't see any reason why someone would pay oxide over aws onprem rack solution.

I'm sure they'll find _some_ customers but they're going to be few and far between.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#408

Post by yencabulator »

zozbot234 wrote: post #404
yencabulator wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal predictions: #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 vec…

> 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. Isn't this just an iGPU? They generally have much lower performance than GPU's sitting on a dedicated card.

It's built to be deployed in units of racks, so that "i" is a little funny. It's not a little wart on the side of a general-purpose CPU.

432 GB memory at 19.6 TB/s are the claimed specs. For one package. Now fill a rack with 72 of those.

(If only AMD could execute on the software side...)

Re: Our $100M Series B

#409

Post by Aurornis »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #57

Isn't it sad we're not able to invest into most new tech companies these days, with private equity taking the lead. I don't blame the companies after seeing what going public entails, but still unfortunate.

There are actually a lot of ways to invest in smaller startups now, but the catch is that the best startups don’t want your money.

Even if all of the laws lined up just right, it’s unlikely that a company like Oxide would be interested in collecting a lot of little investors and then maintaining all of the obligations that go along with serving those investors.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#410

Post by everfrustrated »

brettgriffin wrote: post #351
Aurornis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Salary is identical, equity is not. Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an answer for.

More important than just getting answer, do you understand _why_ every employee isn't granted the same amount equity?

Because if you want to poach talent then you'll likely need to induce them to leave their existing employer and will need to match their existing equity grants that might soon vest. Obviously that number is different for different people.
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