Changelog & Friends — Episode 11

Bringing the cloud on prem

Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck from Oxide discuss building integrated hardware and software infrastructure for on-premises data centers, their design philosophy, and addressing the overlooked on-premises market where 95% of computing infrastructure resides.

Transcript(131 segments)
  1. SPEAKER_01

    Yes, this is Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show about Silicon Valley and bringing the power of the cloud on prem. Thank you to our partners for helping us ship awesome pods pretty much daily. Shout out to Fastly, Fly and Type Sense. OK, let's talk. OK, so this is our talk show. We accidentally I think we gained your guys's name. I didn't realize I think you guys inspired us. This is called Changelog and Friends. This is just our talk show, Brian. So you were on our. OK, you guys know that you were on our interview show. We thought we came up with a name. Then we went back to your website like, wait a second. They already have a podcast called this. So we ganked it. We switched the and to an ampersand. So, you know, we made it our own. You use an ampersand. Oh, crap. Sorry. Not on your website. You don't. We're not called Oxide. So there you go. That's true. Yeah. And then you have Oxide. Yeah, that's the that's all good. Anyways, point being is this will be a lot looser than even our last conversation, Brian. That's my point. Yeah. It's going to feel less interview.

  2. SPEAKER_00

    If

  3. SPEAKER_01

    that's our last conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Our last conversation, super rigid because we were having arguments over which Silicon Valley character I was if you can believe it. That was rigid for us. Fair. Fair. My kids gave me grief for that. It's like, I can't believe, like, Dad, you know which Silicon Valley character you are, your gourd might go to your room. Really? Dang. That's a burn. It is a burn. Well, a fun back story on that. Adam wasn't there for the show. Adam is actually the Silicon Valley aficionado amongst us. It was me and Gerhard. True. And I was going to just not bring it up. That was my plan. And I should have thought it's a good plan. And Gerhard brought it out. And then Brian, also a big fan. So you started launching in and I'm sitting there like, oh, no. Me and Gerhard don't even know the show very well. Brian's an expert. You guys are like, let's go fishing. I'm like, that's great. Let's go deep sea fishing. You're like, why are we on a boat? We're leaving the bay. I'm like, oh, we're going deep sea fishing right now. You're like, I did not. Yeah, you guys were not ready to go. It was awful. It was terrible. In fact, I think we had a cut a few minutes because you just chided us. You're like, come on, guys. And we couldn't look that bad. I was like, well, if you're going to ask the question, be ready to roll. That's right. It was fun. I didn't ask the question. I was just a victim of having Gerhard there. That is true. Gerhard asked the question. I should have never invited Gerhard. Yeah, this is a blowback for Jared. Well, Adam is here. Brian is here. Do you want to get it out of the way? I mean, I'm sure Adam will bring it up. It's going to be the whole show, Jared, the whole show, the whole show with Silicon Valley. Steve, are you a fan?

  4. SPEAKER_00

    I mean, no, I've been Brian's been hazing me for the better part of the last year and a half because I got to season I got through season four. I had not gotten through season five and six. And so he would fire references and he's just like, I can't work like this. I can't I couldn't work that way. Like get through the end of the series. So I finally powered through the rest of season five and season six in the last like six months. So that's that's the part that I have in state. Seasons one through four, it was it was a while ago. I've taken the

  5. SPEAKER_01

    other tactic. I just refuse to watch it now just so that Adam can't. It's so good. It's so good. It's easy. You think you're hurting Adam, but you're not hurting Adam. Jared is hurting Jared by doing that. That's right. I'm hurting myself. It is so extraordinary and it is extraordinary for all the reasons that great satire is extraordinary in terms of it's very much a reflection of this satire that we're living called Silicon Valley. And it's just very, very well done.

  6. SPEAKER_00

    Yeah. Well, the number of people that will say I can't watch it because it hits too close to home tells you it's perfect satire.

  7. SPEAKER_01

    That's what most people say. And Brian's the first one who didn't say that. He's like, oh, and he just launched it. You know, Steve and I actually in a previous life reported that this chair, you know, at one point they get rid of the CEO and everyone's reporting to the chair. And that is the episode. I know a lot of people that like can't watch it because of that episode. Has that happened? Really? Oh, there are plenty of companies where it's like the CEO is so bad. We're going to get him out of here. We actually don't know who the CEO is. But by the way, it's none of you turkeys. So like, right. Like actually this chair is now in charge. Can you really fire us? You can't really fire us. You're just the CTO. Yeah, exactly. But the that whole and there are just a bunch of the dynamics in there that are very and I think this is Dick Costolo is the one to really that's the reason I think, you know, Dick Costolo was kind of a fan of the series. And after season one kind of volunteered to help write a bit. And really, I mean, and he's talked about a bit about this. But I just feel like as you get into these later seasons and you get things that are so dead on. I mean, Jared, I love where they have they've emerged two companies, Sliceline and Optimoji. And there is a civil war in Pied Piper because the two companies had different dog policies. And what one of the oh, one of the company's dog policies was you like absolutely bring your dog to work. The other company's dog policy was like, no, no dogs come to work. And it's like this civil war spills into Pied Piper because Richard casually allows one of them to bring a dog to work. And the next thing you know, he's trying to get him to like him. He's like, nobody likes him, basically. Well, they like him, but they don't respect him. They don't listen to him. He's like, well, I'll get you your favorite coffee. You want dogs in here? I'll get you some dogs in here. So whatever it takes to get him to like him. And I think it's so interesting because it would so many things about the series. It's like it's funny and it's light, but it's hitting on something really, really deep where you have this is a absolute problem in Silicon Valley, where management is like, yeah, I don't know, just want to make you happy. And it's like, well, that's not actually not the way you lead. You're not always going to be, as Steve and I well know, it's like you're not leadership is not always going to leave everybody happy. And if you try to leave everyone happy all the time, what you end up doing is actually just creating a mess, right? You leave no one happy. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

  8. SPEAKER_00

    It's good stuff. It is good stuff. It is good stuff. I mean, the other one that hits home for, I think, a bunch of folks, especially those in enterprise sales, is everything around the box. And then he's like collection of the sales team where it's like, see, now I'm going to fall down because this was before season five. But I can't remember his name. And he's like, you know, regional vice president, northwest. And they're all checking in with all the different like regional sales reps. That's right. I shadow him. I'm Keith. I'm shadowing

  9. SPEAKER_01

    Bob. Jan, the man here again, they call me Jan, the man from inside sales. And it's a woman. So it's like an oxymoron. I was like, well, OK, wait, Jared, you've not watched any of it. So I have watched season one and I liked it, but I just didn't love it. So I watched it and I just kind of dropped off. And then Adam's like basically been trying to reel me back in. I took I kind of took the antagonistic stance, you know. So but you guys are selling it. You're selling it.

  10. SPEAKER_00

    Adam has not used the shame tactic that Brian employs.

  11. SPEAKER_01

    He does, but it doesn't it's not as effective. I think we're too close. You know, I just don't care. He doesn't care about what you mean. Let's not give me too much credit because it took years of ongoing shame to get Steve like finally over the line. But there is a great scene that's kind of Steve's alluding to is something, again, is very close to our own lived experience where they build out sales effectively before they have a product. Yeah. And so Richard walks in and there is this sales team that is already built out, but they don't have a product yet. And the sales team and again, we've seen this over to you and you see this over and over and over again in startups where they build out sales and marketing before having product market fit. The sales and marketing folks are slick. They seem like they're charismatic. They've got all the they got this kind of customer Rolodex. They've got all of these. Next thing you know, you have all of these, you know, RFPs and MSA's and you've got all these trials going on. And it feels like very promising. It feels like a pipeline. Yeah. POCs exactly. It feels like a pipeline, but in fact, it's not. It's all a fiction. And because there's no product. Right. And as customers discover that there is no product, then the sales folks are like, well, the problem is the product. And like, they're not wrong, but they're also not right. It's like actually the problem is that we poured a lot of our scarce resources into building sales and marketing. Yeah. Before we had resounding product market fit.

  12. SPEAKER_00

    What was the line they like the when he's asking about why they can't sell? And he's like, like, well, I mean, they're amazing salespeople when the product can sell itself.

  13. SPEAKER_01

    Wow. Good job, Steve. That's like a line, man. No, I knew because he's like the I thought these guys were the best. It's like, yeah, they're the best because the product sells itself. And there's a Silicon Valley does this over and over again, where someone says something, you're like, what the fuck? And the camera holds an extra beat on the other person in the room being like, are you listening to yourself say that the reaction shots are great. And that is and I feel like that's one of those words. Like there's a lot of wisdom in that shot. And it very much informed the way we build Oxide, by the way. Wow. Here's the oxymoron here to like the the unexpected thing is like, I'm going to spoil some things. So obviously, if you're listening to this, we're spoiling things.

  14. SPEAKER_00

    So

  15. SPEAKER_01

    if you haven't watched beyond season one, like for me, it's everything's spoiled. Cover your ears. I probably shouldn't watch it now. Yeah, spoiled. OK, so the box goes on to be the most moneymaker for holy and like season five. Like it's the of all the inventions of the great inventions that Gavin Belson did in the words of Shari, I believe her name is. She's like, it would have been better if you didn't invent any of those things because they were all money losers. But here is the box. They got like he's like, is this for the whole year? He's like, no, this is for the first quarter in terms of sales. Like it was the best success. What's in the box? What's the box? I don't know what the box is. The box,

  16. SPEAKER_00

    the box. Watching, you'll know.

  17. SPEAKER_01

    Is it kind of like Brad Pitt at the end of seven? What's in the box? What's in the box? I mean, this is kind of funny because they try to like disparage kind of the hardware angle of it. But of course, that's what we're building at Oxide. Yes. I love hardware, by the way. We love it when they're like, oh, this is where. So they've got the great scene where they're looking at in the data center where the box is going to go. And like the box goes here.

  18. SPEAKER_00

    Sad data center operator that, you know, lives in a cave. Yeah.

