| ▲ | Alien1Being 4 hours ago |
| Logical. They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom. |
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| ▲ | TimTheTinker 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | calvinmorrison 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | How about the sellout of Joyent to Samsung? | | |
| ▲ | tw04 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Joyent was founded in 2004. Bryan joined in 2014 - I doubt he had much, if any, say in the sale proceeding or not. | |
| ▲ | TimTheTinker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Joyent was likely a part of what convinced Brian Cantrill that a new cloud machine was needed. They had their own stack running on commodity OEM hardware in their own cloud - likely a painful experience, since Brian talks a lot about how much of a difference it makes to own the complete root of trust and everything in it. | | |
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| ▲ | dkbrk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | senderista 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | VC funding is not for "a sustainable long-term business". | | |
| ▲ | dkbrk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | treis 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | rincebrain 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think that's necessarily true. 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. | | |
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| ▲ | zie 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | boomskats 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | a2ff6eeb0 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | panick21_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Some of their larger costumer might want to buy them instead so it doesn't happen. |
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| ▲ | MisterTea 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Makes sense for Broadcom. |
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| ▲ | Nextgrid 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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). |
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| ▲ | sunshowers an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not actually secret — it's open source! We talk openly about our architecture. Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s | |
| ▲ | throw0101d an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? 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.) | |
| ▲ | wmf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What can't be replicated is a culture of simplicity, quality, and security. I've seen this firsthand working at IBM. | |
| ▲ | steveklabnik an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | (Former oxide) 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 | |
| ▲ | joshuamorton 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | XorNot 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Which only matters to consumers. Businesses at scale have teams doing this stuff and costs matter. 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. | | |
| ▲ | ahl a few seconds ago | parent [-] | | The market is anyone who wants a private cloud but isn’t as big as an Amazon or Google who could build it themselves. Seems like a big enough TAM. |
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| ▲ | FireBeyond 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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