Comment by bcantrill
1 day ago
Thank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to do something together; it's worth getting to know Steve (and our collaboration) in his own words![0][1]
Sorry if this sounds like a letter to Santa Claus Bryan, but when you do really well in this market, do you have any plans to build something this well rounded for small dev agencies, faculty-level education, etc?
Not Bryan, but historically, the answer here is "not any time soon." The design is inherently about the scale of building an entire rack as a single unit; smaller sizes are just an entirely different product. Eventually, I expect they'll branch out in some ways, but there's so much work in producing, and demand for purchasing, their current product that it doesn't make business sense to do so.
Steve seems like a cool guy, wish he was in more content!
Your product and company look really cool, I hope you succeed. In the youtube video you've shared there's an interesting section about your values and how trust is needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY&t=4899
I wonder how Oxide plans to gain trust with European customers who are forced to witness toxic behavior by US elites on a regular basis?
In the past, the DELL/CISCO hardware and their backdoors were accepted because our definition of "national security" concerns was aligned around lawful behavior and human rights.
But for procurement of new hardware from a startup like Oxide in 2026, European customers are forced to accept that US elites have unilaterally changed their definition of "national security" to also include things like invasion of Greenland/Canada, destabilizing tariffs, the idiotically executed Iran war and the Epstein files coverup. That's some seriously bad PR, not even mentioning the religious fundamentalism and Epstein's ties to Thiel and other US old money investors.
You guys know how the sausage is made from your time at DELL.
How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?
Not at Oxide anymore, but
> and their backdoors
One thing about Oxide's product is that it significantly eliminates a lot of these sorts of vectors. Pretty much every part of the rack that can be is open source, for example. That BMC from other vendors that have a full OS running inside, where you have no clue what it's doing? You can go look at what does that job over here: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris
The root of trust means that you know that nothing has been tampered with, and that attestation is threaded up through into the host OS, which pretty much nobody else that I know of is doing.
I don't know what the current thinking is around this issue all of the events you're talking about happened after I left. But the stance was always that it's your hardware, you own it, and you should know what's running on it. That's also why there's no continual licensing fees, you're buying this, not renting it.
At the time I write this parent comment is grey and I don't think it deserves to be. Some people may be down voting around the blanket statement about "US elites" despite a lot of elites clearly not being ok with the horrendous actions taken this last year, but regardless of that the concerns around dependencies and abuse of power right now are very real and quite justified particularly internationally. There are hard business considerations here as well, the executive unfortunately really does have a lot of power under existing law, particularly with a supine GOP in Congress, to unilaterally disrupt trade and export relationships with other countries, allied or not. It is part of the new business climate.
>How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?
Absolutely zero inside knowledge of course, but I think Oxide's approach has intermingled pros and cons. The only real con I can see, but it is a real one, is that one basic argument against unreliability at higher levels is standardization/commoditization. If some big player sells you a standard rack and setup, then gets blocked from further support or otherwise dies, you can just swap in whatever else. Vertical integration and customization offers real benefits but also more dependency, even if things are open unless the niche becomes big enough that other players get interested.
On the other hand, the Oxide approach is also positive thanks to that seem openness and integration. They can offer safe software and firmware up and down the stack in a way others cannot. They can offer assurance not just about one piece but around much or all of the stack. I think there's quite a few layers of insecure mystery meat in the standardized stuff most of us run when you start digging down into it. And of course there is no cloud dependency at all, a European organization can buy their kit have full on-premise control no matter what. While the answer for new "3rd party in another jurisdiction can be pressured to screw with you even if you aren't" worries will probably most often be "go to a cloud provider exclusively under your own jurisdiction instead" Oxide seems like they could have a window there as well. If they're honest and give their own customers the power that more and more of the industry has been trying to take away, while also keeping down the IT cost load as a cloud would, that seems like an argument for some?