  19. SPEAKER_01

    I mean, I can imagine you guys watching the show, like literally taking notes, you know, because I mean, it's so on the nose with what you guys are doing. It is very on the nose. The it's the is the box three, the Gavin Belson signature edition. Jared, they they crowdsource the logo inside of Hooli. Oh, nice. And I won't give that away, but it's really genius. That's too good. Leave some things for him to chew on later. Yes, exactly. But I think that's certainly resonated with what we're doing at Oxide, where we're doing this exactly. We are doing the box three Steve Duck edition. Is that right? We don't have a Russ Hanneman on

  20. SPEAKER_00

    the cap table, though. That's how we do

  21. SPEAKER_01

    it. Well, the trace collage.

  22. SPEAKER_01

    This guy. This guy. This guy. Hey, this guy. You guys sold a box, didn't you? Segue. Didn't you guys sell a box? Segue. Yeah, we are. We're shipping. We shipped. We shipped. We have shipped. I saw the tweet. Was that you? Now that I see you in person, was that you rapping this thing? That is not me rapping this thing. You look similar to whomever that is rapping it. I'm not sure if he's going to be insulted. I'm going to be insulted by that. I don't think I look similar to Robert Keith. I don't have any in particular. So that's our engineer, Robert Keith. OK, now that I zoom in, I'm disagreeing. I didn't open up big. It's small on Twitter. I call back to another Silicon Valley scene. When Robert Keith joined the company, among the very, very few people at Oxide were a Robert and a Keith. And I'm like, look, I don't know how to tell you this, but we can't call you by either your first or last name because we are. And he's like, it's fine. I've been known by RFK before.

  23. SPEAKER_00

    Like, all right, thank God that did the two name problem, which in Silicon Valley was because of a second Jared. Exactly.

  24. SPEAKER_01

    So RFK, our our engineer, he one of the questions that we got on Twitter. So he's rapping the rack. Well, one, there was like a very weird strain of like, I can't believe the amount of plastic that you are using to wrap the rack. And it's like, do you know how anything works or is built like to be like, trust me, the plastic that this thing is being wrapped in is the least of the resources being consumed to. I mean, it is a computer. It is a good one. It's one that we've designed to be efficient.

  25. SPEAKER_00

    You had static versus anti static Twitter. Oh, so there was a big group that was just like, oh, my God, you're wrapping it in something that's going to create static electricity. Wow. And it's actually anti static. But my favorite was medical Twitter that was just spiraling over his right foot, about to plant where his ankles going to snap.

  26. SPEAKER_01

    Oh, no, gosh, really?

  27. SPEAKER_00

    And it's worried about like what happened to his ankle.

  28. SPEAKER_01

    Well, so when you actually talk to RFK about this, because I'm like, you know, one of the burning questions we got on the Internet is like, is this guy back to each because it looks like it? And it does actually zoom in on the right foot. You're like, it's true. It does look like you're about the trip. And he's like, I can't remember, but I can tell you, I definitely did not like I do not recall sprawling all over the floor. So I think, you know, RFK is a coordinated guy. He's did not do not trip. But yeah, that was us. So that's our engineers on site with our contract manufacturer in Minnesota, putting the final touches on that rack as it goes into the truck and ships out to customer one. So pretty exciting stuff. Yeah, very exciting. I mean, to literally ship something real, not just software. I mean, not that that's a bad thing, but like physical thing. It's very hard to like take back and obviously change. You're going to get it on site. They're not going to want to let it go. It's a beautiful thing to me. Right. Guys have phenomenal industrial design as well as like just design. Generally, I love the color who's doing your design work and how can we get some access to this talent? The team. Yeah. I mean, seriously, your guys' design is so good.

  29. SPEAKER_00

    Smoking early on. We were very fortunate to get connected with a firm that was helping us with some elements of design, some other stuff. And one of the folks that was there that was kind of front and center for that had left and was looking to see what they wanted to do next. And thankfully it was one of those things where, you know, in a startup at kind of an early stage, a full -time designer is not, you know, you're not, you're not starting there when you've got, you know, limited resources and a small team. And it was just an absolute no brainer with this particular person that we had worked with getting them in early. And I think like a bunch of people at Oxide, you know, this particular person spans way beyond

  30. SPEAKER_01

    design.

  31. SPEAKER_00

    And thinking about design, not for design sake, because that's the other side of this is we've all lived as like data center operators. You always have seen the products where you see design for design sake show up. And you're always asking the question, like, I don't use that. Could you strip that off? And then how much would the remaining product cost? And there's some good company examples of that in the past where they would put these, you know, really expensive bezels or, you know, LEDs on the front, you know, displays on the front that don't really serve a purpose. And all you as an operator see is like added cost for no benefit. And I think, you know, the team's done a great job of focusing in on design for usability. Like let's colorize this thing. Cause that's where the operator needs to touch, or this is how you indicate health or quality of a particular part of the system rather than, you know, how do we make this thing just look good for looking good sake?

  32. SPEAKER_01

    Well, I think Ben Leonard is the designer that Steve is referencing. And I thought one of some of my favorite conversations is getting Ben together with the mechanical engineers to figure out how to make the rack look great while making it highly manufacturable, while designing for manufacturing, all these other constraints. And, you know, Steve and I are very much students of history. I mean, I think that if you haven't read Steve Jobs, The Next Big Thing, absolutely terrific book about the history of Next. And like the really actually interesting chapter of Steve Jobs' life is at Next. And because he made a lot of mistakes. And one of the mistakes they made is he's after this map, this particular black for the next cube. And it just spends untoward amount of money. And I mean, it's a wrong decision. And like, we do not want to have the matte black that we are finicky about that we're not designing for manufacturing. So how do we make this thing beautiful without sacrificing its manufacturability? And that requires you to get a like some mechanical engineers and a designer in the same room. And there's some back and forth because it's like, how about this? Like, no, no, that's too expensive. Can't do that. Can't do that. But what we landed on, I think is really gorgeous. And the I don't know if you've seen the side of the rack, but there's a punch through with the Oxide logo with that green that just absolutely pops. Yeah, it is. It's good looking, which is really important to us. I mean, it's important to us to build something that when we set out, we wanted to build something that we would all be proud of, that we pull together this kind of team spanning these different domains and disciplines. And Oxide, as a result, because we pulled in so many different kinds of folks from so many different domains, Oxide feels like a heist movie. It feels like a heist movie. I love heist movies. And it's got like, you know, we got the safe cracker and we've got the helicopter pilot and we've got the specialists. But then those specialists like all pulled together to like pull off one last job. That's right. Well, hopefully not one last job in your guys's case. No, no, no. The first job. Yeah. Yeah. There'll be other follow up movies, maybe with different products. This depiction on your home page of the rack, is this pretty accurate to what a typical rack you'd sell would look like? That is very accurate. Yeah, actually, that is based on the CAD renderings. So that's pulling straight from mechanical CAD. Is a lot of that storage? Is that what a lot of that is? Like the vertical greens across the top and bottom?

  33. SPEAKER_00

    That's what the green is. That's right.

  34. SPEAKER_01

    OK. Did I read it right? You had like 32 terabytes of NVMe, like you only do NVMe storage in this thing. Yep. Gosh, these things are expensive. Holy moly. That's good, though, right? I mean, like you want the I mean, for what you're doing in a data center, you want the fastest possible. But like, that is such an expensive buy. I mean, that's not my money. Somebody else's money, right? I think for the lifetime of the company, there's been this real home lab interest in Oxide. Yes. Yeah. Gave me a home lab Oxide edition. I know we've had plenty of requests for that, for sure. I want that for real. For the enthusiasts. Because you remember remember the last time, Brian Gerhard wanted to buy one. You're like, you're not buying one. I think I let Gerhard down a little bit. You see, Gerhard, it's like, when can I buy one? I'm like, you're not going to buy one, pal. Yeah. He's like, I'll save up. I'm like, I don't know if you want to do that, but there is a lot of opportunity there. I mean, obviously, you have to focus on the market. You're going to focus on which totally makes sense. But like you're using ZFS, which a lot of home labbers love. BT -RFS is another one. But like, I think for the most part, open ZFS is one. The home labbers heart. So you're at least there, you know, and you have beautiful hardware. Yeah. And we've got I mean, in ZFS, certainly an important building block. You know, we built our own software from the lowest levels to the highest level. So we've got our own service processor. We've got our own hypervisor. We've got our own control plant software. We've got our own console. And all of that is open source. So that's the other kind of big angle that we can tack into. And this is kind of like what we tell the home labbers. It's like, well, good news, like it's all like downloadable. Right. And we're like, yeah, you want to buy something? You're right. I want the hardware. Sorry. I know. It's kind of weird that you guys have this like nerd cachet and you have this like enthusiast audience. So many people interested watching love it. Want to buy stuff? You're Gerhard's. I'm sure Adam would buy some stuff. I would totally. Yeah. Yeah. But does that even translate into anything of value for you at all? Yeah. How so?

  35. SPEAKER_00

    Yeah, I was just going to say it's like that contingent. Many of those folks are in companies who spend a lot of money on infrastructure, on premises, which again is kind of this like forgotten corner of the technology world. It's like, oh, does anybody do on prem compute anymore? And it turns out like just listen to an AWS keynote from, you know, two years ago and Andy's on stage talking about 95 percent of infrastructure sits outside of the public cloud. And so you have this kind of overlooked area that is much, much larger than the public cloud, but has none of the access to the same benefits that we are all intimately familiar with, which is like how why would you consume infrastructure any other way than at the end of an API that is a set of elastic services? And yet if you want to own parts of your infrastructure for the right reasons or you have regulatory compliance reasons or latency or security or, you know, for any of these types of things, which are good reasons to run portions of your infrastructure on premises, you're doing the same thing that folks are doing 20 years ago, 30 years ago. You're taking, you know, a metal rack and then you're figuring out what server vendor to put in there, who, by the way, is outsourcing firmware and a bunch of other stuff in that in that set of boxes. And then you're figuring out what do you do for storage and what do you do for your networking? And then you have to do the software part. Are you going VMware? Are you going Red Hat? You know, and you have to basically build that whole thing together over months just to deliver what AWS has at the swipe of a credit card, which is a set of elastic services for developers. And it's a tragedy because you shouldn't have to. You know, Brian and I were at a cloud computing company and just realizing how tough it was for those that were not running a cloud computing company to actually get this kind of clean water to their end users to developers. So to your comment, Adam, it is definitely like expensive for home labbers. But the interesting thing that you find is when we're talking to, you know, enterprise customers and they're comparing it to their current stack of putting all that into a rack, it actually becomes really, really attractive, even from an economics perspective. Right.

