Software Misadventures - Ditching the rules to build a team that lasts | Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck (Oxide)

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

From building a new kind of server to building a new kind of company, co-founders Bryan and Steve join the show to chat about their "meet cute" and the origin story of Oxide, their unconventional recruiting process, transparent and uniform salaries, and their solution to the "N+1 shithead problem". Segments: (00:03:03) Bryan and Steve's "meet cute" (00:05:56) "the sun does not shine on me" (00:12:19) the dagger that went into sun (00:21:23) culture of exonerating yourself vs solving customer problems (00:23:25) the shared "error in judgment" of joining joyent (00:27:54) the origin story of joyent (00:29:44) reporting to the (physical) chair (00:31:26) the comically bad ceo candidate (00:36:23) the enterprise software shift (00:40:21) the importance of curiosity in sales (00:48:30) filtering for curiosity in hiring (00:52:26) oxide's unconventional hiring process (01:04:01) bryan's worst hire (01:05:21) the limitations of traditional hiring (01:08:32) the value of written reflections (01:10:28) "what were the happiest moments in your career?" (01:21:16) misconceptions about sales and go-to-market (01:22:03) trust and alignment in sales (01:30:24) building connections across organizations (01:34:23) how to do performance reviews when everyone's paid the same? (01:40:00) the power of transparency in compensation (01:50:14) validation through impact (01:53:14) origins of on the metal (01:55:45) transparency and open communication (02:01:32) the importance of storytelling (02:04:56) building a company differently Show Notes: - Bryan’s blog post on the transparent and uniform compensation model at Oxide: https://oxide.computer/blog/compensat... - On the Metal’s interview with Jeff Rothschild: https://share.transistor.fm/s/6fa1eaa4 Stay in touch: - Make Ronak's day by signing up for our newsletter to get our favorites parts of the convo straight to your inbox every week :D https://softwaremisadventures.com/ Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Whenever I describe Oxide to folks, I describe the principles and the values, and people think it's bullshit because, you know, it's just like corporate bromides or whatever. And then I talk about compensation, which is transparent and it's also uniform. And they're like, wait a minute, what? That is weird. Like, okay, so is this values thing like for real? Are you, yeah, exactly. That's right. Yeah, it just all centers around trust.

As an engineer, it's like, can I trust that this person is not misrepresenting the product to get a deal done and say like oh i can do all this stuff and then come back and say hey by the way we have to go build this like sorry what do you mean we have to go build this like what it's like it's what they bought it's like what do you mean it's what they bought it's like well well, they, sorry, HBO Silicon Valley, right? It does sound like shit. It absolutely is. And it's like the real challenge to make sure that you're being honest in terms of like, you need to be forward looking and optimistic. And at the same time, realistic and have that responsibility to the customer. If you are evaluating a startup and you're like, I love the position of this company,

but I think the founders are crazy, that's not a company you should go to because crazy has a very deep and broad blast radius. Joint kind of survived despite the crazy. Fast forward a couple of years, Steve and I both reported into the chair. If you recall the episode of Silicon Valley where the CEO gets fired and everyone is like staring at the empty chair. And this is where a lot of people stop watching Silicon Valley because it becomes a little too real. And Steve and I both reported to the chair.

We both reported to the chair. A literal physical chair. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was the office of the CEO. And we engaged on an experience that I'm grateful for, but it was definitely a wild experience of a CEO search. Welcome to the Software Misadventures podcast. We are your hosts, Ronak and Guan. As engineers, we are interested in not just the technologies, but the people and the stories behind them.

So on this show, we try to scratch our own edge by sitting down with engineers, founders, and investors to chat about their path, lessons they have learned, and of course, the misadventures along the way. Awesome. Brian, Steve, excited to have both of you on the show. So y'all co-founded Oxide together, and before that, y'all worked together for many years at Drawiant. In our last conversation, Brian, you mentioned that after Drawiant, you knew you wanted to do your own thing. You didn't know what to build, but you were very certain that you would do it with Steve. That speaks volumes. And I've seen a lot of engineers and like PMs product

