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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#491

Post by unicornhose »

cpach wrote: post #456
unicornhose wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

Did you order a unit from them or how did you manage to get access to the Oxide hardware?

Uh no I just rent a box from them.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#493

Post by doctorpangloss »

steveklabnik wrote: post #458
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…

> You're telling me it's important to people to "own" instead of "rent." Well I can manufacture an "Own" out of a "Rent": I write up a contract for my customer that says "$1,000,000 for 100 EPYC servers", I ship an empty steel box, the end user gets an AWS account which they cannot add anything to, and it has 100 EPYC server metal instances in it. I pay the bills in that account. Okay? Now I have created "owning" out…

Okay well my feedback to you is, maybe have a chatbot read what I am saying to you, and ask for a charitable interpretation, which is the site’s rules. It’s simply a “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck” argument. It’s not complicated. The way I am looking at things is how a lot of execs at giant companies and VCs look at things, you are welcome to ask them too, or ask for that frame of reference from a chatbot. You guys just raised $100m, you should be able to engage over questions of arb or whatever, and just know this stuff, and be able to talk to bankers and talk like a banker.

The stubbornness around interpreting this argument as negatively and as flawed as possible is a bad look.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#494

Post by doctorpangloss »

kev009 wrote: post #459
doctorpangloss wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

You are casually transitioning between something that is pretty well understood through the history of online commercial computing (i.e. 1970s): 1) owned hardware versus leased/timeshared/rented hardware or services and 2) concepts of financial instruments that many readers here are probably not intimately familiar with. If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy…

It would be like if you needed to buy a generator versus, I will give you a giant cable that has all the same economics as buying a generator. In that case yeah, if I am giving you all the same economics as buying your own generator, but cheaper, you would be stupid not to take my deal. It’s got nothing to do with energy futures. My suggestion is to copy what I am saying to a chatbot, and ask it what “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck” means, and what’s going on here.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#495

Post by doctorpangloss »

everfrustrated wrote: post #407
doctorpangloss wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they just pretend that AWS OnPrem Rack doesn’t exist.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#496

Post by collinmanderson »

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…

Does Oxide require 3-phase power? Do datacenters typically provide 3-phase power?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#497

Post by hinkley »

collinmanderson wrote: post #496
syntheticgate wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does Oxide require 3-phase power? Do datacenters typically provide 3-phase power?

Their spec sheet shows 208 and 3 phase as options. 3 phase is smaller wiring, and with 15KW per rack I could see how that would quickly become a problem.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#498

Post by kev009 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #494
kev009 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are casually transitioning between something that is pretty well understood through the history of online commercial computing (i.e. 1970s): 1) owned hardware versus leased/timeshared/rented hardware or services and 2) concepts of financial instruments that many readers here are probably not intimately familiar with. If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy…

It would be like if you needed to buy a generator versus, I will give you a giant cable that has all the same economics as buying a generator. In that case yeah, if I am giving you all the same economics as buying your own generator, but cheaper, you would be stupid not to take my deal. It’s got nothing to do with energy futures. My suggestion is to copy what I am saying to a chatbot, and ask it what “looks like a du…

"giant cable" -- this kind of thing does obviously happen, rural electrification is heavily subsidized by governments (see the rest of my comment..). But it is also not a realistic option in plenty of cases as such and therefore industrial companies like Cat and Cummins are happy to sell multi-million dollar generators. If your approach to the subject is to copy it into a chatbot it might explain why this discussion is ultimately specious, because a casual and even jocular approach to this is not really adequate to make any point.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#499

Post by Kirby64 »

abustamam wrote: post #403
bobsomers wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, bi…

> 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.

“Paycheck to paycheck” isn’t really accurate if you can contribute to retirement, emergency fund savings, and give additional money to your family. Far from it. You could pull back on any or all of those contributions and have extra slack. Also, presumably you’ll eventually have enough emergency fund and that slack will be available soon.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#500

Post by aspenmayer »

aGHz wrote: post #481
aspenmayer wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well it would be in oxide's interest to do that before their competitors do if it's profitable, right? Wouldn't the more established companies have more money to invest in research and development to try to beat oxide to their own follow-up, now that the market has spoken in oxide's favor?

This is the concept I'm referring to:

https://gwern.net/complement

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

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