$100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the total amount raised of almost $200M?

Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just staying private?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tull

in the midst of everyone making a land grab for GB200s, does anyone have time to evaluate their alternative OS?

Cool 1999 aesthetics though

The “iPhone” of the data center.

The founders are uber geeks but have never done anything successful on their own. I predict this company will be another zombie.

And then as a follow up you have to explain that

- they sell an entire rack full of servers

- they're the only ones that do this. Normally you have to buy all the pieces and put it together yourself, or pay someone to put it together for you but all the parts are kind of designed on their own by different companies so it's kind of a mess. Oxide makes one big rack with like 16-32 servers and it's all designed by them and just works, so you just plug it in and you have servers you can put a bunch of vms on. Oh and they're huge, each one literally costs like a million dollars

Company Name Single line Headline

Problem Our Solution

Gives you the entire company premise and product description.

Seems pretty clear to me.

Do you have some kind of insight on their future product roadmap? As far as I know their next version will just be a new sled into the existing cubby.

It also uses commodity processors and is open software. Totally unlike what we typically associate with mainframes.

So really its not like a mainframe in any aspect other then its not a PC architecture. Its much more like the machines that people like Google or Facebook use.

Just to be clear, you mean that we have a BlueSky account, in addition to X? I struggle to think of what you mean.

Generally speaking, advertising on a wide array of platforms is considered a good thing, as you reach different audiences.

That's kind of a strange statement.

Because every company has some salary policy and structure. Would you for other companies say 'obsessed with finding different salaries for each employ'?

Seems to me having a fixed salary will lead to less overall discussion and less time spent on salary discussions. Letting the executives actually focus on the product instead of endless salary discussions.

The on-prem cloud is definitely the holy grail for many of us, but the justification to the capex and ongoing commitment to owning the hardware would be that it has have just as easy an upgrade path.

Took them 3 months before a "we're not interested" email was sent. No reasons, either.

I probably should have just used an LLM to generate good sounding garbage. Probably the same chance to get even a stage 1 interview.

With this news I hope they plan on expanding hiring for frontend devs soon, would love to work with such leadership once in my life.

The flat salary structure at a generous level (from my perspective, anyway) is a breath of fresh air. Everyone getting caught up on the equity is a bit hard to understand, given the clarity of the message from the company.

I will be applying for one of the open positions. Kudos to this company for their approach to business, and congrats on the success.

Disclosure, I work in the software automation space.

Also love the Oxide and Friends podcast! What strikes me most lately about Oxide since falling into their hefty episode backlog, is their book club culture. I really appreciate the ability to get a fly on the wall experience of it, I learn a lot!

https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/

It should be trivial to create my own S3 bucket that’s stores data on my laptop.

I’m really glad folks like Oxide are moving in that direction.

But it seems when there’s enough money in something, openness goes out the window.

Could be a need for unclassified workloads also… but curious if this is a defense and Intel community venture fund backing this next round with my tax dollars.

I just hope they can survive in a world dominated by relatively inexpensive, general-purpose Apple Watches.

So what is Oxide and why would I use that over OpenStack?

432 GB memory at 19.6 TB/s are the claimed specs. For one package. Now fill a rack with 72 of those.

(If only AMD could execute on the software side...)

Well, its the assymetry of wanting a 10 year long documented CV with various orthogonal points in your career, versus actually having a 30 minute call.

Unlike an actual interview, which is equal time investment, this 20 page paper gets the commentary and result of "no". "No" what? You can ask an interviewer about concerns, and discussion points. This email from no-mail@ is just nothing.

And its not the sting of rejection. I've been turned down, and I too have turned down. But its the mechanistic, dispassionate, legalistic response after months of a "No". And not even a 'What we're looking for is.... '

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/cloud-revenue...

uptime institute publishes some good numbers from survey, which puts on prem + colo still at >50% last I checked.

And still some additional 5% in like... on prem in closets.

Last year Amazon said it was 85% on prem. I dunno who has the right numbers.

