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.
Aurornis 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
huijzer 4 hours ago [-]
> 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
thomascountz 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
jononor 1 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
fuzztester 7 hours ago [-]
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.
panick21_ 21 minutes ago [-]
They mean is that they are much harder to acquire. Their goal is to become an independent public company.
vivzkestrel 4 hours ago [-]
- 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
dasil003 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dasil003 3 hours ago [-]
Sure. What's your point with regards to Oxide?
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
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?
panick21_ 52 seconds ago [-]
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.
dasil003 2 hours ago [-]
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.
xyzzy123 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sunshowers 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
tintor 4 hours ago [-]
It is easier to raise >$100M than few million.
echelon 4 hours ago [-]
The pool of people trying to raise >$100M is smaller. Failures (in terms of typical VC exit trajectory) have mostly been weeded out.
reherhrh 9 hours ago [-]
lol why are you cheering?
kajaktum 6 hours ago [-]
Because they now have money to do cool stuff?
HtmlProgrammer 8 hours ago [-]
perhaps they like their work
fuzztester 8 hours ago [-]
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.
bithavoc 13 hours ago [-]
(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.
apimade 11 hours ago [-]
They work with HFT/quant firms. Look at some of their former engineers who are now at matX.
Their buyers don’t have customer stories. They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
throwaway2037 1 hours ago [-]
> They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
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.
kaladin-jasnah 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nunez 5 hours ago [-]
I believe JPL and INL were their launch customers for gov.
Sayrus 12 hours ago [-]
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.
MichaelZuo 12 hours ago [-]
How did that compare to the big firms? HPE, Dell, and so on.
Sayrus 10 hours ago [-]
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.
esseph 12 hours ago [-]
You don't go to oxide for lowest cost.
jiveturkey 11 hours ago [-]
I think the idea is that, in fact, you do.
Not one-time cost, but rather TCO.
esseph 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ahl 12 hours ago [-]
Hit me up @oxidecomputer.com
ProAm 6 hours ago [-]
This is an embarrassing response.
SleekoNiko 6 hours ago [-]
How so?
pyb 3 hours ago [-]
Because OP's email is in their bio, for one.
mi_lk 3 hours ago [-]
you can't deny that comes off condescending for a _client_ looking for your business
ProAm 5 hours ago [-]
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.
manquer 7 hours ago [-]
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.
AlphaSite 5 hours ago [-]
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.
elzbardico 12 hours ago [-]
If your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.
api 12 hours ago [-]
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.”
jmward01 7 hours ago [-]
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.
pdntspa 7 hours ago [-]
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
antonvs 11 hours ago [-]
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.
icedchai 11 hours ago [-]
There are also many shades of gray between "big cloud" AWS/Azure/GCP and "my own rack" bare metal hosting.
calvinmorrison 11 hours ago [-]
Right like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it
rincebrain 10 hours ago [-]
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.)
nixon_why69 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ericd 9 hours ago [-]
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.
calvinmorrison 10 hours ago [-]
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.
late2part 10 hours ago [-]
or things like "Datacenter bombed by Iran..."
jeffrallen 3 hours ago [-]
...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.
icedchai 10 hours ago [-]
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.
vachina 5 hours ago [-]
Then buy a small server first. You don’t need a “big” server when you’re just starting out.
antonvs 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dilyevsky 4 hours ago [-]
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
nixon_why69 9 hours ago [-]
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.
shye 6 hours ago [-]
Your legal department does not replace your retained lawyers, they add to it. It’s separate roles.
nixon_why69 5 hours ago [-]
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.
__d 10 hours ago [-]
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.
sgarland 10 hours ago [-]
Until someone gets the bright idea that you should be multi-region.
elzbardico 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Alien1Being 12 hours ago [-]
Logical.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
TimTheTinker 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nixon_why69 45 minutes ago [-]
Google could have bought Sun for less than they wound up paying in a decade of legal fees anyways over Android Java.
pjmlp 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
calvinmorrison 11 hours ago [-]
How about the sellout of Joyent to Samsung?
tw04 9 hours ago [-]
Joyent was founded in 2004. Bryan joined in 2014 - I doubt he had much, if any, say in the sale proceeding or not.
glenngillen 7 hours ago [-]
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.
bcantrill 6 hours ago [-]
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!
TimTheTinker 10 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
dkbrk 11 hours ago [-]
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.
senderista 11 hours ago [-]
VC funding is not for "a sustainable long-term business".
sunshowers 6 hours ago [-]
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.
dkbrk 11 hours ago [-]
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.
rincebrain 10 hours ago [-]
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.
treis 8 hours ago [-]
No, it's not necessarily true but it is a well trod path.
zie 11 hours ago [-]
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.
boomskats 12 hours ago [-]
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.
a2ff6eeb0 11 hours ago [-]
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.
panick21_ 11 hours ago [-]
Some of their larger costumer might want to buy them instead so it doesn't happen.
