I mean, most of the code is open source. With enough enthusiasm and skill, you could probably make a reasonable home-lab out of that code, and some second hand hardware. And yeah, it would not be _hardware-software-co-design_, but it would be better than nothing, plus you will -- for a brief shining moment -- be the only person on planet earth (who is not formally affiliated with Oxide) who has an Oxide home-lab.
You could be a hero. A legend. The internet might even write poems and sing songs about you.
Before I joined Oxide I did a little fan-boying (as one does) and put together home lab components as best I could. You _could_ tie 3+ mini-PCs together and wrangle omicron into some semblance of working that way. But it would not be pretty.
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.
Honestly, right now I'm pretty happy with my Nomad and heterogeneous hardware setup of cobbled together compute. But it's honestly not a bad side project idea.
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.
It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
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.
for me, at least, one interview process being 9 hours isn't a big deal and i agree with you that a company doing that is likely to have a more coherent culture and make smarter hiring decisions.
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.
The only time I see people blitzing interviews and stacking 5-10 different companies interview processes is when they’re unemployed urgently trying to change jobs. In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.
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.
>In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.
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.
> 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.
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.
Nobody doing long interviews is doing it blindly. It's because you're already passed some reasonable level of screening that mostly resembles a regular 45 minute type interview.
And how about people who have a job that they just don’t like that much, and would love to escape.
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…
I guess oxide gets away with it because they have the podcast and lots of people know a lot about the company and are pretty sure they want to work there. It's like would you do a nine hour interview to find out if you can go on a date with some random person from a dating app, no, but would you spend 9 hours with someone that you see potential to be your future wife or husband when there's mutual interest? Yes
On the other hand, in my 20 year career the only real interview I did was for my first job. Every one after that was from people I worked with recruiting me to work with them somewhere, and the interview process was more about pitching me on their company.
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.
This is very well put. There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool, from quizzes to purity tests. What a many startups don't seem to understand is that the 'culture' is the people and what they do. So taking care in interviews tends to hire people who take care in their work. And unlike the gp comment I never felt 'bad' after a number of hours of interviews and a decline, I had a better understanding of the company, presumably they had a better understanding of me.
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.
> There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool
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 agree with this. Also I empathize with the trauma a lot of tech people are going through in the current market because of my experiences in the 'chip downturn', 'dot com downturn' and the 'economic downturn in the late naughts'. So I'm seeing a lot of 'maxing' like this; "I send out 10,000 resumes and maybe get 1,000 people interested, and 100 people willing to interview me, and this takes 9 months and I've only got a few more months of 401k I can eat up ... ahhhhhhhh!" My experiences going through these sources of downturns changed me a lot, I don't see how it couldn't have.
> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
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.
"Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program, let alone leetcode-grinding insanity.
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.
> "Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program
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.
When I was coming up in the 90s what I found was it was mostly conversational, sometimes with some whiteboarding although of a much more relaxed nature than contemporary whiteboarding. It was more a tool to help express your thoughts and draw pictures than writing code.
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.
I'm to understand that Microsoft was one of the companies that had more relaxed interviews in the early 90s, and then took a turn for the more intensive in the mid-90s.
Perhaps the turning point was Jim McCarthy's "beware of a guy in a room", which he meant both figuratively and literally, leading to a transition away from solo or shared offices or even cubicles for software engineers and toward open-plan arrangements. I think that his wisdom led first Microsoft, then the rest of the industry, to treat software engineers not as the darling whiz kids they were in the past, but more a cohort to be closely watched and controlled, as the company is risking a lot on them.
my first job at a startup (first engineer after the founders) consisted of 13 hours on the phone with the CTO over a few weeks and then an in person all day interview that included traveling from Chicago to SF and a couple of dinners with the founders. this was 1996. our typical interviews after joining were all day affairs and they people almost all people that were referred in or had worked with in the past (I wasn't).
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.
> “Job interviews” in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours.
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.
I've worked as an employee, a contractor, and owned my own firm and hired. Seen all sides.
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.
Well, bullshit actually. When I went to Sun in 1996, I was flown out for a full day of interviews (9 hours!) plus both lunch and dinner. (And this was true for more or less every company I interviewed with.)
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]
btw congrats on the company. i was skeptical at the time but it was never because you wouldn't attract awesome talent and make great hires. your process looks great to me.
Thanks! And don't worry -- there were PLENTY of reasons for skepticism in 2019! We got lucky many times over, hitting on stuff that turned out to be really important in ways that we couldn't know at the time.
The hiring process is a very concrete example of that. What still blows my mind (at least a little) is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire about two years before we started Oxide. For a while after that, I wished I could go back and warn my previous self to not make the hire that would be so destructive to the organization -- but in the years at Oxide I have come to realize that that terrible hire was in fact essential for the future Oxide: it was the impetus for putting together a writing-intensive process, and there is no doubt in my mind that I had I not made this atrocious hire, I would have continued to hire the (broken) way that I had been hiring. (I described this a bit in my conversation with Gergely Orosz on hiring.[0])
Anyway: don't get me near the time machine -- I'll only screw things up.
>is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire ... that would be so destructive to the organization
What role was this hire filling? Are they publicly well known enough to name drop?
I think people are just generally grousing about Interview length, not about your company specifically. Don't worry about it. It's not aimed directly at you.
I firmly believe it's because someone getting fired, for poor performance, is a huge deal now.
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.
My experience more closely matches yours, but I've also done the multiple rounds of painful interviews.
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.
> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
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.
Yes, it is normal, especially at the salary that we pay (currently $275K). To take but one domain: at that salary, you are (roughly) at the level of a school superintendent for a school district with thousands of students (like, large town/small city). If you have ever been associated with hiring someone in that kind of position, you will see a VERY time intensive process, with many hours of interviews with many stakeholders. So yes, we have an intensive process -- but we take hiring very seriously, and we believe that it shows in our extraordinary team.
Oh how I wish you guys would hire new grads. I got into kernel dev partly due to zfs and partly due to Redox OS. Well atleast I have worked with Redox now, hopefully someday with you guys too :)
Its simple. Go to Google then. FAANG gang is decades older than Oxide and 3-4 order of magnitude higher revenue. They can hire hundreds of people a year who never do an hour of useful work in a year and still be fine. A startup can't do that.
I don't understand how these arguments about normality are supposed to be persuasive when so many of us have had the experience of being required to travel to do interview cycles. Nine hours does not actually sound like all that much to me.
Travel time is not equivalent to interview time. I would rather travel 2 days for a 3 hour interview than have a 9 hour interview in my current city. Interviews are exhausting if they are thorough.
> Nine hours does not actually sound like all that much to me.
I think because of who you are you haven’t actually had to experience a regular tech interview in 10+ years.
That's directionally true but note that I'm not talking about current interview practice; I'm comparing claims about current norms to what they were before.
(Though: I actually did interview somewhere recently.)
I have had to fly and stay multiple days overnight in New York City, Minneapolis, and Atlanta for job interview processes in the past. This was absolutely the norm. What's not normal is a couple relatively brief online transactions (2-3 Zoom interviews, a work sample test) clinching a job. That's quite new.
I remember before COVID trying to interview multiple places and time it where offers will land at the same time. I remember flying 3 times in one week (!) to make this happen. We have it easy now :).
Back in the days of ZIRP and you could get a job just by showing up it wasn't so bad. Nowadays I certainly wouldn't bother unless it was for a dream job.
> An 8 hour interviewing day plus an hour on the front end (screen) or back end (confirm/double check some things/really meet manager) can make sense.
> 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.
IME those kinds of interviews are a waste for the applicant because you have to do your 5-10 minute elevator pitch and 10-15 minute dive into your experience 9 separate times. It’s terribly exhausting.
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.
In our interviews, the interviewer has read the applicant's detailed written materials, and the candidate has received the interviewer's materials from when they applied. So there is no elevator pitch, no walking through resume, no getting to know you. Just a conversation.
