Our $445M Series D
oxide.computer
oxide.computer
Oxide continues to be one of the most inspiring companies in the space, I was just encouraging someone to apply there yesterday. :)
You could be a hero. A legend. The internet might even write poems and sing songs about you.
However! You absolutely can use non-simulated Omicron: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron/blob/main/docs/how-...
You'll get a single node control plane that's mostly workable, and be able to spin up VMs all day with it. That's what I did. Additionally, if you want to play with microcontrollers you can install Hubris onto STM32H753ZI dev boards! I have one connected to my TrueNAS server over UART and USBTTY for sensors, power management, and console.
I want something like a Synology for the drives, but with something like a Mac Mini for the computer. Ubuntu or similar.
I’ll keep dreaming.
it’s not perfect, i need to run more on the synology than is ideal for containerized reliability reasons, but it’s acceptable for personal stuff
I have had the older version of it for almost 10 years now.
I got another great offer after just 1 interview that I took, so I never went through their process, but it looks very exhausting to me. Being rejected after investing so much time must also feel awful.
I’ve also done interviews that were brief 30-60 minute casual discussions followed by an offer during the hiring craziness that happened in a few years in the past. Anecdotally, coworkers at those companies were a completely random range from smart and kind down to the meanest, most clueless people I ever worked with. They had high turnover both because they were always firing bad hires (hire fast only works if you also fire fast) and people were burning out from the perpetual stream of bad hires being randomly injected into the company after they talked their way through the short interview.
Looking back, the interview processes that took the longest were certainly not perfect, but the companies that had them were much better about maintaining a coherent culture and high bar for the coworkers I would get. Every new hire felt like someone amazing who I was happy to be working with.
Everyone has different priorities, but looking back I think the relatively small amount of time I invested into long interview processes (relative to the 2000 hours I work every year) was time well spent.
the problem is that when the job market isn't too hot, you might be applying to a dozens or even a hundred+ positions. if 5-10 of those all have 9 hour processes, well now you have 1-2 full weeks work of unpaid interviewing to do, which is a lot to organize, prepare for, etc.
For normal job changing, people are more selective and interview maybe a couple times per year, spread out over time. In my experience it hasn’t been hard at all to get 3 hours here and there for interviews. Tech company culture is usually forgiving about people leaving for appointments and other things so this isn’t nearly as hard as it is for some of my friends in other careers where it’s PTO every time.
I’ve also not actually seen many cases where people schedule 10 interviews at once and actually get the full interview experience at every one of them. People get rejected at earlier stages of the interview process or they start pulling out if they realize the job isn’t a good fit. It would be very rare for someone to schedule 10 interviews and actually invest the maximum time into every single one of them.
So I understand your concern, but in my observation this pattern doesn’t really happen. People have been doing much more involved interviews (travel, flights, hotels) for decades.
right, people will do it, but then they'll complain on a forum about having to spend 60+ hours (with prep time) for a handful of interviews with no guarantee of a position and i think that's a fair complaint to make.
>I’ve also not actually seen many cases where people schedule 10 interviews at once and actually get the full interview experience at every one of them. People get rejected at earlier stages of the interview process or they start pulling out if they realize the job isn’t a good fit.
sure, but even if you drop out partway through the process, the prep time remains the same, you're still blocking out time and scheduling, you're still occupied for a portion of the day, etc.
>So I understand your concern, but in my observation this pattern doesn’t really happen.
i have observed it often enough with my former students (and sometimes current ones) to be understanding of the people complaining about a 9 hour interview.
This is an acceptable filter for me on both sides of the table.
You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Where you work should be a major life decision. These are the humans and craft you’re going to spend your time with/on for 40+ hours a week for years. You aren’t going to get a glimmer of understanding of the culture, people, and work in a single 45 minute interview (short of major red flags).
If all you’re doing is looking for a job, any job, I get this sentiment - and the other side of the table needs to be looking for a butt in a seat, any butt, and then these shotgun interviews work.
But if you’re optimizing for career and quality of life, having an extended diligence process is a pro, not a con. Especially since that means the team you’re joining has passed muster in the same diligence process when they were hired.
