[HN Gopher] Oxide raises $200M Series C
___________________________________________________________________
Oxide raises $200M Series C
Author : igrunert
Score : 482 points
Date : 2026-02-10 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oxide.computer)
(TXT) w3m dump (oxide.computer)
| gclawes wrote:
| If I could use the Oxide stack in a homelab form factor, I would
| be so happy...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the
| beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd
| probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their
| product material.
| ubercore wrote:
| If they can scale down the hardware to something close to
| homelab-ish in price, would be great marketing and way to
| build expertise to have their big boy solution promoted at
| workplaces. Probably not a priority at their stage though.
| 9dev wrote:
| Prices start around 800k last time I heard, I don't know if
| that fits within what you consider _a premium_ or not :-)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Hah, that might be slightly above what I'm ready to pay for
| a at-home server yes :) But given the right specifications
| and software integration, I'd probably be ready to pony up
| up to somewhere around 10K for a complete solution if it
| could replace all my existing hardware, even if it was more
| expensive than other options with worse tradeoffs.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| You would need 3-phase power too. At 208V and 15kW it'll
| draw over 70A peak :P. If you can wire that up in your
| living room, I raise my glass to you!
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't
| even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked
| on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it
| lives under the couch.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Their engineered power and cooling solutions are all for
| rack-scaled hardware, doing a NUC wouldn't make sense. Now a
| silent and efficiently cooled studio-sized rack with enough
| hardware (including AMD GPUs) for reasonably quick AI
| inference with the latest local models, that's something that
| they could do and be quite popular.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I'm not saying they should put their software stack on a
| Celeron (or whatever Intel calls their cheap CPUs now). But
| no racks, please. I just can't get with the "rack in my
| house" crowd. If you have a basement, then fine I guess.
| But I live in an apartment, and I don't have the space or
| patience for a computer that's the size of a mini fridge,
| and sounds like a jet engine.
| buchanae wrote:
| I'm interested, tell me more. What about Oxide attracts a
| homelab user?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Many homelab users are actually building things out in an
| effort to learn tooling that they will then use at work. Or
| just out of intellectual interest.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| All of their software is open-source, including the firmware. I
| bet this is actually possible for a subset of their tools.
|
| Step 1 could be to get Illumos running on a local x86-64
| machine.
| pronaosk wrote:
| You can! There are plenty of us running various minis or old
| equipment. The non-gimlet deploy pattern supports virtual
| networking with x86_64 "sleds."
| tylerhillery wrote:
| Can you clarify what parts of the Oxide stack you're running?
| Is it the entire control plane?
| akshitgaur2005 wrote:
| I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it
| is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large
| open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really
| good too.
|
| I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working
| there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I
| think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by
| going forward, "Am I skilled enough that I could work at Oxide?".
| Hope more companies follow suit in putting the people forward!!
| sweetheart wrote:
| This is my first time hearing of Oxide, but I had the same
| initial thought after reading this blog post then poking
| through their site. The degree of careful thought put into
| their policies and culture is really impressive, at least from
| the outside. Good for them, I hope they continue to be in a
| position to have that luxury (genuinely).
| ilogik wrote:
| You should check out their podcast, Oxide And Friends
| bsaul wrote:
| After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be
| really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of
| organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in
| charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a
| long term vision.
|
| Total chaos.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of
| structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that
| there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal
| one that just means there's an informal one which is usually
| much worse.
| mohn wrote:
| Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970
| and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also
| reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I
| didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into
| a book.
|
| [0] https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/01/Free...
|
| [1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy._
|
| See perhaps Le Guin's novel:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
| thaneross wrote:
| This tends to come up every time flat structures are
| discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination
| that anything other than strict hierarchies could work,
| despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some
| people do badly in an environment where you have to have
| convince people rather than use power to get things done.
| However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so
| well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it
| being normal to have an incompetent boss.
| jlokier wrote:
| That's because flat structures are often, or often turn
| into, "flat-in-name-only" structures.
|
| I don't think the Tyranny of Structurelessness is arguing
| in favour of hierarchy, or against other forms of
| organization than hierarchy.
|
| I don't think it's arguing against "flat" or "anarchy"
| style organizations either.
|
| In essence, I think it's asking us to do whatever we're
| doing better, more honestly, more effectively, and less
| stressfully. By acknowledging, clarifying, communicating,
| and seeking to understand the real operating structures,
| what's really going on. And then to improve them, using
| that understanding.
|
| An _actually_ flat organization might be good, I don 't
| know. I've never seen one. I've been in some that claimed
| to be flat, and became stressful places to work, for the
| same usual reasons hierarchies can be unpleasant,
| including incompetent bosses (not called bosses). But
| I've also had some pleasant experiences in flat
| organizations, and I prefer it that way, if it's designed
| and run well.
| fer wrote:
| >Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used
| here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of
| the communication structures of these organizations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the
| organization is geared towards maintenance and care work,
| it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good
| example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot
| happen in hierarchical envrionments.
|
| For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship
| a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be
| detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition
| (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only
| create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is
| even more cruel than what should have been.
| lispisok wrote:
| My experience with flat structure is the most stubborn
| opinionated people end up making all the decisions because
| they dont budge and get to escape all responsibility for bad
| calls. Better to have a designated lead.
| raskelll wrote:
| I always felt the same every since I learnt about the company.
| Can't think of a more rewarding place to work at.
| arcologies1985 wrote:
| I speculate this is to help them pass the vendor business risk
| assessment process at larger customers.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| I suspect it's because VCs have trouble finding decent places
| to put all their money.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Another happy couple!
| twoodfin wrote:
| Do you need to speculate? The post says exactly this.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Could someone explains to me what the secret is here? Apart from
| the fancy marketing, is it the full integration? The hardware? It
| took me a while to find an actual picture of one of the modules.
| cj wrote:
| Related question: Are services like AWS Outpost from public
| clouds the main competitor for Oxide?
| bri3d wrote:
| I don't know who they see as competitors in market
| positioning (ie, who is selling against them on their target
| buyer's calendar). But the space is called hyperconverged
| computing and there are a few other players like Scale
| Computing building "racks you buy that run your VMs."
| jabart wrote:
| From the podcasts they talk a little about their clients.
| It's people who want something like AWS Outpost but fully
| disconnected and independent from any cloud and running 100%
| local.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| More like Nutanix, Xen, IBM, Kubernetes... private cloud,
| colo, on-premise... etc. There's a ton of stuff (I'd bet the
| majority) of compute workload in business that is local/colo
| and not cloud.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I don't think that is the 'main' competitor. But its
| certaintly 'a' competitor for companies that already have put
| a lot of their eggs into the AWS basket.
| delusional wrote:
| The selling point, from the looks of it, is an on-prem cloud
| where you own the hardware.
|
| For the business guys they're focusing on price and
| sovereignty. Owning your business. For technical people they
| are focusing on quality. Not having to deal with integration
| bugs.
| msh wrote:
| Turn key well designed onprem private cloud.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and:
|
| IIRC, Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an
| Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| For those of us who are unaware of "the value proposition"
| of an "IBM AS/400," could someone spell it out for us?