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.
Yep, I had two interview processes that did this... 8 times, at the same time.
Both said no after 8 interviews because of one person in the process who didn't like me, everyone else supposedly were on board.
It genuinely took me another year to even consider applying to another job it was so demoralizing.
It's funny (sad) because these are tech companies. Film a single interview and have the others review the video. Would save all involved a huge amount of time and effort while also providing a solid pathway for improving the interview process over time in a systematic manner.
For many places it's unspoken but true, it's about breaking you down and making you reframe your experience, either you constantly excuse the behavior or you'll not fit in with their weird toxic positivity.
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.
You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
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.
> You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
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.
There's been several mentions of disrespecting the candidate's time in this conversation. Is the expected value of that time investment not worth it? You're trying to land a job. It seems like it would be, even if you have ten such companies.
If most companies take that much time before giving you a rejection or not, then job hunting would require quitting your current job to make sufficient time for it. With ten companies you’d need to organize something like 3-4 weeks of vacation.
The reason companies have that many interview hours spread across multiple slots is that then have fallout over the funnel.
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.
I understand that, but it's still possible to devote up to 9 hours to this and get nothing in return. And maybe not just possible, but likely. We don't know how eagerly their pipeline rejects candidates. Every candidate has to take that gamble.
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.
You do know: we are telling you. We advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview. The written materials are the primary filter.
No, I did not know when I posted that comment. steveklabnik's comment was posted concurrently with mine, and I did not feel the need to scour the whole thread in case there happened to be an answer to this specific question from an Oxide employee. But thank you for the data point.
No worries. It has actually always been my impression that Oxide does good work, even if I may think your hiring process is a bit on the onerous side. Keep up the good work!
A full day is a lot unless you get compensated or something for it I feel. In today's world it is a lot of ask. I could also not be spending any time there, in which case that day is wasted. Imagine if all interviews of all your applications took a full day… probably burn off half your PTO just interviewing…
I personally don't mind the multiple interview slots or 9 hours of conversations. It's fair since it takes their team members an equivalent amount of time (though it's split across team members, each team member is likely interviewing many others as well).
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.
Sans AI is definitely the way to go if you plan to submit!
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.
> It's fair since it takes their team members an equivalent amount of time
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.
Is it not good for exceptionally talented employees who want to work with other employees who are also great at their job and good communication skills?
It's also an investment of their time into you. I assume some candidates get cut after the first or second block, in which case keep in mind the further you make it, the more invested they are in you as a prospective hire.
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 feel like this topic comes up every single time interview processes are discussed. Lots of people complaining "that process is too onerous! How do they expect me to invest that much time! In person coding problems are worthless!" And I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I do wonder what a lot of folks then expect a good process would look like while still allowing the employer enough information to make a decision.
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).
Joel Spolsky said it 20+ years ago: The primary goal of the hiring process is to avoid bad hires, even if you need to turn away potentially excellent hires. If you want to hire insanely good people, there is no alternative to a very onerous process.
This is the same argument that says YouTube can play 3 unskippable ads, TVs can scan and collect data on all devices in your LAN, because they're a private company and can do what they want, and if you don't like it, just don't buy it. Well in that case, I can also smoke in front of kids, because I am a free agent and there's no laws saying I can't.
Except that analogy has absolutely nothing to do with what I posted.
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.
As someone who has dealt with both sides (interviewing and working with those that pass the interview), I really wish a long interview, like this, was standard. 45 minutes is not enough, unless it's easy to fire people.
9 hours of multiple day interview is great to build an excellent team but I wonder if any company has the guts to share candid feedback to the candidates after rejecting them so at least the candidate walks away with some honest feedback? No all they get is some standard HR BS .. thank you for your time , we decided to move blah blah blah
> Being rejected after investing so much time must also feel awful.
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.
I agree, 9 of one hour interviews is exhausting just imagining it. In my company, 3-4 steps of 1h each that spans over days were already stressed. Guess I’m too old for that kind of companies
> if every company had this policy, 90 unpaid interviewing hours.
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.
That’s not how it works. Interviews are like a funnel. If you don’t pass the first interview they don’t schedule you for all of the other hours just to keep going. You get dropped from the pipeline.
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.
100%. Especially with rampant AI interviewing, or even just more automated application spamming, it’s surprising that people are complaining about making it to the interview stage and having to spend time there, the stage where chances of getting the job have increased a hundredfold. If companies automated the process more, then the outcome is guaranteed to be that us candidates get less say in whether we’re hired and how we’re viewed. There’s some serious strawmanning here imagining that 9 hours of interviews is somehow mandatory and likely to happen with dozens of companies at a time. That very unlikely event would be a massive opportunity, and of course would not last long because with that many interviews, you’d get a job immediately.
You have provided no evidence why your technique is superior. By applying to a maximum number of roles, you are increasing your "attack surface". Also, in many cases, when you talk to the hiring manager, they can/will funnel you towards other managers and roles with a better fit.
Well, Oxide was the only job I applied to when I left Meta in 2022. My plan was to broaden my job search if Oxide didn't work out, but even then I'd only have applied to 3-5 places in the following round after vetting the company's culture and values.
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.
Because I have no desire to work for "just some company". I only talk to companies where I actually know I want to work there and feel I'd be a good fit for what they do. Maximizing "attack surface" is only useful if the only thing you care about is a paycheck regardless of from where.
A hundred roles a month and call backs on 10% of them? That's A) and insane number of applications and B) a really high call back rate.
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.
You get worse biases by favoring people that don't value their time IMO. Not too mention it doesn't favor working people with other obligations that can't afford to give away an entire shift to interview for a job they might not get.
Agree. Shotgunning 100 applications a month is not a strategy for finding a good job. It says "I don't care where I work, or what the job is, here's my generic resume, please just hire me." And maybe you're that desperate, but IMO you'll get better returns spending more time on fewer/better opportunities.
Not saying we are or aren't looking for that kind of candidate, but I _will_ say that we're very keen on the motivation to join Oxide at all, and the role you're applying for specifically.
I'm more interested to hear why 9? Why not 3 or 12. What's going on there? I've been on both sides of the fence and it's interesting to hear thoughts on it always.
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.
That's a loaded question. How about just saying it for what it is. Are you willing to spend 9 hours today (not counting the other interviews you have to do for other companies) for a X% probability of getting a job at company A which you like Y amount.
If X and Y are large enough sure. Most of the time X is hidden and Y is hard to gauge.
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.
I don't know how they possibly read all these in full. They are quite voluminous: 1-3 work samples, 1 analysis sample, 1-3 writing samples, 1 presentation sample, and then 8 open-ended long-form questions. The instructions often say to give as much detail as possible, and they are very clear that this is the main way they filter candidates, so I'm guessing serious applications are quite long.
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.
Oxide's process involves submitting writing with various questions about you, what you've done, and what you're looking for in your career. The process of doing so inherently means reflecting on the answers to those questions, and so some people find it a useful exercise.
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.
I think that you are (naturally) approaching it from your side, and they're (naturally) approaching it from theirs, and it sounds like it's not a fit. That's a successful outcome for a hiring process.
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.
You knew before you did any writing there was a good chance you’d be rejected, right? Why did you do it anyway? Why did you apply to this company? Did it have anything to do with their reputation? Or salary?
Lots of people are minimally qualified, and that’s not what they want, so their initial filter works for them. At least that should be your first assumption, no? Better depends on perspective, right? If you think you know a universally better way, what’s stopping you from building it? (If it’s money, be aware that money is available for people who know better ways, but you will have to do a lot more than 5 hours of writing to get it, and you’ll have to be okay with 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?
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.
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.
Enterprise software and hardware, built from the ground up. Definitely not just a VMware alternative, though the end product is virtual instances of course.
We're building racks over here! And all our software is open source.
I'm building my business right now and I'm an engineer on a budget so it's running on a homelab and my intermediate scaling problem is to cluster Mac Minis but if my dreams become real I'd love to have an Oxide rack. Very pie in the sky but I've followed ya'll for a minute and I love what I've read, watched, and seen so far.