MisterTea 12 hours ago [-]
Makes sense for Broadcom.
Nextgrid 11 hours ago [-]
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).
BobbyTables2 5 hours ago [-]
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…
kev507 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sunshowers 9 hours ago [-]
It's not actually secret — it's open source! We talk openly about our architecture.
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.
wmf 10 hours ago [-]
What can't be replicated is a culture of simplicity, quality, and security. I've seen this firsthand working at IBM.
steveklabnik 10 hours ago [-]
(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.
> 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.)
joshuamorton 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
XorNot 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ahl 8 hours ago [-]
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.
esseph 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
esseph 1 hours ago [-]
Complete hardware and software and firmware BOM. You won't get that anywhere.
FireBeyond 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ellieh 12 hours ago [-]
tbf they are probably looking for customers with cloud spend ending in 'm'
Nextgrid 11 hours ago [-]
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.
steveklabnik 10 hours ago [-]
(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.)
esseph 1 hours ago [-]
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.
tecleandor 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jiveturkey 11 hours ago [-]
Well that isn't that much. $1M / month feels more like it.
aatd86 11 hours ago [-]
Forbid a business can grow, haha
api 12 hours ago [-]
Say you are spending $1M. Round up. Or even 0.9M. Their sales might only return inquiries with cloud costs ending in M.
jjice 10 hours ago [-]
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.
ahl 9 hours ago [-]
$400m of Simpsons references is undeniably a good use of VC.
_kb 8 hours ago [-]
Is is a perfectly cromulent use of capital.
fishgoesblub 13 hours ago [-]
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™
ahl 12 hours ago [-]
We've shipped kind of a lot of hardware at this point!
It seems like Jane street and lawrence national laboratory are two confirmed customers.
fishgoesblub 13 hours ago [-]
With those two names it makes more since that I haven't seen anything regarding their use. Not exactly Joe Schmoe LLC as customers.
mihaelm 12 hours ago [-]
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.
antonvs 7 hours ago [-]
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!
diziet_sma 8 hours ago [-]
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?
kaladin-jasnah 5 hours ago [-]
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.
esseph 11 hours ago [-]
Most of their customers wouldn't be the type to let others know.
LennyWhiteJr 12 hours ago [-]
I will implicitly trust anything Jessie Frazelle works on. Rare combination of taste, skill, and passion.
Aurornis 11 hours ago [-]
She stepped down several years ago.
She was still listed as an advisor in some capacity, but she moved on to a different startup.
throw0101d 9 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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
So with all the money raised, it's telling me there is a chance of a home-lab Oxide rack :-) (Congrats guys)
bkolobara 12 hours ago [-]
They just raised $200M in February and $100M a year ago.
schainks 6 hours ago [-]
Must be a pain scaling hardware procurement in a market where everything is overpriced.
dgellow 12 hours ago [-]
Preparing for an IPO maybe?
newsclues 11 hours ago [-]
Funding RAM purchases...
JRandomHacker42 11 hours ago [-]
Wish I could have heard back about my job application there. It looks like a really exciting place to work.
purpleidea 6 hours ago [-]
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!
doctorpangloss 8 hours ago [-]
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
mmmwonderasj 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
panick21_ 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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...
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure the dotcom bubble had many counterexamples
[1]: https://oxide.computer/blog
[2]: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/
>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.
- 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
Apple is now having that aura, only because they got really really lucky before the money collectors shown up at the door.
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?
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Not one-time cost, but rather TCO.
You still have a fairly large up front cost ($600k base in 2023ish numbers, probably over $1M now?), and an ongoing support subscription.
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.
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.”
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not a narrow legal perspective, it's one look at a very obvious balance sheet. The same could go for hosting.
If you're racking up 750/hr putting big law on routine corporate tasks then you are probably messing up. Hire an admin.
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.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.
However given their track record designing programming languages, thankfully that did not happen.
edit/update: and the Samsung acquisition was in 2016. So I'd hope the CTO would have _some_ involvement in that decision.
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!
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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).
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…
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.
Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s
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
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.)
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.
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.
Depends on what you mean by that. Broadcom cremated a lot of VMware's goodwill in the market.
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.)
For me, Oxide is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the computing market in a long time.
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.
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.
* https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669
It seems like Jane street and lawrence national laboratory are two confirmed customers.
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.
Just the thing for an ambitious enthusiast to upgrade to from their Raspberry Pi rack!
She was still listed as an advisor in some capacity, but she moved on to a different startup.
> 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
I'd love to give Bryan Cantrill or ahl a 30 min demo. Feel free to ping!
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
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.
I am still a huge fan and supporter of Oxide, and I'm really glad to see them still doing well.