If you follow Oxide (perhaps just by reading their Blog[1] and RFDs[2]), I think you'd find a more rigorous engineering and business culture than most case studies you're referring to from the 90s/00s. Of course it's not impossible that Oxide is getting themselves in trouble, but there is more evidence supporting a successful case, in my opinion.
The problems are 1) money is flowing so freely that you can't use the raise here as a signal of anything meaningful and 2) the industry (especially hardware) is in massive flux right now.
So what might look like success in this environment might look very different if the bubble pops.
Obviously Oxide has a ton of experience on its side but it's so opaque where any of this goes that even they can't read the tea leaves.
I mean, really no one is fully independent — we are all dependent on each other for the necessities of life. But in this context "independent" means "not a subsidiary of another company".
It’s success compared to the other possibility: not raising money and going out of business. We still cheer when a rocket separates from the first stage and ignites the next. Things going as planned during a risky and challenging endeavor is still a good thing.
And it is not success compared to another possibility, earning enough money to not need further fundraising.
Of course some businesses are more capital intensive and have longer time-to-money timelines due to factors outside the control of the company, and in that case fundraising is an essential tool for a long time.
Yeah they're doing a hardware play, which means it's really capital intensive. That kind of cash means they can afford to do a larger production run, which gets them better economies of scale, which means more profit per unit sold. investors are being given private access to see that the demand is there to justify further investment.
Being the "Apple" of enterprise compute (ie. vertical hardware software integration), solving the layers of aggregrate cruft that every single player in the Linux space (including Facebook/Google and other hyperscalers to some degree) have to deal with for compatibility since no one company has enough leverage to clean up poor or outdated legacy decisions in the stack. This is just a bigger market than anything EdTech, and with a real moat. Plus bonafides and actual evidence they are pulling it off, but that's honestly all gravy on top of the market opportunity.
Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?
The basis of my comparison was nothing to do with business circumstance, but just that Apple and Oxide both were known for having taste in software (in Apple's case faded but still apparent in the DNA), and they build their own hardware to express that taste.
I think perhaps Solaris had a bit of that under Sun but I can't imagine that being the case under Oracle. And I'm not really an enterprise infra guy so can't really speak to IBM or Unisys offerings.
I do feel like Oxide are qualitatively different from the others pjlmp mentioned because they're staying commodity in key interfaces like CPU ISA / OS / ecosystem (thing with big network effects) and mainly focused on fixing the control plane / management / architecture mess.
The others suffered "ecosystem collapse". With Oxide you won't be stuck on a "burning platform", your main risk is that the value prop for the hardware & management experience doesn't play out.
Right -- customers don't have to port their stuff to a new platform or arch or anything. It's just normal x86_64 Linux/Windows VMs, or Terraform if they're so inclined.
IBM stuff is likely to expensive and optimized for different things. Same for the other Post-Mainframe stuff. You would pay for a lot of stuff you don't need, and there is a reason very few new costumers adopt it.
Oxide costumers want to run standard VM that they normally run in public cloud.
Do Oracle Solaris serves come with a horizontal scale out cloud infrastructure? As far as I know they don't.
Product-market fit. Based on prior Oxide announcements, they've been clear the raising is in large part about building out manufacturing to meet customer demand. In venture capital investing, once you've found a winner (a company that you have high confidence will be successful and will produce returns at some multiple above your investment), you ought to put much more money into that winner to maximize that return.
In the last round Bryan and Steve talked about being over-subscribed, especially from existing investors in prior rounds. That likely means those investors see exactly what I've described: a winner that's worthy of additional funding to pump their total return on investment.
shill. or fan, prolly.
i don't use the more current word fanboy. ugh.
(when older words are good enough, why invent a new word. but I see that as a trend. each new generation wants to distinguish themselves from the past one. So they invent new words as one way of doing that. and some of them get adopted into general circulation or use.)
Unless the two words, fan and fanboy, mean the different things, which i'm not interested in checking out anyway.
(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge my request. crazy stuff.
Is this true? If so, how do you know? I have listened to almost of their podcasts. I don't recall them saying there are any type of customer they refuse to sell to. They told a funny story about a sales call with a US national laboratory. They went into the call assuming they would be asking for supercomputer. Instead, they learned they need a bunch of regular rack compute, not all supercomputers.
Also, the OP did not say they are a SaaS company. They only said they spend 900K USD per year with AWS.
I also think they work with government customers. I saw an open job position on their website requiring TS/SCI security clearance and full scope polygraph.
We had the opposite experience. We contacted them through their form this year and they were happy to discuss with us even when we communicated from the beginning we wouldn't be customer in the short to medium term and even for single rack systems.
The rack were not insanely expensive, expandable so you don't have to build fully stacked racks from the beginning. Purely based on a hardware, compares to other blade systems but pricier.
The interesting part was the software, management interface, Terraform provider and how everything just fit together. Having storage, network and compute all in a single managed rack package brings a lot of value and brings down TCO. Really appreciated the security group like approach to network policies.
Unfortunately I haven't worked with HPE or Dell recently so I'm not sure what they currently offer.
Historically, selling to a small niche of price-insensitive customers (e.g. mainframes, defense) breeds complacency and eventual failure. You can see VMware go down that death spiral over its history where every release was more expensive with less innovation.
> Historically, selling to a small niche of price-insensitive customers (e.g. mainframes, defense) breeds complacency and eventual failure.
VMware was a publicly traded company got more than a 20 year run where they dominated virtualization and captured over 80% of virtualized servers. That a publicly traded company sold out to another publicly traded company over and over after two decades where they got scraped for change in the couch cushions doesn't surprise me at all.
> (e.g. mainframes, defense)
And yet mainframes are still in use, still getting purchased, and Defense is by far the largest segment seeing movement in the US right now. TONS of dollars, much of it going into AI, drones, etc. Much of which needs digital and infrastructure development and deployment for R&D and operations.
Right now is probably an amazing time for them sales / interest wise. A LOT of money going into software and hardware attestation right now.
He asked the business for a sales rep through their sales portal a year ago. That is enough. Shouldnt have to complain a year later on a social media platform to get a response that says "hit me up".
Ignoring a sales request for a company that wants to spend ~1M only to say pls reach out to me again after we had our second funding round in 2026? The OP literally could go back to their sales lead db and respond like a real business. So yeah unprofessional and embarrassing.
we spend 2-2.5M a year I wouldn’t consider us their product scale yet.
My understanding is the full rack is about $1.2M and smallest half rack is about $600k and this was before the RAM and other price hikes now.
You are still going to have some residual cloud workloads(so all AWS won’t migrate ) and HA and DR regions etc plus the maintenance and incidentals (power , connectivity ).
I don’t expect anyone less than 5M spends and high base loads is a good fit for their offering.
You are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better.
Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs.
The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff is “hard.”
It is worth the exercise to honestly assess the maintenance, initial costs, ongoing costs, etc etc for owning your own. I did this at a company for a single server to let the ml group test fine tuning frameworks/throw crazy ideas at before spending real money on a training run and it paid for itself in like 3 months. Sometimes the math is overwhelmingly positive, sometimes it isn't. In general, the smaller/earlier you are the less it makes sense. Not because of the per hour costs, but because of the distraction away from implementing the core idea of the company. It is worth some, maybe a lot of, inefficiency to stay focused. When you get bigger and have strong fit and a clear direction it is a lot easier to focus on optimizing hosting costs and spending leadership time away from the core problem of the company.
