(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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on the VC. Some VC's are happy to own great businesses, even long term. Most are definitely vultures after a quick turn around. Mostly it has to do with where the VC gets their funding. Most VC's get their funding from offering a fund with a 2-5 year time-frame. Some are 10 yr funds, and some are long-term funds or are funded by a family office or two, which can be happy with great businesses long term.
It makes sense for Broadcom to remove that avenue of escape, and it makes sense for Oxide's investors to charge a premium to Broadcom, and materialize their returns.
The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).
> 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.
I've seen posts about Oxide for years now, but do they actually ship hardware? I've never seen images, or posts about companies with their new Oxide Thingamajig™
Joe Schmoe LLC will probably do just fine by sticking to popular clouds. I reckon adopting Oxide Computer would pay off at much larger volumes of traffic, or if you have to do on-prem due to regulatory reasons.
It would be nice to know more about pricing so the Enthusiast Joe can have a better idea, but it's more a boutique vibe right now.
Woot!, they are on a tear:
2023: Series A 44 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...
2025: Series B 100 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b
2026: Series C 200 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c
2026: Series D 445 Million https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1795071/000179507126...
(VP of Eng here) I filled out their sales form last year and never heard from them. We're currently spending $900k/year on AWS, and they didn't even acknowledge my request. crazy stuff.
They work with HFT/quant firms. Look at some of their former engineers who are now at matX.
Intel/Barefoot Tofino 2, VHDL/SystemVerilog, FPGA, QSFP28 (100GbE networking), P4 programming.
Their buyers don’t have customer stories. They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
We had the opposite experience. We contacted them through their form this year and they were happy to discuss with us even when we communicated from the beginning we wouldn't be customer in the short to medium term and even for single rack systems.
How did that compare to the big firms? HPE, Dell, and so on.
You don't go to oxide for lowest cost.
I think the idea is that, in fact, you do.
Not one-time cost, but rather TCO.
Hit me up @oxidecomputer.com
tbf they are probably looking for customers with cloud spend ending in 'm'
I wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error).
Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.
If your CIO is not ideologically averse on paying people instead of paying jeff bezos, you can save money even buying dell.
You are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better.
Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs.
The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff is “hard.”
You’re expressing a very narrow engineer’s perspective that doesn’t consider the realities of managing bare metal hosting at any kind of scale.
These are business decisions, made in terms of core competencies, capex vs. opex, and the difficulties and cost of building out a reliable, sustainable hosting operation that handles all the compliance and security requirements, and the full range of “ilities” that real businesses have to deal with.
The fact that Bob in IT might be capable of doing some of this on his own doesn’t really enter into the picture. It’s not relevant.
There’s a reason that most companies don’t operate their own electricity generation systems. Much the same is true for computing systems.
There are also many shades of gray between "big cloud" AWS/Azure/GCP and "my own rack" bare metal hosting.
Right like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it
Logical.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
How about the sellout of Joyent to Samsung?
I doubt that. Oxide was founded by a bunch of ex-Sun people who have already been burned by the Oracle acquisition. If you read through what they say, their company values, and how they act, it's pretty clear their intent is to grow a sustainable long-term business and they're not looking for an exit.
VC funding is not for "a sustainable long-term business".
Read the blog post on their series C [0]. It's not long, but the most relevant excepts are:
> So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the table.
> ...
> Our intent in starting Oxide was not to be an acquisition target but rather build a generational company; this is our life’s work, not a means to an end. With our Series C, customers don’t have to merely take our word for it: we have the capital to assure our survival into the indefinite future.
Maybe you could read that and think its complete bullshit and they're lying their asses off. Considering the people behind Oxide and their history, that's vanishingly unlikely though.
The reasonable conclusion is that they would not have raised yet more money if it wasn't due to being offered very generous terms by investors who wouldn't threaten the long-term future of the business.
[0]: https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c
It says "they've entirely derisked capital" and now ~6 months later they raised twice as much. Lying is a strong word but that post clearly wasn't accurate at the time.
They've raised a lot of money and there will be pressure for an exit sooner rather than later.
Depends on the VC. Some VC's are happy to own great businesses, even long term. Most are definitely vultures after a quick turn around. Mostly it has to do with where the VC gets their funding. Most VC's get their funding from offering a fund with a 2-5 year time-frame. Some are 10 yr funds, and some are long-term funds or are funded by a family office or two, which can be happy with great businesses long term.
I expect the majority of Oxide's customers are actively trying to escape Broadcom's VMWare hell. Can't see how something like that would make sense.
It makes sense for Broadcom to remove that avenue of escape, and it makes sense for Oxide's investors to charge a premium to Broadcom, and materialize their returns.
The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
Some of their larger costumer might want to buy them instead so it doesn't happen.
Makes sense for Broadcom.
Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.
I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).
What can't be replicated is a culture of simplicity, quality, and security. I've seen this firsthand working at IBM.
> 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.
> 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.
Well that isn't that much. $1M / month feels more like it.
Forbid a business can grow, haha
Say you are spending $1M. Round up. Or even 0.9M. Their sales might only return inquiries with cloud costs ending in M.
I will implicitly trust anything Jessie Frazelle works on. Rare combination of taste, skill, and passion.
She stepped down several years ago.
She was still listed as an advisor in some capacity, but she moved on to a different startup.
yep, another fan here!
I've seen posts about Oxide for years now, but do they actually ship hardware? I've never seen images, or posts about companies with their new Oxide Thingamajig™
We've shipped kind of a lot of hardware at this point!
The CEO of Shopify tweeted about it at one point:
* https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669
as far as I can tell, yes?
It seems like Jane street and lawrence national laboratory are two confirmed customers.
With those two names it makes more since that I haven't seen anything regarding their use. Not exactly Joe Schmoe LLC as customers.
Joe Schmoe LLC will probably do just fine by sticking to popular clouds. I reckon adopting Oxide Computer would pay off at much larger volumes of traffic, or if you have to do on-prem due to regulatory reasons.
It would be nice to know more about pricing so the Enthusiast Joe can have a better idea, but it's more a boutique vibe right now.
Most of their customers wouldn't be the type to let others know.
Wish I could have heard back about my job application there. It looks like a really exciting place to work.
They just raised $200M in February and $100M a year ago.
Preparing for an IPO maybe?
Funding RAM purchases...
The real question is why did Steve Klabnik leave
Exactly what I said here: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-see-a-future-in-jj/
I am still a huge fan and supporter of Oxide, and I'm really glad to see them still doing well.
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.
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