kind of starting a company together. But Steve was, if I'm not mistaken, like actually in sales. Do you guys have like a meet cute story is is this is this some sort of millennial slang this i don't think the jed zeers are using this one i mean like my kids would ask me this and then laugh the exact same way so i feel like i'm being pranked in some shape or form here but sorry how did you how did you guys how did we meet so yeah i was so i was at dell computers for the first 10 years of my career and um had left dell in particular because dell does uh and did a lot of things right and a lot of the innovation ingenuity at dell at the time it

was around manufacturing excellence and financial excellence. And part of getting to this really good repeatable business model was building these Swiss army knife-like systems that could be manufactured at high scale, high efficiency, that could go into any environment they need to go into. So part of getting that repeatability from a manufacturing perspective is making sure that the same system that's going to land in a 7-Eleven store may be one of a thousand running a commercial data center. So you have kind of consistency across a bunch of the way that kind of web 2.0 companies were coming along and were looking for systems that were not these can do everything unitary systems. The fit between what Dell was offering and what these hyperscalers, these kind of early web scale companies were needing diverged.

And I had been kind of advocating for this, kind of taking a different approach in terms of go-to-market and how we were supporting these customers. There was not a whole lot of support for that at the time and kind of found myself in discussion with this company, Joyent, who was one of the customers at the time that was making the case that where software wanted to meet hardware was actually at this higher level abstraction called cloud computing. And it was kind of a novel idea for me. I had not been really exposed to it other than via this customer. And this was Joyent. This is the company that Brian and I met at in 2000. I got there in 2009.

He got there in 2000. I got there in 2009. He got there in 2010. It should be said, too, that Steve was famous to me, if not by name, before joining Joyent. So Joyent was a Sun customer and was very much building out on Sun's software stack and wanted to use Sun's hardware. Sun obviously made hardware and software, but they were having some operational struggles getting Sun hardware to show up. And Steve, this story is made famous to me because the the cto of joint at the time and co-founder jason hoffman wrote a blog entry that was uh infamous in famous and infamous inside of sun called the sun does not shine on me and he outlined all of the struggles that he had

in and how much he loved the Sun software stack, but could not get Sun to take him seriously from a hardware perspective. They could not get hardware to show up on time, despite having a really high level connections in the company. Jason Hoffman and Jonathan Schwartz, then the CEO, Jonathan was engaged on this and still couldn't make hardware show up. And kind of the final paragraph of this, if I recall correctly, Steve, is Jason calling up Dell and Dell immediately making machines show up. The person that he called at Dell was Steve.

And does he name you in that piece, Steve? He names me. He should have the person that did not get sufficient credit because the actual call went into kind of just Dell land and landed on this inside sales rep, Michael Brody-Waite. And then Michael and I worked together. The two of us were kind of, you know, the inside and then outside sales pairing. And this was an exciting call because Dell had lost Joyent's business. And Dell lost Joyent's business in a particularly difficult time

because where Dell had made a lot of headway in the market with enterprise servers in the 2002, 2003, 2004, all the way up 2006 period, we had a line of servers, the 2600 series, where had some thermal issues. And these thermal issues manifested themselves in actual fires in data centers. And Sun, I have to give Sun a lot of credit because Sun's marketing team pounced on this and started running campaigns that were using all of the wordsmithing that one could do, including, I remember in particular, there was an ad run that said it's hotter. And so in the background, you can see like the devil fork and some smoke coming up off the tines of this thing.

And it said, it's hotter than Dell in here. And just roasted. Oh, I mean, this is traditional media and just roasted Dell. And part of, you know, so I was working with these kind of West Coast technology companies and Joyent was a mainstay customer. And they had switched off of Dell to something. And so where this all came together is Facebook at the time had a closed development ecosystem. So all the R&D was done for Facebook by Facebook engineers. And Mark had the insight that for this platform to really expand, it was necessary to be able to open the platform up for third-party developers, create an API that would allow third-party developers to

create content on the platform. And it was a very contentious, not in the room, but as it was retold to me, a pretty contentious set of discussions with the board because understandably, you now have much less control over the content that is your platform, that your customers are interfacing with. But Mark was able to, I mean, not that he needed to convince per se, because he had certainly the voting power, but the decision was made to move forward and open up the API to Facebook. And this was in large part, part of the important and important part of the story of the growth of Facebook and the platform. So and this is what you're Steve, this is like 2008. It does make 2000. And so, OK, they've made the decision. They're