Seems like people missed the end of what I wrote though. We run some bare metal but do not physically handle it. There’s many companies who will rent huge boxes with good connectivity in a data center. DataPacket is the best we have found for price and reliability.
Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
> Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
CISA has identified 16 US industries where they have noted that companies should be able to operate indefinitely without internet access. See the Water Plant hack stories coming through right now across more than 19 states, for example. Water, electricity, internet access / telecom, military, chemical, logistics, transportation, etc.
Oh man I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten into arguments on here and other technical forums years ago about self-hosting and how 'stupid' I was to not want to rent cloud servers
You’re expressing a very narrow engineer’s perspective that doesn’t consider the realities of managing bare metal hosting at any kind of scale.
These are business decisions, made in terms of core competencies, capex vs. opex, and the difficulties and cost of building out a reliable, sustainable hosting operation that handles all the compliance and security requirements, and the full range of “ilities” that real businesses have to deal with.
The fact that Bob in IT might be capable of doing some of this on his own doesn’t really enter into the picture. It’s not relevant.
There’s a reason that most companies don’t operate their own electricity generation systems. Much the same is true for computing systems.
Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a premium to only deal with SaaS logistics.
(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)
Ok but add up a trickle of those examples, with staff to handle them, and you're still comfortably in the black.
You dont even have extra organizational overhead. Every cloud first company has a head of devops sitting in the chair where head of infra would be. They somehow wind up with like half the staffing anyways compared to running bare metal.
Our colo experience was pretty smooth, nothing insane like that, and saved us a bundle. Apparently ymmv. I hate working with AWS APIs by comparison, some of the worst UX I've ever seen.
This sounds like either an extremely bad experience or an account from many years ago. Things are better now.
Also like I said: physically racking only makes sense if you are huge. Managed bare metal is a whole market category and it’s spectacularly cheaper than big cloud for most work loads. For bandwidth it’s like 1000X cheaper. That is not an exaggeration.
I've dealt with both. I am continually amazed that people not only pay for AWS, but that it is so complicated, and that they use it in all sorts of absurd ways, not even just hosting 'vms' but using all sorts of amazon tools to do trivial tasks. I am sorry I just dont get it. Is it like learning salesforce and once you're sucked in you're just in? I am so glad I do not work at an AWS shop anymore and am very glad to be in a position where we do not use it.
I actually do get public cloud as well as running your own racks. There is room for both. Your startup is growing 100% every quarter but you're not sure if you have real PMF yet? Yeah probably stick with cloud. Zombiecorn growing 10-20% yoy or not growing and you're paying the cloud $10M/y for 6yo CPUs? - pretty foolish to continue doing that.
You get AWS certifications, use as many AWS services as possible to pad your CV with the service experience and certifications, get your arguments and "well architected" dogma from AWS sales. Then you can get paid more at the next company (or at least high salary offers to extract a raise).
Also building high complexity systems that require a big expensive cloud engineer staff gets you status and visibility. In a tight spot you can still blame AWS for problems.
(Reality is not quite so bleak as people are not completely cynical)
...or "the UPS batteries caught on fire", or "the first unit failed and the contractor who was supposed to replace it replaced the second one instead, resulting in an outage".
Or something as stupid as, "vendor requires $50 failed DIMM replaced under warranty to be returned by UPS instead of chucked into the e-waste bucket, but UPS cannot pick up from DC because the driver can't be bothered to ring the bell on the DC gate".
That one alone probably resulted in our longest ever ticket.
I probably wouldn't start with buying a big server if I was just starting out. I would consider renting one from Hetzner, OVH, or many others.
There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidth.
Personally, I'd rent a small server first. About 20 years ago I had a small web hosting operation with my own racked servers. It's a pain to deal with when something goes wrong. Eventually we transitioned to renting dedicated servers.
There’s a sort of arguable sweet spot where someone motivated and knowledgeable can manage their own hardware, even if it’s just rented from Hetzner etc. But that just doesn’t scale.
Once you do try to scale that - not just the hardware but the staffing that’s needed to avoid a bus factor of 1, to ensure the required uptime especially if it needs to be 24x7, to handle disaster recovery, failover, security and compliance issues etc. etc., you quickly run into all the reasons that infrastructure management services and other computing services - i.e., cloud - have won out so definitively.
If you’re small enough that none of those things matter very much to you, and knowledgeable enough to run your whole system yourself, and have the time and inclination to deal with it, go for it! But such people are outliers who are really indulging a hobby more than anything else. It generally makes extremely little business sense.
the capex vs opex arugment would be persuasive if you couldn't lease servers. and obviously colo was always opex. basically the only time you'd get into serious capex was when you were building your own datacenters
You’re forgetting blame: if an on-prem system has an issue, that’s 100% on you. If AWS/GCP/Azure has an outage, that’s just bad luck, and everyone else suffers too.
Frankly. Most of that stuff is corporate bullshit. Compliance is 99% fucking theatre, cover your ass audits with a fancy check list.
The capex vs opex theatre is just stupid economics and bad generalization from wall street types.
Almost nothing of it is really real.
And your analogy may impress other glorified salesman, but it doesn't hold water for a second, electricity is fungible, computing is not, electricity is stateless, you computing infrastructure carries your data. Power consumption generally is not a competitive differentiator,computing often is. And of course, the economics IN THE FUCKING REAL WORLD is broken: It is very hard to compete with the prices of the grid, not so in the modern cloud world where hyperscalers captured market enough to feel free to start extracting monopolistic rent from their consumers. And even the premise is uninformed, heavy industry frequently resorts to co-generation, and now, ironically, even data centers projects are exploring it.
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
Which many keep forgetting is that there was no one else wanting to acquire Sun, IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn, and that was it.
Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.
Actual shout out to Oracle inexplicably moving Java forward a ton while also not strangling it with fees and suing their own customers. Wonder if there's a story of some genius, unsung internal salesman who made that happen.
Ironically, not only are you entirely wrong on the facts themselves, but the historical record in this case is incredibly (and unusually) crisp: the Merger Proxy Statement that Sun had to file with the SEC[0] has, in accordance with Delaware law, the full narrative of the acquisition.
In the "Background of the Merger" section of that document, there is an incredibly detailed (and interesting!) story of three companies: Party A, Party B, and Oracle. (As was well-known at the time, Party A is IBM and Party B is HP.) As that narrative makes clear (and contrary to your assertion), it was Sun that rejected IBM's definitive agreement, not the other way around. You can certainly argue that IBM's acquisition of Sun would have failed to complete for other reasons (regulatory and so on) -- but your assertion that "IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn" is simply (and demonstrably) wrong.
To answer these questions (or accusations?): Yes, I was at Joyent for the acquisition by Samsung -- but I also was not a founder, did not have a board seat, etc., so the involvement that I had, while substantial at some level (working with the Samsung team when they were doing their significant due diligence, for example) was also ultimately limited. My job was to make the acquisition work, not to determine the fate of the company for which I was ultimately an employee.
