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I know they'll never do this but, by god, I would line up so fast for a mini oxide that I can homelab out of.

Oh hell yes. Throw us a bone @bcantrill

NixOS is the perfect homelab solution. You don't really want an overengineered VM monstrocity - that stuff is only needed to work around coporate process insanities.

I was interested in applying to Oxide a few months back. They ask candidates who reach interviews to provide at least 9 hours of availability, normally arranged as three separate 3-hour blocks. Each block contains three 1-hour interview slots, so the standard schedule is effectively nine one-hour conversations. Not including the follow ups.

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 read their "we will respond to every application, even if it has to be a brief non-specific rejection" and thought that sounded like a great policy that I wish more companies would follow. It's been 6 months now and I never heard anything from them, so that's a little disappointing.

No they don’t.

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.

Looks really cool. I like that kind of process. But the gap between my current skills(mostly application and Data engineering) and the hardware and performance engineering guys they want is large.

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?

the product is a podcast the server is just merch

B2B/Enterprise datacenter software. Alternative to VMware and the likes. None of their core products are open to the average Joe afaik. There was a post about that sometime back on here.

Username checks out.

It's the full hardware/firmware stack up to and including VM hypervisor. A complete rack solution, but it's the tailored firmware and integrated hypervisor, networking that sets it apart from another OEM that sells you a full rack solution. Afaik.

Comms can mean outward communication even if it’s not done or filtered by a comms team. In the case of Oxide it almost certainly means that.

> Why are they paying taxes

"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.

Maybe they're not trying to be great at the tax avoidance game.

The post is about how they don't have the capital to safely expand production capacity, which is why they're raising more.

They can likely fund the purchase orders for 10% while they grow. Sounds cheaper than giving away a percent of all future profits. This is very common.

But if they're just scaling inventory, debt makes way more sense because they payoff is almost instant as soon as they fulfill the order to the customer. I agree the math is hazier when you're talking about massive capex, growing headcount, or other longer-horizon capital commitments. But if they just need to buy inputs to sell output to complete an order backlog, selling a portion of the company seems odd.

Isn't the correct vehicle when in such a position called a "loan"?

That's always struck me as a very idealistic way of looking at dilution.

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!

New shares take away from existing shareholders in every circumstance except one: that the money raised is invested in a way that durably grows the business in excess of the dilution.

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.

Similarly, printing more of a nation's currency does not increase inflation.

did I mention men or women or non-binary ?

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.

I wanted to work at Oxide until I realized I would not be a fit for yall's culture.

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.

We want out of AWS. HPE can't fill the gap now. These guys have a good chance of getting considered.

We're racking hardware right now to move off the cloud providers and but it's just a (small tens-of-millions-of-dollars) test run to start so we didn't want to complicate things by learning anything Oxide-specific, but they are certainly on the radar as the vendor for a larger rollout.

With the major issues with the big cloud providers these days as well as high costs, I’d say there’s a decent shot. Their investors certainly think so.

Previously, they’ve stated that they raised merely to give customers confidence that they are in it for the long haul. You don’t want to buy racks from a company that won’t be around tomorrow. Raising money is likely being used to create a war chest, with some amount of it being used to grow the team and operations, to fill demand, and support their customers. Those functions have to grow sustainably, but the demand also signals to investors that it’s working, and continued investment is a good move.

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!!!”

They just paid income tax?

Well they are not, but this is a startup that's actually buying/creating computer hardware and the most expensive and competitive time in history to source it.

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.

And this is hosted in an Oxide datacenter or shipped to the customer?

I'd argue there's not that great of a track record, legacy vendors are being legally forced to provide better support for their closed-source systems in the EU because it generally isn't very good. Also you're usually buying hardware and software that weren't designed together which comes with many sharp edges we're solving for.

I mean IBM is an amazing company. And this oxide is also doing something very elegant.

I'm not sure about the pricing.

Exactly, no pricing page. Not worth my time to get involved in contract negotiation as a dev when all I want to know is if it's even feasible to try out.