  36. SPEAKER_01

    Well, and I think that that kind of appeal to that enthusiast demographic is super important to us because so many of those enthusiasts that are home labbers at home, they're the ones that are going back to work and making an I .T. decision. So we love having that. And I think that like that's always been really important to technology in general is that that playful tinkering that's happening, where people are kind of following their natural curiosity, right, is a really important way that technology is developed. So even though we're never going to sell to Gerhard and the home labbers, we love the support, the engagement, the discussion, the enthusiasm. It's not our market, but it's a really important element of who we are. And plenty of folks have come to Oxide out of that enthusiast demographic where, you know, one of our engineers came to us because they were starting to do things in Hubris, which is our open source operating system we talked about last time, Jared, rust based operating system that any home labber can experiment with. By the way, I think I think that's what I was trying to steer Gerhard into. Yeah, you were. Yeah. I'm like, dude, what you want to buy is like a twenty dollar eval board, whatever those went off to. Like this is what you want to buy. You know, you want to buy an STM32H753 eval board. You can download Hubris. Then you got like you got an Oxide computer. You have it for 20 bucks. And he's like, no, no, I want a real computer. Are you serious? The thing that's amazing is those things are real computers. And so it is actually a great way for people to get to know some of the the lowest level software that we've done. And because all of that's open, people are able to get insight into this level of software that historically has been completely closed and proprietary. Do you think if you conquer this enterprise world, you'll you'll consider home lab like the home cloud, so to speak? Oh, oh, oh, oh, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, there's room for the home cloud. Like that's what I'm saying. It's not about like, oh, will you please do this? Because I want it. It's more like knows there's a market, I believe, in the future for home cloud.

  37. SPEAKER_00

    All right. So the first step is at least pretty straightforward, which is there are a bunch of use cases. This is still in the enterprise, but there's a bunch of use cases that are sitting in like retail stores, bank branches, manufacturing sites, park attractions, right? Like where there is a lot of need for compute and storage and networking and really needing a cohesive kind of integrated solution. So I think that's like that has to be step one for us as we think beyond the core data center use cases. And then, yeah, there's the pony rack. There's been a lot of calls for how small this thing could get. But you

  38. SPEAKER_01

    know what you guys could do in the meantime and maybe just forever is to throw us a bone, you know, is to like have a brobo kind of a thing, just like it's an oxide storage thing that can sit on my desk. I'm a YouTube or it can be in the background. It can glow green or whatever. And like, I think we'll all shut up and just go on with our life if you guys provide something that we can buy off of the website. You know, I think

  39. SPEAKER_00

    we got to the ask. Yes.

  40. SPEAKER_01

    Yeah. Can you give me an oxide branded machine? No, I think part of the challenge for that home lab or demographic is that we have taken a rack scale approach. This is true rack scale design. So in particular, as you like, really want to actually I'll tell you, like the biggest technical hurdle to getting a true oxide rack into a even a scaled down one is you've got to have your own power shelf and power rectifiers. So we've got a power shelf. We do our AC to DC conversion in a single shelf in the rack, and then we run DC up and down the rack. OK. So again, a mini DC to DC bus bar. And then we also got an integrated switch, which is a actually the single biggest challenge we would have is scaling down that switch to something that can reasonably fit in a home. I also Adam, I feel like I'm doing this courtesy of taking the request a little too seriously, because it's like it's just not going to work in the home. I think it's like, what? I'm very serious. I know. I know you. I know. I know. OK, let's let's back up one step then. So rather than take what you have is that large rack, which is just phenomenal. I mean, two thousand forty eight CPU cores. I mean, I don't need that in my home. So don't give me that scale down. Give me a version of how you think for home lab cloud. Right. Assume that I want you to consume four to eight you on my rack. And you're a simplified system that gives me great power, great networking, maybe great CPU, obviously, and then storage just in one single box that has super fast throughput between all the different services I run. You know, maybe I'm running Proxmox, maybe I'm running something else. I don't know that you've all built something as Proxmox like, but give me not a version of what you have scaled down, but a version that thinks like you think for home cloud. Yeah, I think, again, the challenge there is that we have taken from a technical perspective, it is that ultimately the reason that oxide exists is because the machines that we run in the data center are actually closer to the home lab than they are to the hyperscalers. That's actually the problem is like, haven't you home labbers had enough? Really? Because what we run in the D .C. are these one you and two you boxes that actually are personal computers. And the approach that we've taken is to blow all that up and to take a rack scale approach. So that scales down to a point. But when you get to something like the switch, it's like actually the integration of the switch with our control plane software. So we've done our we've got our own switch. We've got our own switch operating system. Actually, that switch is actually not one switch. It's two switches because you've got a high speed switch and you've got a management switch getting that into a form factor. I mean, it's not impossible and kind of like the arbitrary future, although I even that. Are you scared? Brian, are you scared to do this? You're making all these excuses. I'm just I'm just teasing you. I appreciate your trying all the tactics here. No, I really appreciate it. You start

  41. SPEAKER_00

    you started with like, imagine if let's just go clean sheet. Like, how would you do it? Let's not say you're not going to do it. How would you do it? And then it's like now to the shame, you know? And that was the origin story to the Oxide Mini.

  42. SPEAKER_01

    That's right. I went McFly on you to be super serious. I love the focus on where you're at, though. Like, I'm a ubiquity lover. I love the simplicity of what ubiquity has done for home networks and just enterprise networks. Even like they've just made it really easy to, I guess, get into networking when you would normally been, you know, maybe intimidated by some of the things that the that running a network requires. And so I think they've proven there's a beautiful hardware possibility molded with great thinking and great software. And then distributing that and having a fanatic customer base. They have a finite customer base. So given that in the marketplace, if you can if you can sort of collapse some of those things that you already have done, maybe there's there's another player in the market that's called Oxide. It's a compelling argument. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Yeah, there you go. Just say yes, guys. You don't have to do it. We're going to do it next quarter. 2026 done. Yeah. You know, I think that actually it's funny because I do feel that it would be easy to your point. You're like, can you guys just agree to it so we can move on? And I don't know, like, let's go back and talk about the series that I haven't watched or something. But, you know, we have always tried to be really direct about what we're doing and what we're not doing. And I've got a complicated relationship with Steve Jobs. There's plenty to not like about the guy. But I do love his WWDC 1997 keynote. Focus is about saying no. And especially as a startup, especially as a new company, you've got to know what you're saying no to. And what's actually important in order for us to be able to and this is the hand on heart, honest answer. In order for us to be able to ever serve those smaller edge use cases, which are probably in the enterprise, but would get us much closer to the home lab. We need to survive and thrive as a company. And that means we've got to focus on this core market that we're going after, which is this enterprise D .C. market. So

  43. SPEAKER_00

    good

  44. SPEAKER_01

    answer. Yeah, I'll put my hat down, then, because I for sure agree with extreme focus. So I give you that. However, I will also begin with if you conquer. OK, I'll be if we can look forward to the future. Like, yes, absolutely. For sure. There you go. There you go. Yes, I do feel that like we I mean, our aspirations are really to be the kind of company that young engineers can come up in, that customers love to buy from, that people are enthusiastic about. And it's like we're veterans, right? And we are trying to pull from the best of our collective pasts and careers and where companies really get this right and then they lose their way. And we want to certainly seen a lot of and we are trying to pull from the best of that and build something that can be really generational and special. So, yes, in that future, absolutely. Fantastic. Homelab. Yes. Ox -Con Homelab Edition. He finally landed on the correct answer. 2050 Ox -Con is going to be just really the big announcement there. OK. As we finally serve the homelab. We can go back and play this audio at that announcement and be like, wow. And we will go do that. Exactly. Wow. They knew even then the vision of these guys, 27 years in the future, they would serve the homelab. So how do we get there? Since the state. No, no, no, no. I'm not going there. It's just turned into a board meeting. Yeah, exactly. It's like, OK, so you've already committed to doing this in 2050. I'm just pulling in the date at this point. Yeah. Give us our roadmap. High level,

  45. SPEAKER_00

    high level. Just one of the milestones.

  46. SPEAKER_01

    That's not what I'm saying. But OK. No, seriously, how do we get there? What is the state of on prem? Like you guys are building amazing hardware for this market that you said Steve was sort of like, I forget your words, but basically just unpaid attention to. It's been an afterthought, basically under the radar, under the

  47. SPEAKER_01

    radar. Thank you, Jared.

  48. SPEAKER_00

    It has I mean, it's been in the worst as it's been ignored by the companies that are serving that market. Yeah. And that is largely because, you know, the last 10 years, all the focus has been on how do we is collectively move to this public cloud computing model and forget everything else. I mean, if you were going to give it the most charitable treatment, it's like, well, no, that should be the first focus. It's not in spite of everything else. It's just like that's where you should start. And that's actually not entirely untrue. And that has been the focus for most companies over the last decade. And we were certainly in the midst of it running a public cloud computing company. I think now the question is, OK, well, we've moved most of the good use cases to the rental model of the public cloud, because a lot of people think about cloud computing as this rental service model, this kind of hotel model for living rather than the actual like what it does, which is providing abstractions over a bunch of complicated infrastructure under the surface and making it accessible via APIs. So, you know, I think now companies are rightfully asking, like, how do we get that same service model everywhere the business needs to run? And there's no good answers right now. You know, over the last 20, 30 years, the industry is split hardware and software. You've got hardware providers over on the left and software providers over on the right. And and if you want to bring those two together, it's each individual company's job to go do that. You know, any company that is building cloud like infrastructure on prem has to do all the assembly and the integration of the troubleshooting. God forbid something goes wrong. It's like finger pointing left, right and center. You know, what version of software are you running and instead of delivering kind of a complete solution? You know, now the long forgotten masses on prem are trying to figure out what's next because you can't just like, you know, I'm in a hotel room right now and it's very nice. You know, I didn't have to buy any of this stuff. And, you know, if I want, I can order food to the room. And it is pretty cheap, considering I didn't know I was going to be in this city five weeks ago. But if I were living here five weeks from now, I would be looking at a huge bill. I would have people that can come and go in my room without telling me, you know, there's aspects of hotel living that don't really hold up when you know you're going to be in a city in a location for 12 months, 24 months, 36 months. So I think that's, you know, at the core of this for us was how do we extend it so that cloud computing is sort of that ubiquitous foundation? And now companies in the future are able to either rent it from a provider like AWS, Google, Microsoft for the right use cases and then own it. Where do they want to own it? But it doesn't take an army of 500 people to kind of assemble it and build it, integrate it and support it. There's really this kind of productized hyperscaler like infrastructure that everyone should have access to. That's where we started. Now, Brian, I think I can speak for you that we had a good sense that this was going to take is going to require taking on a lot because it's not only kind of a de novo server design. But then, you know, we decided early on that we we thought we had to do our own switch that has its own kind of back story there. Well,