It's also absurd to call the sale a "sellout" -- the company was not for sale when Samsung came calling. The deal that Samsung proposed was a good and fair one, and if I HAD been on the board, I would have absolutely voted for the acquisition. (It should be said that Samsung themselves had a very high threshold to close the deal -- 97% of shares IIRC?)
And all of THAT said: while I was supportive of the acquisition by Samsung of Joyent (and worked hard to make that acquisition work), when we started Oxide, Steve and I had (and have!) zero interest in building a company to be acquired. Oxide is our life's work (and I mean that "our" broadly, as many at Oxide feel that same calling), and our objective with Oxide is to build an independent, generational company. Indeed, this Series D is all about advancing that objective!
Joyent was likely a part of what convinced Brian Cantrill that a new cloud machine was needed. They had their own stack running on commodity OEM hardware in their own cloud - likely a painful experience, since Brian talks a lot about how much of a difference it makes to own the complete root of trust and everything in it.
I doubt that. Oxide was founded by a bunch of ex-Sun people who have already been burned by the Oracle acquisition. If you read through what they say, their company values, and how they act, it's pretty clear their intent is to grow a sustainable long-term business and they're not looking for an exit.
We are trying to build a sustainable long-term business! It's just that you need enormous amounts of money to get there when shipping this large a product.
The idea behind VC funding generally is that you need large infusions of capital to get to the point where the business becomes sustainable long-term. The first one is the most expensive, and so on. Hardware is capital-intensive compared to SaaS, and especially so in the current environment.
Read the blog post on their series C [0]. It's not long, but the most relevant excepts are:
> 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. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the table.
> ...
> Our intent in starting Oxide was not to be an acquisition target but rather build a generational company; this is our life’s work, not a means to an end. With our Series C, customers don’t have to merely take our word for it: we have the capital to assure our survival into the indefinite future.
Maybe you could read that and think its complete bullshit and they're lying their asses off. Considering the people behind Oxide and their history, that's vanishingly unlikely though.
The reasonable conclusion is that they would not have raised yet more money if it wasn't due to being offered very generous terms by investors who wouldn't threaten the long-term future of the business.
It says "they've entirely derisked capital" and now ~6 months later they raised twice as much. Lying is a strong word but that post clearly wasn't accurate at the time.
They've raised a lot of money and there will be pressure for an exit sooner rather than later.
You can be cashflow positive and still benefit from having a larger pool of cash to throw around, particularly in any situation involving hardware manufacturing.
If you tell your investors "our limiting factor is how fast we can spend to deliver on additional requirements for these new customers", then it can both be true that you're not going to miss payroll for 5 years no matter what happens tomorrow and more cash would be beneficial.
Look at how much the components cost 6 months ago and now. That may explain why some calculations shifted considerably. It may be an act of keeping up with the market and having some reserve.
Depends on the VC. Some VC's are happy to own great businesses, even long term. Most are definitely vultures after a quick turn around. Mostly it has to do with where the VC gets their funding. Most VC's get their funding from offering a fund with a 2-5 year time-frame. Some are 10 yr funds, and some are long-term funds or are funded by a family office or two, which can be happy with great businesses long term.
It makes sense for Broadcom to remove that avenue of escape, and it makes sense for Oxide's investors to charge a premium to Broadcom, and materialize their returns.
The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).
Good question. Can’t eliminate the BIOS/UEFI on commodity systems. Can’t remove/cut down the BMC. Can’t plumb the hardware root of trust into the OS and VMs. Can’t do dynamic rack-level power capping (future roadmap). There’s a whole bunch of the software stack that only works because the hardware and software were designed together.
Oxide exists in part because commodity systems don’t work for building a cloud at scale (Joyent). Similarly, AWS, GCP, and Azure don’t use commodity systems, they use hardware that was designed to work together with their software, Nitro being a prime example.
Managing a single commodity device is pretty simple. Could even be a shell script with a few IPMI commands.
Managing 100s of devices from a mix of vendors is possible becomes itself a massive ball of crap to stick all the pieces together.
Then add firmware management because now there is a plethora of firmware updates to worry about.
And then dealing with networking discovery & orchestration for such setups is an added horror few even try to visualize.
Then abstract all these differences away so one can provision two different vendor’s servers connected to two different vendor’s managed switches in different racks to a new VLAN. And do it with SR-IOV while you’re at it…
Oh, I forgot shared storage… details, details…
Commodity computing is the modern day Tower of Babel.
Yes, it can be done much simpler if one treats all switches as unmanaged, all storage as local, and all networking as flat. That’s just not acceptable for a lot of use cases though…
Their machines are x86 but they've rearchitected basically everything else in the pursuit of a cohesive and integrated machine, they don't even have a BIOS. The secret sauce is having full control of the software stack, and as close to full control of the firmware as is possible on x86.
Yes, custom hardware is a significant part of Oxide. You have to build your own to do that stuff, and that’s why they did. I alluded to some of the things upthread.
I found out about this round from this thread, just like everybody else, but
> Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint
That’s not the only reason to raise a round, by far, especially when you, you know, are building custom hardware. It isn’t a SaaS business.
> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.
> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers?
It was technically possible with (e.g.) OpenStack for years (decades?) before Oxide ever existing, and yet even with such a solution being around, some folks still went with Oxide. (Or, depending on the scale you want to talk about: Proxmox, XCP-ng.)
I wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error).
Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.
An in-house team is most likely competing with something like Dell or VMware, not really Oxide. A significant part of Oxide’s value proposition is that you’re buying hardware and software purpose built for each other. Unless you’re also going to go so far as to do all of that, which companies like Google do, of course, it’s not really the same thing.
This matters when your various vendors start pointing at each other when something goes wrong. Oxide is truly “one throat to choke” in a way others just aren’t, and stand by that quality.
(Not to mention other various efficiencies, like power, or removing things like the BIOS and BMC junk that’s in basically every other server you buy right now. And the ability to send attenuation from boot up through the host OS. Just tons of things they’re differentiated on that your in house team just isn’t going to do.)
VC or private equity fueled companies are weird. At my place we are spending 8 figures a year just in AWS, and it's not like they planning to move to bare metal but, they're in fact removing stuff from their old datacenter. And that bill doesn't include some of the other SaaS like Mongo or Elastic.
With bills of that magnitude, each time I do a little house cleaning and delete some old data, change storage classes, or discover some unused servers... the savings (that are barely a rounding error on their bill) could pay for a whole year of an engineer or a bunch of servers that could power a good chunk of their production traffic.
Its not about bare metal, its about owning the whole stack and giving visibility into every nook and corner, and then supporting that open sourced code. Every network switch, every interconnect, every piece or firmware or software they can attest to because they built it themselves, and that is worth its weight in gold to high criticality industries and governments. They can give you the provenance for every single hardware and software component. Every chip.
If you can roll around those possibilities in your head, you start to see how absolutely unique this is and why these extremely sensitive and important customers and industries want this.
Just like the last Oxide post, I just have to say how excited I am for their product as a concept. I really hope to see them continue to do well!
Selfishly of course so I can make sure there are more episodes of Oxide and Friends for years to come. Adam annd Bryan's ability to reference thirty year old simpsons episodes is unmatched.