going to open up the platform. So you have the whole like launch and rollout. How are you going to do this? And, and importantly, how are you going to court developers to be able to write applications against this? And so there was a bunch of things that had to come together. One of which is like, how do you put guardrails around this? How do you ensure that you've got some level of quality control of these third-party apps that are going to be on the Facebook platform that are very much from an end user perspective, going to be believed to be Facebook. So if the app is bad, Facebook is bad. And yeah. And so you've, you've got, you know, these latency bands that you have to set out there. If you're, if your app isn't performing within this sort of

band, then it's going to get shut off. If, you know, these sort of characteristics to try and tell developers this is what you have to adhere to. But in terms of the courting of developers, they had been working with Joyent to create this Facebook developer platform. This program that would give free development infrastructure resources to the first 3,000 developers. thousand developers and this was going to be made available by way of joint providing the cloud computing layer and then sun microsystems for all the underpinning all the underlying hardware and as it got closer and closer to launch again as uh as as kind of retold to me um sun had said hey you know it's gonna take us a little bit longer than originally planned. So it's going to ship, you know, in another couple of weeks. It's like, okay, well, that's really, really tight.

So, you know, how much confidence do you have around that? And it's like, I should be able to should be able to ship in that time frame. And then like a couple of weeks go by and it's like, hey, it's probably going to be another like six to eight weeks. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Sorry. We're launching November. I think it was 17th, 14th. Like this has to go,

all things are already set up to launch. And, um, and it was so dire that this phone call then got placed to Dell and now Dell was going to get, we were going to get our shot again, back kind of at this particular customer in this particular space. And, uh, and the, the, the kind of the, the, what was required was laid out pretty bluntly, which is like, we have to have, uh, this exact spec server in 48 hours to be able to go through and do our validation and know that we can actually launch on this thing. Um, which, um, you know, Dell has built the order. So there is not, it notably direct to Dell is the name of Michael's book. And it was a direct model.

It was not through the channel. So you don't have just thousands of systems that are sitting in a channel partner in an inventory somewhere that can get shipped. And so we had to kind of beg, borrow, and steal to figure out how we were going to be able to get this make of server and ship it up there with no guarantees like this $11,000 server. I remember in particular, the head of operations at the time was, I said, hey, I have got to get signature on this. I'm just dropping like a $12,000 piece of equipment, like FedEx next flight out. I need a signature on this. And he said, read back to me the address that I gave you. And I read it back to him. And it's like, so-and-so street, Pleasant Hill, California. He's like, yeah, Pleasant Hill. You're doing it without signature. You can just ship it there.

If you want the business, make sure to send it out today. Bye. It hangs up on me. Fast forward, they did the validation. They ended up, the program launched with Facebook, Joyent, and Dell, rather than Facebook, Joyent, and Sun. And the CTO of Joyent at the time wrote a blog post about just this sort of different experience with the sales teams or the teams that were supporting them between Sun and Dell. And he made its, I guess, made its way to Jonathan. Oh, God. Oh, that was a dagger. That was a dagger. I mean, I think you can in many ways say

that the true end of Sun Microsystems is that blog entry. I remember thinking that, thinking that we, because they were still using Sun software. They were using all the things that we had done to open source that we, that we'd made available that were open. They were making them, they were using them in a way that was very savvy that we would want any customer to do. And the whole point of that strategy was to allow us to sell physical systems

into those customers. It's like we had an embodiment of the strategy working. And if we could make this work at this smaller scale, this was replicable. It felt replicable. And the fact that we were so disinterested ultimately, because that's ultimately what it brought down to like we could we did not have the urgency inside of sun on this kind of mechanical aspect of of making it happen and i think that the and i remember reading about steve at the end of that blog entry and just like head and hands being like we're done as a company and damn it this guy from dell's

really good um and i i think that the you know the the piece of the story that i didn't have at the time and it was only when we when i met steve at joyent that and of course this makes sense it's like you know we at the outside looking in we we're just like, of course, like Dell is this like, you know, well-oiled machine that could just make this show up, which is true. I mean, there's a lot of truth to that. But it's also true that what Dell had was someone on the inside in terms of Steve who was going to make this customer successful no matter what it took. And there were all sorts of shenanigans that Steve's pulling in favors. And as you said, bank borrowing and stealing and like, you know, calling other customers and being like, hey, look, can I delay this thing for you for a couple of days? And, you know, divert this and do this. that I think that that is the bit that, that to me was like, you know, working with Steve at Joy-In,

like that is what was so compelling about. And I think that that's where, you know, Steve and I kind of came up on different sides of the business, but in terms of me and Jerry and Steve on the market side, but where we came together was like, we need to do anything that it takes to make customers successful.