| dafelst wrote:
| High capacity, super reliable box that you could run your
| entire business stack on, if you could afford it.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The money IBM made with the AS/400 is actually completely
| mind blowing when you compare it to the rest of the
| computing industry at the time.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| When the AS/400 came out circa 1989 or whatever, you
| could replace an entire mainframe with a box not much
| bigger than a mini fridge. The hardware is built for high
| reliability, and the OS and application software stack
| have a lot of integration. If Unix is "everything is a
| file" then AS/400 is "everything is a persistent object
| in a flat 64 bit address space."
|
| The result is a system that can handle years of operation
| with no downtime. The platform got very popular with huge
| retailers for this reason.
|
| Then in later years the platform got the ability to run
| Linux or Windows VMs, so that they could benefit from the
| reliability features.
| bri3d wrote:
| They're players in a newish market segment called
| "hyperconverged," basically "you buy a rack and it runs your
| workload, you don't worry about individual
| systems/interconnect/networking etc because we handled it."
|
| Oxide seem to be the best and most thorough in their space
| because they have chosen to own the stack from the firmware
| upwards. For someone who cares in that dimension they are a
| clear leader already on that basis alone, for other buyers who
| don't, hopefully it also makes their product superior to use as
| well.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Microsoft and Nutanix have had a hyperconverged architecture
| for over a decade. Oxide is mostly an alternative to Nutanix
| or other soup-to-nuts private clouds.
|
| Oxide is a really nice platform. I keep trying to manipulate
| things at work to justify the buy in (I really want to play
| wiht their stuff), but they aren't going for it.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Afaik nutanix doesn't sell a custom rack, running custom
| firmware, preloaded with their software though.
| mindwok wrote:
| The first attempts at hyperconverged were very hardware
| focused and kinda meh. Nutanix is the best example - they
| pioneered hyperconverged hardware but the firmware/software
| was extremely average. Oxide are the first to say "it
| should just feel like cloud, except you own it" and
| building for that.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Oxide hardware is very well put together
| fulafel wrote:
| So a bit like SeaMicro in the 00's but with more software?
| MITSardine wrote:
| I'm a bit puzzled because this seems backwards from what I
| thought had been the evolution of things.
|
| Didn't companies historically own their own compute? And then
| started offloading to so-called cloud providers? I thought
| this was a cost-cutting measure/entry/temporary solution.
|
| Or is this targeting a scale well beyond the typical HPC
| cluster (few dozen to few hundred nodes)? I ask because those
| are found in most engineering companies as far as I know
| (that do serious numerical work) as well as labs or
| universities (that can't afford the engineers and technicians
| companies can).
|
| Also, what is the meaning of calling an on-prem machine
| "cloud" anymore? I thought the whole point of the cloud was
| that the hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and
| you just got resources on demand over the network. Basically
| I don't understand what they're selling if it's not what
| people already call clusters. And then if the machine is
| designed, set up and maintained by a third party, why even go
| through the hassle of hosting it physically, and not rent out
| the compute?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Didn't companies historically own their own compute?
|
| Historically, companies got their compute needs supplied by
| mainframe vendors like IBM and others. The gear might have
| sat on premises in a computer room/data center, but they
| didn't really own it in any real sense.
|
| > Basically I don't understand what they're selling if it's
| not what people already call clusters.
|
| Is it really a cluster when the whole machine is an
| integrated rack and workloads are automatically migrated
| within the rack so that any impending failure doesn't
| disrupt operation? That's a lot closer to a single node.
| bri3d wrote:
| > Didn't companies historically own their own compute?
|
| As group-of-cats racks, usually, which is a totally
| different thing. Way "back in the day" you'd have an IT
| closet with a bunch of individually hand-managed servers
| running your infrastructure, and then if you were selling
| really oldschool software, your customers would all have
| these too, and you'd have some badly made remote access
| solution but a lot of the time your IT Person would call
| the customer's IT Person and they'd hash things out.
|
| Way, way, way back in the day you'd have a leased mainframe
| or minicomputer and any concerns would be handled by the
| support tech.
|
| > I thought the whole point of the cloud was that the
| hardware had been abstracted (and moved) away and you just
| got resources on demand over the network.
|
| This idea does that, but in an appliance box that you own.
|
| > And then if the machine is designed, set up and
| maintained by a third party, why even go through the hassle
| of hosting it physically, and not rent out the compute?
|
| The system is designed by a third party to be trivially set
| up and maintained by the customer, that's where the
| differentiation lies.
|
| In the moderately oldschool way: pallets of computers
| arrive, maybe separate pallets of SAN hosts arrive, pallets
| of switches and routers arrive. You have to unbox, rack,
| wire, and provision them, configure the switches, integrate
| everything. If your system gets big enough you have to
| build an engineering team to deal with all kinds of nasty
| problems - networking, SAN/storage, and so on.
|
| In the other really oldschool way: An opaque box with a
| wizard arrives and sometimes you call the wizard.
|
| In this model: you buy a Fancy Box, but there's no wizard.
| You turn on the Fancy Box and log into the Deploy a
| Container Portal and deploy containers. Ideally, and
| supposedly, you never have to worry about anything else
| unless the Big Status Light turns red and you get a
| notification saying "please replace Disk 11.2 for me." So
| it's a totally different model.
| newsclues wrote:
| Owning instead of renting, for cost and control, without giving
| up the benefits of the cloud.
| bmitch3020 wrote:
| Rack scale computing, on both the software and hardware side.
| That means building custom network switching, power management,
| etc, in a turn key solution that drops in to a customer's data
| center. Unbox it, plugin a few connections, make a few
| configuration settings, and start deploying. It's the on-prem
| response to the cloud for companies running things at scale.
| treis wrote:
| Companies spend an eye watering amount of money on AWS relative
| the underlying hardware cost. There's definitely a market for
| something like a mainframe that runs K8s, Postgres, Redis, and
| the like where you buy once and then run forever.
|
| I don't know if it's true or not but it seems like our AWS bill
| is something like paying the full purchase price of the
| underlying hardware every month.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| AWS supplies a significant portion (was it something like
| 50%?) of Amazon's overall profits.
| shimman wrote:
| Oxide is the only company where I check the careers page hoping
| that they have a position which I can apply to.
|
| Happy to see their success. Especially so if you've been
| following their journey through their podcasts (easily the best
| tech podcast out there if you care about your craft; no filler,
| all killer).
| ilogik wrote:
| +1 for the podcast.
|
| I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4 hours
| overlap with PST which excludes Europe
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4
| hours overlap with PST which excludes Europe
|
| Wouldn't that depend less on where you are and more about
| your sleeping schedule? I generally go to bed around 04:00Z,
| up around 11:30Z sometime, seems that would work regardless
| of location, no?
| AlejandroM_E wrote:
| Unless the position *strictly* requires the overlap (e.g.
| Manufacturing or Program Management), you can apply. The
| required overlap is the expected team commitment you should
| abide to, the logistics are up to you to make it work. If
| that sounds encouraging, please apply!