A strong diligence process signals the company takes who they hire seriously - and that the people who work there take where they work seriously.
Having 9 rounds of interviews sounds crazy excessive. Why is the 9th interview needed that you couldn’t have figured out by the 8th interview? If regular companies do that, I opt out, it’s a don that they are delusional, inefficient, incapable of making decisions and don’t respect candidates time and potentially different life circumstances (candidates might have family, full time work, hobbies, other interviews).
On the other hand, their company is quite unique, I bet they have enough applicants, so in the end it’s supply and demand, and companies in extreme demand can make their interview process as tiring as they wish…
Sometimes i wonder if I would have a better career if I was more proactive in my job searches, but I do enjoy the experience of being pursued a lot more enjoyable than pursuing.
Reading the article though it was interesting that having a positive EBITDA was the real news here. Not a single AI company can claim that. That's a pretty big milestone.
Reading the replies here, most are assuming that every candidate gets the maximum interview duration. I see a lot of arguments that if someone applies to M jobs and each requires N hours of interviews then they're spending M*N hours without knowing they'll get a job.
Usually you don't get scheduled for interviews at all unless there's a good chance that they expect you to pass the hiring bar. When you are scheduled for interviews, they don't go straight to the full gauntlet until the early interviews show promise.
So by the time someone goes through the 3 x 3 hour interviews in this example, there's probably a very good chance that they're being seriously considered as a hire.
I think part of the reason is that interviews have gotten more adversarial as time has gone on. Ie less respect for the interviewee, more of a power dynamic, more careless wasted time in lazy take home assignments, etc.
I wouldn't mind 9 hour interviews to 3 companies if i knew i'd land the job. It's the 1,000 companies that many people experience that gives them pause after so much disrespect through time.
Once a system gets gamed en masse, anti-gaming measures dominate, and ruin, the whole process. See also: ads vs. ad blockers, and the fact that you can't run a fucking email server of your own anymore without jumping through security hoops.
How far back are you referring to? I'm definitely not the oldest person around here, but most of my interviews since graduating college were more than casual conversations.
The exceptions were primarily where I was coming in via a referral or they were hiring me for something that was already proven and verifiable, like open source contributions.
There were some companies like Microsoft who were starting to become known for being more intense, but I never came across that.
It wasn't until the mid-aughts that I started to see brain teasers, "real" whiteboarding, and other aspects that started to bleed into standard interviews.
interviews at twitter back in 2010 were 6 hours and that was true even for me when we had an agreement to acquire my company pending the success of those interviews. at the time they had a lot of ex-googlers and they were setup similarly.
In 30 years of interviewing on both sides, as candidate and as hiring manager, I’ve never seen that myself. I don’t doubt it’s happened. I can’t speak to what’s normal everywhere. But I can say for sure that either a half day or full day of formal interviews (usually depending on both team and company size) has been absolutely standard in my experience, both in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, for decades.
On top of that, all of my jobs I’ve ever had, even when I was a shoe-in because I got the interviews via networking, they all involved multiple days worth of email and phone calls and resume prep and benefits negotiations, and (later in my career) sometimes legal negotiations like non-compete exclusions.
I’ve had lots of casual conversations during the process, but I’ve never been hired on a casual conversation alone, and never seen someone else hired that way.
Until the last few years, the idea of hours and hours of interviews wasn't a thing. I interviewed at IBM and was hired after two, 1 hour interviews. One of those over the phone.
I can't even envision what these interviews are all for. It feels like people attempting over the top risk management, without really scoping the risk. It feels quite disorganized.
I'm not sure why people are indexing so hard on the interviews, as we matriculate very few candidates into conversations; if you want to complain about something, complain about the written nature of our hiring process.[0]
The largest difference I have found between then and now is what the interview actually consists of, not how long they last.
I know in my case, it's not about you directly.
Where I am, exposing someones poor performance is more of an exhibition in the failure of the hiring process and all involved. So, you just keep the under-performers around.
I do find that the latter can be explained by care and concern, and also by organization chaos and poor boundaries. It's hard to tell until you're in them, but I try to avoid the latter whenever I can.
