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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#71

Post by diggan »

drdrek wrote: post #60

God why do startup sites suck so much? Why do I need ChatGPT to cut through the marketing speak to understand what they are actually selling? I literally spent 5 minutes in the site trying to understand before giving up and asking GPT... Cool 1999 aesthetics though

Maybe I'm old-school, but I clicked on the logo in the top left, then read the first sentence which reads "On-demand elastic resources", which gives me some idea about what it is, and then later it says "A rack-scale system, built true to cloud architecture, that you can own and operate in your data center." which makes me 100% understand what the product is.

Do new internet users not know that the landing page usually contains information about the product they're talking about in their blog posts? 99% of the cases you can find what you're looking for on the landing page, and it took me a whole of 30 seconds to get here, writing this comment took longer time.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#72

Post by maerF0x0 »

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.

some aspect of that picture are nanny-state sorts of laws like Accreditation which have a bias that says if you're "poor" then you're not intelligent enough or qualified enough to make your own best choices of investment.

I was happy to learn about Sweater Ventures https://www.sweaterventures.com/our-story (and their kind) which are opening up access to investments, and also helping ensure the entry price is quite low (for example I invest $50 a month with them) .

It is my hope that in the future you will be able to order a micro fraction of any company as easily as you could a starbucks.

And IMO part of that equation might be to have the state start to work against contracts which restrict your rights on your own property (essentially contracts restrict when you can sell your shares, usually not until IPO or a company organized liquidity event)

Re: Our $100M Series B

#73

Post by Aurornis »

NewUser76312 wrote: post #27
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?

Of course not, what's the purpose of asking such as silly question? Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the same upside that founders deserve?

> Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the same upside that founders deserve

The founders are excluded from the employee compensation discussion. They own the company because they founded it. Nobody thinks they just put the equity into a structure that nobody owns.

The question is whether all employees are compensated equally, which is a very important detail. Giving everyone the same salary is very different than giving everyone the same total compensation.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#74

Post by master_crab »

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.

I don’t disagree that there are some fat margins in the cloud, but how is vendor lock-in any different here? Companies could end up paying fat margins to oxide too while still managing physical gear and plant.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#75

Post by turnsout »

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.

I've run my own servers for over 20 years now, but I guess I don't understand the pain point. Can you elaborate? They write:

  > Our system delivers all the hardware and software you need to run cloud…
To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs?

I'm literally so old that I write programs that run on a server and never think about infrastructure.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#76

Post by abxyz »

ArnoVW wrote: post #53
ekianjo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so basically everything converges to having specific reasons to have different salary schemes.

One exception, for sales. I don't see how they could have done it differently. We have a "one rate per level" rule. The rates are published, and so are the definitions of the levels, and everyone's level (i.e. indirectly you can know everyone's salary) Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't work. They only know incentive-based schemes. So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the sales,…

I argued this in the previous discussion about oxide’s compensation structure: I disagree that sales must be commission based. Yes, finding sales staff that are willing to work for a salary and equity shrinks the pool but the same is true of engineers willing to work for a flat rate across the company.

Sales might seem mystical and magical to engineers but it isn’t. A small company with a small sales team can absolutely work without commission. Yes, it is harder, but it is not impossible. The carve out for sales undermines the ideas behind a flat salary structure. Just because we can measure a sales person’s contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar amounts. Sales is as much about the partnerships between sales people and product/engineering, why aren’t all the people who work on a deal getting commission?

I’d go as far as to argue that oxide is in the perfect position as a big-ticket long-cycle business to abandon traditional sales commission structures. They take on all the negatives (sales people overselling to get commission) with no benefits. There are other ideas. Company wide bonus based on sales made during the year?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#77

Post by jillesvangurp »

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.

I actually think that having more cloud providers might deflate a lot of the pricing. If you think about it, companies like Amazon buy server hardware and then rent it out by the vcpu (with throttling if they can get away with it) per month. Add memory and IO and you are looking at bills that pay for the server in mere months/weeks several tenants carving up all the hardware and each paying tens/hundreds per month.

There are of course benefits to using cloud based VMs and I use them as well. But you are paying a very steep premium for what is a pitiful amount of compute and memory. There's a lot of wiggle room for price decreases and the only thing preventing that is a lack of competition. There's a reason Amazon is so rich: nobody seems to challenge them on AWS pricing. There's value in having them do all the faffing about with hardware of course. That's why companies use them. I'm in GCP; but same principle. I don't want to have to worry about replacing hard disks in the middle of the night, deal with network routers that are misbehaving, cooling issues, etc. That's why I pay them the big bucks. But I'm well aware that it's not that great of a deal.

I used Hetzner a decade ago and paid something like 50 euros per month for a quad core xeon with a raid 1 disks, 32 GB, etc. Bare metal of course. But also, 50 euro. We had five of those. Forget about getting anything close to that with modern cloud providers for anything resembling a reasonable price. Your first monthly bill might actually add up to enough to buy your own hardware. Very tempting. They have beefed up their specs since then. You now get more for less. And they also do VMs now.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#78

Post by heeton »

colesantiago wrote: post #36

Lots of praise not much skepticism, so what is the exit here? $100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the total amount raised of almost $200M? Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just staying private?

I'd assume eventual IPO. And/or specific lucrative contracts within US Govt/Military/Tech.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#79

Post by throw0101c »

turnsout wrote: post #75
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.

I've run my own servers for over 20 years now, but I guess I don't understand the pain point. Can you elaborate? They write: > Our system delivers all the hardware and software you need to run cloud… To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs? I'm literally so old that I write programs that run on…

> To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs?

Machine/system/service deployment via API.

See §Essential Characteristics

> On-demand self-service; Broad network access; Resource pooling; Rapid elasticity; Measured service

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

None are generally applicable to standalone pizza boxes as managed individual (as opposed to being herded by (e.g.) OpenStack).

Re: Our $100M Series B

#80

Post by kayson »

dcminter wrote: post #55
kayson wrote: post #41

What do they need so much capital for?

I think the downvoting on you is a little harsh. TFA does allude to it, but doesn't explicitly answer your question. I presume the implicit answer is here: > With growing customer enthusiasm, we were increasingly getting questions about what it would look like to buy a large number of Oxide racks. Could we manufacture them? Could we support them? Could we make them easy to operate together? i.e. they need the capital…

Thanks. It was a genuine question but I guess I can see how it might be taken otherwise.
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