  49. SPEAKER_01

    the paths diverged so long ago is the problem. Yeah, the problem is that kind of the extent hardware makers are PC companies, Dell, HPE, Supermicro, and they don't actually understand cloud computing. And those folks at those companies that understood cloud computing. Steve grew up at Dell. Steve was at Dell for what, 10 years. And when Steve saw this burgeoning new use case in California for Dell servers company called Facebook and inside of Dell, they're like, this is a website. This is just not that like we don't see why this is that important. Like we should be selling to, you know, the chevrons of the world. Insurance and manufacturing. Right. Finance. And yeah. And part of the reason that Steve went to a cloud computing company in 2009 is because couldn't really get Dell to understand the importance of cloud computing. And you see this over and over and over again. Go look at the the backgrounds of people doing cloud at Google, at AWS, at Metta. And you'll see the Dell and the HPE in their own past. And you know that like they left because those companies didn't get it. As those companies didn't get it, they got further and further apart. And so those designs haven't moved from 20 years ago. So in order for us to be able to go deliver that hyperscale class infrastructure, hardware and software together, we've got to go back to where the trails diverged and we've got to go down the right path to on -prem. The problem is they diverged so long ago that we have to take on a huge, huge problem. And the minimum viable product for this company is enormous. As Steve's alluding to, it included the networking switch. It included getting rid of the baseboard management controller, the BMC, doing our own service processor, doing our own software all the way up and down the stack. So VMware does not run on this box. ESX does not run on this box. AMI does not run on this box. AMI does not run on this box. We have done we don't have a bias. We don't we have done our own hypervisor. We've done our own control plane. And that's an enormous,

  50. SPEAKER_00

    enormous lift. Yeah.

  51. SPEAKER_00

    Well, and by the way, this is I mean, when you look at kind of professionalized cloud computing infrastructure providers, this is pretty consistent. Like Amazon and Google and Facebook, these companies, their infrastructure looks nothing like what's accessible to the Fortune 500 companies that are out there building on prem. And you've kind of seen a similar pattern in the automotive industry where we've been in like a couple of decades of outsourcing. So there's a really good podcast where Jim Farley is talking about how Ford outsourced everything in software. And so when they wanted to make a change to like the seat controller mechanism, they had to go to Bosch and be like, hey, do you mind updating the software that controls this aspect of the car? There were like 500 different examples of this. And this was done to lower costs to bring the cost of each car manufacturer down by like 500 bucks. And the realization that he is having, having watched what Tesla has done and what some of the Chinese manufacturers have done is like, this is not only costing us more, we are moving slower. We are not competitive. And they kind of had this revelation that they had to bring everything back and start thinking holistically at Ford about what a modern vehicle looks like. And I think as we were kind of peeling back the layers, we had a sense of it while we were at Joyent. And because of all the issues that we would run into that were kind of like, we're at that hardware software interface. But when you start peeling it back, it's like, man, there is some decades long cruft that are going to be pretty challenging to rip out and do a new. The

  52. SPEAKER_01

    saving grace was that at every single one of those layers, there were groups of technologists that had come to the same conclusion of like, no, this layer's got to get blown up and rethought. And the reason we are where we are is because those technologists came to Oxide and said, wait a minute, like, oh, you're rethinking the switch. Thank God someone's rethinking the switch. I've thought a lot about this problem. Why? That's what I want to go to. What's so wrong with the switch? Oh, no. Here we go. We don't have time. Oh, my God. And it's not just the switch, but the switch operating system. And you've got the switch is in charge of a lot of different things, obviously. It's like moving the packets. It's connecting the devices. It's connecting all the IP stuff, right? Like it's super important, obviously, in the network. It's the network. It's the backbone of it. It is. But right now, like the switch has no real integration with the compute nodes that it's talking to. So there are a bunch of things that you actually want to go deliver functionality to that end user. You want to give them that virtual private cloud, right? You want to give them that there's a bunch of like sophisticated. You want to give them sophisticated firewall. There's a bunch of sophisticated stuff you want to go do in order to do that. You actually need to have hardware and software and cross stitch across the compute slide and the switch. And when those things are delivered by two different companies that have no real sense of collaboration or constantly pointing fingers at one another, it's really hard for that end user to go create that infrastructure. For on -prem. So, yeah,

  53. SPEAKER_00

    very much the switch had to go. It's not a problem with the switch. It is very much that the switch just doesn't know what happens when data leaves.

  54. SPEAKER_01

    Right. It's like silos.

  55. SPEAKER_00

    And if you're actually thinking about a pool of resources that are all like, again, back to cloud computing, you're not trying to design, you know, specific hardware components and software components. You're trying to give developers instant access to arbitrary amounts of compute storage and networking via an API. And in that you give a quality of service to that. And you can't do that when, you know, you have kind of that brainstem, that switch that is unaware of what's happening on, you know, compute slides and unaware of what's happening up in the software stack. And I mean, it's the classic anytime there's a bump in the night, everyone blames what the network.

  56. SPEAKER_01

    Yeah.

  57. SPEAKER_00

    Like, oh, it's got to be something in the network. And core network engineers are left kind of trying to defend themselves, saying, no, like everything I see in the switch and the routers looks good. It can't be in the network. This is where, again, kind of time and time again, we realized that you need to build these things together and be able to deliver that kind of end to end visibility.

  58. SPEAKER_01

    How different is what you guys are doing? So if I'm a CTO and I have two proposals on my desk and I have to decide a direction we're going to go, you know, with a new data center we're building on or whatever, and I can go with Oxide racks or I can go with whatever is currently there, stack a bunch of Dells and some switches together and do what I've been doing for the last decade. What kind of switching costs am I looking at? What kind of lock in is there? Like, do I have huge risk to pick you guys or is it like everything you're doing is so low level that at a point where I'm going to care about it as a company who's rolling out some services, it's all good. How different is it?

  59. SPEAKER_00

    So in terms of I mean, we would propose in terms of value and density and economics and services, it's very, very different. In terms of switching costs, I think one of the big benefits and why the timing was right for Oxide now versus Oxide, say, five, 10 years ago, is that where companies have oriented and really invested a lot of resources is is sort of developer friendly tooling for cloud computing. So by that measure, the switching costs are extraordinarily low because you're now able to leverage the same kind of terraform frameworks and the models and workflows that you become accustomed to are stitching into Oxide because you can think about it as kind of another cloud that you now kind of own and operate on prem. And it's leveraging all that investment you've done over the last five years, getting to more cloud first type models and workloads and development practices. But being able to leverage those on prem

  60. SPEAKER_01

    and

  61. SPEAKER_00

    then in terms of like thinking from a data center operator perspective, where this solution meets the rest of the data center is obviously at the network handoff. And so we speak, you know, BGP to the network. We come with gifts to the network operators and engineers, which gives them a whole kind of new world of visibility so that they can not only be in defense mode, but actually be proactive and be able to anticipate where there's congestion and be able to kind of help give users better experiences. And then we're you know, we've invested a lot to make sure that that handoff point that where we're talking BGP to someone's network is clean and pretty straightforward. So pretty well. And in terms of that

  62. SPEAKER_01

    operator experience, one of the things that we definitely optimized for, because we've actually built this thing as a product, you can actually get it wheeled in, de -created, powered up and you can start provisioning on it that day. No way. So actually, even now, I like when I I guess, Steve, you won because Steve would say like, we are going to get you up and running

  63. SPEAKER_00

    within a day. And I'm like, look at Steve. I Nick normally and by the way, by the way, just for context, like this happened to us as we were building out data centers all over the country and eventually the world when Samsung acquired joy in it and the lag time from when those boxes all land to when you've got added capacity, which, by the way, is dead. Like you can just watch the dollars burning on the clock when you have got boxes you paid for and you do not have customers that are being served by them. And so that time is really, really important when you're thinking about the economics of the business. And for us, I think we had it. You know, we were operating pretty efficiently, but that's still measured in weeks. And a bunch of the companies that we went and talked to in 2019 were telling us that they measure it in months. It's like an average of like 100 days from when boxes land, when they've done installation, integration and burn and test and software deployment and validation and network settings. They've handed this off to developers 100 days. And, you know, our goal, at least, but my goal, Brian's goal was was higher than this, but was that we'd be able to do this in one day. So you roll it in, you give power, you apply networking and you have productive end users in the same day. It is like it's not a day. Like I keep saying it's like it's not a day. It's like hours.