I've seen posts about Oxide for years now, but do they actually ship hardware? I've never seen images, or posts about companies with their new Oxide Thingamajig™
Joe Schmoe LLC will probably do just fine by sticking to popular clouds. I reckon adopting Oxide Computer would pay off at much larger volumes of traffic, or if you have to do on-prem due to regulatory reasons.
It would be nice to know more about pricing so the Enthusiast Joe can have a better idea, but it's more a boutique vibe right now.
Putting together bits and pieces from different sources: a half-rack is the minimum SKU, and it has 1024 cores and 16 TiB RAM for somewhere around $600k. (So many people have repeated the latter number that it must be true! I.e., add salt grains to taste.)
Just the thing for an ambitious enthusiast to upgrade to from their Raspberry Pi rack!
Very good point. That number almost certainly doesn't take into account recent RAM price increases, etc.
Tracing back through all the multitude of references to the $600k price, the earliest I found was from 2023, and it's completely unsourced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840
> In this episode, we sit down with Jessie Frazelle, CEO and co-founder of Zoo, a company working on innovative software and hardware technology. Jessie shares her fascinating journey, from getting her start at digital agencies to working at tech giants like Google and Microsoft and ultimately co-founding her own successful startup, Zoo.
> Zoo makes CAD truly AI-native with a modern geometry engine, readable code, and an editable feature tree at its core, enabling AI to make precise geometric changes without trapping users in a chat-only workflow. https://zoo.dev View our current openings: https://zoo.dev/careers Check out our blog: https://zoo.dev/blog
Zoo really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They got so many things about CAD right (new kernel, solid UI, programmatic language with either graphical or text editing) then they went and did this extremely online-only/SaaS model where they're rendering and streaming the 3D from their cloud. And last time I checked your design files live on their cloud.
That's just not an acceptable modality of software for complex hardware industries. I'm not going to launch a half-decade long engineering project on a subscription software where I rent access to my own design files and logic. You can't access CAD on a plane, in flaky WiFi, or at a remote test facility or site. Until they let me just buy and run their software on my team's computers it's a non-starter.
I've been following closely and have been both very impressed with what they're building but also very disappointed. They have a great vision for a seamless hardware project, but completely missed the point of what the software automation to tie it all together should look like.
I'd love to give Bryan Cantrill or ahl a 30 min demo. Feel free to ping!
left hand: governance gaps, privacy, owning instead of renting
right hand: nearly every employee of every org buying these things is sending almost everything to LLMs - or using software ULTIMATELY written by, tested by or whatevered by, these LLMs. LLMs that were created by or distilled from anthropic, openai, or google, who see everything SALIENT about what you do, or what ALL of your customers do, even if they are careful about not looking at the specifics of what you do
Woot!, they are on a tear:
2023: Series A 44 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...
2025: Series B 100 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b
2026: Series C 200 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c
2026: Series D 445 Million https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1795071/000179507126...
I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success.
Also interesting from their Series C press release from earlier this year:
> With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.
> I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success.
You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors.
Oxide raising this much money is a big accomplishment.
> You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors.
I’m pretty sure the dotcom bubble had many counterexamples
If you follow Oxide (perhaps just by reading their Blog[1] and RFDs[2]), I think you'd find a more rigorous engineering and business culture than most case studies you're referring to from the 90s/00s. Of course it's not impossible that Oxide is getting themselves in trouble, but there is more evidence supporting a successful case, in my opinion.
[1]: https://oxide.computer/blog
[2]: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/
The problems are 1) money is flowing so freely that you can't use the raise here as a signal of anything meaningful and 2) the industry (especially hardware) is in massive flux right now.
So what might look like success in this environment might look very different if the bubble pops.
Obviously Oxide has a ton of experience on its side but it's so opaque where any of this goes that even they can't read the tea leaves.
oxide is a hardware company, not a Dotcom
I have a physical tulip to sell you
same as Cisco
pets.com has entered the chat.
Good points.
>I don’t know who needs to hear this
Plenty of people on this forum need to hear it. Because they think otherwise.
>but raising a ton of money is not success.
Yes. It's not even an accurate predictor of future success.
>With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.
Independence from whom?
If they mean from everyone, they left out two important categories:
The Series C givers.
The other big C. Customers.
They mean is that they are much harder to acquire. Their goal is to become an independent public company.
> "independent public company"
But they are not independent though, they will be owned by Wall Street should they go public.
Instead they remain in the private markets for a long time and sell secondary shares, just like what Stripe is doing.
I hope they never go public for the reason that Wall Street would own them.
> But they are not independent though, they will be owned by Wall Street should they go public.
That depends on how much equity they issue as public stock. (And stock classes and voting rights, but you get the idea.)
I mean, really no one is fully independent — we are all dependent on each other for the necessities of life. But in this context "independent" means "not a subsidiary of another company".
It’s success compared to the other possibility: not raising money and going out of business. We still cheer when a rocket separates from the first stage and ignites the next. Things going as planned during a risky and challenging endeavor is still a good thing.
And it is not success compared to another possibility, earning enough money to not need further fundraising. Of course some businesses are more capital intensive and have longer time-to-money timelines due to factors outside the control of the company, and in that case fundraising is an essential tool for a long time.
Yeah they're doing a hardware play, which means it's really capital intensive. That kind of cash means they can afford to do a larger production run, which gets them better economies of scale, which means more profit per unit sold. investors are being given private access to see that the demand is there to justify further investment.
It's success, just not what you consider success.
- stupid question: how do you go about raising that kinda money consistently
- like why wont you fund me a few million dollars to build my deep edtech startup
- like what guarantee does this guy give you which i cant
Being the "Apple" of enterprise compute (ie. vertical hardware software integration), solving the layers of aggregrate cruft that every single player in the Linux space (including Facebook/Google and other hyperscalers to some degree) have to deal with for compatibility since no one company has enough leverage to clean up poor or outdated legacy decisions in the stack. This is just a bigger market than anything EdTech, and with a real moat. Plus bonafides and actual evidence they are pulling it off, but that's honestly all gravy on top of the market opportunity.
Apple is the survivor of vertical integration on consumer computing, the PC clones were the exception from everyone else in the market.
Apple is now having that aura, only because they got really really lucky before the money collectors shown up at the door.
Sure. What's your point with regards to Oxide?
The point was it being compared to Apple.
Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?
The basis of my comparison was nothing to do with business circumstance, but just that Apple and Oxide both were known for having taste in software (in Apple's case faded but still apparent in the DNA), and they build their own hardware to express that taste.
I think perhaps Solaris had a bit of that under Sun but I can't imagine that being the case under Oracle. And I'm not really an enterprise infra guy so can't really speak to IBM or Unisys offerings.
I do feel like Oxide are qualitatively different from the others pjlmp mentioned because they're staying commodity in key interfaces like CPU ISA / OS / ecosystem (thing with big network effects) and mainly focused on fixing the control plane / management / architecture mess.
The others suffered "ecosystem collapse". With Oxide you won't be stuck on a "burning platform", your main risk is that the value prop for the hardware & management experience doesn't play out.
Right -- customers don't have to port their stuff to a new platform or arch or anything. It's just normal x86_64 Linux/Windows VMs, or Terraform if they're so inclined.
IBM stuff is likely to expensive and optimized for different things. Same for the other Post-Mainframe stuff. You would pay for a lot of stuff you don't need, and there is a reason very few new costumers adopt it.