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I'm happily voluntarily unemployed, but happy to hear my
| reasoning was accurate regardless, cheers and good luck
| :)
| ilogik wrote:
| If I were in college, that would make sense, but I like to
| spend evenings with my family.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| You just need to find the right family it sounds like ;)
| We both have the same sleeping schedule so works out for
| us, and we hang out more than ever. But YMMV.
| dcre wrote:
| It doesn't strictly exclude Europe, we have a few employees
| in Europe. But as the other reply says, they work slightly
| odd hours.
| patkai wrote:
| Same here. As a teenager I dreamt about working for SUN. Oxide
| comes close in a way.
| bflesch wrote:
| Can you name some people who are working there and who you look
| up to? I need some new idols after the old idols all went up in
| MAGA and Epstein files .
| Graziano_M wrote:
| Is Jessie Frazelle still there? She is very impressive.
| robszumski wrote:
| no, but still being super impressive. CEO of a company
| rebuilding a CAD rendering engine because they put an LLM
| on top of it. So you describe the mechanical specs of the
| part you want and it models it. Takes all the tedium out of
| modeling stuff. Super cool and many applications.
| pcl wrote:
| Oh cool! That looks like a super interesting product.
|
| https://zoo.dev
| panick21_ wrote:
| They had to do CAD while working on Oxide and realized
| that it sucked. So she went off to solve that.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| that's taking yak shaving to another level!
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Bryan Cantrill
| dylanowen wrote:
| I've seen Bryan Cantrill present at a few conferences and his
| talks are always the best.
| throw0101a wrote:
| A recent one (2025q4) he gave at Jane Street, "Andreessen's
| Folly - The False Dichotomy of Software and Hardware":
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JjG0Qfwi8
| shimman wrote:
| Well one, don't look up to people you personally don't know.
| Parasocial relationships are not healthy. Look into your
| local community for people to be mentors or help you.
|
| That said I like Bryan Cantrill as an engineer and leader,
| but I would never put him on a pedestal.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| On the other hand, it's normal to have heroes, and to need
| to have them.
| Eldt wrote:
| Heroes like Spiderman and Batman? Or strangers that put
| on a mask, and whose public image is maintained by PR
| firms?
| kortilla wrote:
| Not really, that's what leads to parasocial
| relationships.
|
| Nobody is flawless and part of becoming an adult is
| learning to admire specific qualities rather than obsess
| over individuals.
| shimman wrote:
| This is a child mindset, people don't need heroes. They
| need leaders that care about them and want to better
| their communities; these leaders are found within your
| literal neighbors, friends, and family.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Tip that will work forever, even when the ones you replace
| your old idols with get replaced: Don't have any idols.
|
| Listen to the words, don't follow "personalities", don't
| listen to specific individuals just because of their status.
| Not a single time have I been disappointed by an idol,
| because I've made the conscious choice of not having
| following any. Bunch of smart people say smart stuff all the
| time, until they don't. I read everything as if I don't know
| the author, I think more people should do this and less
| celebrity worship would make the entire ecosystem better. We
| need less of it, not more.
| surajrmal wrote:
| It's best to avoid idolizing folks. It can give you a skewed
| set of expectations and lead you to resent them when
| inevitably they cannot live up those those expectations
| (which is unfair to them), and possibly lower your own self
| esteem if you cannot meet those same standards yourself.
| jjice wrote:
| Oxide and Friends is the only computing podcast I listen to
| anymore. It's a bunch of fun and they have insights I actually
| value.
|
| The original On The Metal podcast they did is incredible too.
| The interviews they had with computing legends are just
| fantastic.
| newsclues wrote:
| I love the new podcast but miss on the metal so much. It
| should be quarterly at least
| muvlon wrote:
| I used to enjoy it much more before it became just another
| podcast extoiling the virtues of AI-assisted coding. I have
| too many of those already.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I appreciate their treatment of the current AI boom cycle.
| Just last night they had Evan Ratliff on from the Shell
| Game podcast[1], and it was a great episode. They're not
| breathlessly hyping AI and trying to make a quick buck off
| it, instead it seems they're taking an honest, rigorous
| look at it (which is sadly pretty rare) and talking about
| the successes as well as the failures. Personally I don't
| always agree with their takes, I'm more firmly in Ed
| Zitron's camp that this is all a massive financial scam,
| isn't really good for much, and will do a lot more harm
| than good in the long run. They're less negatively biased
| than that, which is fine.
|
| [1] https://www.shellgame.co/
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Has the audio quality / recording method for _Oxide and
| Friends_ gotten better?
|
| I have this horrible "completionist" tendency and I got stuck
| on a 2021 episode where the audio needed post-processing and
| I just never got around to it.
|
| I loved _On the Metal_ and it was a bummer to fall behind on
| the new show.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's absolutely no shame in "falling behind" on a
| podcast when even the audio itself is subpar, your time and
| attention is way more valuable than that. If the hosts have
| problems with that, they can provide sensible extra aids
| such as high-quality transcripts, to help viewers catch up
| on what they've missed without placing undue demands on
| their time.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I already know it is out of my league, however the podcast is
| great to listen to.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I actually did apply, The mere application takes hours upon
| hours, and for what a generic rejection email.
|
| This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an
| interview with another startup company, and after six
| interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the
| same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me
| he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little
| bit to stay employed.
|
| Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call,
| somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental
| amount of time.
|
| Things are looking up though, I'm starting a job soon and the
| entire interview process was more or less a 30 minute phone
| call with the technical manager. That's it, two days later or
| so I had a verbal offer. I don't need to change the world, I
| need to pay my rent.
| grim_io wrote:
| You're not changing the world either way, you would just be
| working for a more demanding guy. Fuck em.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This is my favorite response in the thread. We aren't
| talking about getting a job at doctors across borders or
| something, we just want to manipulate bits of silicon to
| increase our networth.
| WD-42 wrote:
| When you say "we aren't" I hope you realize you aren't
| speaking for everyone. Even doctors across borders
| probably needs an IT person. There are jobs available for
| less pay that are fulfilling in other ways. I know I have
| taken them and am better off for it.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure VC backed companies are by and large
| doing it to increase the networth of the founders, and
| hopefully investors.
|
| I don't lie to myself, I know why I do this.
| gedy wrote:
| > Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call,
| somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental
| amount of time.
|
| Honestly these "reasons" they give are usually BS excuses
| when it basically amounts to they don't like your personality
| or looks.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package
| was at any point during the process.
|
| It's a contractor life for me, I work for money, not
| "purpose" or anything else.
|
| Hell my Facebook (technically a fully owned subsidiary to
| be fair) interview loop was easier. I didn't get the job
| that time either, but at least it was straight up.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Did I mention no one told me what the compensation
| package was at any point during the process.
|
| In previous HN threads they said something to the effect
| that they expect their applicants to have read what's
| online about their equal base salary. Equity is not
| equally applied though.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm not talking about Oxide here, this was a different
| company.
| ghaff wrote:
| Eh. I've been on a bunch of hiring committees. It hasn't
| been personality or looks. But a combination of things that
| we probably didn't all agree on and that may not have been
| able to fully articulate in a short message.
| sevensor wrote:
| A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never
| heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the
| materials was great. I don't usually take the time to think
| about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for
| yourself if you do it at all; don't go into it with high
| expectations for feedback and you won't be disappointed.
| mlacks wrote:
| I just reached out to them after the 4 to six weeks had
| passed. got my decision a few days later
| sevensor wrote:
| Yeah. I tried that at the eight week mark, but I heard
| nothing back. Obviously not a process-heavy company, but
| that's part of their appeal.
| pfraze wrote:
| If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were
| seriously considering you but ultimately they didn't get to a
| yes. If it's any comfort that means you did pretty well.
|
| The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason
| you didn't get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know
| that it's seen as a pretty bad signal. The general
| expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple
| short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a
| candidate doesn't commit to their jobs, or that they don't do
| well at their jobs and are getting let go.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Okay, but if my resume is a concern let's talk about in the
| first interview. I can't exactly rest and vest for 2 years
| when the company is running out of money. I had the bad
| luck of this happening 3 times in a row.