  64. SPEAKER_01

    And Steve's like, no, you say an hour. You would say one hour. Come on, Steve, it's hours. And it's also like it's not like, well, what we're aspiring to. It's like what we've done. And so I'm like, Steve, can you give us and it's like, look, can we just say a day? And I'm like, you know, I mean, if it takes hours, like it'll be done in a day. I'm like, they'll definitely be done in a day. But it's actually and this is where you get to the real payoff of having rethought all of this, having designed it holistically, just like that iPhone unboxing experience is really quick and smooth. That Oxide unboxing experience, decreating experience is in. The reason that it's possible is because this whole thing, we have all the hardware and all the software. And so when we actually do our initial install of the software, we effectively go through our own recovery path of like, assuming you've got nothing on the rack and we go from literally nothing on the rack to you can provision within hours within. I mean, it is like I think standing at like 90 minutes right now and actually do without what ultimately we are ultimately bound by is the UART speed inside of the sled when we're transferring the most primordial image so the thing can bootstrap itself up and boot off the network or be able to put off the network. You need to have like enough of an image that you can actually go boot and that we are ultimately bound by that UART speed is ultimately if we had a I do love that the install experience around this is just eye popping and the folks that have been working on this are not necessarily I mean, we've got some folks who have suffered through the pain of Dell and Supermicro and HPE, but a lot that are actually coming just from like the cloud side of things. Right. And they're like, I don't know, like, I want to make this as great as it can be. Like, I don't even like they don't know. It's like, do you know how far ahead you are of the state of the art? And so this when you initially install the rack and you plug into these technician ports and do this original because you have to have some initial configuration, right, you have to have some initial before you can actually just hit API endpoints and hit that web console. There's got to be bootstrapping. And the actual software that does that is just gorgeous. And it's a we think it's going to be a wholly different experience. So, you know, Jared, to go back to your question, you're that CIO. If you look at what this product offers your internal customers, it's much more comparable to the cloud than it is to the on prem stack of garbage that you're currently suffering with. Gotcha. Sorry, home lab. No, no, no. I'm saying that's not home lab. No, no, no. All right. I'll go with that. No, the problem is actually we are running home labs in our DCs. That's we are. Everyone is. Those are bold words. It's time to get the home lab out of the DC. I think that's a good pitch. We're

  65. SPEAKER_00

    trying to get the home lab out of the DC. That's exactly what it is.

  66. SPEAKER_01

    Yeah.

  67. SPEAKER_00

    To the earlier conversation, like the home labbers that go into these enterprise environments are the rabble rousers. They're the ones that are like shaking their fists. Like, why can't we get better? And it's interesting because our motion is not top down. It is, you know, these folks are some of the most load bearing folks in these organizations that are helping create the products that these companies are selling to their customers. And they are saying, you know, how come we can't do better internally so that I we can focus on building better products for our customers instead of being our own private cloud corporation?

  68. SPEAKER_01

    Yeah.

  69. SPEAKER_00

    We had one company that we're talking to in the finance space that was like, we have a 500 person engineering operations team and we have to put them out of business because our customers don't and not not get rid of them. We need to reapply those folks to be able to work on the things that our customers are waiting for and want. But it is folks that are not going to necessarily sign the P .O., but they're the ones that are making the noise to get to the folks that do sign the P .O.'s. And it's been great to have that kind of community support. And it is that like clarifying time when companies have moved certain things to the public cloud and realized how much less operational overhead there is to help sharpen like, wait a minute, how can we can't have that same operational efficiency internally back to like the CIO and the CTO? It's like, wait, we can we can vastly improve being able to focus our talented folks on our business and then give those developers a much better developer experience, which I think that's kind of the all important bit. Especially is the the the amount of importance placed on shipping new features, shipping new products, focusing on what what their actual business is has been super important.

  70. SPEAKER_01

    Can you walk us through exactly what it's like to boot for the first time this oxide rack? Is it assuming the the sad data center person has walked us to where it will go and says this is where your oxide server rack will go? What's the box?

  71. SPEAKER_01

    Assuming that's already taken place, we're there. Jared, let's say Jared and I are there. We're the administrators, the operators, whatever you want to call us. We've got to provision this thing. You say it takes a few hours. We slide it in. Maybe it takes a small forklift or several people or maybe it's got wheels. I have no idea. This thing is not short. So let's just say it's there. It's there. We're not worried about door spaces. How wide we got to be. Nothing like that. We're at the rack. It's not plugged in. Is RFK with us? Do we have RFK here or are we on our own?

  72. SPEAKER_00

    RFK's unwrapped it because he comes to unwrap it. And we're ready to plug it in

  73. SPEAKER_01

    to the network, to power, et cetera, and then boot it for the first time. Are we, you know, attaching our ethernet cable to a port on this thing or a console port? What is the exact interface, the real details? Yeah, the real details. So if you look at the rack and I think maybe you'll be able to see it on the website, but there are technician ports at the front of the switch. So that is where you are going to plug in. Your laptop cable effectively is going to plug in to the switch. An ethernet port. An ethernet port. You have got a configuration file that will specify that bare minimum that we are going to need to be able to connect to your broader network. That's going to be uploaded over that technician port. And then you are going to SSH into that technician port. And you've got a an install screen that's going to walk you through the actual installation of that rack. And then you're going to we've got to get a video out there so people can kind of see it, because this is also where it's just like we've got a very demo based culture. And so we do every Friday, we've got a demo Friday where anyone can just demo anything to the company. That's been really, really important for us because it allows people who are doing things that are like pretty maybe pretty small in the stack to kind of get that appreciation of the peers. But we had the demo on Friday of one of our engineers making this thing that is already gorgeous, like even better. Steve, I don't know if you got a chance to watch John's demo, but it's just like absolutely eye popping. So but we got to put a video of it out there so people can actually see it. He was demoing

  74. SPEAKER_00

    yesterday. Oh, nice. And we didn't even have the latest back to where we started. We were with a customer and John was like, well, as he started to go in on that early setup, he's like, well, you should take a look at my laptop really quickly. And again, it is fun to watch customers get delighted by these low level kind of small implementation details, because back to the fact that they've sort of been ignored, having folks around them that really, really care about what is most painful or frustrating about their daily jobs and seeing a little bit of care and thoughtfulness go into these parts of the stack is really fun. And Wicket is kind of part of this sort of set up service on the rack that gives you a visual of how many sleds do you have? What is up? What is not up

  75. SPEAKER_01

    in this? Like, we're not over the Web right now. We can't be right. So this is all over SSH. This is a terminal app. So this is where actually one of those like strange bounties of Rust. So this is based on Rust 2e, which is a terminal user interface builder. And you can build like really easily. You can build a really robust, eye -poppingly beautiful terminal based apps. And so this is all right. Yeah, this is a terminal based experience. I love that. And I think it's to Steve's point. It's like one of these things where we are going into these like little details that matter a lot to people who've been suffering. And one of the things that we that is really important to us at Oxide for the virtual machine. So you provision a virtual machine. How do you get into that virtual machine if it itself, the guest, has borked networking or screwed up or even screwed up the image in some way? It's like you need a great serial console. The irony of the cloud is that the serial console is actually like more important than ever. And the serial console is something that actually even the biggest public cloud providers don't take very seriously. And we have taken the serial console really, really seriously. And one of the things that kind of fell out of our implementation is you can have many people watching a single serial console and participating in a single serial console. So you can share effectively. And I think this is going to be one of these things that is just like our customers are going to absolutely love, because it is when you're dealing with one of these like low level issues, that's annoying. It's like, oh, I've screwed up cloud in it in some way and it's hitting the wrong thing or what have you. And no one else can log into it because like that's the problem. The ability to like share out a serial console where everyone can log into the same serial console and begin to get this thing debugged, which is a problem that everybody has in the public cloud. This is a problem that we have, right? And it's I think it's going to be one of those little touches that we think people are going to really love because it's meaningful. It's not well, I mean, it's actually like really, really significant, and it's going to have a material effect on the way people are able to do their jobs. So back to the boot up.

  76. SPEAKER_00

    Yeah, I don't think Adam, I don't think we took you or Jeremy took you all the way.

  77. SPEAKER_01

    Not deep enough. I want to go take me to the TUI. So yeah, I'm in the TUI and I've I've uploaded or I'm already in the TUI, so I've uploaded this config. You know, I'm in this thing. What do I see as an initial operator? Like, am I you said this is your own OS? So it's like, yep. So you are seeing the it is telling you, like, I'm going to give you a root of trust image, a service processor image and an OS image. And I've done this for each of these sleds. And we are now this is now in progress for each of these sleds. One of the challenges is always how do you deliver a beautiful interface that's also transparent and gives people the details that they need when things go wrong? So we very much have designed that in this in mind. So you're seeing its progress, but you can also get as much information as you want about what's actually happening and where are we actually in terms of what's actually going on in the system. Again, one of the big advantages of us being more transparent, open source, like we want we want you to know if this thing goes wrong, where it went wrong and what happened. You've got all these details, but what's actually happening? And then truthfully, that takes like 20 minutes. You can do all that in parallel. That kind of all comes up. And then you are your configuration, provided that you've been able to actually connect to via BGP and you've got external connectivity, which, you know, you've got to deal with one's own internal network to do that. And we've got the ability to get an NTP server and so on. You're up and you're going to go hit a web console and you're going to go provision.

  78. SPEAKER_00

    That web console then is going to walk you through a workflow to go get set up with your IDP. What's IDP? Identity provider. OK, yeah, your identity provider for R. So again, in enterprise environments, you've got, you know, usually like a SAML based off environment. And whether it's, you know, key cloak or some larger, more unwieldy Microsoft products, we were not going to go try to replicate all of that. These are established authentication and identity validation mechanisms. And so integrating into that so that you have kind of a pretty clean workflow for being able to get that stitched together. And now you have you're the administrator. So now what you are doing is setting up a silo. And that is kind of a boundary for because one of the other important aspects of this is being able to operate a multi -tenancy. And I know like multi -tenancy gets thrown around a lot, but the necessities of having both delivering kind of quality of service guarantees to customers while having complete isolation is one of the very complicated and hard elements of running a cloud and something that has been very difficult for accident systems providers to get right who are selling on prem. Even some of the kind of hyper converged folks that entered the market in the last five, 10 years. This notion of multi -tenancy is is a pretty tricky one to get right. But in the oxide system, you're basically setting up a silo or a number of silos depending on your customers that you're serving. So you, Adam, have like two different departments and you would have those sort of departments in their own kind of boundary. And then it's as simple as inviting them in. And those users can then come in just like they're hitting EC2 or AWS. They can set up their credentials and create a project and they're off and running. They can go deploy instances directly. They can do it via the API CLI or the web

  79. SPEAKER_01

    console.

  80. SPEAKER_00

    Yep. Web console. And off they go.

  81. SPEAKER_01

    Is there installment of Boon2 at that point or their flavor of enterprise Linux, whatever they decide to? Yeah,

  82. SPEAKER_00

    they can upload images that they want to run. You can kind of promote those images to be available to everyone in the silo, just someone in the project. So you have, you know, the ability to kind of select who you want to have access to what as, say, the project lead. The purpose of this is to enable those end users, whether it's SREs, developers, et cetera, to be able to operate fully self -service. Right. It's like get out of the shadow IT where folks feel like they need to go swipe a credit card because that's how they can move quickly and start giving them that same agency on prem that they have in the public cloud. And then from an operator's perspective, back to you as the administrator, your job is to keep them running, you know, make sure that they have ample quota and that they are, you know, accessing the resources that they need. But you should not have to be in the way in allowing them to kind of run and deploy software and run software, much like the cloud.