As another commenter mentioned - I now respect companies that take their time in hiring. The last thing I want is to jump on with some company that will hire anyone. But there is an element of respect - if you're just duplicating questions and wasting my time? GTFO here.
I've never been flown somewhere for a multi-day process. 5-hours or less of actual interview time on those for me. The lead-up was usually 3-or-fewer 1hr calls.
Yeah, the travel eats up some other time, but that's different than being grilled for 3 hours straight on three separate days.
I agree with the "that seems overly excessive" position.
I'm very curious what marginal signal they think they get from hours 6-9.
3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.
> 3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.
I think most people would prefer 3 x 3 hour blocks.
A 3 hour block could be worked into a day without anyone batting an eye at every (tech) employer I've ever had. People go to appointments all the time.
A full 8 hour interviewing day requires taking the day off. It's also exhausting to do it all continuously.
The 3 x 3 hour structure also allows the company or candidate to end it early if it doesn't look like it's going to be a fit. I'd rather lose 3 hours and than take a vacation day, spend 8 hours somewhere, and then get rejected if they knew I wasn't a good fit after the first few hours.
On the other hand I like meeting a lot of people that I’d be working with. It’s nice to start day 1 knowing who people are.
We also advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview, so it's not like you're doing all this interviewing for the usual slim chance of being hired. The written materials are the primary filter.
Hiring process RFD: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
It genuinely took me another year to even consider applying to another job it was so demoralizing.
They told me I could re-apply in six months and encouraged me (seemingly genuinely) to re-apply for their capricious activity, I just laughed in their face.
In my experience with this format it isn't like you are coding for 9 hours. It starts with soft HR stuff, ends with a sales pitch to you, and most of the middle is just pleasant conversation with interesting people.
Right, but you're not just doing it with them, you're potentially doing it with lots of companies you're applying to. It would be untenable to devote that much time to every prospect. Oxide can only do it because most other companies don't.
There are lots of axes on which to judge a company so I wouldn't write off Oxide for this alone, but it doesn't speak well of their respect for their candidates' time.
If you consistently fail (or give up) at the very last interview, there's something rather wrong.
Your median/average should be better.
They don’t have every candidate scheduled for the entire time of all the rounds. If you don’t pass earlier rounds, they’re not going to waste time (yours and theirs) hauling you through more rounds of interviews.
If you make it to the end of all of those scheduled interviews, there’s probably a very good chance you’re getting an offer.
9 hours just seems excessive. Other companies have "funnel" hiring processes like this and still manage to do it in 3 hours instead of 9.
My blocker has been the initial written answers to the questions. I've had the questions half-answered for nearly a year now. I want to do it properly (sans AI) but other things come up and I question the EV of spending the time, especially since I'm not a strong writer in the first place※.
For Oxide, it makes sense to demand a strong writer due to their culture, so even if technically qualified I might not be a good fit, assuming I even get an interview.
※ - I write unambiguously, but use point form whenever possible and am not great at naturally writing concisely.
As for the materials, they play a part in the conversation stage, and even if you get hired and interview others hoping to join. Every interviewer reads the materials of the candidate, and we send the interviewer's original materials to the candidate. It's not nearly as tedious as some of these comments are making it out to be (and believe me, I've been through the "ten elevator pitches" gauntlet in my career).
tbh, I really enjoyed filling out my Oxide materials. They got me thinking and taking stock of my wins and motivations, not just the crap we throw on resumes to attract the eye.
Well, they're being paid to do that. That's part of the unfairness. The other part is the time is bounded on the employer side. On the prospective employee side, it's unbounded - you're interviewing until you get a job somewhere.
It's important to remember the interview process isn't just one way. That's 9 hours you get to interview them (which I would personally love to help inform my decision) and you can always walk away early if it doesn't look like it will be a good fit.
I'd go even further if I could, and work on a little test project with the team to feel this out. Despite everyone's best intentions during a hiring process, neither of you know for certain how it'll go until you're in the trenches together.
I did an interview process that was 6 hours, one hour per week, then flew me in for a 6 hour on-site. They decided not to take me at that point and provided no reason.
Suppose you get interviews on 10% of those. That’s 10 interview pipelines, and if every company had this policy, 90 unpaid interviewing hours.