|
| Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company
| B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half,
| switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C
| merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most
| of us.
|
| I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3
| years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back
| then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you
| land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to
| do quality work, you really should just stay there instead
| of chasing slightly more money.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| After my dates of employment I will parethetically add
| (bankrupt) or (shutdown) to indicate that it wasn't
| related to me personally. My best job was 18 months.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short
| stints on my resume while I was interviewing for
| DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't
| dedicated or trustworthy.
|
| He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months
| into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous
| layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives
| doing the layoffs got removed by the board.
|
| So I left and got to add another short stint at a company
| run by craven morons to my resume :)
| warunsl wrote:
| > If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they
| were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn't
| get to a yes.
|
| Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would
| have specifics around the interview and where the candidate
| did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If
| job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's
| time putting them through full rounds of interviews?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > ... specifics around the interview and where the
| candidate did not perform well ...
|
| Takes time away from the day job and other candidates.
| HalcyonicStorm wrote:
| It could also be that they might be sued for stating the
| real reason so they went with something that would be
| dismissed if it went to court.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| This is the reason. If they make any statement you could
| contest it in court, so they don't make any statement
| swyx wrote:
| if you were an experienced/mature tech employee you
| should probably know that there are real HR reasons why
| companies are strongly advised not to give too much
| information in a rejection email. there is only ever
| downside. your reaction here is a potential red flag.
|
| i'm sympathetic to you, it sucks, why cant we all be nice
| to each other, and my answer to that all is lawyers.
| woooooo wrote:
| If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably
| based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step
| after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may
| have spent 15 minutes on it.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It was actually a round with the CEO.
|
| I don't feel disrespected or anything, just feels weird
| to spend that much time interviewing someone.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Reminds me of the 6 interview gauntlet I dealt with when
| interviewing with Hashicorp[1] years ago.
|
| ---
|
| [1]: <https://blog.webb.page/WM-025>
| lispisok wrote:
| Excessive amounts of interviews is more likely they were
| not enthusiastic about him but didnt have anybody else
| better and were stringing him along until they found
| somebody else.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time.
| Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's
| still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable
| to the company.
| pengaru wrote:
| Don't underestimate the importance of timing, for both the
| company you're applying at and the industry/economy as a
| whole.
|
| As they say, you can't get blood from a turnip.
|
| Writing this comment reminded me of a personal experience,
| story time:
|
| Many moons ago I interviewed at a mature startup in silicon
| valley, they shipped a tiered storage appliance and were in
| the process of pivoting to a new storage medium (think
| transitioning from spinning rust to SSDs, something like
| that).
|
| This was in-person, and everything went swimmingly well,
| before departing they stated an intention to make an offer
| and I should expect an email w/offer attached within a week.
| I got an offer letter, and accepted immediately, as I was
| super excited about the stack I'd be playing with.
|
| A week before the start date I get a call from a founder,
| they said I couldn't start because their funding round didn't
| come through. The economy was going through some sort of
| financial crisis and it was one of the many blood baths where
| silicon valley startups shuttered by the hundreds overnight.
| So in essence, this was a job I got fired from before I could
| even start, wee!
|
| What followed was a pretty frustrating few months of
| interviewing and not getting anywhere.
|
| But there is a silver lining to this story, that founder who
| called me sat on the board of other storage startups. One of
| them managed to get some water in this funding desert, and
| its founders reached out to me at his recommendation. I ended
| up building some great stuff over 4-5 years at that company.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Usually the stated reason is not actually the real reason.
| They just state something generic that isn't illegal to
| admit.
|
| The real reason might be "they didn't like your vibes" or
| something like that
| loeg wrote:
| Vibes aren't a protected category.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| They aren't explicitly, but, if you ever find yourself in
| a position where you're part of the hiring decision, it's
| best to categorize vibes as protected for anything
| written or otherwise recorded.
|
| SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be
| protected because they are "proxies" for protected
| categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip
| codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because
| it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular
| races.
|
| For some people, the 'wrong vibes' are often proxies for
| cultural things - all kinds of body language contribute
| to vibes and it's easy to accidentally (or on purpose...)
| discriminate against a whole categories based on vibes.
| If you tell a candidate "Hey we just didn't like your
| vibes as much as this other guy", it could affect your
| exposure to claims that you discriminated against them
| based on their race.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Department_of_Hous
| ing_an....
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Do "vibes" really matter all that much when you're going
| to be working 100% remotely? Maybe we should be moving to
| fully blind auditions for such jobs, where the interview
| might still be proctored in some way to prevent outright
| cheating, but the people who make the hiring decision
| aren't even put in a position where they might "vibe"
| with the candidate.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I mean, yes. You're still working with them even if it's
| behind a computer screen.
| skissane wrote:
| > SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be
| protected because they are "proxies" for protected
| categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip
| codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because
| it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular
| races.
|
| I realise it may be somewhat beside your point, but that
| was a Kennedy+liberals vs conservatives ruling in 2015 -
| so the current SCOTUS would likely have ruled the other
| way, and decent odds they overrule it sooner or later.
| Scalia's dissent was objecting to the entire idea of
| disparate impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act, so
| more likely that gets overruled than this specific
| application of that idea.
|
| This was a statutory interpretation case though, so if
| SCOTUS overturns the decision, Congress could reverse
| that with ordinary legislation, no constitutional
| amendment required. But who knows whether that will turn
| out to be politically feasible.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Department_of_Housing
| _an...
|
| (Also, you need to change the last period in the URL to
| %2E to stop HN from mangling it.)
| heurist wrote:
| Hiring is incredibly complicated when done well. If
| 'limited fuzzy Boolean windows' over 'complex interpersonal
| dynamics' is vibes, then we will need to accept vibes.
| robinhood wrote:
| So basically you wanted to have it easy - joining a company
| with a certain prestige and be over the recruitment process
| in 30 minutes or less.
| moregrist wrote:
| I really tried to like the podcast. It's been a few years, so
| maybe it's improved.
|
| The topics were good. The guests were great.
|
| But Bryan Cantrill was just terrible at letting his guests
| actually talk.
|
| Bryan, if you're listening, please let your guests talk. We
| have a large amount of content on YouTube if we want to hear
| the Bryan Cantrill take on, well, anything and everything. And
| it's often amusing and sometimes right.
|
| People don't tune in to a podcast with guests to hear the host
| pontificate. They tune in to hear the guest, and sometimes the
| guest/host dynamic. When the host talks over the guest, you
| don't get either.
|
| After the Jonathon Blow episode, I gave up. Dude had
| interesting things to say about C, C++, and Rust, but most of
| what we got was Bryan talking about Rust. I guarantee anyone
| tuning into the Oxide podcast knows Bryan Cantrill's opinions
| about Rust. And firmware. And Oracle. And Linux. Etc. etc.
|
| Let your guests talk.
| tverbeure wrote:
| And lawnmowers.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Well, a couple of things. First, the Jonathan Blow episode[0]
| was over six years ago. Second, it was nearly a three hour
| conversation -- I don't think I can be accused of not letting
| him talk? Third, I definitely remember that I felt I _had_ to
| interrupt him to move the conversation along. Fourth, I had
| to pee really badly, I was absolutely freezing, and I was
| quite concerned about missing my flight to New Zealand that
| evening with my family for Christmas (which I damned near
| did) -- and I have no doubt that I was not at my best!
|
| I do try to get better at this stuff, and I re-listen to our
| episodes to improve as an interviewer. If it's been "a few
| years", maybe you haven't listen too much to Oxide and
| Friends? I think we've had some wonderful guests and great
| conversations over the span of the podcast -- though I also
| have no doubt that it's imperfect, for which you have my
| profound apologies!
