Item — HN Reader

Lots of praise not much skepticism, so what is the exit here?

$100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the total amount raised of almost $200M?

Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just staying private?

4 comments

From the article:

"Our thesis is [...] and that a large, durable, public company could be built by whomever pulled it off."

So the goal is an IPO.

I'd assume eventual IPO. And/or specific lucrative contracts within US Govt/Military/Tech.

AFAIK staying private is nearly impossible after taking VC funding…?

Also, what they do is very capital-intensive, so I’m not surprised that they’re raising more money.

I don't get it. They're a hardware integrator with a secret sauce management layer on top. I like anything on-prem but this seems a bit hyped. Slick website and appears to have a very good team though.

The server and switch hardware is designed in-house (from the PCBs on up), though we do source DRAM / SSDs / CPUs / ASICs from the usual vendors.

The "secret sauce management layer" is available at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron, released under the MPLv2 license.

(I work at Oxide)

These days there are very few companies innovating in this space. Oxide is the only one I can think of. (No, HPE and Dell doesn’t count, not in my book at least.)

There used to be lots of them, but they all had a very rough time after the 90s when cheap x86 boxes started to become ubiquitous.

I have no idea if Oxide will succeed or not, but I sure hope so. If it goes well they might become the Sun of the 20s.

Do hardware integrators usually build their own BMC, their own power supply, their own backplane, their own firmware, their own motherboards, their own switches, their own SDN, their own hypervisor, their own OS, their own rack design, their own blade / sled design, their own management API, and build it all in coordination with each other to produce a comprehensively new computing platform?

In my mind they’re much more like an SGI, Sun, IBM, DEC, or Apple type of play than merely an integrator.

what a weird take.

they produce a private cloud in the form of racks you can buy then just plug in to power and ethernet and run. also, they did a bunch of work so the OOB management isn't fucking terrible, and it uses way less power per FLOP because they bothered to, for example, "make the fans work properly".

Dell will sell you a thousand servers you can then buy racks for, then rack yourself, then buy switches from Aruba, then plug all the switches in to all the computers, then pay VMWare for an vm-cluster-OS, then you can install that, then when something goes wrong you get to call up Dell, Aruba and VMWare and have them all tell you it's someone else's fault.

you...don't get the difference between these two situations?

They created a lot of hardware and low level work. (The bullet point on the blog post)