The cloud doesn't pan out for long running, predictable workloads. Most companies are and will continue to use VMs for many years.

Do two people hired at the same time get the same equity? Or is there room for one candidate to get more equity due to their experience or simply because they negotiated more?

Obviously early employees get more equity. The question is whether or not there’s room for negotiation. They heavily imply that everyone is paid the same, but all of those claims are about base salary.

People coming back from the cloud is a future growth market, but there is plenty of non-cloud stuff in many places.

iphone is nice and upgrade from commodities phone and I have one, but I wouldn't care much if my fridge has sleek UI because I just need it to be a fridge.

> Look at their CPU density and do the math on power. It's fairly low density. Look at the interconnects (100gb per system). Also fairly conservative. It's the perfect product to replace hardware that is aging out, as you wont have to re-plumb for more power/bandwidth, and you still get a massive upgrade.

It sounds like the CPU density and network bandwidth are not great. If it's only suitable to replace aging systems, does that not limit their TAM? Or is that going to be their beachhead for grabbing further market share.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at compensation tables and reference data. $200K is definitely good salary, but I wouldn’t call it “life changing” relative to what someone qualified to work at Oxide could earn in an average non-tech hub metro area.

The type of candidate who qualifies to work at Oxide has numerous options for high paying remote work, and probably well paying local work too.

You’re not gonna retire early, take years off at a time, or anything else like that which the big tech companies RSU grants can get you.

Let’s define this. Let’s say 1:25? 1:50? What ratio is appropriate?

You can "just" migrate away from Oxide but that would mean throwing away the hardware you now own. That's the grandparent's point; if you're migrating out of a cloud to avoid the margins demanded by the cloud vendor, now you're at the mercy of whatever Oxide thinks your support contract is worth.

Sure, the convenience may be worth it, but watch how many companies are now struggling to get off of VMWare after Broadcom moves.

We have a "one rate per level" rule. The rates are published, and so are the definitions of the levels, and everyone's level (i.e. indirectly you can know everyone's salary)

Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't work. They only know incentive-based schemes.

So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the sales, which is (essentially) budgetted from their stock-option package (that everyone gets). I.e. they benefit from growth a little bit earlier and directer.

If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have a sales department.

The most obvious change is that you guys use half-width, full length enclosures.

But I'm realizing now that I haven't looked at the OCP specs in a long, long time. I recall the common DC rail from some early Facebook papers on this topic, and I thought they were pretty similar to how you plug into power.

I just looked at the OCP power connector, and I would have lost any bet anyone was willing to make me about what they looked like. That's not at all where I thought we were. I think I understand now why you guys went to such pains getting the keyed connectors to work exactly right. Their power connectors look like something from a scifi movie, and not in a good way.

I hope you can see that this is a logical fallacy known as "zero-sum thinking". It is not only possible for a business to profit while lowering prices, it is universal throughout the economy. Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home. Bakeries radically undercut the cost of home baking. It is obviously cheaper to buy motor fuel at the gas station than it would be to buy crude and refine it yourself.

The main reason people think their on-prem is cheaper than cloud is that they are bad at accounting.

> Everyone at Oxide makes $207,264 USD, regardless of location. (Some sales positions have a lower base salary and contain a commission component.)

On our applications page (see it here: https://oxide.computer/careers/sw-control-plane)

It's also a pretty well known aspect of the company. Combine this with the fact that our hiring process is different, where interviews are the very last thing before possibly being hired, and someone who has missed this fact could come across as having not done some very basic research about the company that they're applying to.

To be clear, I still think calling it "a red flag" is a stretch. I fully agree with you in a general sense, for places that are willing to negotiate compensation in the first place, but we make it very clear up front that we do not.

It would still likely be much cheaper to do everything in house, but you would be assuming a lot of risks and locking yourself in losing flexibility.

There is a reason people go with AWS over many competing cheaper cloud providers.

Does the world class engineer or business development lead just take it easy and travel around after they join?

Does the new manager push the team and business forward or prioritize stability?

Do engineers spend their time on reactors and impressive sounding projects or figuring out what customers need?

