Yet another Hacker News

168 points ahlCVA 1 hour ago 39 comments

tylerhillery 1 hour ago | parent

Congrats to the Oxide team!

piker 1 hour ago | parent

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.

bkolobara 1 hour ago | parent

- Series B in Jul 2025 $100M

- Series C in Feb 2026 $200M

- Series D now $445M

I expect the next round soon :)

guywithahat 1 hour ago | parent

One has to hope they're not actually burning through their money every 6 months, but I've been disappointed before

parthdesai 54 minutes ago | parent

They just paid income tax?

ronfriedhaber 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

passive 1 hour ago | parent

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. :)

willmeyers 57 minutes ago | parent

They have one of the best hiring processes in the game. Just all around great people who care.

bkolobara 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

orsorna 40 minutes ago | parent

Right...so best interview process in the game for employers, not so much employees.

newsclues 9 minutes ago | parent

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?

sergiotapia 33 minutes ago | parent

Nine hours is crazy

SoftTalker 2 minutes ago | parent

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?

crab_galaxy 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

hilariously 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

dcre 10 minutes ago | parent

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

JRandomHacker42 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

999900000999 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

bambax 35 minutes ago | parent

Yes they seem to be doing everything right so far. Inspiring and exciting.

sgt 1 hour ago | parent

With series B,C and now D, makes one wonder; will there be any shares left for the original team?

Aurornis 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

xnorswap 30 minutes ago | parent

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!

CPLX 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

reticulates 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

simonw 1 hour ago | parent

Love the photo caption "FIGURE 1. US BEING AS EXCITED AS YOU CAN BE PAYING TAXES".

Oxide are so good at comms.

piker 30 minutes ago | parent

And yet that seems like a caption Bryan could have written…

oldfuture 54 minutes ago | parent

sovereign compute is the only way out of tiranny

trebligdivad 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

thatsabadlook 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

typon 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

Sebastian_09 45 minutes ago | parent

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?

tosh 36 minutes ago | parent

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

jiaosdjf 27 minutes ago | parent

A legit business? Raising legit money?? In this economy???

Wake me up please

wg0 11 minutes ago | parent

Is this the new IBM?

dzonga 10 minutes ago | parent

if these guys just capture 1% of spend that's on AWS, Azure & Google Cloud they will still be very big.