Change "something" to "a computer" and you got it!
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.
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.
Well, in this case it was actually literally paying our taxes. (In the photo, Steve is about to initiate a wire to the IRS.) At our size, it's not a check -- and certainly not a credit card.
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.
A few ideas on why reducing profit by investing into the company might not be their best choice without the new investment round:
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.
Oxide doesn't have the same type of capex opportunities that Amazon had. Amazon had a massive physical footprint to build. Oxide contracts with other companies to produce the actual boards. Most of the inventory of components they have are held in their contractor facilities. So they don't have extra warehouses to build. They could change course and adopt more in-house production. However, I think doing that during the sale of their first model would be unwise.
Awesome company, awesome products. I wish they pushed AI less in their socials, like we get it computers and servers means ai workloads. It just devalues their whole image in my opinion. Hope you all do continue to do awesome things and don't become evil.
I think some of that is defensive. They don’t have a GPU or other AI Accelerator story right now. They have to remind people that regular compute is still relevant for all the other stuff around the AI workload.
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”
I think I was moreso referring to how I started following some of your employees and then my feed became very ai heavy so I removed them. Like the "nonai users get left behind", "you should be token maxing" type of messaging, etc. Sorry to misconstrue marketing with other forms of PR
totally fair, there's the "Marketing" I'm responsible for and then there's "marketing" which is the broader discussions around something, the algo, etc and I totally respect doing whatever you can to keep your timeline cleaner in a mostly AI-washed hellscape. Know that I am endeavor to do the same with Oxide Marketing.
Well you guys don't talk much on X, which is the center of AI-positive attitudes. I would expect AI-negative response on other social media platforms as they are very prevalent in those spaces, especially on Reddit and Bluesky.
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.
I'm surprised they didn't go the debt route, trade finance could cover their customer orders. I know they are risk averse in case companies back out of orders, but bringing on more shareholders is its own form of risk.
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
Debt can bankrupt you, equity can’t. They’re concerned the meme companies will collapse, cancel their orders and then kill them. Then mr bezos will turn up and liquidate their assets.
Or… they could just take on equity investment at no risk.
This is a crazy take. If you can raise on good terms (or better) then it almost always beats debt. Debt can make it a lot harder to raise or take on more debt in the future.
They're profitable, they are going to get the best terms possible at this moment.
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.
The people running the company are people who lived through the tech crash, and saw how quickly the entire economy around them can evaporate. At Sun, only slightly exaggerating, they went from flying high and controlling a market segment, to seeing all the demand evaporate and customers vanish, leaving the company holding the bag on just massive piles of inventory, basically in a day.
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.
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.
That would mean they would be growing slower. Being common is irrelevant.
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.
They said they are profitable aside from funding purchase orders, they don't need capital to fund growth. If they said they raised in order to grow faster and that they were not profitable then I would agree with you.
Oxide is so cool, I just wish the hiring process was a little less crazy. I spent such an incredible amount of time on my application just to not hear anything for months until I got the rejection.
I think that hiring process is what makes that entire team great and hum in such harmony. At the very least, going through that rigorous writing process helps you prepare for other applications or prepare materials for future applications with other companies. Hiring is hard. I have heard Bryan Cantrill say something that has also been true in my experience, along the lines of: Some of my biggest career mistakes were related to hiring.
I found myself confused about what they actually do. They sell you a server rack + software stack that you keep on-prem? The comparison between traditional cloud vs. on-prem vs. oxide is vaguely worded and I can't figure out if their hardware is physically stored on-prem or not.
But why sell hardware then? From customer perspective, wouldn't buying racks from Dell or HP be more stable procurement-wise and equally manageable by the excellent Oxide software stack (if such thing exists)?
This is akin to asking why not install iOS on a lower cost, easily available Android phone. Much of the benefit is only available if one provider designs the hardware and software as one. The complete elimination of the security-nightmare UEFI layer is a good example.
It’s not like they get magical components or firmware. All it takes is supporting specific rack configurations from top vendors. Or, if you want more lockdown, reselling custom-ordered racks with your software on top.
they do get custom firmware, for example there is no hardware vendor in the world that can supply a server that could start an AMD CPU without a UEFI the way we require. Supporting the existing hardware out there would necessitate worsening the Oxide software to compensate. Trust me, if this were possible to achieve on commodity hardware, it would be done on commodity hardware. Same reason AWS, GCP, and Azure make their own hardware- there are advancements that can't be made on commodity gear. The cabled backplane is another good example, it can't be done on commodity gear and eliminates days of setup and manual servicing/configuration errors.
Something that comes up frequently on their podcast - often in passing, I'm not sure I remember a specific episode to refer you to - is the woes of trying to support/debug commodity hardware. Think waiting for Dell to get back to your support ticket about a BIOS issue. Or being told "well you're the only person with this problem, so it must be your fault sorry!" This seems to come especially from Bryan's experience at Joyent. The way they describe "Oxide value" is being able to own as much of the stack as possible so that they can debug things down to the lowest level possible.
Funny I was about to ask the same question. Went to look at the products they offer and was confused why HN gets pumped up all the time with anything oxide do :) End of the day looks like a great product that has great comms team.
They aimed to bring the ease of scaling workloads and infrastructure-as-code workflows from the cloud to the on-prem data center, and did so by owning the stack from cold boot all the way up.
It's all software in the end. If you plan ahead, it is hard to be completely locked in. I worked for a company, where we had build a data transformation pipeline, and we had GCP and AWS credits, and wanted to use both of them. We built a minimal, high-level library that could be mapped onto both PubSub and SQS (we were transforming the WARC files from the internet archive, in preparation for data analysis). Once we built this, and worked around the near-criminally incompetent design of SQS (e.g. PubSub does compression, batching, and does not send duplicate messages, while you need to all that yourself for SQS), we were able to use both clouds (for free) at the same time, and we were not locked in at all.
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.
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.
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.
Having followed this since the first On the Metal Podcast episodes its crazy how far it has gotten.
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.
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.
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.
As those of us from the upper Midwest keep telling the rest of you guys
"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.
I believe this is evidence of the stalemate and culture clash as I was writing about earlier.
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.
If it's of any solace, the feeling is almost assuredly mutual: your hypothetical candidate materials at Oxide would likely reveal that you are more interested in picking fights than solving problems. So you would likely not be welcomed at Oxide simply because you wouldn't make the cut -- quite aside from whatever social grievances you may foster.
Wow, that’s a pretty rude thing to say to a person who was commenting about a stranger being publicly shamed by one of your employees. He didn’t pick a fight - your employee did.
Regardless of where you stand on the term “you guys”, your inability to even listen without lashing out is a bad look.
hi Bryan(1). no fight was picked. your employee corrected a stranger or I would say threw the first punch. we can disagree on that if you want. that said, I could work with them, being kind and professional. I am sad it isn't mutual. could you work or sell to with someone who you disagree with as your values state?
given the opportunity I would still buy and do support 0xide and have since day one.
It's actually quite nice: people treat each other with respect, which includes listening to other people when they talk to you about the unintended impact your words are having on others.
There is little standardization in the GPU world and the technology deprecates quickly.
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.
How is oxide trendy and IBM systems z/i are seen as archaic? Isnt that essentially what they sell “cloud” on prem? Seriously wondering what are the major differences in market, is it just that Oxide is targeting modern software stacks?
> Well, yes, it is: most startups don’t pay income tax because most startups aren’t profitable! Indeed, startups seek investment because they have costs long before they have revenue, let alone gross profit — let alone income. This is by design: profitability is a lagging indicator of product/market fit (the adventure in venture capital is investing long before the business has materialized!).
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.
A confusing thing about fundraising and dilution is that the new shares don’t take away value from existing shareholders.
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.
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!
