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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

- 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to some degree) have to deal with for compatibility since no one company has enough leverage to clean up poor or outdated legacy decisions in the stack.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?

Can you link me to a rack you can buy from them, I couldn't find any. Are they it conventional servers? What's the software base?

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.

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