Like the comment elsewhere in this thread, candidates will find other roles before your interview gauntlet concludes.
You’d be so lucky! You could then actually prioritize and choose the companies you might want to work for. If you’re spamming applications and waiting for a low callback rate, the expected value of job offer quality is low and the amount of control you have over where you find work is low.
I’m always so curious when people frame interviewing as unpaid work why they think about it this way; it doesn’t seem like a helpful framing. For someone out of work, looking for a job is a full time unpaid job no matter what, and interviews are a good thing - a chance to talk to people and show them you’re hireable. If you spend your time applying but not interviewing, that’s a signal that your strategy needs to change.
Companies don’t make money on the time they spend interviewing you, they aren’t getting direct financial value out of it either, in fact it’s a cost for them, they lose money on the immediate transaction, but they make it back in spades when they hire good people, just like you make it back in spades when you get hired. Interviews are considered an investment by them, and you should consider whether viewing them the same way and acting on it might actually increase your odds.
When a company says they have 9 hours of interview time, that’s usually the maximum time if you make it through all the rounds. If you get that far, you’re highly likely to get an offer.
You would also be surprised at how many people will actually do 10-20 long interview rounds to try to maximize their chances for the best job.
There are almost two different bubbles of candidates: Those who refuse to do anything more than a couple quick calls, and those who will rearrange their life to spend days putting in work for each job they want. I think that’s fine and everyone should do what works for them, but if you think 9 hours of interviewing is going to turn candidates away from a company like Oxide you’d be very surprised to see the quantity and caliber of applicants who line up for jobs like this.
I think you also might need to adjust your expectations now that AI interview cheating is getting out of control. A lot of companies are moving back to on-site interviews. I’d happily do 3 x 3 hour video calls more than flying and staying at hotels and renting cars to get to an office in another city just to interview.
Spotted your first problem. Don't shotgun apply to anyone and everyone. You should only be applying to jobs you actually want.
I've always preferred this kind of targeted application -- I've applied to 5 jobs total in my ~15 year career and gotten 4 offers, two of which I accepted. Everyone has their own objectives they optimize for -- personally, I care most about building monuments of lasting value.
I'm on the market right now due to a layoff and I have an agent that reviews linkedin every morning and cross references levels.fyi for role leveling and salary and then assess fit to my resume. I get around 5-10 _possible_ positions per day and with human judgement that's usually down to 0-2, averaging about 0.5 per day.
I hear back from probably close to 10% but that's with a highly targeted approach, not just spamming my resume everywhere. And my pipeline is freaking full. It's a full time job doing prep and participating in all the interviews.
The only interview so far that's been a huge time sink has been anthropic's. But that's because I chose it. Their take home I have the option to use between 2 and 8 hours and I used the full 8 hours because I'm highly motivated and the position is well fit to my career history.
Hiring is the most important thing you are doing in a company. Always has been. From my experience it's also highly dependent on how big the org is and how structured it is. No two hiring processes are alike. Common theme I've picked up when hiring people is first and foremost to do a 'vibe check' convo through which both you and the applicant get to know a bit each other, ambitions, learn about the role and do a q&a. If you have experience with this, and you know your team(s), you will easily pick up if the person fits the bill. That usually takes around an hour to two _at most_. Second part is then for the person to talk to the team itself, the team lead. Over time, I found it's best to do a live exercise of either walking through something or doing something (not leet code, just something representative as a mental exercise) while chit chatting about it which is also a covert vibe check. If that passes, third convo is back to the same person initially talked to to strike a deal (which was foreshadowed with terms on the first talk). All in all 3-4 hours total after years of pruning.
Personally - vibe check, vibe check, vibe check. Never let HR do the talk, let HR funnel candidates for a shopping list.. or in this case it seems to be essays that do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN8lcIUKZAU
The discuss it in some other places. That said I don't remember why exactly 9h, more in general why they heir the way they do.
If X and Y are large enough sure. Most of the time X is hidden and Y is hard to gauge.
Oxide can obviously impose a 9 hour interview process because they're a good enough company that lots of smart, motivated people want to work there and thus good candidates are willing to endure that process. Lesser companies obviously can't impose that process because there aren't enough good candidates willing to endure it.