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY
| moregrist wrote:
| I appreciate the reply and that it's been a while; I will
| give your podcast another listen.
|
| It wasn't just the Jonathon Blow episode; that was just the
| point where I said "this is frustrating." For what it's
| worth, frustration came from knowing that this could be
| really good: your perspective is valuable, your topics were
| interesting, and your guests were excellent.
|
| I find this a common mistake that people with strong
| opinions have when doing interview/guest style podcasts or
| shows. There's really an art to it; it's not easy to engage
| guests, keep the show interesting, and let the talk move in
| interesting ways. That's why Terry Gross and Howard Stern,
| in very different ways, have had such long and storied
| careers.
|
| But it's something that people definitely get better at,
| and I have no doubt that you have. Again, I'll give it
| another listen.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Is this only based on _On the Metal_? (If so, those are
| all from six years ago -- even the ones that were
| released a mere five years ago.) Please do check out
| _Oxide and Friends_ [0] -- and feedback always welcome!
|
| [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
| panick21_ wrote:
| I disagree. I found the 'On the Metal' to be great balance
| between the guest and the hosts. And Oxide and Friends I
| would expect Oxide to be big part of it.
|
| And Jonathon Blow manages to talk enough ...
| agentultra wrote:
| I applied last year. But they had too many candidates apply to
| consider my application.
|
| This is good news for them. I expect there will be more
| competition for positions there should any open up.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Working for them would be cool, but just getting to work with
| their gear would be great. I am so tired of commodity Dell x86
| servers (and garbage drivers, management hardware, etc) and
| support technicians who have no resources to actually support
| the hardware (beyond telling me to update the firmware and
| pray).
| pronaosk wrote:
| As an AWS heavy user, spinning up an oxide VM really does
| feel so slick.
| kjuulh wrote:
| Looking forward to the podcast! Congrats. Had to do a double
| take, wasn't it around summer last year they closed 100 mil. Wild
| bflesch wrote:
| Their website is so nice and smooth even on my shitty computer,
| not like the other announcement pages of major companies that
| only work on state of the art macbooks.
| greatgib wrote:
| The website looks good but it is very hard to know what they do
| exactly and what they sell, if you can be their customer or not
| just browsing the website. If you don't know them before.
|
| Like do they sell a service or a product. Do they sell
| hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.
| db48x wrote:
| I think https://oxide.computer/product/specifications makes
| it pretty clear: Compute Sleds (Total)
| 16, 24, or 32 CPU Cores 1024-2048
| Memory (DRAM) 8-32 TiB Storage
| 465.75-931.5 TiB Network Switches
| 2 Switching Capacity 12.8 Tbit/s
| Power Shelves Up to 2 Power
| Supplies per Shelf 6 (5+1 or 3+3) Typical / Max
| Power Draw 12 / 15 kW Dimensions H x W x
| D 2354mm (92.7") x 600mm (23.7") x 1060mm (41.8")
| Weight Up to ~2,518 lbs (~1,145 kg)
| Max Thermal Output 61,416 BTU/hr Airflow
| Requirements 145.8 x kVA CFM
|
| If you need a rack full of computers that are managed
| programmatically via an API then this is the machine for you.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Unfortunately you have to read further down in the specs to
| see the actual hardware details. They're on older
| generation hardware, so going by cores and RAM alone isn't
| enough to tell you about the speed of those cores and the
| DDR4 RAM.
|
| Hopefully raising money helps them iterate faster on their
| hardware so they're not so far behind.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| DDR4 is the right choice in this day and age, if they had
| gone with DDR5 it would have doubled the cost for the
| whole rack.
|
| Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based
| option.
| Aurornis wrote:
| DDR4 is not being manufactured at scale any more so it's
| becoming very expensive too.
|
| > if they had gone with DDR5 it would have doubled
|
| They charge a premium for their hardware due to the
| software. They have plenty of room for RAM price
| fluctuations. It would nowhere near double the price.
|
| > Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based
| option.
|
| I know you're joking, but anything DDR3 based is really
| slow and power inefficient relative to current gen
| hardware.
| panick21_ wrote:
| They are already selling the next generation, its just
| not public. I assume they are focusing on existing
| costumer and larger orders. While for now in public they
| still sell the older version. That is at least my guess.
| db48x wrote:
| Not really super relevant given that the question was "Do
| they sell hardware, software or something else? it is
| very confusing."
| sudomateo wrote:
| We're working on making this easier to understand. Stay
| tuned! We know the last decade or so of using public cloud
| providers has made people forget that hardware and software
| are things you can own and run successfully. Oxide is exactly
| that. Hardware and software designed together to give you the
| public cloud experience on-premises.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Oxide.
| akshitgaur2005 wrote:
| I'm the undergrad who commented earlier. I've been poking
| around the Hubris source code and it's exactly the kind of
| stack I want to work on. I'm actually doing the Redox
| Summer of Code this year, focused on implementing an EEVDF
| scheduler and a performance testing harness for the kernel.
|
| From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can
| actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of
| hardware/software co-design so high that you really just
| need a few decades of experience to be effective? I'd love
| a reality check on whether I should keep Oxide as a long-
| term 10-year goal or if there's a path for people starting
| out.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't
| that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server,
| but is there anything special about it apart from that?
| drakenot wrote:
| I think its the end-to-end, integrated nature of it.
|
| API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than
| bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-
| like" stack in your own datacenter.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Yep, it's basically slick hyperconverged infrastructure that
| you can buy a rack at a time without a subscription license.
| kijin wrote:
| Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if you
| go without a subscription license?
|
| If the answer is no, then you might own the hardware on
| paper, but you don't control any of the software that makes
| said hardware useful.
|
| If the answer is yes, on the other hand, then one must ask
| who is paying for those updates, because that can't be
| sustainable.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The software is open source and developed in the open.
| You can pay for support, but there's no software
| licensing cost.
| bananapub wrote:
| > Do you get updates to the proprietary software stack if
| you go without a subscription license?
|
| what proprietary software stack? they just publish it all
| on https://github.com/oxidecomputer/ .
| ahl wrote:
| So while most of the software is open source rather than
| proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers
| pay for support (as they do with most enterprise
| products). One could theoretically use the product
| without first-party software updates, managing the open
| source oneself... but that would have practical
| impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one
| simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product).
|
| Two points about your last point. First, software
| improvements benefit all customers; as the business
| grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also,
| most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will
| replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The
| sustainability of investments into the software (and the
| product generally) is on solid ground.
| nradov wrote:
| Nothing particularly special. Their proprietary technology
| gives you some minor improvements in performance, reliability,
| and power efficiency relative to what you could assemble into a
| rack yourself. But more importantly for large enterprise
| customers they give you a single throat to choke: if something
| doesn't work then you can call them up to fix it with some
| assurance that it will get handled quickly. They won't point
| fingers at another vendor.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining
| the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the
| hard problems that oxide is solving
|
| https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...
