Logical.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
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!
While I practically never agree with the guy, Thiel did say that "every startup is a conspiracy". Which is just another way of saying that every business is a conspiracy. The Oxide "conspiracy"[1] is to divert a chunk of the enormous economic surplus that is being captured by Amazon (and Broadcom, and others), and in the process, put some meaningful amount of that surplus in the pocket of the customer (otherwise, there is no reason to switch).
This is an incredibly ambitious goal, that cannot be achieved without upfront capital. Part of it is certainly hardware (which is getting more expensive, rapidly, and so it might make sense to buy years-worth of it), but another part is the _switching cost_ (which the _challenger/conspirator_ usually has to cover for the customer). That cost can easily be measured in the millions of dollars (Dropbox, famously, migrated off of AWS, via a client-side reupload, because moving the data from AWS to their own DCs was prohibitively expensive[2]).
Also, WW3 is slowly unfolding. The only reason energy prices are not in "brownout territory" is because (IIUC) the world's largest oil consumer is importing half as much oil from the mid-east as it used to. A few of the things that I buy, have _not_ gotten more expensive in euros, but they have gotten more expensive in dollars (by around 5% last I checked). If you need to use dollars to stockpile input-goods, now is the best time to do that, if you anticipate that the dollar will lose value over the next year.
A similar logic applies to selling a company. Amazon, in 2016, was already on the path to _massively_ improving the performance of its VMs and cloud services (via using more SSDs, building custom hardware, etc), and bare-metal performance was one of the Joyent selling points. With the resources of a company like Samsung, Joyent could also (potentially) use faster hardware, etc.
However, even under the aegis of Samsung, some (let's call them) _political asymmetries_ could not be avoided. I cannot talk about _internal_ asymmetries, but _external_ ones are already public knowledge. In particular, in 2017 or 2018, spectre and meltdown CPU-exploits hit the industry. All the major cloud providers had advance knowledge of this (and were able to mitigate via KPTI), except for Joyent (who had to work with the OpenBSD community for a few months to fix this). In those few months, if customers wanted to be completely safe, they would have had to move their instances to a different cloud. It is unclear (to me, because I am an engineer and not an accountant or account manager) if Joyent could have survived that without being part of Samsung.
And by the way, this would not have been as urgent of a problem, if Joyent was selling physical machines (like Oxide is, right now), instead of renting them out to multiple tenants. Imagine if an adversary could just spin up a VM right next to yours on the same exact machine. Even without spectre and meltdown, they could probably impact the performance and latency of your VMs indirectly, if they were willing to spend enough money. I once did this by accident (because I, foolishly, overestimated Google) on GCP, via their lambda-equivalent, and found out when they told us that those workloads were moved to a different DC. So if this is a problem for _Google_, it's a problem for everyone.
For at least the last decade, HN has consistently (but, thankfully, not exclusively) been attacking Joyent (and now Oxide), for various perceived misbehaviors[3], while frequently letting much less ambitious projects off the hook. Engineering any meaningfully new or disruptive technology is a very challenging marathon, and doing so, in business circumstances (which can only be characterized as: circumstances where the other runners are armed and always out to get you, while sometimes, the universe itself decides to send a few lightning bolts and storms in your direction) is almost impossible, without either (1) a monopoly, like MSFT and GOOG and AMZN enjoy, or (2) massive amounts of investment-cash that can only come from a very smart and very keen sugar daddy[4].
[0]: I can't recall who said this, but someone at the time said, they were tired of buying Bezos a BMW every month (via their AWS bill). Sometimes, it wasn't even an issue with the size of the bill: Amazon competes with many, many companies out there.
[1]: Based on various public statements. So basically, the Joyent conspiracy, but this time on-prem (so maybe Joyent + Fishworks = Oxide), and with fewer faulty drives (IIRC, there was a batch of drives, worth a huge amount of money, that had bad firmware, which caused their throughput to drop sporadically -- the exact details escape me, but you can see why there is a distrust of firmware written by others (also worth noting, is that this HDD vendor did not even offer to replace the faulty drives, but instead offered a marginal discount on the next order)).
[2]: Not because of any real, physical cost, but because Amazon bills you for every byte that leaves their datacenter (but not for any byte that enters).
[3]: I think it started when Joyent did not honor the "lifetime storage" promise that it made to its customers from the 2000s.
[4]: If anyone knows any wealthy heiresses that are looking to get married (or for a concubine), in exchange for financing my ambition to build an invention that is simultaneously (1) the last invention humanity will ever need, and (2) the invention that humanity needs most urgently, please hit me up. I have a sense of humor and am hung AF.
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.
They could also have fired a lot of people and likely survived. But the CEO clearly had no interest in that path.
I am using computers since 1986.
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...
> 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.
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 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.
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).
Depends on what you mean by that. Broadcom cremated a lot of VMware's goodwill in the market.
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.
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.
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.)
Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s
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 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…