  83. SPEAKER_01

    Very cool. When we started the show with saying that you've just delivered your first rack, so congratulations again. How did you know you're ready to deliver? Like, how did you know this was hardened to the point where you can deliver on that promise? What did it take to get there? Like how much how bloody are your knuckles? How upset are people on the inside to some degree to get there? Like, how do you know? How did you know? What did you do to know to know that this was mature enough to do that? Yeah, I mean, so I think you always have a problem when you're co -designing hardware and software. You've got the things that you can kind of revisit and the things you can't revisit. And you kind of said this at the top, that when you ship that hardware, that hardware leaves. Yeah, it's out of your control. So the hardware has to be absolutely right. And you really need to drive that to be correct. And there are huge numbers of challenges there in terms of getting the hardware is hard. And the I think actually more directly, the details really matter. And a very small detail can be the difference between hardware that works and a warm brick. And so getting those details right takes a long time. There's a lot of iteration involved. We actually have been pretty transparent about that whole journey. So we've got our our and friends, Oxide and friends. The O .G. and friends. The O .G. and oh, yeah, exactly. Well, I think we can all be friends. Like we're all friends here. Yeah, I was telling you, I'm like, this is amazing. They have this podcast called Oxide and Friends, how novel. Yeah, exactly. Yes. We've loved getting the team on there in their own voice. So we've been able to shed a light on some things that really have not had a light upon them. So getting the double team talking about bring up tales from the bring up lab have been extraordinary and getting compliance, regulatory compliance. So when you have hardware, you can't just like ship hardware. You've got to actually have the FCC has to certify that you have not made something that's going to interfere with all the electronic equipment around it. And that's that's compliance.

  84. SPEAKER_00

    And and by the way, the FCC has fixated on the state of the art, which are these one U2U systems. So it turns out when you're building a rack level system and you walk in to go get compliance, they are measuring you against these much smaller systems. And if you push back on that, you're like, well, wait a minute. There's you know, there's the density of two racks running inside this one rack. This is the product

  85. SPEAKER_01

    they

  86. SPEAKER_00

    kind of shrug. They're like, I don't know, pick it up with the FCC.

  87. SPEAKER_01

    Oh,

  88. SPEAKER_00

    and you just find that, you know, time and time again, there are few in the industry that are thinking at the rack level. In fact, the only demographic that has to think at the rack level are these end customers.

  89. SPEAKER_01

    Yeah. And that's not where you want to think about it at.

  90. SPEAKER_00

    No,

  91. SPEAKER_01

    because that's where it's already baked. That's the cake, you know. Right. You know, as we went through this, it's like you can see why this is hard. And compliance was hard. And we got a great oxide and friends talking about all of our adventures in compliance, which, by the way, people never talk about because what happens in compliance stays in compliance historically because of all of the for any company going into compliance is tough because you're going to find things where it's like we are emitting. We got this emitted at this particular frequency. We have this mission that we need to go understand and patch up. And so there's a lot of work. And but once that's done, you've got to have the software ready to go. And in particular, the software that is the most important software to have ready to go is the ability to actually update the software. So you need that. There are two elements of software that have to be perfect when you ship. One is the actual root of trust and the ability to actually indicate that this is oxide firmware to actually sign that firmware and to put it on the root of trust and to lock down the root of trust such that it can't be impersonated. That has to be done correctly. And that's actually super complicated because that requires the generation of a secret, namely the private key that we generate that is ultimately used to sign that firmware. That's a secret. And how does Oxide keep that secret? And I am convinced that many other companies our size are like, just like lock it in the CEO's drawer and don't ever talk about it again. But it's like that's not really good enough, because if this secret is going to be used, if you could impersonate oxide firmware in perpetuity with this, you actually need to go solve a really thorny problem, which is how you you generate this securely and how you store it securely. And that's a whole thing. And so there's something called a ceremony. And this is a technical term in security spaces. And Steve, this is something you and I learned a lot about. Do not appreciate the complexity. You've got to have that exactly correct. And that's a whole thing. You've got to have the ability to update the software. That's got to be correct. The software has got to be able to bootstrap itself. And then you've got to know the software that constitutes that minimum buyable product. And there's a whole

  92. SPEAKER_00

    lot. And by the way, software update is enormously difficult. This is very difficult for Amazon. It's very difficult for a good example of a company that does it really well in Tesla and the company that is struggling because they don't do it well in VW. Like it has these very, very, very long shadows. If you cannot do a good job of versioning and updating software. And it sounds trivial. I mean, it was the feature that we had to make sure we had gotten right before shipping and everything beyond that. Well, obviously, there's a huge amount of software that ships in this system. It's more software than hardware, which is a bit counterintuitive because we've got a big hardware rack on the website. And it's easy for folks to think about it as a hardware product, which it certainly is. There's a whole bunch of software on there. But update is the fulcrum. I mean, that is the thing that allows for all of the rest of the software to continuously be improved to go fix things that are wrong. And we were, again, very, very fortunate that we were able to attract folks that had been working on this problem for their career, very passionate about this problem that were front and center on working on that. But as Brian points out, that's like one of a couple of really, really critical things that we had to get through gates before we knew we were on the path of shipping.

  93. SPEAKER_01

    And then I think, Adam, importantly, you go like, how do you know? We got a great luxury at Oxide, namely the product that we're making is one that we ourselves want to use. So we've got an Oxide rack that runs our software that we are constantly updating and running on ourselves. And we are the first customer. We are the first customer. And this is always essential. You know, when you buy a product from someone and it feels like, are these guys using their own product? Because it's like this thing kind of sucks. And if the engineers were forced to use their own product, I think it'd be a lot better. And we are a big believer it's something that was instilled in me early in my career at Sun, where a real turning point at Sun. And you talked about errands, about ZFS, and one of the early moments for ZFS was us storing our own home directories on ZFS. And, you know, I'm very proud to be in that first batch of whatever it was, eight people that had all of their data on ZFS. And because we had to go all in first. And that machine, Zion, was a machine that we all volunteered to be on. Part of the reason that we've deployed on ZFS at Oxide is because I've been on ZFS for whatever it has been, 20 years. And when you walk that trail with your own infrastructure, you have a level of confidence in it because you've been using it yourself. And so we are using our product ourselves. And there's so many things that have come out of our own use of it, where we have obviously discovered all sorts of issues that need to be improved and so on. But it's also given us the confidence to know that, like, you know, what we're building is actually in it. To pull this whole thing together required a hardware rack that was to the point that it could really be used. We needed a lot to be in place to be able to even use our product ourselves. And boy, the first demo day that one of our engineers actually did, and you could kind of see him working himself up to it. And Lukman and our team and Steve, I know you'd been like DMing Lukman to see if we could actually demo the whole rack together. And that moment where all of a sudden we had all Oxide software running on all Oxide hardware and being able to demo that for the whole company is so catalytic and was so energizing. And to realize, like every single one of us at this company has been demoed today. And how great is that? When was that, that demo? How far back was that demo? That demo was, I mean, because again, you need all this, like this stuff has to go through a compliance first. Compliance was in January. So, you know, it was in early April is when we were able to actually pull everything together and then started iterating really quickly. Unfortunately, the software had been developed in parallel. Of this year, 2023.

  94. SPEAKER_00

    Yeah. But if you go back to some of the other milestones of strongly believing that this bird was going to fly, you know, if you go back to the first bring up of the first board, and we did a de novo design on the board, you kind of find there's these reference architectures for server boards that everyone in the industry uses. And if you break the mold, which is, again, based on this sort of it's a PC mold from the 80s. If you break that mold, you're kind of in the wilderness and you find that this stuff is very poorly documented for the reasons that we have reference architectures that everyone runs off of. And so that first bring up on that first board was in 2021. There was September 2021, right? Yeah, October, because we would be getting it up through October, November. And then and then another big, big, big one was because, again, remember, like early 80s is when the PC industry outsourced bios and firmware and companies like American Megatrends came up because it was IBM and the clones, all the clones, like everyone was consolidating around this outsourced model of let's have one company or a set of companies write the firmware for all these machines. So we don't have to. And the outgrowth of that is you've got this massive, proprietary, opaque blob of software on enterprise machines that is not very well qualified and definitely not understood. So ripping all of that out and writing a de novo set of firmware in Rust and getting that to boot on an x86 board was actually maybe the riskiest thing we did. And when that booted up, that was another like, holy we we might make it. It's broken flat, man. It works. And that was a while ago. That was a long time ago.

  95. SPEAKER_01

    Then I would say I like it. And then on the software side, we've been working on the control plane, the hypervisor and all that whole had to happen long before we had hardware. So there was another early demo from Sean Klein on our team. And see, let's remember when that demo was when demoing all of the software not on oxide hardware. So this is on commodity hardware. And that was that was another moment of work. Everyone's like, holy we're going to pull this thing off. And that was a year and a half, two years ago. That's a long time ago. Yeah. So this is on the one hand, it all came together on the rack in April. But this has been going on for a long, long, long time, because it takes a long time to do all this stuff.

  96. SPEAKER_00

    One other demo that was amazing. And you could just tell the two engineers, James and Greg, that were doing this demo were just like so giddy. They could barely they did a good job of playing it off. Like it was just another casual demo. So they had a Minecraft server running

  97. SPEAKER_01

    and

  98. SPEAKER_00

    they're like, you know, chatting up about, you know, their Minecraft activities and who's doing what, running in the oxide rack to be clear. Yeah, running in the oxide rack. And one important aspect of any kind of cloud infrastructure is the ability for you to move workloads uninterrupted. So you need to be able to tolerate live migrating things around. And so we're watching this demo and they're, you know, small talking and just like giddy to give the final reveal. And at the end of this Minecraft banter, they had been demonstrating our live migration. They've been migrating stuff all over the place with no blips in gameplay. And again, it was kind of another because just there's a bunch of aspects of this that you need to go kind of stress test. And it was yet again, another one where the whole company on demo day is sitting there just like gobsmacked. That this capability was running as well as it was under the hood. And live migration is one of those,

  99. SPEAKER_01

    like, again, little things that if you don't do, if you don't build into the first product, then you have these violence of compute that you can't do anything about. And it's very, very important that we're able to migrate things around so we can reconsolidate the rack, so we can service it, so we can pull sleds, so we can add sleds. It's like you need to have this capability, but it's got to be built into the very lowest DNA of the product.