Do people feel lucky to have a seat in the org or do they spend their time complaining and looking for the exits?

Money isn't the only lever, but its a strong one - startups will never compete with established firms on cash outlays.

But what sorts of things input into the function of "deserve"?

Focusing on just this financial narrative you're weaving, what stops a bank from selling "virtual racks" that work financially the same as owning an Oxide rack, but it's just AWS?

$1m buys you 42U of, whatever. You're handed an AWS account you do not pay for, but it has the $1m worth of, whatever in it, in perpetuity. Maybe the bank even throws in some fakey market you can "part out" and "sell" your rack to, years later, at some "market price."

It seems like, the product - and maybe the experience of buying the product - is what is most important to Oxide. It's really interesting to me, because I cannot wrap my head around what this narrative is:

You guys are Apple of Racks. But minus the iPhone, because there is no monopoly here. So, Apple (Minus iPhone) of Racks. Is that it? It's the rest of their offerings, which without the iPhone monopoly effects, are Buying Experiences. It's like when people buy $10,000 Mac Studios to "run LLMs", which of course they are going to do like, zero to one times, because they are excited about the idea of the product. For the audience that needs to "run LLMs" they buy, whatever, or rent. But they don't buy Mac Studios. Just because people do something doesn't mean it makes sense.

Is the narrative, AWS Doesn't Make Sense? AWS makes a ton of sense, for basically everyone. Everybody uses it and pays up the wazoo for it. And there are good objective reasons AWS makes sense, at basically all levels. Who is fooled by, "AWS doesn't make sense?"

The problem with AWS isn't even that they are expensive. It's that Amazon is greedy. It could be cheaper, which is a different thing than being expensive. It matters because "AWS stays greedy longer than the average Y Combinator company stays private" is an interesting bet for an investor to take. They could decide to be less greedy at any time, and indeed, it did not take long after offerings of S3-like storage from others led them to simply reduce prices.

What that is telling me is, I could take $100m in funding, sell $1m "racks" of equivalent compute on the Rolls Royce of cloud infrastructure, making everything financially and legally and imaginarily the same as ownership, and then take a $300k loss, right? On each "rack", same as your loss? It's a money losing business, but here I am making the money losing very pure, very arby. Is this what you are saying customers want?

Clearly they want a physical rack. By all means, I can send them a big steel box that provides them that aesthetic experience. Cloudflare, Google, they do the physical version of this all the time: dumb, empty appliances that are totally redundant, because people ask for them. RudderStack, Weights & Biases, a bunch of companies come to mind doing the same thing in software, like so called Kubernetes Operators that literally just provision API keys but pretend to be running on your infrastructure. People ask for Kubernetes operators, they made them, but of course, they don't do anything. They are imaginarily Kubernetes operators.

The reason there are licensing fees and rentals and whatever is the enterprise sales pipeline, right? Enterprise sales is, give people want they ask for. People ask for a price that's below $X up front, so that's what IT vendors do, and then it turns out people are okay with some ongoing licensing fees, so there. That's what they do.

So what IS it?

That's fair! Just like, pointing out that on-prem can make financial sense.

> To stretch the metaphor to a grotesque extent,

I like it, haha.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHbgjB0RQ1s [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmw9OICH-4

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

If they have a fixed salary with a high objective to "make it" (e.g. if you sell less than $X, you get fired), lots of sales folks will skip on it because they can't go over, and most probably prefer to have a quarter or two or year at e.g. 70% salary while working on longer term deals, rather than losing their job for not being good enough within that arbitrary time period. And going over their quota can be wildly lucrative depending on the terms.

It sucks but they like to think that if they work harder they'll get paid more.

Basing compensation on supposedly objective things like "the dollar amount a sales person brought in" might be important to a given pool of potential employees, but resist the temptation to think of it as objectively determining the value of the employee's work. Remember that all you're doing is making offers that people will accept.

I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much.

Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a year?

Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some people will just take “offer with most money” every time. Hell of a lot of people don’t.