But that's not how shares work. And companies aren't lotteries.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
They’re raising from a position of strength for capital they don’t need. As far as I know, they haven’t published their valuation, but it is very possible they’re giving up little equity. Plus, giving up some equity to meet customer demand is generally a good idea as more revenue means higher valuation.
Taking on debt is MUCH faster and easier way for all shareholders in a startup to end up with $0.
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".
Also time for the quarterly reminder that On the Metal / Oxide and Friends is an excellent podcast if you're into Rust and/or EE. Bryan and co. do such a good job keeping the technical discussions entertaining. Seems like an awesome place to work, too.
You can still be heavily cash flow negative while being Net Income positive. It's actually one of the big use cases for VC money; you have a flywheel of revenue but not enough cash to pay to service that revenue and actually get cash.
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!!!”
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.
Server racks which are vertically integrated and provide great cooling, are quiet, and fully vertically integrated software (including bootloaders, hypervisor, etc. -- no BIOS!).
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
Looks like a mainframe computer and their selling point is that the operating system is open source.
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.
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.
Why are you answering if you have not looked into it very much?
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.
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.
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.
Congrats! Now it does get tricky - because once you tempt investors with a profit they start worrying about your spending and expect you to keep a profit.
Sounds like a great company raising money for the right reasons.
Oxide continues to be one of the most inspiring companies in the space, I was just encouraging someone to apply there yesterday. :)
Still waiting for their 10 inch homelab mini oxide servers
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.
I mean, most of the code is open source. With enough enthusiasm and skill, you could probably make a reasonable home-lab out of that code, and some second hand hardware. And yeah, it would not be _hardware-software-co-design_, but it would be better than nothing, plus you will -- for a brief shining moment -- be the only person on planet earth (who is not formally affiliated with Oxide) who has an Oxide home-lab.
You could be a hero. A legend. The internet might even write poems and sing songs about you.
Before I joined Oxide I did a little fan-boying (as one does) and put together home lab components as best I could. You _could_ tie 3+ mini-PCs together and wrangle omicron into some semblance of working that way. But it would not be pretty.
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.
You are a dream. I'd love to try this out.
Honestly, right now I'm pretty happy with my Nomad and heterogeneous hardware setup of cobbled together compute. But it's honestly not a bad side project idea.
Oh hell yes. Throw us a bone @bcantrill
I went hunting but it seems this isn’t even rumoured.
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.
my pre-nightmare prices homelab setup was this: a synology 8-bay and a mac mini. 10GbE for as much as was practical at the time.
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
Why don't you get a TrueNAS Mini X+? Literally is that.
I have had the older version of it for almost 10 years now.
Literally is nothing like that - it’s got the CPU horsepower of a mac mini from 2020, at 5x the price of a 2026 Mac mini….
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.
They have one of the best hiring processes in the game. Just all around great people who care.
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.
It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
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.
for me, at least, one interview process being 9 hours isn't a big deal and i agree with you that a company doing that is likely to have a more coherent culture and make smarter hiring decisions.
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.
The only time I see people blitzing interviews and stacking 5-10 different companies interview processes is when they’re unemployed urgently trying to change jobs. In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.
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.
>In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.
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.
> 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.
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.
Nobody doing long interviews is doing it blindly. It's because you're already passed some reasonable level of screening that mostly resembles a regular 45 minute type interview.
And how about people who have a job that they just don’t like that much, and would love to escape.
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…
I guess oxide gets away with it because they have the podcast and lots of people know a lot about the company and are pretty sure they want to work there. It's like would you do a nine hour interview to find out if you can go on a date with some random person from a dating app, no, but would you spend 9 hours with someone that you see potential to be your future wife or husband when there's mutual interest? Yes
On the other hand, in my 20 year career the only real interview I did was for my first job. Every one after that was from people I worked with recruiting me to work with them somewhere, and the interview process was more about pitching me on their company.
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.
This is very well put. There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool, from quizzes to purity tests. What a many startups don't seem to understand is that the 'culture' is the people and what they do. So taking care in interviews tends to hire people who take care in their work. And unlike the gp comment I never felt 'bad' after a number of hours of interviews and a decline, I had a better understanding of the company, presumably they had a better understanding of me.
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.
> There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool
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 agree with this. Also I empathize with the trauma a lot of tech people are going through in the current market because of my experiences in the 'chip downturn', 'dot com downturn' and the 'economic downturn in the late naughts'. So I'm seeing a lot of 'maxing' like this; "I send out 10,000 resumes and maybe get 1,000 people interested, and 100 people willing to interview me, and this takes 9 months and I've only got a few more months of 401k I can eat up ... ahhhhhhhh!" My experiences going through these sources of downturns changed me a lot, I don't see how it couldn't have.
> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
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.
"Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program, let alone leetcode-grinding insanity.
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.
> "Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program
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.
When I was coming up in the 90s what I found was it was mostly conversational, sometimes with some whiteboarding although of a much more relaxed nature than contemporary whiteboarding. It was more a tool to help express your thoughts and draw pictures than writing code.
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.
I'm to understand that Microsoft was one of the companies that had more relaxed interviews in the early 90s, and then took a turn for the more intensive in the mid-90s.
Perhaps the turning point was Jim McCarthy's "beware of a guy in a room", which he meant both figuratively and literally, leading to a transition away from solo or shared offices or even cubicles for software engineers and toward open-plan arrangements. I think that his wisdom led first Microsoft, then the rest of the industry, to treat software engineers not as the darling whiz kids they were in the past, but more a cohort to be closely watched and controlled, as the company is risking a lot on them.
my first job at a startup (first engineer after the founders) consisted of 13 hours on the phone with the CTO over a few weeks and then an in person all day interview that included traveling from Chicago to SF and a couple of dinners with the founders. this was 1996. our typical interviews after joining were all day affairs and they people almost all people that were referred in or had worked with in the past (I wasn't).
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.
My first job in 2004 was a pretty casual conversation. My next few through the 00s were basically the same tbh.
> “Job interviews” in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours.
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.
I've worked as an employee, a contractor, and owned my own firm and hired. Seen all sides.
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.
Well, bullshit actually. When I went to Sun in 1996, I was flown out for a full day of interviews (9 hours!) plus both lunch and dinner. (And this was true for more or less every company I interviewed with.)
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]
[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
Yes, I definitely had some full day interviews back then, including travel time.
The largest difference I have found between then and now is what the interview actually consists of, not how long they last.
What are the differences in what the interviews consist of?
btw congrats on the company. i was skeptical at the time but it was never because you wouldn't attract awesome talent and make great hires. your process looks great to me.
Thanks! And don't worry -- there were PLENTY of reasons for skepticism in 2019! We got lucky many times over, hitting on stuff that turned out to be really important in ways that we couldn't know at the time.
The hiring process is a very concrete example of that. What still blows my mind (at least a little) is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire about two years before we started Oxide. For a while after that, I wished I could go back and warn my previous self to not make the hire that would be so destructive to the organization -- but in the years at Oxide I have come to realize that that terrible hire was in fact essential for the future Oxide: it was the impetus for putting together a writing-intensive process, and there is no doubt in my mind that I had I not made this atrocious hire, I would have continued to hire the (broken) way that I had been hiring. (I described this a bit in my conversation with Gergely Orosz on hiring.[0])
Anyway: don't get me near the time machine -- I'll only screw things up.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/hiring-proc...
Wish I could apply for Oxide. Been admiring from afar (physically)
>is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire ... that would be so destructive to the organization
What role was this hire filling? Are they publicly well known enough to name drop?
What an attrocious question.
Why is that an atrocious question?
in Sun's defense, that was in the 1990s, before the invention of the telephone.
I think people are just generally grousing about Interview length, not about your company specifically. Don't worry about it. It's not aimed directly at you.
I know in my case, it's not about you directly.
Thank you for caring about us.
I firmly believe it's because someone getting fired, for poor performance, is a huge deal now.
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.
Could be.
My experience more closely matches yours, but I've also done the multiple rounds of painful interviews.