I mean, back to the meet cute story. I think I remember this early, very early in Brian showing up to joint, which was a big deal. It was a great, really important add to the team. And there's a lot of excitement, enthusiasm around it. It was, you know, but you don't know who this person is. And you, and also coming in, in the role that he's coming into, you know, being able to set and drive engineering vision and go, you know, think kind of holistically about the product and where things are going. you know, you don't know what the accessibility or the involvement is going to be when it comes to customers. And at the time at Joyent, we were in this really, really formative phase where Joyent was providing a multi-tenant public cloud infrastructure service. And like AWS was aiming to deliver that high-speed self-service interface so that developers could go from idea to deploying code and operating stuff in minutes rather than it taking days, weeks, months in on-premises environments.

And AWS had been doing this for years. It was at a scale that Joyent would never achieve and be able to achieve. And the difference was Joyent had been pretty thoughtful about this, the reliability of the infrastructure and kind of investing in the quality all the way up in the infrastructure for a more production-oriented use case. So the, you know, the failure domains were not like some of these wild 96-hour outages that you would see in EC2, even as late as 2011. And so kind of the angle that Joyent was taking was that this is real grown-up production-grade infrastructure as a service. Yes, it's not in 11 countries and doesn't nearly have the same scale, doesn't have the same services scale and breadth, but is really good for apps that really matter.

And so it was really important that we delivered on that when we had customers who were taking a bet on Joyent and going away from the obvious choice of AWS at the time. And so we had a particular customer at the time, Kabam, this gaming company that was building mobile applications. And again, this is someone who we met at like, God, what was, I want to say it was, it was, what conference was it? It was over in the Mission Center, Mission Bay Center. They came up to the booth, had a conversation with them. They were early and, you know, fast forward a little bit. They tested the service and they started to get to know the team

and they ended up making a big bet on Joyent. And they were scaling Kabam. Kingdoms of Camelot was the game at the time. And this thing had gone kind of nonlinear. And I remember we are just building as fast as we can in front of that. We are laying down the bricks right before they're stepping on that next step. And, uh, and they had hit a particular issue. And I remember, and, and, you know, this was just another example of it but like going to going to Brian and and asking if you you know if we can get some him to take a look at something and it wasn't

you know again going back to Dell like you would you would have there'd be people who would have people who would have people that would go look at these kinds of things and yes we're a startup and we're a relatively small team but the fact that he would be popping open his laptop and directly going and tackling the problem and like coming out of the bunker, you know, 12 hours later, having figured out what the kind of the root of this particular thing was, uh, it was, was, was exciting. It was like, wow, you've got like a real partner who really wants to go figure out this customer issue and not do what I ran into a bunch of times in my career at Dell, which is like absolve the technology that has been sold of the issue. Like, oh, you know what? This is not a Dell issue. We definitely looked through this. It is, you know, best we can tell

this is not an issue in the product. And that's kind of where, you know, generally, I think this is not like this is not an indictment of Dell or I mean, this is a condition that's pretty prevalent is step one is make and you could kind of justify it as like, well, we're we're trying to make sure the things that we control and understand are not that issue. But what it turns into very quickly is like jobs done once you've proven that it is not that issue, it is now something upstack. It is something in the software the customer's running on this. It's some other service. It's in your network. You know, we can just tell you that it is not in our domain where the problem stems from. And yeah. And when you end up with an entire culture that where the responsibility is

to exonerate rather than to actually solve a customer problem uh and i i think that you know what what kind of it's kind of funny to actually hear i had forgotten about the kambam issue and you know it's kind of funny because because Steve and I both had frustrations. You know, Steve on the go-to-market side was having frustrations with the engineering side in terms of this, you know, desire to exonerate itself rather than actually solve customer problems. Me coming up on the engineering side, having real frustrations with the go-to-market side, being disinterested in all of the nitty gritty mechanics. And I mean, in many ways, like when you get into the, you wade into the tech, the details of go-to-market, there's a lot of technical details there, you know what I mean? Where there are like details of contracts and MSAs and, you know, operational issues and how things show. It's like,