  100. SPEAKER_00

    And then we bring it all the way to today and we are going to be finding things that are at the edge of oxide and the customer environment that some of which are smooth and some of which have sharp edges. And the next

  101. SPEAKER_01

    six

  102. SPEAKER_00

    weeks and six months and six quarters are going to be continuing to smooth that out and continually improve that so that the product is even easier and getting better as we go.

  103. SPEAKER_01

    Yeah. So, Steve, you mentioned that you're in a hotel room. I'm not sure if you mentioned before we hit record that you're actually on site with a new customer. And getting messages now like this exciting start of the day, messages are coming in. So surely you're going to learn a lot today, probably, you know, and ongoing.

  104. SPEAKER_00

    Yes, I may have been going to my DMS occasionally during this to see how things were going. It's all good.

  105. SPEAKER_01

    You played it very smoothly. Thankfully, nothing must be that much on fire because we have had one guest have to just run out in the middle of the show before. And I wouldn't have blamed you if you had to. But happily, you haven't had to. I

  106. SPEAKER_00

    may have muted once or twice, but now it's exciting.

  107. SPEAKER_01

    You know, when you look at on premise versus not on cloud, is that synonymous? And the reason I bring that up is like the question really is, is who is an oxide rack for, like what type of customer? And the second question, I suppose, is this shift for 37 signals to move off the cloud, is it should they have bought an oxide rack? Like, is that the kind of, you know, given, you know, the prolific move from, OK, cloud is you talked about rental earlier, Steve, and how, you know, obviously it doesn't make sense to live in a hotel forever. Is there is that the same song? Basically, is that should 37 singles be a customer or are they a customer type for you all? Who should buy these things?

  108. SPEAKER_00

    Yeah, I think probably. But I would want to have a conversation with DHH first and make sure to understand what their explicit use case is. And this first product from ours is not intended to be applicable to every single use case on premises. It's focused first on general purpose compute. So we are definitely going to have hardware acceleration in the product in future iterations. But there's a large swath of workloads that are well suited for this. And it's a lot of the on premises workloads today. You know, by the way, I own a home and I'm staying in a hotel room. So it's also like, you know, there are the right kind of accommodations for the right use case. But the general customer set that we're talking to and that we're engaged with and that we're serving right now are large organizations typically. So you've got kind of Fortune 1000 regulated industries. You've got a lot of large institutions that are going to have a lot of need for rental public cloud computing. And also we're going to have a lot of on premises IT infrastructure that they need to support for the next couple of decades as far as the eye can see. And you even ask some of these folks like the most ambitious public cloud adopters. How much of your workloads do you expect to have in a public cloud only model in five years? And you are it's hard to find anyone that will even say north of 50 percent.

  109. SPEAKER_01

    Is that right?

  110. SPEAKER_00

    So you have this just massive, massive and these are measured in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in both places, right? And again, still having to pick from these kind of 1980s architectures that Brian mentioned and deal with having to then find software. Is that software provider that I'm using today getting acquired by maybe a mega Corp who's going to raise prices? And and so the large kind of institutions and large enterprises are the demographic that we are focused on the most right now, because those are the ones that have reached out and said, hey, we have spent a lot of time and energy on our public cloud strategy over the last five years. And now we're kind of turning that ray gun on premises and figuring out how we modernize and how we improve that. There's another group that is really interesting and we spent a bunch of time with, and that is the large cloud SaaS companies, companies that were born in the public cloud. They themselves are now spending as much as large enterprises in the public cloud. And I think the thing that I don't like about the whole 37 signals discourse is this like cloud repatriation. It's like, you know, it's time to leave the cloud. It's time to go back to on premises. And I think that's totally the wrong conversation. What's really interesting is when you talk to these large cloud SaaS companies, and they're not saying like, oh, we got to get out of the cloud. It's a racket. We could do all this for less. We could do it better than the cloud. Like, yeah, good luck. You're going to do it better than than AWS does it. No, it's conversations that are around. How do we grow and go get access to more of our customers data in this financial regulated industry? We've got 10 % of this four letter banks data. How do we serve that bank and help them use our products for 100 % of the data? Well, in order to do that, we've got to extend our platform closer to where that customer is for a bunch of their data. And we can't do that by cobbling together a kit car of five different enterprise providers and building a 500 person engineering team. And that's where we've had some really, really rich conversations with these folks where they're excited that they've got a vertically integrated appliance that they can land their cloud SaaS platform on top of and go deliver that into a colo, an exchange, you know, places where a lot more of this customer data lives or these customer use cases live. And so we're really excited about that use case because that is now allows Oxide in a way to help kind of extend enterprise software beyond just public cloud use case to a bunch of these other markets. And yes, they will be customers of Oxide. We will be partners because we're going to be, you know, there's kind of a nice virtuous cycle here where it can be kind of a helpful distribution channel that also help these companies to improve latency, you know, grow revenue. And those use cases are much more interesting than like, oh, is the pendulum swinging back out of the public cloud and back to on -premises. It's like, that's kind of the wrong way to think about it.

  111. SPEAKER_01

    I've got two really quick questions and then we'll let y 'all go. Sound good? Yeah. My first one is, where are you guys storing the secret? Ooh, yeah. That's a good one. We actually do want to do an Oxide and friends. Clearly, we're not going to tell you exactly where the secret is stored, but I think we do want to go into some, I think it's like the technical details are really interesting. I think it's important that we talk about the dot matrix predator that gave its life for the secret. Oh man, I like the sound of that. Most gave some, some gave all for Oxide. And that dot matrix printer sacrificed itself for the greater good. Metadremel that it wished it had not. It lived a short but important life. Was this like a scene out of Office Space, you know, where they take it out back? And it goes beyond that, though. You can't do that. Oh, yeah. Because we thought we're like, oh, this is going to be like PS load letter and we're going to take it into the field and we're all going to. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is going to be like taken apart surgically and like destroyed surgically. So in particular, the Dremel goes through the microcontroller because this dot matrix printer. Why did this dot matrix printer have to die? Because it printed out the secret. It saw the secret. It saw the secret. Yeah. So it might be like, you can see the secret, but then I have to kill you. You know, the dot matrix printer has died and the the secret is stored, attended by armed guards. So the you know, they're fortunately society has some some apparatus for storing such things. So which landfills this thing in? Yeah, exactly. That's right. We got we got Russ Hanneman out there looking for the thumb drive.

  112. SPEAKER_00

    It's

  113. SPEAKER_01

    a good, good question. Ultimately, that ends in a safe deposit box at an unspecified institution. That's what I figured, you know, in an unspecified country. Ultimately, it has to. But I think the apparatus there is really interesting and it's something that we actually want to get into. In the future, it was really fascinating, just like all of the the precautions that you take and that are really important because the secret is super, super important. The secret is company ending. And we you have seen this from there are vendors that have lost control of their signing keys. And it's it. Oh, yes, MSI. This is having MSI. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's happened recently. MSI, they lost control of their signing key. And it's like, you're done. It's game over. You can never know what you're actually running on. You can't trust what you're running on. Right. Right. And it is really, really important. So we've treated that with great care and great rigor. And then we're also it for any customer. That's like because another really interesting aspect of this is documenting this process really thoroughly. So a customer, we obviously can't tell you what the secret is, but we can be very transparent about all of the steps that we took to go secure that. So there's a very crisp audit trail. So we know exactly who was there, how it was done, all of the steps and procedures that we took. You've got when it was done and so on. So it's pretty neat. That's cool. You guys should publish that ceremony. Like not the details, but just the general flow and like how to really keep a secret kind of thing. That'd be a cool blog post or GitHub repo or something.

  114. SPEAKER_00

    Mockside and Friends.

  115. SPEAKER_01

    There you go. Well, your hub has got to be the podcast. Right. And everything else is the spokes. So I agree with that. That's right. Yeah. Put it on the podcast first. While we're on the podcast conversation, you know, there's the I think podcasting moment has kind of passed. And in terms of like there was a time where it was like everybody had to have a podcast, you know, and I feel like people kind of moved on the general consensus. But brands have wanted to have podcasts, some have podcasts. It seems like it's a great thing for a brand. So many of them make podcasts that nobody wants to listen to. And you guys have a podcast that everybody wants to listen to. You're also a brand, so to speak, you're a company. And I'm just curious, like, do you have a strategy? Is there like a strategy around this? It's like you like to talk on microphones or like, is there a content strategy going on here or is it just like, we like to talk on the microphone?

  116. SPEAKER_00

    We should talk about On the Metal first, because I think that was the first version of the podcast was On the Metal and the strategy such as it was behind that, because it was also selfish in that we wanted to talk to people that had been there as computers were built over the last couple decades and found that there was not a lot of recorded history of it. I mean, obviously thousands of books written, but there wasn't a lot of audio kind of telling the stories of computing in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and even more recently. And we were seeking and kind of were fortunate to run into or know folks that were at that hardware software interface in the earliest days of Honeywell and Intel and getting them on record telling those stories. I think we had a pretty good instinct that this was going to be content folks would want to listen to, but that historical themed kind of how we got here, like why we are in the state we are was really compelling. And I think was strategically

  117. SPEAKER_01

    the thing that was clearest in our mind was that there are other technologists out there that would like to join us and they're going to be folks that we've never met. They're going to be out of our network. And the podcast was a way of putting the content in front of them that we knew was compelling and we think that they would find compelling too. So kind of like the such as like the initial strategic thrust was, this is a way to help build the team. Yeah, it felt like it was a bit of a bet, but not much of one because it just felt like this was pretty obvious. I don't think we were expecting just how quickly it would bear fruit. So we got that first episode out of On The Metal with Jeff Rothschild, who extraordinary technologist, founder of Veritas, very early Facebook. First VP of Engineering at Facebook. Early Intel. Yeah, it was early Intel way back in the day. And Jeff's extraordinary. And he was so generous with his time and really terrific conversation with Jeff. That podcast drops. And six hours later, I've got someone coming in on LinkedIn saying, I just listened to the podcast. I am leaving Facebook. We've got to talk. And that was Aryan Rudzala, who is one of our founding engineers. Aryan was the first one that was like totally out of network for us. But Aryan is such an important part of who Oxide is. And we share values with Aryan because he was attracted by the podcast that we put out there. And he's like, you know, the folks that make this, I want to talk to these people. And

  118. SPEAKER_00

    early

  119. SPEAKER_01

    on with those stories, we knew would be attractive to the kind of technologist because we what we knew, like the thing that we knew that I think investors didn't necessarily know is that the world technologists, customers knew that it was time for this company and that if we could put the bat signal out there saying, hey, here's what we're doing, come join us. We knew that technologists and customers would raise their hand. And so that's the strategy such as it is behind the podcast was it's a way of getting that bad signal out there. By the way, it's doing it in a way in a vector that we just love. We love podcasts. We love listening to them. We we think it's a really important vector. So, yeah, it was on the metal was huge for us.