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.
IBM - well, that tells us all :) seriously though, you may be referencing the dot com era, when a warm body was all that sufficed
> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
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.
9 hours is certainly excessive considering there's only 8 hours or less in a work day!
It's over several days. This used to be a pretty normal thing in hiring processes!
That has never been a normal thing in hiring processes. Normal within Silicon Valley maybe, but normal overall in the US? Absolutely not.
Yes, it is normal, especially at the salary that we pay (currently $275K). To take but one domain: at that salary, you are (roughly) at the level of a school superintendent for a school district with thousands of students (like, large town/small city). If you have ever been associated with hiring someone in that kind of position, you will see a VERY time intensive process, with many hours of interviews with many stakeholders. So yes, we have an intensive process -- but we take hiring very seriously, and we believe that it shows in our extraordinary team.
Oh how I wish you guys would hire new grads. I got into kernel dev partly due to zfs and partly due to Redox OS. Well atleast I have worked with Redox now, hopefully someday with you guys too :)
I call BS. Google didn’t have that many hours of interviews for L5 and it’s TC and the TC is around 500k between cash and liquid RSUs.
The comparison to a superintendent is bunk because that’s a politically loaded position so the vetting is high because of that, not the comp.
None of the FAANG gang put up 9 hours of interviews and pay more than Oxide.
Just own it, your process is more time consuming and is NOT normal. But it’s what gives you an extraordinary team. FAANGs are filled with bad hires.
Its simple. Go to Google then. FAANG gang is decades older than Oxide and 3-4 order of magnitude higher revenue. They can hire hundreds of people a year who never do an hour of useful work in a year and still be fine. A startup can't do that.
Yes, my point is you can’t claim 9 hours of interviews in 3 3 hour tranches is standard.
I don't understand how these arguments about normality are supposed to be persuasive when so many of us have had the experience of being required to travel to do interview cycles. Nine hours does not actually sound like all that much to me.
Travel time is not equivalent to interview time. I would rather travel 2 days for a 3 hour interview than have a 9 hour interview in my current city. Interviews are exhausting if they are thorough.
> Nine hours does not actually sound like all that much to me.
I think because of who you are you haven’t actually had to experience a regular tech interview in 10+ years.
That's directionally true but note that I'm not talking about current interview practice; I'm comparing claims about current norms to what they were before.
(Though: I actually did interview somewhere recently.)
Apple will happily put you through 8 rounds if interviews lol
Not default, not an hour each, and that’s still 1 short of the standard for oxide.
I have had to fly and stay multiple days overnight in New York City, Minneapolis, and Atlanta for job interview processes in the past. This was absolutely the norm. What's not normal is a couple relatively brief online transactions (2-3 Zoom interviews, a work sample test) clinching a job. That's quite new.
If anything the hiring practices have gotten much shorter.
I’ve had the _Batesvilke Casket Company_ in _Batesville Indiana_ demand I come in for multi-day interviews.
Well that just makes sense. You can't be too careful hiring casketmakers.
To be fair, Batesvilles owners, until recently, were famous for innovation in caskets.
Not so much for short interview cycles.
I remember before COVID trying to interview multiple places and time it where offers will land at the same time. I remember flying 3 times in one week (!) to make this happen. We have it easy now :).
Back in the days of ZIRP and you could get a job just by showing up it wasn't so bad. Nowadays I certainly wouldn't bother unless it was for a dream job.
How many of those extended processes ended in a no?
An 8 hour interviewing day plus an hour on the front end (screen) or back end (confirm/double check some things/really meet manager) can make sense.
3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.
> An 8 hour interviewing day plus an hour on the front end (screen) or back end (confirm/double check some things/really meet manager) can make sense.
> 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.
IME those kinds of interviews are a waste for the applicant because you have to do your 5-10 minute elevator pitch and 10-15 minute dive into your experience 9 separate times. It’s terribly exhausting.
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.
In our interviews, the interviewer has read the applicant's detailed written materials, and the candidate has received the interviewer's materials from when they applied. So there is no elevator pitch, no walking through resume, no getting to know you. Just a conversation.
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
Yep, I had two interview processes that did this... 8 times, at the same time. Both said no after 8 interviews because of one person in the process who didn't like me, everyone else supposedly were on board.
It genuinely took me another year to even consider applying to another job it was so demoralizing.
It's funny (sad) because these are tech companies. Film a single interview and have the others review the video. Would save all involved a huge amount of time and effort while also providing a solid pathway for improving the interview process over time in a systematic manner.
For many places it's unspoken but true, it's about breaking you down and making you reframe your experience, either you constantly excuse the behavior or you'll not fit in with their weird toxic positivity.
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.
This is exactly why we have the materials process and the materials are the primary filter. It’s one identical artifact we can all look at.
You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
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.
> You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
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.
When I worked at Oxide, you only get to the interview part if you’re extremely close to an offer. Like, down to one or two candidates out of hundreds.
There's been several mentions of disrespecting the candidate's time in this conversation. Is the expected value of that time investment not worth it? You're trying to land a job. It seems like it would be, even if you have ten such companies.
If most companies take that much time before giving you a rejection or not, then job hunting would require quitting your current job to make sufficient time for it. With ten companies you’d need to organize something like 3-4 weeks of vacation.
That is worst possible outcome thinking.
If you consistently fail (or give up) at the very last interview, there's something rather wrong.
Your median/average should be better.
The reason companies have that many interview hours spread across multiple slots is that then have fallout over the funnel.
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.
I understand that, but it's still possible to devote up to 9 hours to this and get nothing in return. And maybe not just possible, but likely. We don't know how eagerly their pipeline rejects candidates. Every candidate has to take that gamble.
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.
You do know: we are telling you. We advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview. The written materials are the primary filter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021846
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021016
Great, I'm glad to hear it.
> You do know
No, I did not know when I posted that comment. steveklabnik's comment was posted concurrently with mine, and I did not feel the need to scour the whole thread in case there happened to be an answer to this specific question from an Oxide employee. But thank you for the data point.
Sorry to come off a little abrupt!
No worries. It has actually always been my impression that Oxide does good work, even if I may think your hiring process is a bit on the onerous side. Keep up the good work!
A full day is a lot unless you get compensated or something for it I feel. In today's world it is a lot of ask. I could also not be spending any time there, in which case that day is wasted. Imagine if all interviews of all your applications took a full day… probably burn off half your PTO just interviewing…
It sounds like the unemployed programmers have an advantage over the employed, when interviewing at 0xide.
Most employers view employed candidates are much more valuable compared to unemployed candidates. However, Oxide isn't "most employers".
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I personally don't mind the multiple interview slots or 9 hours of conversations. It's fair since it takes their team members an equivalent amount of time (though it's split across team members, each team member is likely interviewing many others as well).
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.
Sans AI is definitely the way to go if you plan to submit!
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.
> It's fair since it takes their team members an equivalent amount of time
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.
Right...so best interview process in the game for employers, not so much employees.
Is it not good for exceptionally talented employees who want to work with other employees who are also great at their job and good communication skills?
No, because you lose access to a ton of employee's who value their time more than spending 9 hours repeating the same stuff over and over.
It's also an investment of their time into you. I assume some candidates get cut after the first or second block, in which case keep in mind the further you make it, the more invested they are in you as a prospective hire.
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 feel like this topic comes up every single time interview processes are discussed. Lots of people complaining "that process is too onerous! How do they expect me to invest that much time! In person coding problems are worthless!" And I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I do wonder what a lot of folks then expect a good process would look like while still allowing the employer enough information to make a decision.
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).
Joel Spolsky said it 20+ years ago: The primary goal of the hiring process is to avoid bad hires, even if you need to turn away potentially excellent hires. If you want to hire insanely good people, there is no alternative to a very onerous process.
This is the same argument that says YouTube can play 3 unskippable ads, TVs can scan and collect data on all devices in your LAN, because they're a private company and can do what they want, and if you don't like it, just don't buy it. Well in that case, I can also smoke in front of kids, because I am a free agent and there's no laws saying I can't.