Oxide costumers want to run standard VM that they normally run in public cloud.
Do Oracle Solaris serves come with a horizontal scale out cloud infrastructure? As far as I know they don't.
Oracle Cloud services?
Product-market fit. Based on prior Oxide announcements, they've been clear the raising is in large part about building out manufacturing to meet customer demand. In venture capital investing, once you've found a winner (a company that you have high confidence will be successful and will produce returns at some multiple above your investment), you ought to put much more money into that winner to maximize that return.
In the last round Bryan and Steve talked about being over-subscribed, especially from existing investors in prior rounds. That likely means those investors see exactly what I've described: a winner that's worthy of additional funding to pump their total return on investment.
It is easier to raise >$100M than few million.
The pool of people trying to raise >$100M is smaller. Failures (in terms of typical VC exit trajectory) have mostly been weeded out.
lol why are you cheering?
Because they now have money to do cool stuff?
perhaps they like their work
shill. or fan, prolly. i don't use the more current word fanboy. ugh.
(when older words are good enough, why invent a new word. but I see that as a trend. each new generation wants to distinguish themselves from the past one. So they invent new words as one way of doing that. and some of them get adopted into general circulation or use.)
Unless the two words, fan and fanboy, mean the different things, which i'm not interested in checking out anyway.
(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge my request. crazy stuff.
They work with HFT/quant firms. Look at some of their former engineers who are now at matX.
Intel/Barefoot Tofino 2, VHDL/SystemVerilog, FPGA, QSFP28 (100GbE networking), P4 programming.
Their buyers don’t have customer stories. They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
Also, the OP did not say they are a SaaS company. They only said they spend 900K USD per year with AWS.
More like the rack isn't viable for SaaS.
I also think they work with government customers. I saw an open job position on their website requiring TS/SCI security clearance and full scope polygraph.
I believe JPL and INL were their launch customers for gov.
We had the opposite experience. We contacted them through their form this year and they were happy to discuss with us even when we communicated from the beginning we wouldn't be customer in the short to medium term and even for single rack systems.
How did that compare to the big firms? HPE, Dell, and so on.
The rack were not insanely expensive, expandable so you don't have to build fully stacked racks from the beginning. Purely based on a hardware, compares to other blade systems but pricier.
The interesting part was the software, management interface, Terraform provider and how everything just fit together. Having storage, network and compute all in a single managed rack package brings a lot of value and brings down TCO. Really appreciated the security group like approach to network policies.
Unfortunately I haven't worked with HPE or Dell recently so I'm not sure what they currently offer.
You don't go to oxide for lowest cost.
I think the idea is that, in fact, you do.
Not one-time cost, but rather TCO.
You get a fully auditable hardware and software BOM, and you get an air-gapped, API-driven, on-prem cloud.
You still have a fairly large up front cost ($600k base in 2023ish numbers, probably over $1M now?), and an ongoing support subscription.
I think it’s fair to assume the idea is for it to eventually be more cost effective than other solutions as they scale up.
I've never been under the impression that is the case.
They are filling a niche no one else is for a small pool of fish with virtually endless pockets.
That really doesn't sound like a good business though.
I can't even fathom this statement tbh, it doesn't make any sense. They are in the most profitable and protected niche there can be in the US.
Historically, selling to a small niche of price-insensitive customers (e.g. mainframes, defense) breeds complacency and eventual failure. You can see VMware go down that death spiral over its history where every release was more expensive with less innovation.
> Historically, selling to a small niche of price-insensitive customers (e.g. mainframes, defense) breeds complacency and eventual failure.
VMware was a publicly traded company got more than a 20 year run where they dominated virtualization and captured over 80% of virtualized servers. That a publicly traded company sold out to another publicly traded company over and over after two decades where they got scraped for change in the couch cushions doesn't surprise me at all.
> (e.g. mainframes, defense) And yet mainframes are still in use, still getting purchased, and Defense is by far the largest segment seeing movement in the US right now. TONS of dollars, much of it going into AI, drones, etc. Much of which needs digital and infrastructure development and deployment for R&D and operations.
Right now is probably an amazing time for them sales / interest wise. A LOT of money going into software and hardware attestation right now.
Hit me up @oxidecomputer.com
This is an embarrassing response.
How so?
you can't deny that comes off condescending for a _client_ looking for your business
Because OP's email is in their bio, for one.
He asked the business for a sales rep through their sales portal a year ago. That is enough. Shouldnt have to complain a year later on a social media platform to get a response that says "hit me up".
Ignoring a sales request for a company that wants to spend ~1M only to say pls reach out to me again after we had our second funding round in 2026? The OP literally could go back to their sales lead db and respond like a real business. So yeah unprofessional and embarrassing.
we spend 2-2.5M a year I wouldn’t consider us their product scale yet.
My understanding is the full rack is about $1.2M and smallest half rack is about $600k and this was before the RAM and other price hikes now.
You are still going to have some residual cloud workloads(so all AWS won’t migrate ) and HA and DR regions etc plus the maintenance and incidentals (power , connectivity ).
I don’t expect anyone less than 5M spends and high base loads is a good fit for their offering.
I mean its capex vs opex, assuming a 5 year deprecation period thats 1.2 million isnt too bad, its 10% of their aws spend.
If your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.
You are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better.
Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs.
The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff is “hard.”
It is worth the exercise to honestly assess the maintenance, initial costs, ongoing costs, etc etc for owning your own. I did this at a company for a single server to let the ml group test fine tuning frameworks/throw crazy ideas at before spending real money on a training run and it paid for itself in like 3 months. Sometimes the math is overwhelmingly positive, sometimes it isn't. In general, the smaller/earlier you are the less it makes sense. Not because of the per hour costs, but because of the distraction away from implementing the core idea of the company. It is worth some, maybe a lot of, inefficiency to stay focused. When you get bigger and have strong fit and a clear direction it is a lot easier to focus on optimizing hosting costs and spending leadership time away from the core problem of the company.
It’s always a spreadsheet decision.
Seems like people missed the end of what I wrote though. We run some bare metal but do not physically handle it. There’s many companies who will rent huge boxes with good connectivity in a data center. DataPacket is the best we have found for price and reliability.
Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
> Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
CISA has identified 16 US industries where they have noted that companies should be able to operate indefinitely without internet access. See the Water Plant hack stories coming through right now across more than 19 states, for example. Water, electricity, internet access / telecom, military, chemical, logistics, transportation, etc.
Oh man I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten into arguments on here and other technical forums years ago about self-hosting and how 'stupid' I was to not want to rent cloud servers
You’re expressing a very narrow engineer’s perspective that doesn’t consider the realities of managing bare metal hosting at any kind of scale.
These are business decisions, made in terms of core competencies, capex vs. opex, and the difficulties and cost of building out a reliable, sustainable hosting operation that handles all the compliance and security requirements, and the full range of “ilities” that real businesses have to deal with.
The fact that Bob in IT might be capable of doing some of this on his own doesn’t really enter into the picture. It’s not relevant.
There’s a reason that most companies don’t operate their own electricity generation systems. Much the same is true for computing systems.
There are also many shades of gray between "big cloud" AWS/Azure/GCP and "my own rack" bare metal hosting.
Right like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it
Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a premium to only deal with SaaS logistics.