it's not that different from actually engineering the thing where the details really, really matter. And I think that, you know, what Steve and I were both early, you know, kind of had an early bond over is the details matter to us. And the customer's experience is what is the lodestar for us. And getting a customer successful, we're going to do whatever it takes to get the customer successful. And yes, coming at it from different domains of expertise. But I think it's extremely important for founding teams to come from that complementary expertise. And it's part of the reason, again, Steve and I knew we wanted to go do something together because I think each of us appreciated how lucky we were to find that complement in the other, but still be unified by shared values, shared principles, especially.

So I came to Joyent knowing that the founding pair was a little like bonkers. And I mean, I guess Steve and I were also both lucky in that we were all, we were both like at the right level of naivete in our careers where we, Steve and I both made the same error in judgment at some level, right? I mean, like I've got no, in fact, I've got,

Joy, it was a terrific decision in part because I met Steve and we, he and I met so many, brought in so many terrific people in the Joyette. So it was like, I don't regret the decision at all. But it was an error in judgment that a wiser person would not have made because you should if you are evaluating a startup and you're like i i love the position of this company but i think the founders are crazy that's not a company you should go to because if when the founders are crazy like crazy has a very deep and broad blast radius um and i joint kind of survived despite the crazy um ultimately steve and i at of course to fast forward a couple of years steve and i both reported into the chair um if you recall the episode of silicon valley where where the uh the ceo gets fired and everyone is like staring at the empty chair and uh the this is where a lot of people stop

watching silicon valley because it becomes a little too real and steve and i both reported to the chair we both reported to the chair and literally oh yeah i literally yeah there was it was called the office of the ct it was the office of the ceo um and we we engage on an experience that i'm grateful for but it was definitely a wild experience of a ceo search so we were interviewing ceo so we had fired the ceo i mean not to not to spend too much time on this particular era but i think it did it was it was formative for both of us in a bunch. Oh, it was formative. But I do think, cause one may be asking like, well, how do I suss out like the nature of the

founding team? When, when it's like, how, how do I not go do, you know, what Brian did? And, and I was just, I was just reflecting on it. It's like, it's not that the founders collectively were crazy. I think at the root of it, there was a founder dynamic there that was at the heart of the problem. And that is you had one founder that had really established himself as the dominant, the person who in his mind was running the company and everyone else was sort of in service to him. And the other founder that, you know, unfortunately found himself in that position of someone who wanted to build a fear-based culture and someone who wanted to really run things from the very, very top. And that fear-based culture kind of permeated and created all of this bad behavior later. Because what do you do in a fear-based culture kind of permeated and created all of this bad behavior later.

Because what do you do in a fear-based culture where you've got someone who's an effective bully at the top is, you know, everyone's seeking to get the kind of admiration or the respect of that bully and is doing things like taking credit for stuff when it's not their work, is terrified of admitting failure or admitting wrongdoing, right? So you go and bury any kind of fault or issue. And so then imagine in that kind of culture when you get to a CEO search where you have eight people reporting to a chair and you've got people, this dynamic that's kind of endemic in the team of like seeking, you know, kind of jockeying for position and all these sorts of things. And so I think it's like asking founders of a company when someone is joining a company why the founders went into business, like why they started the company together in the first place would be a great question.

Because can you imagine if you heard the answers to that? Well, the true origin story of Joyent is it was two different companies. So the, and each company was in financially very dire straits. And they realized that they thought the other company was very well capitalized. They were basically each lying to the other about their financial position. And each thought that the other was kind of a chump. And it's like, okay, I am being misleading about my own financial position. But this person clearly is well capitalized.