Except that analogy has absolutely nothing to do with what I posted.
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.
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As someone who has dealt with both sides (interviewing and working with those that pass the interview), I really wish a long interview, like this, was standard. 45 minutes is not enough, unless it's easy to fire people.
9 hours of multiple day interview is great to build an excellent team but I wonder if any company has the guts to share candid feedback to the candidates after rejecting them so at least the candidate walks away with some honest feedback? No all they get is some standard HR BS .. thank you for your time , we decided to move blah blah blah
Dont you want to spend more than 1 hour getting to know the company you might spend the next 5-10 years of your life with?
> Being rejected after investing so much time must also feel awful.
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.
At least you know what the time commitment is up front. Not true of every company.
I agree, 9 of one hour interviews is exhausting just imagining it. In my company, 3-4 steps of 1h each that spans over days were already stressed. Guess I’m too old for that kind of companies
Nine hours is crazy
You work 2000 hours in a year. You ideally have an employer you like and stay with for many years. That's not worth 9 hours of your time?
That’s not how it works for the applicant. Many people are applying to nearly 100 roles a month.
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.
> if every company had this policy, 90 unpaid interviewing hours.
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.
That’s not how it works. Interviews are like a funnel. If you don’t pass the first interview they don’t schedule you for all of the other hours just to keep going. You get dropped from the pipeline.
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.
100%. Especially with rampant AI interviewing, or even just more automated application spamming, it’s surprising that people are complaining about making it to the interview stage and having to spend time there, the stage where chances of getting the job have increased a hundredfold. If companies automated the process more, then the outcome is guaranteed to be that us candidates get less say in whether we’re hired and how we’re viewed. There’s some serious strawmanning here imagining that 9 hours of interviews is somehow mandatory and likely to happen with dozens of companies at a time. That very unlikely event would be a massive opportunity, and of course would not last long because with that many interviews, you’d get a job immediately.
> Many people are applying to nearly 100 roles a month.
Spotted your first problem. Don't shotgun apply to anyone and everyone. You should only be applying to jobs you actually want.
You have provided no evidence why your technique is superior. By applying to a maximum number of roles, you are increasing your "attack surface". Also, in many cases, when you talk to the hiring manager, they can/will funnel you towards other managers and roles with a better fit.
Well, Oxide was the only job I applied to when I left Meta in 2022. My plan was to broaden my job search if Oxide didn't work out, but even then I'd only have applied to 3-5 places in the following round after vetting the company's culture and values.
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.
Because I have no desire to work for "just some company". I only talk to companies where I actually know I want to work there and feel I'd be a good fit for what they do. Maximizing "attack surface" is only useful if the only thing you care about is a paycheck regardless of from where.
Most people, even here, don't have that luxury. If you do, good on you, but you should have more consideration of others.
Exactly my point. Enough months of unemployment and any normie with a family and mortgage will go brrrrrr with the applications.
A hundred roles a month and call backs on 10% of them? That's A) and insane number of applications and B) a really high call back rate.
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.
Maybe Oxide isn’t aiming to hire people who apply to 100 roles per month.
You get worse biases by favoring people that don't value their time IMO. Not too mention it doesn't favor working people with other obligations that can't afford to give away an entire shift to interview for a job they might not get.
Agree. Shotgunning 100 applications a month is not a strategy for finding a good job. It says "I don't care where I work, or what the job is, here's my generic resume, please just hire me." And maybe you're that desperate, but IMO you'll get better returns spending more time on fewer/better opportunities.
Not saying we are or aren't looking for that kind of candidate, but I _will_ say that we're very keen on the motivation to join Oxide at all, and the role you're applying for specifically.
I don’t understand this. Applying to 3 jobs per day doesn’t sound crazy. It’s certainly not so many that you can’t tailor your resume to each.
I'm more interested to hear why 9? Why not 3 or 12. What's going on there? I've been on both sides of the fence and it's interesting to hear thoughts on it always.
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.
Well they are a podcasting company, so they have podcast about it:
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.
That's a loaded question. How about just saying it for what it is. Are you willing to spend 9 hours today (not counting the other interviews you have to do for other companies) for a X% probability of getting a job at company A which you like Y amount.
If X and Y are large enough sure. Most of the time X is hidden and Y is hard to gauge.
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.
I don't know how they possibly read all these in full. They are quite voluminous: 1-3 work samples, 1 analysis sample, 1-3 writing samples, 1 presentation sample, and then 8 open-ended long-form questions. The instructions often say to give as much detail as possible, and they are very clear that this is the main way they filter candidates, so I'm guessing serious applications are quite long.
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.
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.
A friend encouraged me to write the paper, even if I didn't submit it, as a means of self-reflecting.
Are we talking about the same thing.
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.
Oxide's process involves submitting writing with various questions about you, what you've done, and what you're looking for in your career. The process of doing so inherently means reflecting on the answers to those questions, and so some people find it a useful exercise.
OK.
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.
I think that you are (naturally) approaching it from your side, and they're (naturally) approaching it from theirs, and it sounds like it's not a fit. That's a successful outcome for a hiring process.
> I’d rather an LLM auto-reject my application
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.
So instead I wasted 5 hours without a way to figure out why I was rejected.
Say the first step was an OA. I fail my OA and move on with my day, or I pass and we both know I’m minimally qualified.
I just think there are better ways to do an initial filter.
You knew before you did any writing there was a good chance you’d be rejected, right? Why did you do it anyway? Why did you apply to this company? Did it have anything to do with their reputation? Or salary?
Lots of people are minimally qualified, and that’s not what they want, so their initial filter works for them. At least that should be your first assumption, no? Better depends on perspective, right? If you think you know a universally better way, what’s stopping you from building it? (If it’s money, be aware that money is available for people who know better ways, but you will have to do a lot more than 5 hours of writing to get it, and you’ll have to be okay with rejection.)
> I apply for jobs because I want money. Not to reflect or learn about myself.
We are not the same.
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?
I just heard about this company for the first time. the energy does feel inspiring
Yes they seem to be doing everything right so far. Inspiring and exciting.
What is their product exactly? It’s a server that is cheaper for some reason?
the product is a podcast the server is just merch
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.
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.
Enterprise software and hardware, built from the ground up. Definitely not just a VMware alternative, though the end product is virtual instances of course.
We're building racks over here! And all our software is open source.
I'm building my business right now and I'm an engineer on a budget so it's running on a homelab and my intermediate scaling problem is to cluster Mac Minis but if my dreams become real I'd love to have an Oxide rack. Very pie in the sky but I've followed ya'll for a minute and I love what I've read, watched, and seen so far.
Its a bit strange thing to say, their software is QUITE LITERALLY OPEN TO EVERYBODY. Its literally all 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 server that is more expensive for some reason.
The more accurate way to frame this would be a server that cheaper for some reason.
Username checks out.
I’m serious I can’t tell what it is. Something with all the benefits of on prem and cloud without the costs of either.
Change "something" to "a computer" and you got it!
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.
Data center in a box
Love the photo caption "FIGURE 1. US BEING AS EXCITED AS YOU CAN BE PAYING TAXES".
Oxide are so good at comms.
But maybe not great at finance?
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.
> 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.
Well, in this case it was actually literally paying our taxes. (In the photo, Steve is about to initiate a wire to the IRS.) At our size, it's not a check -- and certainly not a credit card.
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.
>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.
A few ideas on why reducing profit by investing into the company might not be their best choice without the new investment round:
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.
Hah, well, I stand corrected. And also, huge congratulations on profitability!
Can I just say how unfathomably based you guys are re:
"Compensation Everyone at Oxide makes $275,000 USD, regardless of location."
As someone who has applied less than 6 weeks ago, this is great news. I can't wait to hear back!
Maybe they're not trying to be great at the tax avoidance game.