I do think that C suite folks might not have the right vision of what “normal/comfortable” is for employees though. So they might offer a low number thinking it’s actually a “comfortable to live with at this stage of life” number and then get confused why they can’t recruit good talent and think people are obsessed with money.

First offer has gotta be within the ballpark of the right number if you don’t want your interviewee to immediately come back to you with a much higher number!

Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.

That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the same. When I transitioned to software development (from basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my first software job, they were all because I liked the particular product in some way or another, and what the compensation was is basically the least interesting thing for me.

Of course, some level of base payment is needed, because I still needed to pay rent, but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. And no, I'm just an individual contributor who wants to like what I work with, not an executive, manager or similar.

That is, the work itself should be interesting and fulfilling.

Yes, we need money, but when the work relationship approaches being purely transactional the whole thing is demeaning for everyone and less effective.

Boy, it takes a lot of luck and skill and privilege to be able to shop for (or offer) work like this, and money is still important.

While this is true for most of the cases, it's not the case always. There are definitely jobs I'd work for less than I make at the job now and there are jobs which are considered "dream jobs", but ultimately there needs to be a solid base to make you and your family feel comfortable if you're spending at least 1/3 of your day on.

I used to have a manager that gave me this line. He left this company to join another one, had multiple offers, and told me he accepted the highest one because "it's all about the money".

They know, we know, everybody knows, but that's not the playbook.

Or do you mean PC as in rackmounted servers? If that's what you meant, PC is a very poor word for it. That's kind of the point Oxide made from the beginning. Why are you running server workloads on a PC with a funny shape? Why do you need 84 power supplies (2/shelf) in your rack? Why do you need any keyboard or graphics controllers? Why don't you design for purpose a rack-sized server?

Or did you mean exactly what you wrote: "a PC"? You only need one server, not a whole rack's worth? Again, that is not the market Oxide is targeting.

Or you need to be able to run "dynamic workloads" that could require 40-4000 CPUs? You need hypervisors and orchestration, etc.? And you don't want them to be Solaris, or to run on Solaris? And you know all about Hubris and you don't want that either? But you think it would be nice if they weren't Linux? Maybe if they were modern microkernels written in something like Rust? But not the Hubris microkernel written in Rust?

I'm going to have to take you at your word. Your needs are "a bit of a different world" than Oxide fits.

But it's pretty cool that you still got some friendly personal attention from two big-name Oxide employees who seem willing to try to help you if they can. If you ever do find yourself in a world that aligns with theirs it appears that they are willing to try to accommodate you.

This logic about stops working as soon as you sell something that is not some immediately exchanged mass produced commoditized gadget. Sales people on commission have tons of incentive to saddle the company with demands and imaginary product features they can't actually deliver on and be long gone before the bill comes due.

> Many top salespeople have a zero base salary.

Hmm, probably true in some places, but here (Spain) that wouldn't even be legal. When I worked in sales we had minimum wage + commission, but I'm sure the salary would be 0 if they were allowed to set it up like that.

Going from 40mm fans to 80mm fans will not take energy usage from 25% to 1-2%. They must have taken an extreme example to compare against. What they’re doing is cool, but this is a marketing exaggeration targeted at people who aren’t familiar with the space.

Oxide also isn’t the only vendor using form factors other than 1U or focusing on high density configurations. Using DC power distribution is also an increasingly common technique.

To be honest, a lot of this feels like Apple-esque marketing where they show incredible performance improvements, but the baseline used is something arbitrary.

It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware etc, with a bespoke OS and management stack.

Better to be thinking in transactional terms from the get go especially in early startups, where majority of total comp is an illiquid call option.

Selling a customer a contract for on-premises computing and giving them a fake metal box and SaaS is borderline unethical depending on the terms of said contract. I understand the sentiment of that point though. There are many reasons a customer chooses to own instead of rent. Legal requirements, financial incentives, and even control over performance to name a few.