My main point being, different strokes for different folks. If you think that process is too long, great, find a company with a less time consuming process. But Oxide's process obviously seems to work well for them, so I think it's pointless to complain about it (note I don't really think that's what you are doing, but a bunch of reply comments certainly are).
First, some potential candidates (I'll raise my hand) actually prefer a rigorous, onerous hiring process. I prefer to work with people who put a lot of thought and investigation into their technology, and who demand a high bar for their colleagues. I'm not just talking about "length for the sake of length" interviews or irrelevant brain teasers, but I want to know a prospective employer is putting a lot of thought and work into who they hire. One of the biggest red flags for me is if the hiring process is just a bunch of "shoot the shit" interviews.
At some point, there becomes a mathematical impossibility of too many pages of applications for too few evaluators who also have to do the rest of their jobs. Either they don't get quite that many applications, or the initial evaluations must be based on some incomplete reading (looking just at the resume, reading a subsection, skimming, or randomly discarding), or the backlog keeps growing.
Fwiw I also applied and the auto-reply said I should expect to wait 4-6 weeks, which has recently passed without hearing back. The application is a ton of work, and I don't mind doing it with a significant chance of being considered, but I think it's a normal reaction to be devastated if you put all that time and energy into crafting your materials, which manifest all your experience, behavior, and personality, and it turned out nobody read them. I still have a little hope, but I'm sorry you never got a response.
They waste very large amounts of candidate time on an essay like assignment before you get to talk to someone.
Truth be told they already know from your resume if you’d be worth interviewing. That’s enough , and maybe a OA.
The best process I’ve experienced, was a quick conversion with a few technical questions, then I can start as a contractor. If it works out it works, if it doesn’t that’s ok too.
No need for me to write a long paper, when HR probably took one look at my resume and sent out a rejection.
I apply for jobs because I want money. Not to reflect or learn about myself.
It’s just business, even if you do the song and dance to get hired they can still fire you later.
But that should be done later in the process. I'd rather an LLM auto-reject my application vs spending 5 hours on a writing exercise.
Think about, I apply to a minimum of 5 jobs per day. If I need to spend 5 hours for each application I'm spending 25 hours a day on job applications. Obviously this isn't possible.
Be careful what you wish for. You might end up with no writing exercises and a 100% automated rejection rate with no way to figure out why or talk to someone.
Yes obviously you need to choose how to allocate your finite time, that was always true, so think about whether it’s truly effective to apply to so many jobs. You aren’t required to apply to 5 jobs per day, right? You want to maximize your chances of getting 1 job, right? Is it possible that fewer, longer interactions with people (and not LLMs) might increase your chances?
Also consider that getting enough bites on your resume that you have to choose between companies is a great problem to have. Don’t forget that interviews and writing questions also cost the company time, and they’re not asking unless they think there’s a decent chance of success. Nobody is asking anyone to write 5 hours of unique material per application without filtering resumes and talking to candidates a little bit first, so it’s extremely unlikely you could end up with the problem you’re complaining about even if you wanted to.
We are not the same.
Sometimes a company comes along that one what's to join even if its outside my wheel house. Do they have an intern/mentorship program for generalists that one can join that could turn into a FTE?
We're building racks over here! And all our software is open source.
Their product is a bunch of servers in a rack designed to run that open source software.
But you can run most of their software yourself.
It's a big ass computer (technically many computers in a rack) that gives you a cloud provider style API to manage on-premises infrastructure. Plug it in, connect to the web console or API, and provision yourself some sweet sweet virtual machines, disks, and VPCs.
Oxide are so good at comms.
Why are they paying taxes if they have a huge order backlog. Expand your production capability. Amazon famously had no profits on paper for many years because of their relentless expansion.
"Paying our taxes" in this kind of context is nearly always shorthand for "filling out our tax returns". That part usually takes a substantial hunk of time. The actual payment process is typically writing a check or entering credit card info, which just takes a few seconds.
As to why we're paying taxes: while tax minimization is certainly a thing (and we have taken advantage of things like R&D tax credits), we're paying taxes because we're profitable.
