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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#481

Post by aGHz »

aspenmayer wrote: post #480
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a small company, a limited TAM isn't a problem (and honestly is probably an advantage) if the overall market is big. Datacenters as a whole are a ~$30B market per year. The last thing you want as a small company is a bunch of different customers pulling you in different directions. By limiting your TAM, you limit the number of problems you need to solve for a few years, and if everything goes well and you start o…

Is there a risk that the established players can commoditize oxide’s complement here? Is oxide’s product a feature that the big companies can just clone? I’m not sure to be honest. I have followed oxide through the news and am happy to see some progress in this area, I just want to know how to understand their success in the proper context.

The complement of a set consists of everything that is not in the set. Having your complement commoditized is a good thing, it refers to everything your users need that is not part of your value proposition. If it's commoditized, your users have easier access to it hence use more of it, which drives up their demand for the things that _are_ part of your value proposition.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#482

Post by menaerus »

naikrovek wrote: post #251
vonneumannstan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skeptical of that. There's only so much you can do against the physics of moving electrons around at high speeds... "Bigger Fans" and "compute density" doesn't change that

maybe you're not familiar with just how stupidly written most code is. you're right that there are efficiency limits, but not once in my career have I ever seen anyone even attempt to write their code so that it is efficient to run, outside of gaming.

Anything can be improved. Or almost anything. The question is by how much, 5%, 10% or 300%. In this case, I am not really I understand the problem oxide is set to solve so I can't really comment precisely but to me it sounds that if we generally say that data center equipment is suffering from power budget and cooling issues then I don't see this as a problem that software can solve.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#483

Post by throw0101c »

throwmeaway222 wrote: post #466

I remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events. So what is Oxide and why would I use that over OpenStack?

> I remember when OpenStack was a big thing, what happened to them? They were everywhere- free swag at events.

Still releasing software twice a year:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack

Available as open source so you can self-deploy, or go with a vendor if you want some hand-holding / support:

* https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/

Perhaps they were "everywhere" when they were newer and needed to get their name out there, but nowadays they're more established and so will come up in search and such as an option for those that want to run cloud (either for their internal needs, or as the basis of a public product offering).

Re: Our $100M Series B

#484

Post by shortrounddev2 »

lumost wrote: post #370
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are paid salary and awarded equity based on supply/demand for labor, the marginal product of that labor, and the amount of risk engineers are willing to accept by joining a startup. It's an economic transaction, the same as buying office equipment and signing contracts for cloud resources. Trying to imbue mysticism into it is just asking to be lied to by your employees

There is no mysticism in incentive structures. My point was rather that if you provide strictly below market compensation (as most startup equity is positioned these days). You are likely to get below average talent, or below average results from poor incentives.

Im not saying that you should pay below market rates, im just saying that the equity calculation is just about supply and demand. It has nothing to do with fairness

Re: Our $100M Series B

#486

Post by ethbr1 »

cestith wrote: post #174
steveklabnik wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I fully agree with the characterization above (that asking about salary is a 'red flag' in our process), but if I had to try and steelman it: we prominently put > Everyone at Oxide makes $207,264 USD, regardless of location. (Some sales positions have a lower base salary and contain a commission component.) On our applications page (see it here: https://oxide.computer/careers/sw-control-plane ) It's als…

I think in general, at many companies a candidate asking is a red flag. Also for many candidates a company not wanting to discuss it until the offer is a red flag. It seems that specifically your open disclosure very up front bypasses at least most of this from both sides.

Fair. At least one of the two should broach it pretty early in the process, and if the other doesn’t then the remaining party should.

For anyone talented and in-demand, there are attractive and unattractive total comp numbers.

If the company and the potential employee are too far apart on those, why should both waste their time on an interview process?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#487

Post by hinkley »

syntheticgate wrote: post #454
hinkley wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thermal dissipation is a function of the current squared. The heat in the conductor is a function of the size of the conductor and the surface area for heat dissipation. So these high current common rail systems you can sometimes see in youtube videos for power distribution, have great honking bars of copper in them. And in most of the videos I've seen, the video is about someone screwing one of these up, damagin…

In Oxide's design, we do have a 54V DC busbar so that's what the rectifiers put out, and runs vertically up and down the back of the rack. The power connection into each of the cubbies for the sleds, and the power into the sidecar switches connect to this bus bar at 54V. Each of these assemblies has an intermediate bus converter IBC that does the 54->12V conversion on board and 12 and other lower rails are used for t…

One of the things I recall from automotive discussing the switch to 48v systems as a route to hybrid vehicles, is that the coils in motors and generators can be smaller when the voltage is higher. An example they gave is that the alternator could drop about a pound of copper out of its windings. Do the 54v fans have smaller hubs?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#488

Post by lumost »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #484
lumost wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no mysticism in incentive structures. My point was rather that if you provide strictly below market compensation (as most startup equity is positioned these days). You are likely to get below average talent, or below average results from poor incentives.

Im not saying that you should pay below market rates, im just saying that the equity calculation is just about supply and demand. It has nothing to do with fairness

It's not so much a question about fairness, just that the employee and employer are playing different games. Acknowledging this and devising a compensation strategy which aligns incentives is important.

Employers play an iterated game where they will hire/release/develop many workers, Employees play a single game where they choose the firm that maximizes their compensation offer.

Once the employee joins, the incentives flip - employers can take advantage of the fact that employees can't move in less than a year to maximize output, while employees can take advantage of their influence on the organization to minimize expectations.

Hence employers offer strong bonuses, or pay above market to avoid this behavior. Supply/Demand influences what companies pay - but isn't the only influence.

Thinking that you can stiff your employees on equity compensation and have it go unnoticed is imaginary. Employees convinced of outsized valuations for equity compensation will quickly become disillusioned.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#489

Post by steveklabnik »

klooney wrote: post #485
steveklabnik wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much broader than that, but you're right that we make sense for larger organizations, not smaller ones.

Any plans to launch a desk sized version built from Raspberry Pis?

That would be pretty cool, honestly. I've seen some racks for pi's before, haha. But no plans to get into consumer stuff directly any time soon, sadly.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#490

Post by naikrovek »

jeffbee wrote: post #283
naikrovek wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

like us old assholes were saying when the cloud really started to take off: "this is nuts, it's just someone else's computer! and they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing!" Now a lot of the things that were done pre-cloud were done in bad ways, and I'm not saying that we were right about those things. Having APIs for provisioning and monitoring are far better th…

> they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing! I hope you can see that this is a logical fallacy known as "zero-sum thinking". It is not only possible for a business to profit while lowering prices, it is universal throughout the economy. Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home. Bakeries radically u…

You’re right but this isn’t tomato farming. This is writing software to automate certain actions and expose that automation as an api.

This is an attainable goal for just about any skilled software development team, and the analogy of a tomato farmer doesn’t really fit.

AWS has to provide a generalized solution to serve a wide range of customers and needs, while a company writing its own stuff needs only provide a solution for its own needs.

Damn near everything I do can be expressed as EC2, S3, and Lambda. And IAM.

Those are not challenging APIs to write in order to expose basic functionality and authentication, and such an API existing in my employer 10 years ago would have proven cheaper than AWS, especially for bandwidth; it’s all the manual steps and manual checks that needed to be done within my employer which drove us to AWS quickly.

We could definitely do EC2, S3, and Lambda cheaper than AWS charges us today.

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