Oxide doesn't have the same type of capex opportunities that Amazon had. Amazon had a massive physical footprint to build. Oxide contracts with other companies to produce the actual boards. Most of the inventory of components they have are held in their contractor facilities. So they don't have extra warehouses to build. They could change course and adopt more in-house production. However, I think doing that during the sale of their first model would be unwise.
The post is about how they don't have the capital to safely expand production capacity, which is why they're raising more.
And yet that seems like a caption Bryan could have written…
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.
Awesome company, awesome products. I wish they pushed AI less in their socials, like we get it computers and servers means ai workloads. It just devalues their whole image in my opinion. Hope you all do continue to do awesome things and don't become evil.
I think some of that is defensive. They don’t have a GPU or other AI Accelerator story right now. They have to remind people that regular compute is still relevant for all the other stuff around the AI workload.
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.
That’s certainly the aim! What is Oxide's thinking around GPUs? FAQ Friday #56 https://youtu.be/3y5DwFJH3ho
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”
I think I was moreso referring to how I started following some of your employees and then my feed became very ai heavy so I removed them. Like the "nonai users get left behind", "you should be token maxing" type of messaging, etc. Sorry to misconstrue marketing with other forms of PR
totally fair, there's the "Marketing" I'm responsible for and then there's "marketing" which is the broader discussions around something, the algo, etc and I totally respect doing whatever you can to keep your timeline cleaner in a mostly AI-washed hellscape. Know that I am endeavor to do the same with Oxide Marketing.
Well you guys don't talk much on X, which is the center of AI-positive attitudes. I would expect AI-negative response on other social media platforms as they are very prevalent in those spaces, especially on Reddit and Bluesky.
I was following the employees on LinkedIn. Lots of ai maxing and fear tones from engineer content ensued so I stopped
Couldn't happen to a better bunch of people.
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.
Seems you are one of Oxide's customers. If you are, could you share your experience cost wise.
I'm surprised they didn't go the debt route, trade finance could cover their customer orders. I know they are risk averse in case companies back out of orders, but bringing on more shareholders is its own form of risk.
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
Debt can bankrupt you, equity can’t. They’re concerned the meme companies will collapse, cancel their orders and then kill them. Then mr bezos will turn up and liquidate their assets.
Or… they could just take on equity investment at no risk.
It’s not no risk. The risk is losing employees because you’re diluting a large portion of their income.
Continued rounds for a decade really blows as an employee.
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This is a crazy take. If you can raise on good terms (or better) then it almost always beats debt. Debt can make it a lot harder to raise or take on more debt in the future.
They're profitable, they are going to get the best terms possible at this moment.
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.
The people running the company are people who lived through the tech crash, and saw how quickly the entire economy around them can evaporate. At Sun, only slightly exaggerating, they went from flying high and controlling a market segment, to seeing all the demand evaporate and customers vanish, leaving the company holding the bag on just massive piles of inventory, basically in a day.
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.
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.
That would mean they would be growing slower. Being common is irrelevant.
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?
They said they are profitable aside from funding purchase orders, they don't need capital to fund growth. If they said they raised in order to grow faster and that they were not profitable then I would agree with you.
>Can you imagine if they raised $445M of debt?
Yes, it wouldn’t even be a headline. “Profitable company sells bonds, water is wet, news at 10.”
blog mentions the use of debt facilities, there's a smart mix of both debt and equity
Oxide is so cool, I just wish the hiring process was a little less crazy. I spent such an incredible amount of time on my application just to not hear anything for months until I got the rejection.
I think that hiring process is what makes that entire team great and hum in such harmony. At the very least, going through that rigorous writing process helps you prepare for other applications or prepare materials for future applications with other companies. Hiring is hard. I have heard Bryan Cantrill say something that has also been true in my experience, along the lines of: Some of my biggest career mistakes were related to hiring.
The company is not very big and has a lot of very talented people. The vibe is probably similar to what big tech used to be in the early 2000s
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.
We don't do referrals -- everyone applies through the same front door.
I looked at applying there way back in 2020 and bounced off the application because it seemed like more work than I had time for.
I found myself confused about what they actually do. They sell you a server rack + software stack that you keep on-prem? The comparison between traditional cloud vs. on-prem vs. oxide is vaguely worded and I can't figure out if their hardware is physically stored on-prem or not.
Maybe I'm just tired!
Yup, it’s a rack+software. My understanding is that you get all the convenience of the cloud, but the hardware is yours
But why sell hardware then? From customer perspective, wouldn't buying racks from Dell or HP be more stable procurement-wise and equally manageable by the excellent Oxide software stack (if such thing exists)?
This is akin to asking why not install iOS on a lower cost, easily available Android phone. Much of the benefit is only available if one provider designs the hardware and software as one. The complete elimination of the security-nightmare UEFI layer is a good example.
It’s not like they get magical components or firmware. All it takes is supporting specific rack configurations from top vendors. Or, if you want more lockdown, reselling custom-ordered racks with your software on top.
they do get custom firmware, for example there is no hardware vendor in the world that can supply a server that could start an AMD CPU without a UEFI the way we require. Supporting the existing hardware out there would necessitate worsening the Oxide software to compensate. Trust me, if this were possible to achieve on commodity hardware, it would be done on commodity hardware. Same reason AWS, GCP, and Azure make their own hardware- there are advancements that can't be made on commodity gear. The cabled backplane is another good example, it can't be done on commodity gear and eliminates days of setup and manual servicing/configuration errors.
Something that comes up frequently on their podcast - often in passing, I'm not sure I remember a specific episode to refer you to - is the woes of trying to support/debug commodity hardware. Think waiting for Dell to get back to your support ticket about a BIOS issue. Or being told "well you're the only person with this problem, so it must be your fault sorry!" This seems to come especially from Bryan's experience at Joyent. The way they describe "Oxide value" is being able to own as much of the stack as possible so that they can debug things down to the lowest level possible.
They do get magical components and firmware, they make them
Funny I was about to ask the same question. Went to look at the products they offer and was confused why HN gets pumped up all the time with anything oxide do :) End of the day looks like a great product that has great comms team.
They aimed to bring the ease of scaling workloads and infrastructure-as-code workflows from the cloud to the on-prem data center, and did so by owning the stack from cold boot all the way up.
yes, goes on the customer premises, or their colocation facility of choice
its not going to go anywhere
with agentic coding lock in @ AWS and Google Cloud is evaporating fast
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
SQLite isn’t equivalent to something like aurora.
It's all software in the end. If you plan ahead, it is hard to be completely locked in. I worked for a company, where we had build a data transformation pipeline, and we had GCP and AWS credits, and wanted to use both of them. We built a minimal, high-level library that could be mapped onto both PubSub and SQS (we were transforming the WARC files from the internet archive, in preparation for data analysis). Once we built this, and worked around the near-criminally incompetent design of SQS (e.g. PubSub does compression, batching, and does not send duplicate messages, while you need to all that yourself for SQS), we were able to use both clouds (for free) at the same time, and we were not locked in at all.
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.
FYI previous discussion of the series D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174407
Oof thanks - I missed that earlier. Macroexpanded:
Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174407 - Aug 2026 (198 comments)
Excellent podcast, still not sure about their stack. No GPU support is a hard sell these days.
> No GPU support is a hard sell these days.
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.
> No GPU support is a hard sell these days.
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.
This is literally a post about how no GPU clearly isn't a hard sell.
Having followed this since the first On the Metal Podcast episodes its crazy how far it has gotten.
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.
if these guys just capture 1% of spend that's on AWS, Azure & Google Cloud they will still be very big.
Yes but is that likely?
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.
FYI there are many women and nonbinary people on our team.
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.
I'm not sure why you think accents would be an issue at Oxide.
As those of us from the upper Midwest keep telling the rest of you guys
"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.
As those of us who aren't guys keep telling the rest of y'all...
I believe this is evidence of the stalemate and culture clash as I was writing about earlier.
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.