I guess the question is why not invest those profits to further expand when there are already a backlog of orders to fill.
But on the other hand Huge Congrats being a profitable company! Hardware business is insanely brutal, and having the backlog is great to hear. AMD being investor I hope you guys get Zen 6c and Zen 7c earlier in the future.
Hiring people is hard, takes time, and timing of big sales closing causing income may not line up well enough with the hiring process to offset that income fully.
Their machines are sold for high prices. It’s not small and not cheap. If a buyer pays in a lump sum that can be a big income and Oxide may not be able to time that ideally for tax purposes.
Buying electronics components is funny. Want to buy 1000 units? Price X. Want to buy 100,000 units, price is X/25. But till you can place an order for every component at the 100,000 quantity, you can’t get those price breaks so your cost to manufacture machines is much higher. $400M may let them buy at those bigger quantities and get those price breaks and it may not have been worthwhile to buy inventory at the lower quantity pricing if the investment round was looking to close real soon now. Cash flow is king, and hard, for hardware companies.
"Compensation Everyone at Oxide makes $275,000 USD, regardless of location."
That said AMD’s participation in this round + heavy hints on the podcast and YouTube suggest they will pursue an GPGPU Compute Sled built around an AMD product.
As the person who runs socials, the idea we push AI on socials doesn’t resonate. I get more feedback around “thank goodness you haven’t pivoted to AI-washing your website/marketing”
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
Or… they could just take on equity investment at no risk.
They're profitable, they are going to get the best terms possible at this moment.
When you sell shovels, even slight downturns are massively exaggerated because the shovels can be resold, and if some of their customers go under, it's not just that demand that goes away, it's all the demand that can be satisfied by their customers purchasing second hand servers from the bankruptcies instead.
No-one can really say how long this bubble will last. Might pop tomorrow, might be a decade. But if Oxide funds inventory on debt, and the bubble pops, they go with it. Whereas if they fund on equity, and it pops, they will come out the other side just fine. The cost of this is that the old stockholders have a slightly lower upside.
Raising a Series D is an attempt to permanently increase the velocity of their enterprise. The change in the cap table is negligible if they succeed.
Raising debt right now would be a massive unforced error given they were able to shore up half a billion dollars in funding. If the funding well were dry then it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.
Can you imagine if they raised $445M of debt?
I'm pretty sure most people getting in are not getting in through classic website application, but by word of mouth, or knowing somebody who's in etc.
It's the type of company where you probably know before applying if you belong or not.
a few days ago I migrated a non-trivial firestore app to sqlite
10x less latency (10x requests / second)
migration took a few minutes (+ 2 days of prep)
just a few months ago that would have been infeasible or at least nerve wracking
In fact, we had a call with some people who worked at GCP, and I (naively, and excitedly) mentioned that our design is simple/minimal and cloud-portable. A miasma of awkwardness fell upon the conversation, and I realized that the reason that the GCP people were so keen to speak to us, was that they were anticipating, that once we used up the credits, that they would then get regular recurring revenue from the company.
Most cloud companies are in the business of locking you in via very convenient APIs, that would be costly to migrate off of, if you did not abstract them away to begin with (naturally, the egress costs cannot be abstracted away, but those were not much of a problem in our case, because our output-data was very small compared to the input-data).
There is an expression in my native language: he who lacks virtue in the head, has virtue in the legs.
Maybe I'm just tired!
Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174407 - Aug 2026 (198 comments)
No GPU support is a hard sell for people who latch onto buzzwords and media narratives without actually understanding technology. CPUs are not going anywhere.
you still need pure compute when doing the agentic ai dance.
you certainly need gpu for inference purposes, but everything else (harnesses, tools, mcps and the actual software) still runs on regular cpus with regular ram and storing data on regular disks.
I could not work at a place where I would be corrected for praise of an accomplishment or working under the fear of misapplying a generally accepted term. The inability to include those who have different opinions by accepting different accents or euphemisms.
"you guys" is just our y'all, it is not gendered! We keep explaining this, we'll add redundant statements like "I have called a group of only women 'you guys', frequently!" and it's like you refuse to believe us.
