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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#421

Post by rtpg »

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.

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

I think if your kind of comfortable is needing to clear 500k or million in comp a year then you aren’t not in scrappy startup mode! This is fine but money out the door is money that then needs to get raised in early rounds

I dunno, I do think oxide for basically everyone who joins is asking for them to get pay cuts but I would really hope that people would still at least putting some stuff into savings.

And like … even if the equity is variable if people are getting even a bit of equity, that might end up as something in the end.

Saying this I think with the recent raise the comp could be made higher just to make the buffer even better. There’s definitely an opportunity cost

Re: Our $100M Series B

#422

Post by steveklabnik »

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…

> what stops a bank from selling "virtual racks" that work financially the same as owning an Oxide rack, but it's just AWS?

I'm struggling to understand what you're suggesting here, to be honest. First of all, banks don't sell cloud compute, so no bank is going to do that. Secondly, what does "work financially the same" mean? These are fundamentally different products, AWS is a service, Oxide is purchasing hardware that you then own.

> $1m buys you 42U of, whatever. You're handed an AWS account you do not pay for, but it has the $1m worth of, whatever in it, in perpetuity. Maybe the bank even throws in some fakey market you can "part out" and "sell" your rack to, years later, at some "market price."

What would be the advantage to anyone in this arrangement? Why not just have an AWS account in this case?

> "AWS stays greedy longer than the average Y Combinator company stays private"

Just to be clear, we are not a yc company. But beyond that:

> The problem with AWS isn't even that they are expensive. It's that Amazon is greedy. It could be cheaper, which is a different thing than being expensive.

It is true that if Amazon dropped prices, then the "rent vs buy" equation changes for some customers. But there always will be some people for whom it makes sense to own, and some people for whom it makes sense to buy.

> RudderStack, Weights & Biases

Neither of these companies seem to sell general cloud computing? They also don't sell hardware? These seem like completely different businesses.

> So what IS it?

We sell servers. Customers buy those servers, put them in a data center, and get a private cloud. That's the business. Other folks are doing similar sorts of things, but they all tend to be integrating parts from various vendors. We believe that our product is of a higher quality, because we built the whole thing, from the ground up. Hardware and software, working together. There are other things that matter as well, but that's the big picture.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#423

Post by steveklabnik »

Aurornis wrote: post #406
throw0101c wrote: post #286

Earlier 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…

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 foc…

Our claim is not that just switching fans drops from 25% to 1-2%. We are claiming that the rack has very low energy usage, and we like to talk about the fans as one part of that reason because it's very visceral and easy to understand.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#424

Post by renewiltord »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #414
renewiltord wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a random sequence.

I suppose I must just have seen you post here before and that's why it's familiar. Funny, felt so familiar.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#425

Post by newsclues »

Aurornis wrote: post #406
throw0101c wrote: post #286

Earlier 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…

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 foc…

I think 1U was poorly optimized for scale, and thus bigger chassis in a rack could use bigger heatsinks and fans at lower speeds instead of small screamers.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#426

Post by abustamam »

rtpg wrote: post #419
abustamam wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bi…

Yeah my point is that it’s comfortable enough. If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck right? You’re putting money off to the side. Tho perhaps you’re not putting aside much for, like, travel. Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level, especially when they’re lean. And I think up until this raise Oxide was lean! (To be honest given this finding raise I could s…

That's true, but I still consider 3-6mos emergency fund to be a basic necessity, since living in the startup world you never know when you may need to use it.

A while back I interviewed for a startup that was asking me to work from 6am to 8pm for about 75% of what I make right now working regular 9-5 at a different startup. It was super early stage so that level of commitment was understandable but I can't imagine very many engineers with families willing to take that much of a paycut. But that's the name of the game, right? When you're early stage you can't afford to pay much but you need your product done yesterday. Thats probably why most startups fail. Cheap quality talent is hard to come by, at least stateside. Offshore developers can be cheap and amazing (someone living in India making $100k USD would probably be considered royalty) but if you don't have someone from that part of the world to vet the devs it could end up being more expensive in the long run.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#427

Post by davinoishi »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #126
siliconc0w wrote: post #26

Pretty bullish, anyone who has tried to setup and manage their own compute knows the pain they're solving. Plus I predict more companies will exit the cloud once they realize how thick the margins have become or want better guarantees over sovereignty.

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…

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#429

Post by Aperocky »

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.

That's almost always been true but servers are more like commodities at this point.

iphone is nice and upgrade from commodities phone and I have one, but I wouldn't care much if my fridge has sleek UI because I just need it to be a fridge.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#430

Post by purpleidea »

Building sovereign systems management with low overhead is an incredibly important goal. For this I salute them for pursuing that path. However their mistake is that it's a hardware problem. It's actually almost entirely a software problem, modulo convincing some hardware vendors to make their ILOM/IPMI implementations not be buggy or suck.

Disclosure, I work in the software automation space.

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