  120. SPEAKER_00

    But we didn't talk about Oxide at all, except for some a couple of advertisements that listeners because we just recorded a couple of like tongue in cheek ads and listeners after they had listed, you know, the 10th on the metal 12th and got the same ads, they started just protesting like, please, God change the ads. We actually had one listener submit a ad for us. No, just use this. Like, we'll start adding ads for you. But we didn't talk about Oxide at all. And I think the morph into Oxide and Friends was not specifically just to talk about Oxide more. There's plenty of topics on there that have absolutely nothing to do with the space and some of the problems in computing and cloud computing, but to provide a forum where we could go deep into areas that no one talks about. No one talks about bring up because bring up is ugly, especially on, you know, first boards for systems. And no one talks about compliance because, again, there's a lot of words. It's ugly. And folks are scared to expose that to their customers. They're scared to expose that to the market. And what we've found is that that transparency is actually endeared us to this demographic of customers because they love that they get to see it all. They kind of get to see where it came from, how it was built, who built it, why they built it. And that level of transparency were like, you know, even myself, like five, 10 years ago in my career, you're always like, ah, we really want to share this. Do we really want this out there? And you're thinking of all the downside. Right. And once you start sharing stuff and you see that positive feedback, it emboldens you to want to share more and more and more. And I can say we are definitely not at risk of sharing too little.

  121. SPEAKER_01

    Not at all.

  122. SPEAKER_00

    I mean,

  123. SPEAKER_01

    it's all contextual. That's the problem. Like people get so scared about, I mean, obviously the printed secret with the dot matrix. That's when you keep, you know, very close. Yeah. But like your ideas, some of them are worth keeping close to the vest, but not like secret forever. And they're all contextual. Like what you are doing is maybe drastically different than what most are doing. And they're not in the same space. So they can't just like transplant this great idea. I heard on this podcast from Steve and Brian and bam, my company is successful. It's not like that. You know, so many people are just not building in the public and not like literally sharing every possible secret thing ever. Like there's some things that you do keep that just shouldn't be private, but like most of it, just put it out there because you'll probably attract the better people you want to work with anyways. You

  124. SPEAKER_00

    just made a really important point, which is like someone that you might worry about wanting to take an idea and go do it. You find that some of those people actually join the cause they want to join you or they, or they become customers instead of wanting to go build for themselves.

  125. SPEAKER_01

    And they're like, Hey, I don't want to take on all that risk. You all did like everything you all did. That's amazing. I just want to work with you all, not instead of you all a hundred percent. That's right. And I think also we knew that our customers, cause we'd been our customers, that the customers in this space for on -prem computing have been gas lit by their vendors and their vendors are not just not transparent. They're deliberately opaque. And when you are responsible for running that infrastructure and the system is misbehaving and you feel that everybody is lying to you or otherwise obfuscating what you know to be the truth, namely the system is not working. Like we knew that a real differentiator for us would be that transparency. And we've gone to an extreme that I think is terrific in providing this bright light into these things that, that have not had a light upon them. And that's not just opening up all the software, although we've done all that too, but is getting all these engineers to talk about the actual like real experience of getting this stuff done and brought up. And actually I just, I think it just dropped this morning. Actually there's a go -to Chicago talk that I gave on the rise of social audio. So Jared, you were saying that kind of the time for podcasting maybe has, has passed. I think we are in a golden age for social audio. I think social audio is really, really important. I think it captures something different than we get through these other media. And I think that the, so actually Oxide and Friends was actually born on Twitter Spaces. So I remember you telling me about Twitter Spaces back the last time we talked that you were big on it. And I don't think you were making it a podcast back then. It was just Spaces only, wasn't it? We started recording really early. So we realized that and fortunately we didn't record the first one. That's a bummer actually. Well, what we learned is actually someone did record it. Oh, they did. Always be recording. And they always be recording. I absolutely agree with you, Adam. I'll always be recording. Always be selling, just transplant to be recording. Always be recording is an Alex Bloomberg -ism and a... What is it really? That's Alex Bloomberg. That's Ira Glass, This American Life. Always be recording. I didn't know that. I thought I invented that. Geez, this whole time. Just have a good idea like somebody else. Okay, fine. There you go. And it's, it is really important because you get it's a different medium. So I think social audio and so this go to Chicago talk I gave on the rise of social audio and why it's important for engineers. So what I would like to see, I think that actually, I think people focus too much on, oh, I need to create like this well edited, well produced podcast, obviously love the change log. That's great. It's a lot of work to social audio, throwing a discord out there, recording it and throwing it out via an RSS feed is not a lot of work, actually. And getting engineers in any, I think any company, getting technologists, getting, I mean, getting people that are solving real problems together and talk about the struggles they had together, solving these problems in detail, recording that and getting that out there is enormously valuable. And I actually think that one of our problems, not to go overly large on you here, but one of our problems societally is that we have done too good a job of insulating one another from the details of what we're building. And as a result, like when people look at the phone, it just feels magical. When they look at the cloud, it feels magical because we've been insulated from the actual details and from the humanity that's involved in building these things. So I think it's actually really important that we talk about these details so we can let people know that, by the way, yes, there are people that are still building computers. And yes, it's interesting and it's hard and it may speak to you. Maybe you're interested in these details intellectually. Maybe you're interested in these details at a deeper level where it's a deeper calling. And I think one of the disservices that we have done to young people, especially, is to imply that everything's been done and everything's solved. And it's definitely not. And we're all out here solving real problems. But we need to be transparent about that so people can get engaged and see that. So sorry, that's a much bigger answer, I think, than you're probably anticipating, Jared. No, man. I like that answer a lot. All answers are good answers. We are big, big social audio proponents, not on Twitter spaces anymore. Thank you. No, thank you on that. I want to get off Mr. Musk's wild ride, but we are on a Discord that we then record. And that's been a really actually that's been really important because it gives you a chat vector. So you've got people can type comments and then you've got people speaking on stage. And which is really, really helpful because it allows people to participate. There are lots of people that want to participate in the conversation, but don't actually want to raise their hand and speak. And on Twitter spaces, the only way to participate in the conversation was to actually like take the mic and speak. It's really nice on Discord to have people be able to like point to links or contribute to the conversation in a way that doesn't require them to do it. And then if they want to get on stage, they can get up on stage, too. So it gives you that flexibility. Huge proponents of social audio. And yeah, again, this go to Chicago talk just came out today. Is this your next company you're going to try and build, Ryan? Or is this just like a... It's such a I think it's like open source, actually. Open source is not a business model. Open source is a technique, a tactic, something you do as part of building a different kind of business. And it's the right way to build a different kind of business. Open source is not a business model for us. Open source is something that we do as part of who Oxide is. For me, social audio is not a business. Social audio is part of we do what we do at Oxide as part of who we are. What Steve and I are in our nucleotide based pairs. We are this computer company. Like the next business is this one, because we believe that we're building a generational company. Well, we got to Adam in order to be able to release to the home lab in our 2050 keynote. Yeah, we have a lot of work to do. I know and you got to commit 2050. That's right. You can't have another business. 2050 coming to a home lab near you. What the heck will that be 2050 doing? I don't think I'll be playing with it. So you got to do it faster. Can we do it like 20, 30, 30, 30? Maybe I can do 20, 40, maybe. But 2030 will split the difference 20, 40, 20, 40. But that's the last and final offer. Yeah, let's do it for 2030. We'll take it. All right, guys, thanks so much for hanging out with us. This was fun. Oh, this has been a lot of fun. Love what you're doing here. Yeah, it's been fun. I like this changelog and friends thing. Yeah, it's good. Thank you. Sweet. We'll have to get you on to Oxide and Friends. We'll do a crossover episode. Happily. We'd love to. What you need to do is send us a rack so we could test out and do something. Let me truly speak contextually. Or you know what? Here's one better.

  126. SPEAKER_00

    I'm full circle.

  127. SPEAKER_01

    Invite us to your next customer install. And as media, we'll come there and help you document some stuff. We'll do some fun stuff. That'd be fun.

  128. SPEAKER_00

    Why don't you come to our first customer install at Oxide? OK, what's that? Is that in the past up to Emeryville? We've got live running kit. We've got a whole the whole history of boards kind of laid out.

  129. SPEAKER_01

    Yeah. Oh, that'd be fun. It'd be great to have you up. Cool. Let's do that. All right, guys. All right, friends. Thank you so much. Bye, friends. Bye. Jared, you got to burn up on Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. I got a lot of work to do. Yeah, exactly. Get on

  130. SPEAKER_00

    it. Come

  131. SPEAKER_01

    on, Donald. All right. See you. Thanks. Come on, Donald. I think I made my case pretty clear during this podcast. So Oxide Home Lab Edition, Oxide, the home cloud, whatever it might be called at some point. I'm rooting for Oxide to dominate and really just serve a ton of value to the full server rack marketplace that really needs it to have the cloud on prem, the cloud in their data center, not someone else's cloud. OK, so once again, thank you to our partners, Fastly, Fly and also Type Sense. And those beats from Breakmaster. Just so good. So good. Well, it's been good having you here today. This is it for this episode of Changelog and Friends. But hey, come back next week. We'll see you again soon and talk some more.