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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#441

Post by sudomateo »

mystraline wrote: post #400
sudomateo wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loved reading your experience here. Thank you for posting it. I've written about the value of an artifact in the past when people pushed back against the Oxide materials saying they are a lot of work for no guarantee. When I first applied to Oxide I was also rejected and the materials process taught me a ton about myself and changed the way I viewed job searching and my work. I shifted course and increased my skills…

> they are a lot of work for no guarantee. Well, its the assymetry of wanting a 10 year long documented CV with various orthogonal points in your career, versus actually having a 30 minute call. Unlike an actual interview, which is equal time investment, this 20 page paper gets the commentary and result of "no". "No" what? You can ask an interviewer about concerns, and discussion points. This email from no-mail@ is j…

It's tough on both sides. I understand the disdain of receiving a "no" after putting in hours or days of effort on the materials. Candidates are welcome to ask for feedback on their application but must understand that Oxide is limited in what we can say due to legalities. Hiring is a tricky balance on the legal front. I also understand that it's impractical to give every candidate a synchronous screening call just to confirm whether they should continue applying. Not only for time's sake but also bias. Is it enough for 1 person to do a screening call and decide someone's fate?

No hiring process will ever be perfect but at least, as the experience mentioned previously touched on, the candidate is left with an artifact that they can then use in future applications. Candidates walk away having learned something about themselves. Open roles are also limited, applying for such roles is also optional, and it's up to each candidate to decide how much time and effort they wish to put into the materials.

We're humans here at Oxide too, and we're doing the best we can to ensure the hiring process is fair and humane as well.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#442

Post by mrcwinn »

Aurornis wrote: post #56
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?

> 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…

Exactly right. It doesn’t answer the question. It does some cartwheels to avoid to the reality: despite their philosophies and soap boxing on compensation, equity is a form of compensation and their equity is no doubt distributed very, very differently.

It’s intellectually dishonest. I look forward though to their “in depth” follow up post.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#443

Post by sudomateo »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #434
steveklabnik wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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. You're telling me it's important to people to "own" instead of "rent." Well I can manufacture an "Own" o…

Similar to what others noted earlier I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you're trying to communicate here. I'll respond based to points I am clear on.

Selling a customer a contract for on-premises computing and giving them a fake metal box and SaaS is borderline unethical depending on the terms of said contract. I understand the sentiment of that point though. There are many reasons a customer chooses to own instead of rent. Legal requirements, financial incentives, and even control over performance to name a few.

On-premises computing was so good that the cloud providers packaged it up and sold it back to people at a premium that could only ever be rented. The finances of that model don't make sense to many businesses as they look to reignite their on-premises computing with the modernity of the cloud providers. That's where Oxide shines in my opinion- being able to have on-premises computing that combines the efficiencies of the hyper scalers with an API-driven approach to managing resources. We take that a step further by building hardware and software in-house for additional benefits such as power efficiency, control over the networking stack, additional telemetry, etc.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#444

Post by sudomateo »

neumann wrote: post #440

Is there a clear hardware upgrade path? Couldn't see it obviously on the website. The on-prem cloud is definitely the holy grail for many of us, but the justification to the capex and ongoing commitment to owning the hardware would be that it has have just as easy an upgrade path.

Hey! The current generation rack is compatible with the current generation compute sleds, switch, and power shelves. The next-generation compute sleds will be compatible as well. Possibly the next-generation switch but I would have to defer to my colleagues for that answer.

We'll ultimately ship a next-generation rack to take advantage of changing constraints (e.g., physical form factor, power requirements) and we'll provide a mechanism for upgrading to that generation of rack as well. Likely, in the form of multi-rack connectivity to move workloads or perhaps even financial incentives to purchase the latest and greatest.

I don't work on the hardware side at Oxide so I don't have further details to share. Great question!

Re: Our $100M Series B

#445

Post by sudomateo »

bix6 wrote: post #86

What is the initial cost to setup their smallest system on prem?

We're working on publishing an updating pricing page to better communicate this to the public. Stay tuned!

Here's what I can knowingly share. We sell full-rack and half-rack SKUs today coming in at 1024/16TiB and 2048/32TiB of CPU cores and RAM respectively. Disk varies depending on the drive size. On top of the cost of the rack you'll pay an annual percentage for support and that's it. No software licensing or other weird fees.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#446

Post by chrishare »

KetoMojito wrote: post #50
bcantrill wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it's hopelessly on-brand for us to offer up a podcast episode for everything, you may also be interested in our Oxide and Friends episode on RFDs with our colleagues Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus Mayo.[0] [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-ba...