And then they merged the companies and realized that they've both been lying to one another and that basically the merged company is flat broke and it's like which is a very revealing origin story it's the because i think that the the the biggest problem that those two had is a loose relationship with the truth and and some of the this is this is endemic in startups like i don't want to pick on those two too much because this is not i mean one of the kind of the big education that i had from all of that is that the crazy that starting a company is crazy and starting a company requires you to deny certain amounts of reality and the we want startups to be crazy in all the good ways of like, we want you to be ambitious and solve this big problem. And despite the odds,

but we want you to be no crazier than that. And it's like, no, this is the crazy dial. Like the crazy dial is not a finely tuned instrument. And like the person that's crazy enough to start a company is also crazy enough to lie about all sorts of other things, lie to themselves, you know, have extramarital affairs and a drink. It's like all of the other like stuff that comes in crazy. It's like, can we just be like, can we be crazy in the good ways, but not in any of the bad ways? And that's, that's a challenge. I think when we when we started the CEO search, I mean, because Steve, I just feel I be I have to tell the story. Just because please do. So yeah, so they decided that like, look,

that our investors, but several of whom are actually investors in Oxide, saw the value in Steve and me. And they're like, we need to find, like, a CEO that can build on these kind of pillars of the company. Brian in engineering, Steve in sales. And so we're bringing in CEOs. We had fired the CEO. And when you are, and this is like not a deep thought, but when you have a company that does not have a CEO, that is not an attractive company to an A-list CEO. Like a CEO who like is a good CEO is not attracted to a basket case. Like this is, this shouldn't be a deep thought, but like

the CEOs that you are attracting for that gig, I mean, and maybe you could find that kind of, you know, that very rare CEO who is, and ultimately we did actually find someone like this who could, who likes to turn around situations. And it's like, no, I like to go into situations where there's some good nuggets there, but it has been through some tough times and I like to be the person that come and turn around. That's not generally who you're going to find. Generally who you're going to find are people who believe that they deserve a CEO job and they're not being hired by a lot. It's a year. You're generally doing with an executive recruiter.

That executive recruiter is not just like your a-listers aren't attracted. So we were getting some CEO candidates that were comically bad. And in particular, we had a CEO candidate who had been the general counsel at a very large company. And that's a super weird path to be a CEO. Like the, to me, like the path to being a CEO is to come up on the go-to-market side. That to me is like the, I think that they make better CEOs than engineers generally. I mean, there are some CEOs that are engineers.

I have always believed that the best CEOs are folks that come up on the go-to-market side. And so you could say, like, okay, maybe on the engineering side, maybe on the product side, maybe on the marketing side. But it's like the GC, like the lawyer wants to be the CEO? Like, I mean, I'm not taking anything away from like the prestige of the profession it's like you know the the calling of the profession it's like you can do all sorts of great things as a general counsel but like you're not in the the mix for the CEO conversation but so this is a GC who wanted to be a CEO you're like okay so I'm the first interview that this guy has we sit down and I've tried to replay this in my head so many times.

I swear this was in the first 45 seconds of this conversation. I don't know. Maybe it was in the first minute or two. I don't think it was longer than that. And we're kind of like talking lightly about the challenges at Joyent. And he said, well, you know, the real problem at Joyent is Steve Tuck. I was like, wow. So first of all, one thing you should definitely know about Steve, Steve is an intensely likable person.

Sorry, I'm speaking in the third person, Steve. people generally i've i've never i i had never heard i'll put it this way i had never heard anyone speak truly ill of steve in my life and this guy is like no this guy is like the problem at this company forget like and i'm like so i have i'm like steve is okay like that's that's that that's aggressive and i'm like um what's the problem with with steve it's like well he's he's too young i'm like he's too young it's like what are you talking about like steve's you know married he's got kids like what are you talking about and i'm like steve how old is steve it's like 27 like steve was 35 at the time so i'm like with steve are you talking about well i'm like i'm like i'm like no steve steve's 35 it's like oh well actually the problem is not steve's age the problem is actually Steve's experience. And I'm like, what's his experience? It's an MBA.

I'm like, he's not, no, he was at Dell prior to coming to the joint. It's like, well, no,

the problem is like, he just wasn't, he wasn't at Dell for enough time. I'm like, well, how long was he at Dell? And he's like,

at this point, he's beginning to realize and like, I don't know the answer to any of these questions. He's like, two years. I'm like, no, how long was he at Dell? And he's like, at this point, he's beginning to realize that, like, I don't know the answer to any of these questions. He's like, two years. I'm like, no. He said, no. He was at Dell for, like, a decade.

