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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Think "AWS in a box", with the high level features you’d get there. API, Terraform, "managed" products like load balancers, database, etc. You get all that in a turnkey rack delivered to the datacenter or office doorstep.
It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.
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?
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.
> ...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
80 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 76.8 ms ] threadStep 1 could be to get Illumos running on a local x86-64 machine.
All I need is some financial backers and I'll happily document the whole thing on a blog and a youtube channel. Now accepting offers.
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!!
Total chaos.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This is good news for them. I expect there will be more competition for positions there should any open up.
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.
If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.
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.
It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.
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.
> ...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.
We can hope that this is the case for Oxide, though I don’t expect they are reliably profitable yet.
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.
Watch the QA.
Basically, they Nvidia ecosystem is to closed for them to add value. And competing with Nvidia is difficult so its not their focus.
> "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.