Ah well.
We believe the best results come from combining different perspectives and uniting them with shared values and mission. We believe in and encourage diversity on any axis that remains consistent with our mission, principles and values.
We abide by the spirit of the truth, not merely its letter; we do not hide falsehoods in language that is technically true or otherwise misleading.
These are from your site. Who defines truth? In this case - HR does.
This is a reason I would not be welcomed at Oxide because my truths (obscene and archaic as they are) would conflict with the local culture despite living two zip codes away.
We treat others with dignity, be they colleague, customer, community or competitor.
and and that a good sense of humor is essential for humility
To some people in the US - 'guys' is gender neutral. This is not respected by them (you) leading them (you) to point out the unintended gendering. There was not intention and there was no gendering. The good will is lost because the respect is not bi-directional. Language-fluid people exist and their diversity brings color and humor to non-binary phrases.
this is political grand-standing or political correctness that leads to nowhere.
did I precede my statement with I'm a black cis-gendered man who likes women and more women ?
honestly some things have to stop.
Timestamped to "the differentiator" (15:45) and "what are you guys doing about GPU?".
They could certainly pick a previous-generation GPU architecture, and get it integrated their way with Rust drivers and whatever else their technology fetishism is, it wouldn't matter because ultimately people want to run software, and right now all the AI software is targeting NVIDIA SDK as a first-class citizen, and AMD SDK as a distant second-class citizen.
So their story is partially correct: get our systems for general purpose and buy GPUs for the rest. It's just that it kind of self-defeats their entire raison d'etre, which is to have a single highly-integrated vendor. Now turns out you still need to deal with the messy world of GPU computing.
Venture Capital is one of the greatest engines of growth, and fitting for the vast majority of early stage tech companies, it is interesting to see how changes in business economics may result in niche, differing capital structures. Eg. Companies which sell RL envs have vastly different economics than a food delivery app.
If each share is worth $1 at the valuation used in the raise, then an investor adding $100 million gets 100 million shares for it. The shares aren’t taken away from anyone, they're issued in exchange for the capital.
So ideally the dilution is neutral to the value of the equity. In practice this is highly variable because the valuations are fuzzy numbers used for the raise, but you get the idea.
If a company can get the same growth without raising, that would be better because the proportional ownership stays higher. However, the reason companies give equity in exchange for capital is that they need the cash for growth and can’t get it on better terms anywhere else.
Another way to look at it, is that it's partly locking in the value of those shares at the time of dilution, effectively reducing the variance of the future value of the existing shares.
As a thought experiment:
If you're holding a lottery ticket that you bought, and someone comes along, says they're going to buy 1,000 lottery tickets, but promises to share any winnings with you pro-rata. You don't really have a choice to say no.
You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1.
It's an expectation neutral thought experiment, but reducing variance isn't always wanted!
Your lottery comparison isn’t logical. I think you’re just repeating the same misunderstanding I was trying to dispel above.
If you want to force the analogy, you would have to imagine a lottery where your win and the investor’s wins are tied together. Either you both win or you both lose. But to make the analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a lottery where their ticket purchase increase the winnings proportionally.
So in this bad forced lottery analogy, you would have a smaller number of the overall tickets, but the same odds of winning as before and the payout would be the same as before.
You’re making the common mistake of assuming that the company could get the same outcome without taking investment money. It’s common to imagine getting that your 0.1% of a sweet $1 billion IPO without ever getting diluted along the way, but getting a company to that IPO point requires a lot of cash. If a company is lucky enough to have all the cash flow they need to get there then they can do it all without dilution. Most companies need to raise some cash to get there, though.
So raising the money actually lowers your variance of getting a large payout, because the cash is what enables the growth to that liquidity event.
Yes, which makes the lottery comparison moot.
If I have a business and I raise $10M at a $100M valuation for 10% of the company, the people giving me the money really value the business at $90M, their addition of the $10M into the business brings the valuation to $100M.
It's not always exactly like that, 1 for 1, but that's the gist. Without the capital, the business is not worth as much as the valuation at the time of the raise.