And I think he's beginning to realize that, like, maybe I'm down the wrong path here. He's like, no, no, no. Like, you know, the problem is not, like, it's not Steve's age. It's not Steve's experience. The problem is that, like like Steve needs a mentor. And I'm like, okay, no, no, this is actually good though. I'm like, okay, now we're getting, cause actually Steve and I remember

both talking to one another, but like this is what we were both looking for in a CEO that we would bring into the company. It's like, we were looking for someone to learn from. So I'm like, okay, we're now like in the domain of something that makes sense. I'm like, okay, that sounds good. And the domain of something that makes sense. I'm like, okay, that sounds good. And so it's like, yeah, we need to bring in like someone who can run sales for Steve. I'm like, Steve is the SVP of sales right now. So if you're going to bring in,

and I did say this to him verbatim, I'm like, if you're going to bring in someone to like, that Steve is going to report to with respect to sales, are you going to bring in like an emperor of sales? And he's like, look, we're getting very caught up in organizational mechanics. I'm like, you're a CEO. The job is organizational mechanics. And I'm like, I'm like, this is the worst interview. And I'm like,

okay, clearly this guy has got like some very strange bad blood with Steve. And Steve, he's talking to Steve later in the day. So I caught up with Steve before he talked. I'm like, Steve, I don't know like what you said to this guy,

or he clearly knows you. I don't know what's going on, but like this guy, like, I don't know. He hates on but like this guy like i don't know he hates your guts and i mean steve you were like as i recall you're just like i've never never talked to him never seen the name of my life oh wow wow and then so the funny thing is he was interviewing with steve later in in praise and talking about collaborating together. Yes, I remember. I mean, the reason part of the reason we were all there is because the previous CEO had done what I of where the company could go in the market, namely this idea that instead of running a public cloud computing service, what if you were to take

the software that underpinned that service and you were to go sell it, license it and sell it to every telco on the planet so they could build their own AWSs. And if you were to do that, then you could shift out of being this paltry services provider, which, you know, as this person did not like was, you know, could only be a six to eight X multiple when he sold the company. You could be an enterprise software company that does on the order of 30 to 40 X multiples. So that's a much more lucrative business. And behind that went and built this army globally to go sell enterprise software to every telco around the globe. And this organization was started with where one would start said organization in this model, which is pluck a seasoned executive from the very top of Oracle's go-to-market organization. And then that person shows up and says, well, I need to now build out the organization to go tackle this large enterprise software go-to-market strategy.

And so I need to have a president of Europe and president of Asia. And then they obviously need their VPs and directors and was burning millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars a quarter. And there was no product market fit. So you had yet to find repeatable patterns in one market, let alone, or, you know, in one, one, one kind of small subset of a particular market. And the company burned through tens of millions of dollars and, and had like $800,000 of revenue to show for it in this other business unit, right? There was sort of a public cloud business unit that I was very fortunate to, to be able to go run because it was definitely the cast off.

It was like- It was so, during the kind of the height of this, we don't like the public cloud. We want to be an enterprise software company. First of all, Steve was not invited to the executive staff meeting, which is like, this guy runs the actual like revenue. And the CEO would refer to Steve

as the redheaded stepchild. I mean, he would like, that was like, he to steve as the redheaded stepchild i mean he would like that was like he would say that the redheaded stepchild and the and you're like should we wait for you it's like this oh my god and deeply proud of it by the way because it was actually the exact place that we should be building the company because it turns out this cloud computing thing had some legs. But it was, I think the one thing that really stuck with both of us, obviously, is how careful you have to be before you start really building out and really investing a lot in mature go-to-market organizations. And it is, it was, and so, you know, to have folks coming in that were talking again about how to do a big top-down, top-down go-to-market build process

without even having the curiosity to ask questions about who the customers are. What do they like about the platform? What do they dislike about the platform? What are the top two things customers are asking for that we don't have today? I mean, these are the kinds of things where all of a sudden both of us would perk up and be like, wait a minute, we've got someone who's like deeply curious about the customers and the market and the competitive landscape. And instead, again, it was comical, absolutely comical to a degree of where some of these folks would start as they're thinking about coming in and running a company. And this was very informative as we started Oxide because

we certainly did a lot of early field work of trying to gather as much insight from the market as possible. Folks that are running on-premises enterprise infrastructure at scale and like, what's working, what's not working, where are your biggest pain points, why, how does that show up in your products, your services, your customers? And we got a lot of really good feedback and folks that were so excited about this idea that there could be a computer that would ship that now is of the kind of class and capability of these hyperscalers have inside Amazon's data centers and Microsoft data centers that someone could now own that, that comes complete with all the hardware and all the software you need to go get cloud computing on-premises, to be able to get the same kinds of services that everyone was accustomed to consuming in the public cloud, but on-prem. And we would just get a lot of really, really, really positive feedback and a lot of enthusiasm and the necessity to not be satisfied at that point and say, okay, great.