| mrweasel wrote:
| While I haven't looking into it all that deeply, I'd say it's a
| replacement for vSphere and cobbled together hardware and
| networking, all with a centralized management interface/API.
|
| Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide
| the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers,
| who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a
| minute or so, especially if you also want a new private
| network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
|
| Having a single provider for your entire stack, software,
| hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with
| vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract
| for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to
| provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern
| developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual
| machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new
| private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
|
| If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in
| Proxmox.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Proxmox isn't quite there yet for scalibility and
| hyperconverged but it is getting there really fast. It's
| more of a competitor to Microsoft HyperV HCI.
| kevinrineer wrote:
| Agreed. Its more reminiscent of Cloudstack or Openstack
| from what I gather. I'm thinking of Jetstream2, but for
| you buy it rather than rent some of it with an NSF
| budget.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Proxmox is nice and getting there but what you simply
| can't replicate is the lower level firmware and managing
| layer. Proxmox on commodity hardware will always be
| limited by that. Same goes for deep integration with the
| switch that Oxide can do.
| maeln wrote:
| It's more than a server, it's the whole rack with networking
| and all that, integrated and with unified management.
|
| There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are
| obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting
| up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment
| for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle.
| And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API
| manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's
| another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system
| on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of
| different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for
| those company.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't
| netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or
| the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the
| server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to
| 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when
| it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans
| happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician
| tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you
| get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your
| version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension
| your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand
| why Oxide is a good deal.
|
| If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not
| going to get it.
| bubblethink wrote:
| All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc.
| as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with
| growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to
| the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are
| not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much
| of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-
| prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is
| a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier
| version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this
| is the Dropbox comment.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I think you might be underestimating how big the "old(er)
| school workloads" market is. And, at least from Oxide's
| point of view, it isn't shrinking but instead growing. A
| certain segment of tech has been enamored with the public
| cloud for the last ~15yr but personally over my career
| spanning that time I've seen some real drawbacks.
| "Spaghetti infrastructure" is a real, bad problem. Cloud
| pricing models heavily penalize some totally legitimate
| workloads. Keeping costs down while scaling up is really,
| really hard. If you own a fixed amount of hardware and
| buying more of it is expensive, you tend to use it more
| intelligently. Or maybe the one on-prem company I've worked
| at was just exceptionally good at computers?
| unnah wrote:
| There are plenty of old-school companies in Europe still
| working on moving to the cloud. Now that there is a
| burgeoning movement towards avoiding American cloud
| providers, Oxide could have an opportunity to sell "private
| cloud" servers instead. If they play their cards right,
| they could make significant inroads in European markets.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I worked at Red Hat a few years ago... early 2020s. For our
| customers, something like 80% of our RHEL customers were
| still on-prem.
|
| Yes, cloud is huge, etc. But there's a very big iceberg of
| on-prem.
| wmf wrote:
| Because cloud customers don't pay for Linux and they use
| Ubuntu.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there
| isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here
|
| Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM
| people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing
| everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a
| lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive
| issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not
| also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is
| delivering.
|
| If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all
| the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack
| (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting.
|
| Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of
| IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know
| the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger
| then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking
| because the bad economics of cloud are becoming
| increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends
| such as making computing more local, not letting US
| companies control everything.
|
| > You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro.
|
| Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20
| billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure
| Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with
| his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital
| Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended
| up being such a loser.
|
| I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming
| for that is somehow not worth doing.
| bubblethink wrote:
| >Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20
| billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess.
|
| For a startup, if the thesis is to take market share away
| from those two, it's actually not such a good story. You
| need a product that is 10x better than the competition,
| and I'm not convinced that the enhancements to firmware,
| reliability etc. amount to a 10x jump in business value
| prop. You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately
| a purveyor of other people's IP.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The claim that you need a 10x better product to win any
| market share is simply incorrect, both logically and
| historically.
|
| Maybe if people that bought Dell had a deep love for Dell
| products and were deeply integrated unable to move, but
| even then 10x is a waste exaggeration.
|
| But if you have any serious academic literature that
| underlies this 10x claim I'm happy to take a look.
|
| > You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a
| purveyor of other people's IP.
|
| And neither does Dell and they are worth 80 billion $.
| And AMD doesn't make semiconductors, so they relay on
| other people IP. And TSMC doesn't make their lithographic
| machines or many other things, relaying on other people's
| IP. And all those materials relay on other people IP to
| be brought to market in the first place.
|
| This is just a silly argument that for some reason puts
| CPU design companies as 'the real deal' and everybody
| else is somehow not good enough.
|
| Historically good systems companies make just as good
| margin as most CPU design companies, specially those that
| don't have near monopolies.
|
| > it's actually not such a good story
|
| They are making inroads in a market that is 100s of
| billion $ large and people invested 300M$+ in them
| because they see costumer demand. If that's not good
| enough for you then I don't know what to tell you. I wish
| any of the starups I have worked at that kind of
| opportunity.
|
| It seems to me you operate in a sense where anybody that
| doesn't go for a monopoly in a 5 trillion $ market is
| somehow not 'worthy' of being a startup. That just a very
| strange perspective on reality.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| You're not wrong. This is old school enterprise dressed up
| as a start up.
|
| Brian is trying to recreate Sun and using investor money to
| do so.
|
| Good luck to them but I can't see it ending well.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| ... Ancient jvm running under wine with webstart just to get
| to the remote console? ;) I do not miss those days.
| kevinrineer wrote:
| You mean you don't have that issue anymore? I'm jealous.
| SSLy wrote:
| at least relatively - gen9s, almost 10 years old by now -
| modern HPE iLOs have HTML5 remote console. dell too I
| think.
| SSLy wrote:
| webstart at least works if non-plugin. Flash not so much --
| looking at vcflex.
| kristjansson wrote:
| A stack of 38x 1U and a switch does not a cloud make.
|
| Slightly less pithy: they're selling rack-scale systems, with
| power, hardware, network, and control plane software all
| integrated. Something that presents to the user as something
| more like API to interact with than a pile of servers to be
| managed.
| sylvinus wrote:
| Love Oxide and what they're building, but I'm not sure raising
| even more VC money is the way to build a generational company.
| Quite the opposite? With money you don't need, you're trading
| faster growth for more dependencies on third parties that will
| seek a ROI eventually?
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| There is a gold-rush going on. It needs plenty of compute
| besides GPU's, this is definitely the time to scale as quickly
| as possible.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I don't think any Oxide racks come with GPU's at present, and
| the power density of modern GPU-centric AI compute is on a
| rather unprecedented level. Oxide racks are very well cooled
| but are no match for the racks in an AI datacenter that's
| literally burning a full gigawatt of power.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Yeah, they're not going to go up against the nVidia NVL72,
| NVL144 or AMDs UAL systems
|
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gb200-nvl72/
| https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2025/amd-delivering-open-
| rack-s...