(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)
Ok but add up a trickle of those examples, with staff to handle them, and you're still comfortably in the black.
You dont even have extra organizational overhead. Every cloud first company has a head of devops sitting in the chair where head of infra would be. They somehow wind up with like half the staffing anyways compared to running bare metal.
You still need to do devops on your own infrastructure.
Our colo experience was pretty smooth, nothing insane like that, and saved us a bundle. Apparently ymmv. I hate working with AWS APIs by comparison, some of the worst UX I've ever seen.
This sounds like either an extremely bad experience or an account from many years ago. Things are better now.
Also like I said: physically racking only makes sense if you are huge. Managed bare metal is a whole market category and it’s spectacularly cheaper than big cloud for most work loads. For bandwidth it’s like 1000X cheaper. That is not an exaggeration.
I've dealt with both. I am continually amazed that people not only pay for AWS, but that it is so complicated, and that they use it in all sorts of absurd ways, not even just hosting 'vms' but using all sorts of amazon tools to do trivial tasks. I am sorry I just dont get it. Is it like learning salesforce and once you're sucked in you're just in? I am so glad I do not work at an AWS shop anymore and am very glad to be in a position where we do not use it.
I actually do get public cloud as well as running your own racks. There is room for both. Your startup is growing 100% every quarter but you're not sure if you have real PMF yet? Yeah probably stick with cloud. Zombiecorn growing 10-20% yoy or not growing and you're paying the cloud $10M/y for 6yo CPUs? - pretty foolish to continue doing that.
You get AWS certifications, use as many AWS services as possible to pad your CV with the service experience and certifications, get your arguments and "well architected" dogma from AWS sales. Then you can get paid more at the next company (or at least high salary offers to extract a raise).
Also building high complexity systems that require a big expensive cloud engineer staff gets you status and visibility. In a tight spot you can still blame AWS for problems.
(Reality is not quite so bleak as people are not completely cynical)
Having worked on some systems where the previous developers drank the AWS kool-aid, this rings true.
or things like "Datacenter bombed by Iran..."
...or "the UPS batteries caught on fire", or "the first unit failed and the contractor who was supposed to replace it replaced the second one instead, resulting in an outage".
Or something as stupid as, "vendor requires $50 failed DIMM replaced under warranty to be returned by UPS instead of chucked into the e-waste bucket, but UPS cannot pick up from DC because the driver can't be bothered to ring the bell on the DC gate".
That one alone probably resulted in our longest ever ticket.
The physical world sucks.
I probably wouldn't start with buying a big server if I was just starting out. I would consider renting one from Hetzner, OVH, or many others.
There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidth.
Then buy a small server first. You don’t need a “big” server when you’re just starting out.
Personally, I'd rent a small server first. About 20 years ago I had a small web hosting operation with my own racked servers. It's a pain to deal with when something goes wrong. Eventually we transitioned to renting dedicated servers.
Agreed, it’s why I said “at any kind of scale”.
There’s a sort of arguable sweet spot where someone motivated and knowledgeable can manage their own hardware, even if it’s just rented from Hetzner etc. But that just doesn’t scale.
Once you do try to scale that - not just the hardware but the staffing that’s needed to avoid a bus factor of 1, to ensure the required uptime especially if it needs to be 24x7, to handle disaster recovery, failover, security and compliance issues etc. etc., you quickly run into all the reasons that infrastructure management services and other computing services - i.e., cloud - have won out so definitively.
If you’re small enough that none of those things matter very much to you, and knowledgeable enough to run your whole system yourself, and have the time and inclination to deal with it, go for it! But such people are outliers who are really indulging a hobby more than anything else. It generally makes extremely little business sense.
Most corporations past a certain point have in-house counsel because it would be ruinous to pay Big Law for every little thing.
That's not a narrow legal perspective, it's one look at a very obvious balance sheet. The same could go for hosting.
Your legal department does not replace your retained lawyers, they add to it. It’s separate roles.
Sure, just like CDN or rarely-used excess capacity could be separate roles to the bulk of your compute.
If you're racking up 750/hr putting big law on routine corporate tasks then you are probably messing up. Hire an admin.
Your legal department usually doesn't do litigation. This is contracted to external offices.
the capex vs opex arugment would be persuasive if you couldn't lease servers. and obviously colo was always opex. basically the only time you'd get into serious capex was when you were building your own datacenters
You’re forgetting blame: if an on-prem system has an issue, that’s 100% on you. If AWS/GCP/Azure has an outage, that’s just bad luck, and everyone else suffers too.
Until someone gets the bright idea that you should be multi-region.
Frankly. Most of that stuff is corporate bullshit. Compliance is 99% fucking theatre, cover your ass audits with a fancy check list.
The capex vs opex theatre is just stupid economics and bad generalization from wall street types.
Almost nothing of it is really real.
And your analogy may impress other glorified salesman, but it doesn't hold water for a second, electricity is fungible, computing is not, electricity is stateless, you computing infrastructure carries your data. Power consumption generally is not a competitive differentiator,computing often is. And of course, the economics IN THE FUCKING REAL WORLD is broken: It is very hard to compete with the prices of the grid, not so in the modern cloud world where hyperscalers captured market enough to feel free to start extracting monopolistic rent from their consumers. And even the premise is uninformed, heavy industry frequently resorts to co-generation, and now, ironically, even data centers projects are exploring it.
Logical.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
Which many keep forgetting is that there was no one else wanting to acquire Sun, IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn, and that was it.
Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.
Google could have bought Sun for less than they wound up paying in a decade of legal fees anyways over Android Java.
Indeed, which is why I am the opinion they had nothing to complain about.
However given their track record designing programming languages, thankfully that did not happen.
Actual shout out to Oracle inexplicably moving Java forward a ton while also not strangling it with fees and suing their own customers. Wonder if there's a story of some genius, unsung internal salesman who made that happen.
I don't think that's true. Oracle just came in with clearly higher price then anybody else was willing to even consider.
They could also have fired a lot of people and likely survived. But the CEO clearly had no interest in that path.
One great thing about historical fact is that anyone is able to check them, including interviews with key figures.
I am using computers since 1986.
Ironically, not only are you entirely wrong on the facts themselves, but the historical record in this case is incredibly (and unusually) crisp: the Merger Proxy Statement that Sun had to file with the SEC[0] has, in accordance with Delaware law, the full narrative of the acquisition.
In the "Background of the Merger" section of that document, there is an incredibly detailed (and interesting!) story of three companies: Party A, Party B, and Oracle. (As was well-known at the time, Party A is IBM and Party B is HP.) As that narrative makes clear (and contrary to your assertion), it was Sun that rejected IBM's definitive agreement, not the other way around. You can certainly argue that IBM's acquisition of Sun would have failed to complete for other reasons (regulatory and so on) -- but your assertion that "IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn" is simply (and demonstrably) wrong.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709519/0001193125091...
How about the sellout of Joyent to Samsung?
Joyent was founded in 2004. Bryan joined in 2014 - I doubt he had much, if any, say in the sale proceeding or not.
He became CTO in 2014. I was familiar with him at Joyent some years before that though.
edit/update: and the Samsung acquisition was in 2016. So I'd hope the CTO would have _some_ involvement in that decision.
This all became pretty personal over here!