If it's of any solace, the feeling is almost assuredly mutual: your hypothetical candidate materials at Oxide would likely reveal that you are more interested in picking fights than solving problems. So you would likely not be welcomed at Oxide simply because you wouldn't make the cut -- quite aside from whatever social grievances you may foster.
Wow, that’s a pretty rude thing to say to a person who was commenting about a stranger being publicly shamed by one of your employees. He didn’t pick a fight - your employee did.
Regardless of where you stand on the term “you guys”, your inability to even listen without lashing out is a bad look.
hi Bryan(1). no fight was picked. your employee corrected a stranger or I would say threw the first punch. we can disagree on that if you want. that said, I could work with them, being kind and professional. I am sad it isn't mutual. could you work or sell to with someone who you disagree with as your values state?
given the opportunity I would still buy and do support 0xide and have since day one.
(1) edited as I misspelled your name
It's your employees that are needlessly picking fights in this thread, perhaps you should reflect on that.
An employee and a CTO posting in this manner is an awful look. How derranged is Oxide's internal Slack? You should be ashamed.
It's actually quite nice: people treat each other with respect, which includes listening to other people when they talk to you about the unintended impact your words are having on others.
FYI "guys" is gender neutral. The only people who have a problem with the word "guys" in CURRENTYEAR are terminally online linguistic racists.
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.
Why do Rust developers have to say shit like this
Always happy to see Oxide growing. The way their company is run is pretty close to how I think all engineering orgs should run.
Hoping they hire for a position in my area of expertise some day!
Maybe the most thoughtful fundraising announcement I’ve seen. Focusing on all the right stuff.
That's enough that they can drive down to Central Computers and grab a 32GB stick.
Commenting about the unique compensation to ruin someone’s bingo card :)
I'm pretty sure this is the bingo card free space
Really cool company! Checking out the state of the product I would have expected to see a gpu / tpu server there. Is this on the roadmap?
we have an FAQ Friday on this: https://oxide.computer/faq-friday/what-is-oxides-thinking-ar...
I was watching some Oxide videos recently and I think this one answers that question: https://youtu.be/n2ze5RCy3TM?t=928
Timestamped to "the differentiator" (15:45) and "what are you guys doing about GPU?".
Right? Bryan, go put a GPU in there, integrate it in a noncrazy way with firmware and software that just works, and go make a killing!
There is little standardization in the GPU world and the technology deprecates quickly.
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.
How is oxide trendy and IBM systems z/i are seen as archaic? Isnt that essentially what they sell “cloud” on prem? Seriously wondering what are the major differences in market, is it just that Oxide is targeting modern software stacks?
IBM systems don't have APIs. Everything is configured, manually, through archaic mainframe terminals. That's why they're seen as archaic.
> Well, yes, it is: most startups don’t pay income tax because most startups aren’t profitable! Indeed, startups seek investment because they have costs long before they have revenue, let alone gross profit — let alone income. This is by design: profitability is a lagging indicator of product/market fit (the adventure in venture capital is investing long before the business has materialized!).
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.
With series B,C and now D, makes one wonder; will there be any shares left for the original team?
A confusing thing about fundraising and dilution is that the new shares don’t take away value from existing shareholders.
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.
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!
But that's not how shares work. And companies aren't lotteries.
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.
> In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand
They add greatly to your expected chance of winning, given you have pooled winnings.
So do additional investment rounds as they theoretically increase the viability of the company.
Indeed, which is why I think the analogy fits.
You can have equal or even increased expectated value and still be unhappy, which was my entire point.
People aren't rational economic maximisers, despite what economics 101 might tell you.
> 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
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.
That's the scenario I said, where they share any winnings from their tickets too. You still have the same expected value.
> You still have the same expected value.
Yes, which makes the lottery comparison moot.
Here's a good way to think about this.
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.
But as an existing shareholder you have the right to buy in to the new shares to maintain your percentage if you want to.
Is that common with ISOs, even after exercised? I don't think I have ever seen an opportunity given to employees to buy shares beyond their grant...
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.
Printing more money doesn’t come with an increase in GDP or assets.
They’re raising from a position of strength for capital they don’t need. As far as I know, they haven’t published their valuation, but it is very possible they’re giving up little equity. Plus, giving up some equity to meet customer demand is generally a good idea as more revenue means higher valuation.
Forbes has our valuation, at $6b: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2026/10/09/thi...
Isn't the correct vehicle when in such a position called a "loan"?
Taking on debt is MUCH faster and easier way for all shareholders in a startup to end up with $0.
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".
Not necessarily, no. That’s just one option with its own risks and tradeoff
Loans make no sense for oxide at current interest rates
depends on market conditions and visibility on future revenue. And current balance sheet, cost of debt vs cost of equity.
Why do you think there wouldn’t be? They are just different prices.
I just looked into their product, WOW that is cool. Wish them the best
sovereign compute is the only way out of tiranny
Also time for the quarterly reminder that On the Metal / Oxide and Friends is an excellent podcast if you're into Rust and/or EE. Bryan and co. do such a good job keeping the technical discussions entertaining. Seems like an awesome place to work, too.
Probably I'm blind.. is there any form of imprint on their page? An address?
I don't think so, located in Emeryville, California
They brag about generating "taxable income", as if it was a novel thing
Says a lot about the state of affairs in California
- Series B in Jul 2025 $100M
- Series C in Feb 2026 $200M
- Series D now $445M
I expect the next round soon :)
One has to hope they're not actually burning through their money every 6 months, but I've been disappointed before
They just paid income tax?
You can still be heavily cash flow negative while being Net Income positive. It's actually one of the big use cases for VC money; you have a flywheel of revenue but not enough cash to pay to service that revenue and actually get cash.
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!!!”
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.
Having one of these in a colo is on my bucket list. Would love to just tinker with one to see how they work.
I really wish they had a SOHO offering, would love to run this with NextCloud and personal projects from home.
Their entire control plan is open source and you can run it on commodity hardware: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron/blob/main/docs/how-...
may the Sun never set
Nice! Amen /)
I still don't get Oxide's offering. Anyone care to give me the skinny?
I wrote this back in 2022 when I worked there, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
Server racks which are vertically integrated and provide great cooling, are quiet, and fully vertically integrated software (including bootloaders, hypervisor, etc. -- no BIOS!).
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.
And this is hosted in an Oxide datacenter or shipped to the customer?
shipped to the customer
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!
Shipped - hence on-premises.
Shipped to the customer, we don't offer leased/managed hardware or VM instances.
I think this blog covers it pretty well:
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.
They are selling you a rack of computers instead of a single computer, with well integrated high speed connection, storage, power, and cooling.
Expensive servers but with no GPU.
Looks like a mainframe computer and their selling point is that the operating system is open source.
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.
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.
Why are you answering if you have not looked into it very much?
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.
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Excellent news! It's wonderful to see a great company succeeding.
Congrats to the Oxide team!
awesome job to the whole team. Congrats Bryan and everyone!
$445M is a lot of money.
I'm interested in exploring what it would be like to use them but... there's no pricing page? I don't even know where to begin.
https://oxide.computer/contact
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.
In their current scale, I believe Oxide are like Rolce Royce: if you have to ask for the price before taking a test ride, you can't afford it.
this is a good point, and we make trial environments available for you to try here: https://oxide.computer/remote-access
Starts at about $1MM per rack if I remember. It may have gone up.
I believe that number was floated before the RAM price spikes. At 36 TB max, you could be looking at over $500k in just DRAM at todays prices
For the CEO being skeptical about AI, their site looks straight out of Claude.
Dumb question, what GPUs does Oxide use?
Is this the new IBM?
hopefully they are.
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 mean IBM is an amazing company. And this oxide is also doing something very elegant.
I'm not sure about the pricing.
This is the new Dell IMO.
Congrats!
A legit business? Raising legit money?? In this economy???
Wake me up please
september has ended so
Congrats! Now it does get tricky - because once you tempt investors with a profit they start worrying about your spending and expect you to keep a profit.
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