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| > needs plenty of compute _besides_ GPU 's
|
| Databases, K/V stores, crawlers, services, etc all still
| necessary _besides_ GPU 's. The closer to GPU's the better
| and if you have GPU's in your own DC.
| neom wrote:
| Not necessarily. Supply chains and vendor management into scale
| is very difficult and very very expensive, I think we prob
| spend north of $200MM to get to $150MM ARR, but the economics
| started to shake out thereafter based on CAGR. To do this
| without owning 0% of the company while still recognizing
| needing a lot of cash in the system to keep everything
| lubricated, (for example Michael Dell might be fine personally
| extending a $500MM line of credit to the business, if the
| business has $50MM in venture funds on some predictable growth
| rate) - basically you use true risk capital via the smallest
| amount of equity you can give to de-risk downstream capital
| requirements. I don't know anything about how Oxide is growing
| their business so this could be total nonsense in their case,
| but it's how we built a generational business (digitalocean)!
| Aurornis wrote:
| Hardware businesses are capital intensive. They need the money.
|
| They also need to grow and iterate faster. Their software stack
| is great, but their hardware is quite dated in a fast moving
| industry. This limits them to domains that value their software
| and security but don't need the latest hardware for performance
| and aren't necessarily concerned with performance per dollar,
| which is a small market.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| They state:
|
| > ...it's not uncommon for us to be asked directly: "How do I
| know you won't be bought?"
|
| Raising ~infinite runway from investors who are already known
| quantities signals that you can safely buy into their product
| knowing they're not getting snapped up by $megacorp anytime
| soon. That's where the faster growth comes from--customers who
| feel secure in the knowledge that the company isn't going
| anywhere.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| If they didn't buy all the RAM they needed for their near
| future before the prices spiked, they probably need most of the
| $200M just for that.
| unholiness wrote:
| Not sure this is necessarily for faster growth. Riding out the
| AI bubble's rise and/or its bursting will each present a lot of
| need for capital and a lot of barriers to raising it. They're
| not an AI company but they obviously have tons of exposure
| across the stack to these markets. They may simply be making
| the call that this is a better time to be raising money than
| the years to come.
| shrubble wrote:
| As companies grow, their capital needs actually increase, even
| if they are profitable.
|
| We can hope that this is the case for Oxide, though I don't
| expect they are reliably profitable yet.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I wonder how Oxide's basic value proposition changes with the
| very recent growth in rack-scale and multi-rack (datacenter-wide)
| compute for AI. Surely these other vendors have tech
| (particularly around network interconnect) that can be repurposed
| effectively for the more general private cloud workloads Oxide is
| focusing on.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Conversely, has Oxide discussed in depth how they see GPU
| compute?
|
| I'm guessing for their current target market of existing
| enterprise software it doesn't matter, but the ownership and
| economics stories are at least as compelling for matmul code.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I'm confused and saddened on why Oxide has to keep raising money
| (in substitute for growth) and keep entrenching their business
| with VCs and letting them control business and ownership.
|
| > "So if we didn't need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we
| weren't seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the
| business take off, were eager to support it."
|
| From this of course the VCs will back and support Oxide (they are
| mentally thinking that Oxide will move into supplying hardware
| for AI datacenters) eventually want their money back at many many
| multiples and the pressure is there to achieve this.
|
| Can you even invest in Oxide?
|
| I just wish Oxide wouldn't have to keep getting owned by VCs
| which would inevitably lead to enshittification to pay back the
| VCs.
|
| If Oxide followed the model of Valve (100% founder and employee
| ownership, profitable, vast unlikelihood of enshittification or
| pressure to get acquired or IPO) then it would be a different
| situation.
| Aurornis wrote:
| There's nothing confusing about it. Hardware businesses require
| a lot of capital to build the hardware.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I don't see Hetzner getting into bed with VCs and raising
| $100M or $200M?
|
| How long until Oxide needs $2BN, $4BN or $8BN from VCs,
| further getting owned by them?
| neom wrote:
| K, well I was on the first/founding team of digitalocean
| and owned strategy there from zero to just before IPO, we
| took a bunch of venture, heck if you'd seen our covenants
| in our lease lines, they made our venture debt look like
| kittens, yet we IPO'd, and I don't think very many in the
| digitalocean story are particularly unhappy? VCs do not try
| to "own companies" they try to _exit_ businesses at a gain.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > VCs do not try to "own companies" they try to exit
| businesses at a gain.
|
| They do both as they need many multiples to return the
| fund.
|
| And it also sounds very predatory to me and not aligning
| with any startup's mission other than for the VCs to
| pressure Oxide to get acquired for over $20BN+ or go to
| the public markets.
|
| Not even Hetzner did this. DigitalOcean could have
| followed Hetzner, but I guess VC money is very attractive
| and now DigitalOcean is now the slave of Wall St.
|
| Going into deals with VCs and IPO'ing to Wall St.
| _always_ leads to enshittification.
| dcre wrote:
| Valve is primarily a software company with zero marginal cost
| to a game sale.
| neom wrote:
| How could a massively capex business like Oxide scale in the
| same manner that Valve did based on the current market movement
| of the industry that Oxide is addressing? I personally cannot
| see how that is _at all_ possible. The cash required to back
| downstream capital in a business like this as it scales without
| it falling flat is surly well in excess of $6 /700MM, if they
| manage to get by with with only selling 300/400 million of
| equity, that will be a great outcome for the founders.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Unfortunately since they already took VC money they have to
| keep doing it and each time they do it they do it the VCs
| would own more and more and would control the business.
|
| I predict in less than 10 years Oxide exits by way of being
| acquired or an IPO. The enshittification would have already
| begun by then.
|
| > You seem very sure of yourself in how business works! I'm
| curious now, how did you create your $100MM++ revenue
| hardware business? I'd love to learn from you. [deleted]
|
| You don't need to create a $100MM++ revenue hardware business
| to know how this ends when you get into bed too many times
| with VCs.
|
| We already know it is a huge capex spend (which is why they
| keep going to VCs) the question is, how many times does Oxide
| need to go back to VCs to keep raising (even though they said
| they didn't need to raise?)
|
| I hope they become immensely profitable enough to buy out the
| VCs stakes and get control back and become independent.
|
| But I am doubtful that Oxide will do that if they keep
| raising and they will just be sold down the river in less
| than 10 years.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| I am confused. How do you own a cloud you pay for as a service.
| liamkinne wrote:
| You buy the physical rack and install it in your data centre.
| It is your property.
| toast0 wrote:
| I don't know how it works for Oxide, but this isn't a new
| concept, IBM has been doing it since the 1950s. Own the
| mainframe, pay for the required service contract.
| kev507 wrote:
| importantly, you don't pay for it as a service, you buy it and
| it's yours. like buying a cloud in a box, instead of having to
| build it yourself with various server, storage, networking, and
| software vendors it all comes ready to use.
| kevinrineer wrote:
| And, interestingly for Oxide, rack scale solutions from HW
| vendors might not be suited for your company's workload.
| Their solution isn't all-in on AI, from what I understand.
| sudomateo wrote:
| What led you to believe that this is a SaaS offering? It's not.
| choiway wrote:
| How much money do you have to raise to buy a decent mic?
| KenoFischer wrote:
| Congratulations to the Oxide team! It's a tough market out there
| :)! I'm still personally frustrated that I don't get to play with
| the hardware (too expensive for our internal server needs; not
| the right fit for our datacenter partners/customers), but I'm
| excited to see that they're successful and hopefully they'll come
| around to my use case eventually :). In the meantime, I
| appreciate that they're building largely in the open - every once
| in a while I'll glance at their issue tracker for light bedtime
| reading. Just recently we had some fun internally throwing our
| controls software at their thermal loop as a usage example - it's
| often hard to find compelling real-world systems to use as openly
| sharable examples (of course we have interesting customer
| problems, but that's all NDA'd), so having companies build real
| stuff in the open is fantastic. Great company, wish them the
| best.