On-premises computing was so good that the cloud providers packaged it up and sold it back to people at a premium that could only ever be rented. The finances of that model don't make sense to many businesses as they look to reignite their on-premises computing with the modernity of the cloud providers. That's where Oxide shines in my opinion- being able to have on-premises computing that combines the efficiencies of the hyper scalers with an API-driven approach to managing resources. We take that a step further by building hardware and software in-house for additional benefits such as power efficiency, control over the networking stack, additional telemetry, etc.

No, you haven’t. You didn’t deliver what was paid for. This wouldn’t be accepted.

> Do you see?

I’m sorry, but I do not. You’re not describing a business. You’re throwing some numbers out to describe a fraudulent enterprise.

> what is really the material difference between cloud and on-premises compute, when the interfaces between the two look so similar?

The material differences are around capex vs open spending, that you can locate your own hardware where you want to (which matters for things like “must be in a colo in southern Manhattan” (or any of the other reasons why physical location matters for latency reasons) or “must not leave the soil of $COUNTRY”), and the entirety of “TCO of owning is cheaper than renting for many workloads.” That’s just some of the larger obvious ones.

But that's the same no matter if you work in sales, customer support or many other roles, a lot of people just care about the money with little regards to anything else, yet the sales department are the only ones who must have commission?

If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck right? You’re putting money off to the side. Tho perhaps you’re not putting aside much for, like, travel.

Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level, especially when they’re lean. And I think up until this raise Oxide was lean!

(To be honest given this finding raise I could see a salary increase for oxide across the board, to help with that)

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

Amazon is expensive but not that expensive.

If they gave everyone the same equity compensation presumably they’d put that front and center like they do for the base salary.

The claims about paying everyone the same are a red herring because it’s only about base salary.

Exactly. Just because they are similar in some senses doesn't mean that they're fungible. Generator manufacturers still have a business even though you can purchase energy futures.

They’re a remote company. They’re not targeting HCOL metros.

> and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.

> "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy talk in 2025.

Claiming that $200k is not enough to live on is rich-guy talk. The majority of the country lives on well below $200K.

I agree that a single person living in a HCOL metro like SF Bay Area would not find this compensation attractive, but that person also has nearly infinite other jobs to choose from nearby.

Jobs like this (remote work for interesting startup) do not need to pay HCOL comp.

The median US income in 2023 was $39,982 for an individual, and $78,538 for a household.

Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things. Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It’s not poverty wages!

“I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I’m passionate about” is such a normal thing that everyone serious I know in this industry says. Or like… even just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there’s a reason online casinos pay their software engineers so much!). Not everyone makes the choice (and I get people saying no) and but in a sense I gotta imagine it’s part of the calculus for making it work. “We won’t have to pay people half a mil in total comp like meta has to, because the mission is more straightforward”. I feel like an O&F ep mentioning someone from intel expecting _triple_ the comp. 600k!

And like… people saying it’s not enough and talking about equity. You’re not paying rent with equity!

Signed: a guy who was at a small startup and who would have been very happy with the inflation/CoL equivalent of 200k instead of what I had those early leaner years

At one point “joining the scrappy startup” does involve some scrappiness. Otherwise you’re just working in a division of Google that hasn’t been integrated into the borg yet.

Note that according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 200k in 2025 is equivalent to about 160k in 2020 when the pandemic began, and 160k would've been on the low end for an experienced software engineer at a Series A or B startup at that time, in the SF Bay Area.

This sub-thread is about the habits of speech that make a certain breed of armchair public policy economist jump out like a lump on plate glass. Get Patek in here and we could start a convention.

By the way, I received every rating from Greatly Exceeds (including an additional equity grant) down to Meets Most, and the rating I got overall had very little correlation with either effort or impact. I got Meets Most for some of the most valuable and industry-impactful work I've done in my career, and Greatly Exceeds for something that got replaced in a year.

Anyway this is mostly just one example, it's just one that comes up often when I speak with my peers about how Oxide works vs other companies.

And some of "us" have an ownership stake, and some of "us" do not. But "we" like to talk about how everyone's working on a level playing field, anyway.

You're quite right. It isn't an environment for me.