Bryan you absolute legend. You give the best technical seminars i've ever watched (& countlessly rewatched). Ty for inspiring a generation of engineers. Best of luck with everything at Oxide!

What was it?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#447

Post by doctorpangloss »

sudomateo wrote: post #443
doctorpangloss wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're telling me it's important to people to "own" instead of "rent." Well I can manufacture an "Own" o…

Similar to what others noted earlier I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you're trying to communicate here. I'll respond based to points I am clear on. Selling a customer a contract for on-premises computing and giving them a fake metal box and SaaS is borderline unethical depending on the terms of said contract. I understand the sentiment of that point though. There are many reasons a customer chooses to o…

there's seriously nothing complicated about this. Define ownership. Who cares about owning a bunch of computers? If you can get the compute, and you pay up front for it once, and then you can sell "it" later, and it's cheaper than renting, what does it matter if the compute comes in the form of a physical box or if it is in the cloud? So these are all things that matter about ownership! To me, occupying a physical space is not important for ownership, wrt servers.

Nobody is saying anything about anything unethical... I am mocking the idea of needing the steel box, forget about the steel box.

It's just Amazon Reserved Instances, but with an indefinite period. Okay? Isn't that an attractive product?

Why am I talking about banks? Because maybe in Oxide's deck it says, "Amazon will NEVER do this. Amazon will NEVER sell indefinite reserved instances." Fine. Well a bank can simply pay spot prices and sell you an up front price, if you want. Okay? It's the same thing. It only matters what Amazon does when we're talking about $100m Series B, which is what this article is about! It's not about the technology.

> On-premises computing was so good that the cloud providers packaged it up and sold it back to people at a premium that could only ever be rented.

No... guys... AWS makes sense. It's not a premium "that could only ever be rented." There are a ton of much cheaper cloud providers. Amazon just happens to be selling the Rolls Royce of clouds. They have a ridiculous margin. Figma makes more profit for AWS each year than it will ever make for itself in its entire lifetime. "that could only ever be rented" is simply not true, they can afford to make all sorts of innovative pricing models, reserved instances being one of them.

Oxide just hasn't had to compete with "99 Year AWS Reserved Instances." But absolutely, positively, utterly nothing stops them from offering that. They already give you a massive, MASSIVE discount for 3 year reservations.

That said, obviously not having to deal with human beings managing hardware is valuable. It's the same shit as the difference between "AI" meaning a computer and overseas workforces. They might produce the same outputs for the same cost, but think deeply about yourself: how much are you willing to pay to deal with a computer instead of an IT tech? To avoid phone calls? To avoid doing things that might be faster, but are in person?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#448

Post by pyuser583 »

It’s funny how we are knee deep in the next “big thing” (AI), and still haven’t made the last “big thing” (cloud computing) generally accessible.

It should be trivial to create my own S3 bucket that’s stores data on my laptop.

I’m really glad folks like Oxide are moving in that direction.

But it seems when there’s enough money in something, openness goes out the window.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#449

Post by vlovich123 »

sofixa wrote: post #391
vlovich123 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla salespeople do not work on commission. Also you can align incentives through stock grants which appreciate by you selling more.

> Tesla salespeople do not work on commission I work with tech salespeople with a variety of former employers as tech sales people, and I've never heard of anyone having worked without a commission. I'm vaguely in tech sales myself (solutions architect) and I'm on commission too, and so is everyone who joins our division from similar employment (solutions engineers/architect, or even customer success folks).

While I agree it's the norm, clearly Tesla has gone a different route and it's possible to do so.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#450

Post by vatican_banker »

throwpup666 wrote: post #267
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 still dont get it. If someone else's software is running the hardware, what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite?

Banks care _a lot_ where the data is store, hence most banks are inclined to keep customer data on-prem.

Because data must be on-prem, banks are stuck in legacy infra paradigms. The whole org suffers, innovation is stiffled, yada yada…

An on-prem cloud product (hardware+software) is a game changer for these companies, IMO.

My question to oxide: how easy is to integrate external hardware into the cloud? For example: bunch of GPUs or a bunch of next-gen hardware like SambaNova.

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