| cmdrk wrote:
| > too expensive for our internal server needs; not the right
| fit for our datacenter partners/customers
|
| You and me both. They're doing neat stuff, but I wonder how
| many other potential customers feel that way too.
|
| What is Oxide's market? It feels a bit like advanced alien
| technology that is ultimately a little too weird and expensive
| for most enterprises to adopt.
| yla92 wrote:
| Has anyone purchased/enquired about an Oxide rack or currently
| running one ? any info on pricing ?
| dagi3d wrote:
| I just talk about some comments I read some time ago, so take
| this with a grain of salt. It was my understanding that if you
| were spending about $300k-$500k a year in cloud services, it
| would make sense this type of solution, so the expected price
| would be something between $500k-$1M depending on the
| configuration
| Aurornis wrote:
| Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted
| it's in the $500K to $1mm range.
|
| Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point,
| however. I wonder if they're starting to reduce the price
| because it's hard to justify paying so much for old hardware.
| They could just be targeting customers who don't care as much
| about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the course
| for any server hardware that's put in production, this is not
| a gaming PC build. Hopefully they're working on bringing
| their hardware up to date, since efficiency is a key
| consideration for the class of workloads they're aiming at.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Being a few generations behind is kinda par for the
| course for any server hardware that's put in production
|
| No it's not. Normally if you're buying server hardware you
| don't start with a CPU that's already 5 years old and last-
| generation RAM that isn't even manufactured at scale any
| more.
|
| CPUs have advanced a lot in recent years. The jump from Zen
| 3 to Zen 5 is very substantial.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Prices are high. You're not buying Oxide to save money.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Amazing, and all employees literally have equal equity, just like
| they did for salaries! Bravo.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Not equity, last I heard
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and all employees literally have equal equity
|
| In previous HN threads they said that equity was not equal for
| all employees.
| bix6 wrote:
| Anyone have insight into revenue or valuation? Implied $1B Val
| but revenue guesstimates I see put them at sub $50M?
| dagi3d wrote:
| If I had millions in my bank, instead of buying fancy cars, I
| would definitely buy an Oxide rack just for the lols
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Same, I've wanted one of these things for years.
| drewbailey wrote:
| Congratulations to the team. Oxide & Friends, Bryan, Adam & Team
| are such a valuable resource to our community. Their podcast is
| amazing, the problems they encounter, and their willingness to
| share with the rest of us is not taken for granted!
| spamizbad wrote:
| I'll say: You made the right call striking while the iron is hot.
| My employer did one of those "Didn't need to but did it anyway"
| rounds and it was critical for a successful exit that came years
| later.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Wow, amazing. That some serious money. Everybody gets a raise
| hopefully. Congrats everybody.
|
| What to do with so much money?
|
| An AI product is of course the 'no-brainer', I would love to see
| them partner with Tenstorrent for the CPU/AI part. I think Bryan
| described this as Door 3 'doing something crazy'.
|
| A product around AMD APU was talked about, but in a recent talk
| Brain said AMD doesn't seem to care about that product.
|
| OpenTitan is now getting ready for production uses, maybe makes
| sense to switch to that in the future. Moving Hubris onto that
| shouldn't be to big of a lift.
|
| A conventional server without DC bus bar maybe? Not talking about
| homelab server but something in a class where you can't have a
| whole rack and the bus bar. The main seller would be the fireware
| and software ontop to get people into the control plane
| ecosystem. And you could make Linux boot on it too for more
| market reach potentially. I'm not sure how much such a platform
| could share with current system.
|
| An SSD or NIC with open fireware would be great, but not sure if
| you can develop that only for your own product or if you would
| want to sell it separatly to make sense. But that would be big
| departure from the current All-in-One product.
|
| Amazing what you can do when all you try to do is make podcast.
| Maybe now they have money to bring back 'On the Metal'. I enjoyed
| the more structured interview style podcast about history of
| computing quite a bit. That said the more discussion oriented
| 'Oxide and Friends' is also nice.
| drfuchs wrote:
| Can they re-raise it in Series Rust?
| Traster wrote:
| I guess there's two ways of looking at this, way (1) is leaning
| heavily into what seems at least seems to be top of cycle in a
| cyclical business, which is likely to be highly problematic when
| they hit downturn, or (2) doing an Amazon and getting lucky by
| having a massive war chest to survive the next down turn.
| xer0x wrote:
| Congratulations Oxide, it's inspirational to see curiosity,
| conviction and rigor pay off.
| singularfutur wrote:
| Another $200M for a company whose product most developers will
| never touch. VCs continue to confuse "hardware that sounds cool"
| with "business that makes money". This ends one of two ways:
| acqui-hire or Chapter 11.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Most developers won't know if they're touching it or not, given
| their market.
| wmf wrote:
| It's been six years and they still won't say "it's Nutanix but
| better". Is it not better? Does the "we akshually don't have
| competitors" approach work with customers?
| kev507 wrote:
| I don't think we'd ever go with the "we don't have competitors"
| line, it's not serious. The competition is more AWS, GCP, and
| Azure than it is Nutnaix though, they can't provide a similar
| experience or economic value when they don't make or control
| their own hardware. That doesn't mean we never see Nutnaix, but
| it's not the most apt comparison. As Alan Kay famously said,
| "People who are really serious about software should make their
| own hardware" - otherwise you'll be stuck at the intersection
| of support and scaling pains long term.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Love the team and the podcast. Kudos to them
| arjie wrote:
| I get the whole x CPUs y RAM story (it's akin to how clouds sell)
| and that often makes sense in the cloud, but when managing my
| datacenter operations a big constraining point is compute / kW.
| At 30 A / 208 V at 85% efficiency I've got 5 kW to work with per
| cabinet. If I'm putting in low core density slow machines I've
| got to do a lot more management than if I'm using my Epyc 9755
| based servers. This is a practical constraint not just a
| theoretical "oh I want the latest and greatest". It's just that I
| can't really justify using up 4U and a kW on an Epyc 7003 series.
| The compute density just isn't there for the power use. The old
| chips are practically deadweight.
|
| Anyway, I'm glad to hear of the raise because the team seems
| exceptional (judging by the posts you guys write and they have
| written prior to the company) and I love work in this area that
| simplifies hardware management. Good stuff, good luck, and
| congratulations!
| kristjansson wrote:
| > 5 kW to work with per cabinet
|
| have my expectations been shot by reading too much about
| Nvidia's latest and greatest, or does this seem quite low?
| shrubble wrote:
| That's standard practice in many data centers; but you can
| often pay more to get more amps delivered to your rack.
| arjie wrote:
| No, your expectations are not wrong. I'm a small business. A
| fully stacked AI/GPU cabinet is multiples of this. A single
| GH200 based server will have 2x2.7 kW power supplies in a 1U
| form factor. As you can imagine, I am not running a cabinet
| full of such servers. But you don't need AI power
| requirements to do normal software. And there's lots of
| normal software to do!
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Can't wait to own one of their racks someday...or get around to
| making Oxide at home.
| joshAg wrote:
| God, i am so glad to see these guys succeeding. The sun may have
| burned out, but the sky is still bright thanks to them. May they
| be so successful that i can eventually buy workstation versions
| of their minicomputers, sort of like how they made CoaL for
| triton.
| aus10d wrote:
| I like this!
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