To answer these questions (or accusations?): Yes, I was at Joyent for the acquisition by Samsung -- but I also was not a founder, did not have a board seat, etc., so the involvement that I had, while substantial at some level (working with the Samsung team when they were doing their significant due diligence, for example) was also ultimately limited. My job was to make the acquisition work, not to determine the fate of the company for which I was ultimately an employee.
It's also absurd to call the sale a "sellout" -- the company was not for sale when Samsung came calling. The deal that Samsung proposed was a good and fair one, and if I HAD been on the board, I would have absolutely voted for the acquisition. (It should be said that Samsung themselves had a very high threshold to close the deal -- 97% of shares IIRC?)
And all of THAT said: while I was supportive of the acquisition by Samsung of Joyent (and worked hard to make that acquisition work), when we started Oxide, Steve and I had (and have!) zero interest in building a company to be acquired. Oxide is our life's work (and I mean that "our" broadly, as many at Oxide feel that same calling), and our objective with Oxide is to build an independent, generational company. Indeed, this Series D is all about advancing that objective!
Joyent was likely a part of what convinced Brian Cantrill that a new cloud machine was needed. They had their own stack running on commodity OEM hardware in their own cloud - likely a painful experience, since Brian talks a lot about how much of a difference it makes to own the complete root of trust and everything in it.
I doubt that. Oxide was founded by a bunch of ex-Sun people who have already been burned by the Oracle acquisition. If you read through what they say, their company values, and how they act, it's pretty clear their intent is to grow a sustainable long-term business and they're not looking for an exit.
VC funding is not for "a sustainable long-term business".
We are trying to build a sustainable long-term business! It's just that you need enormous amounts of money to get there when shipping this large a product.
The idea behind VC funding generally is that you need large infusions of capital to get to the point where the business becomes sustainable long-term. The first one is the most expensive, and so on. Hardware is capital-intensive compared to SaaS, and especially so in the current environment.
Read the blog post on their series C [0]. It's not long, but the most relevant excepts are:
> 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. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the table.
> ...
> Our intent in starting Oxide was not to be an acquisition target but rather build a generational company; this is our life’s work, not a means to an end. With our Series C, customers don’t have to merely take our word for it: we have the capital to assure our survival into the indefinite future.
Maybe you could read that and think its complete bullshit and they're lying their asses off. Considering the people behind Oxide and their history, that's vanishingly unlikely though.
The reasonable conclusion is that they would not have raised yet more money if it wasn't due to being offered very generous terms by investors who wouldn't threaten the long-term future of the business.
[0]: https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c
It says "they've entirely derisked capital" and now ~6 months later they raised twice as much. Lying is a strong word but that post clearly wasn't accurate at the time.
They've raised a lot of money and there will be pressure for an exit sooner rather than later.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
You can be cashflow positive and still benefit from having a larger pool of cash to throw around, particularly in any situation involving hardware manufacturing.
If you tell your investors "our limiting factor is how fast we can spend to deliver on additional requirements for these new customers", then it can both be true that you're not going to miss payroll for 5 years no matter what happens tomorrow and more cash would be beneficial.
No, it's not necessarily true but it is a well trod path.
Look at how much the components cost 6 months ago and now. That may explain why some calculations shifted considerably. It may be an act of keeping up with the market and having some reserve.
Depends on the VC. Some VC's are happy to own great businesses, even long term. Most are definitely vultures after a quick turn around. Mostly it has to do with where the VC gets their funding. Most VC's get their funding from offering a fund with a 2-5 year time-frame. Some are 10 yr funds, and some are long-term funds or are funded by a family office or two, which can be happy with great businesses long term.
I expect the majority of Oxide's customers are actively trying to escape Broadcom's VMWare hell. Can't see how something like that would make sense.
It makes sense for Broadcom to remove that avenue of escape, and it makes sense for Oxide's investors to charge a premium to Broadcom, and materialize their returns.
The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
Some of their larger costumer might want to buy them instead so it doesn't happen.
Makes sense for Broadcom.
Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).
Good question. Can’t eliminate the BIOS/UEFI on commodity systems. Can’t remove/cut down the BMC. Can’t plumb the hardware root of trust into the OS and VMs. Can’t do dynamic rack-level power capping (future roadmap). There’s a whole bunch of the software stack that only works because the hardware and software were designed together.
Oxide exists in part because commodity systems don’t work for building a cloud at scale (Joyent). Similarly, AWS, GCP, and Azure don’t use commodity systems, they use hardware that was designed to work together with their software, Nitro being a prime example.
Managing a single commodity device is pretty simple. Could even be a shell script with a few IPMI commands.
Managing 100s of devices from a mix of vendors is possible becomes itself a massive ball of crap to stick all the pieces together.
Then add firmware management because now there is a plethora of firmware updates to worry about.
And then dealing with networking discovery & orchestration for such setups is an added horror few even try to visualize.
Then abstract all these differences away so one can provision two different vendor’s servers connected to two different vendor’s managed switches in different racks to a new VLAN. And do it with SR-IOV while you’re at it…
Oh, I forgot shared storage… details, details…
Commodity computing is the modern day Tower of Babel.
Yes, it can be done much simpler if one treats all switches as unmanaged, all storage as local, and all networking as flat. That’s just not acceptable for a lot of use cases though…
It's not actually secret — it's open source! We talk openly about our architecture.
Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s
Their machines are x86 but they've rearchitected basically everything else in the pursuit of a cohesive and integrated machine, they don't even have a BIOS. The secret sauce is having full control of the software stack, and as close to full control of the firmware as is possible on x86.
What can't be replicated is a culture of simplicity, quality, and security. I've seen this firsthand working at IBM.
(Former oxide)
Yes, custom hardware is a significant part of Oxide. You have to build your own to do that stuff, and that’s why they did. I alluded to some of the things upthread.
I found out about this round from this thread, just like everybody else, but
> Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint
That’s not the only reason to raise a round, by far, especially when you, you know, are building custom hardware. It isn’t a SaaS business.
EDIT: here’s another commentor with an example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176704
> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.
Which only matters to consumers. Businesses at scale have teams doing this stuff and costs matter.
I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.
The market is anyone who wants a private cloud but isn’t as big as an Amazon or Google who could build it themselves. Seems like a big enough TAM.
If large corps see the value and build whole data-centers with oxide racks, a few large costumers alone can be huge.
I suspect part of this raise has to with Antropic using Oxide at pretty large scale.
If its really true that things will move from public cloud to private in large scale, its not narrow at all.
And they have a pretty clear fitting product range they can expand into.
> I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.
You may not have heard, but the US government just prints money.
Banks make a lot of it, too.
... and Anthropic for instance.
> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers?
It was technically possible with (e.g.) OpenStack for years (decades?) before Oxide ever existing, and yet even with such a solution being around, some folks still went with Oxide. (Or, depending on the scale you want to talk about: Proxmox, XCP-ng.)
Complete hardware and software and firmware BOM. You won't get that anywhere.
> Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to.
Depends on what you mean by that. Broadcom cremated a lot of VMware's goodwill in the market.
tbf they are probably looking for customers with cloud spend ending in 'm'
I wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error).
Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.