In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand. It's just not a good metaphor. That's not how buying shares in a company works. Investors don't invest using bearer instruments of totally unknown value. They invest using cash. Cash always adds the value of the cash. That's intrinsic to it being cash.
A much better way to think about it is that you have something in your hand that's worth X dollars and has Y shares. If somebody were to give you X dollars in investment in exchange for Y additionally issued shares, then at the end of that operation the company, by definition, would be worth $2x, and your Y shares would be exactly half of that value, meaning that you start with X and you end with X.
As mentioned, knowing exactly what the company is worth in dollars is a little tricky, but that's the premise, and it completely makes sense.
Back to your lottery ticket example: let’s say you had a company with assets consisting solely of a winning scratch-off lottery ticket worth $1,000, and then you agreed to sell half the company to an investor who contributed $1,000 in cash. At the end of the exercise you would have a company worth exactly $2,000 (the company's assets include the lottery ticket and the new $1,000 of invested cash) and you would own exactly half of it.
If you have a unique skill at buying scratch-off lottery tickets and can turn that $1,000 in cash into more than $1,000 in lottery tickets, then you and the investor win from the transaction. That's what the investor is betting on.
If you can't get those results then the investors shouldn't invest in you and you shouldn't seek investment.
They add greatly to your expected chance of winning, given you have pooled winnings.
Every story where a company sold for an amount that wiped out employee equity (for example every Bending Spoons acquisition) is because they raised too much and it never materialized into (sufficient) growth.
Loans are a lot better when you're in a more stable scenario - lower growth and/or lower risk of implosion due to just being more established.
As well as Oxide is doing, startups are still volatile and taking on debt that might need to restructure or be defaulted can create a lot worse outcome for shareholders than just "we diluted and then stopped growing as much".
I used to think that Oxide's business model sucks in the face of the hyperscalers. When AWS/GCP/Azure "just works" and is generally reliable and cheap, why would I go through the trouble of buying my own computers? Well the past 5 years have been a constant decline towards more concentration of power, lack of care for their customers, and degradation in quality in general. AI is of course accelerating this decline - selling de-slopped products is now a huge competitive advantage. All the best luck to Oxide.
- Series C in Feb 2026 $200M
- Series D now $445M
I expect the next round soon :)
In reality, it could very well be investors just saying “we’re so happy with how things are going, we want more, take our money!!!”
The economics are going to look different than all the sloppified enterprise SaaS startups that charge crazy amounts for a crappy data lake product on S3.
I'm still sad On the Metal is gone, while Oxide and Friends is good, its not quite the same as On the Metal.
Honestly, they have now raised enough money they should have the money to bring back On the Metal. Having one podcast isn't enough for a podcast company that has raised so much money.
Congrats to everybody.
This includes everything from the rack itself to the PDU/switch/BMC, to the actual server blade and its chassis.
All presented in a nice package to give you a on-prem cloud-like experience.
you buy one or more of the data-centre-rack-sized computers, hook em up to each other / your datacentre network, and you now have essentially a cloud services platform like AWS/Azure, in your own datacentre, under your control, with full visibility of what every part of the platform is doing (hypervisor, underlying bare metal kernel, firmware, bootloader, etc), because it's ALL open source, written from the ground up by them
I think it's pretty neat!
https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer
Basically they sell a pre-assembled rack of compute, storage and networking with their own open source management software to build on-premise clouds.
I have no idea why you'd buy that over any of the more established players that have a proven track record of being able to support these multi-million dollar machines for many years.
Its not really like a mainframe at all. Mainframe usually have extreme hardware availability focus with the goal of extreme uptime. This is the opposite of what Oxide offers.
And their OS being open source is far from the primary thing they advertise.
Hoping they hire for a position in my area of expertise some day!
Says a lot about the state of affairs in California
IBM is more than 100 years old and has brought us a lot of innovations of the modern era.
To give a trivial example the relational model for databases was theorized by F. Codd while working at IBM Research (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Relational_Model_of_Data_for... for further details)
IBM still does a bunch of stuff, mainly in the research area. They just don't sell netvista/aptiva computers and ibm laptops since like 2005 or so. They still develop and sell mainframes though.
I'm not sure about the pricing.
Wake me up please