(Former Oxide)
An in-house team is most likely competing with something like Dell or VMware, not really Oxide. A significant part of Oxide’s value proposition is that you’re buying hardware and software purpose built for each other. Unless you’re also going to go so far as to do all of that, which companies like Google do, of course, it’s not really the same thing.
This matters when your various vendors start pointing at each other when something goes wrong. Oxide is truly “one throat to choke” in a way others just aren’t, and stand by that quality.
(Not to mention other various efficiencies, like power, or removing things like the BIOS and BMC junk that’s in basically every other server you buy right now. And the ability to send attenuation from boot up through the host OS. Just tons of things they’re differentiated on that your in house team just isn’t going to do.)
"attestation" not "attenuation," thank you autocorrect :/
The more I read responses on here, the more I realize how much marketing work oxide needs to do even for the HN segment, which is very bizarre to me.
For me, Oxide is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the computing market in a long time.
Hacker News has a wide variety of people in it, but certainly leans more toward software expertise.
VC or private equity fueled companies are weird. At my place we are spending 8 figures a year just in AWS, and it's not like they planning to move to bare metal but, they're in fact removing stuff from their old datacenter. And that bill doesn't include some of the other SaaS like Mongo or Elastic.
With bills of that magnitude, each time I do a little house cleaning and delete some old data, change storage classes, or discover some unused servers... the savings (that are barely a rounding error on their bill) could pay for a whole year of an engineer or a bunch of servers that could power a good chunk of their production traffic.
That's just any company with serious money.
Its not about bare metal, its about owning the whole stack and giving visibility into every nook and corner, and then supporting that open sourced code. Every network switch, every interconnect, every piece or firmware or software they can attest to because they built it themselves, and that is worth its weight in gold to high criticality industries and governments. They can give you the provenance for every single hardware and software component. Every chip.
If you can roll around those possibilities in your head, you start to see how absolutely unique this is and why these extremely sensitive and important customers and industries want this.
Well that isn't that much. $1M / month feels more like it.
Forbid a business can grow, haha
Say you are spending $1M. Round up. Or even 0.9M. Their sales might only return inquiries with cloud costs ending in M.
Just like the last Oxide post, I just have to say how excited I am for their product as a concept. I really hope to see them continue to do well!
Selfishly of course so I can make sure there are more episodes of Oxide and Friends for years to come. Adam annd Bryan's ability to reference thirty year old simpsons episodes is unmatched.
$400m of Simpsons references is undeniably a good use of VC.
Is is a perfectly cromulent use of capital.
I've seen posts about Oxide for years now, but do they actually ship hardware? I've never seen images, or posts about companies with their new Oxide Thingamajig™
We've shipped kind of a lot of hardware at this point!
there are even images of it on our website!
The CEO of Shopify tweeted about it at one point:
* https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669
as far as I can tell, yes?
It seems like Jane street and lawrence national laboratory are two confirmed customers.
With those two names it makes more since that I haven't seen anything regarding their use. Not exactly Joe Schmoe LLC as customers.
Joe Schmoe LLC will probably do just fine by sticking to popular clouds. I reckon adopting Oxide Computer would pay off at much larger volumes of traffic, or if you have to do on-prem due to regulatory reasons.
It would be nice to know more about pricing so the Enthusiast Joe can have a better idea, but it's more a boutique vibe right now.
Putting together bits and pieces from different sources: a half-rack is the minimum SKU, and it has 1024 cores and 16 TiB RAM for somewhere around $600k. (So many people have repeated the latter number that it must be true! I.e., add salt grains to taste.)
Just the thing for an ambitious enthusiast to upgrade to from their Raspberry Pi rack!
Is that an up-to-date quote? That's not a bad price for 16 TiB of RAM. Once you add the CPU cores and the storage, it's actually an amazing deal.
Very good point. That number almost certainly doesn't take into account recent RAM price increases, etc.
Tracing back through all the multitude of references to the $600k price, the earliest I found was from 2023, and it's completely unsourced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840
I couldn't find any evidence Jane Street is a customer, only that Jane street is an investor. Do you have a source for that?
Not OP, but someone I met who worked for Jane Street said that he was pretty sure that Oxide sold to them and was their primary customer.
Furthermore, do they ship only to the US or can those racks be bought elsewhere too?
Elsewhere! We’re completing compliance testing to deliver to Europe.
Most of their customers wouldn't be the type to let others know.
I will implicitly trust anything Jessie Frazelle works on. Rare combination of taste, skill, and passion.
She stepped down several years ago.
She was still listed as an advisor in some capacity, but she moved on to a different startup.
From a 2024 interview:
> In this episode, we sit down with Jessie Frazelle, CEO and co-founder of Zoo, a company working on innovative software and hardware technology. Jessie shares her fascinating journey, from getting her start at digital agencies to working at tech giants like Google and Microsoft and ultimately co-founding her own successful startup, Zoo.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MkDJMiB_8U
> Zoo makes CAD truly AI-native with a modern geometry engine, readable code, and an editable feature tree at its core, enabling AI to make precise geometric changes without trapping users in a chat-only workflow. https://zoo.dev View our current openings: https://zoo.dev/careers Check out our blog: https://zoo.dev/blog
* https://www.linkedin.com/company/zoodotdev/
* https://zoo.dev
Zoo really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They got so many things about CAD right (new kernel, solid UI, programmatic language with either graphical or text editing) then they went and did this extremely online-only/SaaS model where they're rendering and streaming the 3D from their cloud. And last time I checked your design files live on their cloud.
That's just not an acceptable modality of software for complex hardware industries. I'm not going to launch a half-decade long engineering project on a subscription software where I rent access to my own design files and logic. You can't access CAD on a plane, in flaky WiFi, or at a remote test facility or site. Until they let me just buy and run their software on my team's computers it's a non-starter.
yep, another fan here!
They just raised $200M in February and $100M a year ago.
Must be a pain scaling hardware procurement in a market where everything is overpriced.
Preparing for an IPO maybe?
Funding RAM purchases...
So with all the money raised, it's telling me there is a chance of a home-lab Oxide rack :-) (Congrats guys)
Wish I could have heard back about my job application there. It looks like a really exciting place to work.
Same, especially given how long that app specifically takes.
I've been following closely and have been both very impressed with what they're building but also very disappointed. They have a great vision for a seamless hardware project, but completely missed the point of what the software automation to tie it all together should look like.
I'd love to give Bryan Cantrill or ahl a 30 min demo. Feel free to ping!
left hand: governance gaps, privacy, owning instead of renting
right hand: nearly every employee of every org buying these things is sending almost everything to LLMs - or using software ULTIMATELY written by, tested by or whatevered by, these LLMs. LLMs that were created by or distilled from anthropic, openai, or google, who see everything SALIENT about what you do, or what ALL of your customers do, even if they are careful about not looking at the specifics of what you do
Preempted the blog post.
Man, they are just sucking up capital. If somebody like Antropic has made them the primary 'CPU' rack, then that's they kind of cash you need.
I mean, you could probably get multiple GIGAbytes of RAM with 445M.
The real question is why did Steve Klabnik leave
Exactly what I said here: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-see-a-future-in-jj/
I am still a huge fan and supporter of Oxide, and I'm really glad to see them still doing well.
Just read the post you linked but didn't really get it. You left oxide to build something on jj?
yes, specifically https://www.ersc.io/