Got a lot of people that are super excited about this idea. Time to build. There's a very important point in there where Steve talks about not just one's customers, but your customer's customers. So in infrastructure software, you're not serving a true end user you are serving an infrastructure team that is and it's like how do i help you serve your customers and this is a really important point about understanding your own go-to-market that i feel that certainly the kind of like back in the joint days, folks on the, on those telcos, we didn't understand where, because the reality was those

telcos were interested in, in competing with AWS, but they didn't understand at all how to do that. And they were actually very poor customers because their customers, customers, their customers. And I remember actually one national telco that's monopoly talking to them about buying joint software and asking them how they were going to run this as a service. And he said, you have to understand my customers. If I make it, they must buy it. And I'm like, that doesn't sound right. I'm not sure. And of course, like, if you go to that country, all of their customers hate their guts. And they're like, no, we're not using, I'm not using my national telco for cloud services. I'm using the AWS

data center that they just opened up in country. Like, sorry. And you know when steve was talking about you know how we engaged with those early oxide customers it's because they were excited about how they could serve their customers and that was a really it's always been a kind of an important element about the way we built the company uh i'm curious there's a lot of threads to kind of pull on. Maybe one is the, so curiosity, like that came up like during, I guess, important attribute in terms of what to look for in a CEO. Like what are some other things that popped up during that search? Well, and not just a CEO. I think it's like, I think, you know, I'm sure you talked a bit about kind of our hiring process and the materials process that we go through.

And we try to, you know, when we're thinking about a particular role, we want to hit on what are those core underlying couple of values of our 15 values that we want to ask about in the materials for a particular role. And, you know, obviously in sales, responsibility is paramount. I mean, you have to have responsibility at the core of who you are as someone who is going to be at that kind of commercial interface with the customer. But curiosity is probably the number one thing that we look for in folks that are going to be in a sales role and, you know, kind of any go-to-market role. And, you know, you would imagine it's like, well, of course that's, you know, consistent in what folks are keying on for sales.

But it is often it is just pure historical results and curiosity is the thing that is going to drive when times are good when times are bad and make sure most importantly that this person is responsible for finding customers where they are a good fit for the products and services that they're selling and that the customer is, that the products and services are a good fit for the customer. Because sometimes you can find a mismatch there. I remember in particular in 2015 or so, the container craze was everywhere. Docker had not only been on the scene, but now it was like, this was the Envogue thing to do is like, how do we bring Docker

and containerization into what we're doing from an infrastructure perspective at every single startup company, et cetera. And so we would, Joyent had a very kind of a novel way of delivering containers, namely kind of doing them on bare metal in such a way that you could get better performance and a bunch of things. So anyone that thought they needed

containers would show up to Joyent's doorstep and say, we're all in Joyent. And it was important to have these conversations with customers of like, why containers? Forget Joyent, forget like anything else, like why containers? Forget, forget like anything else. Like why containers? And how many of these customers would be like, well, I don't know, but we does this customer maybe think they want to buy this particular product, but like, who are they? What are the things that they're talking about with their investors? What are the products and services they're delivering to their customers? And what's going well, what's not going well? And that level of curiosity is going to just serve that customer partner relationship so, so, so much better. So sorry to drag it out of like CEO characteristics, because I think curiosity is one that is just so,

so deeply important, really across all roles, whether it's support engineering and having someone who, again, to our earlier conversation, is not trying to exonerate the company, but is really curious, like what is causing this issue? Maybe it's something up in like MongoDB that sits outside of the stack that we're responsible for, but how do we walk this trail end to end to figure out why your end customer is unhappy and how do we collectively get them back to being happy again? That is one that I can't underscore enough, the importance of in characteristics that we look for, but especially in go-to-market. How do you filter for it, by the way? Yeah, it's a great question. One way, and this goes back to the written materials that we ask

for in folks that are applying to Oxide. Actually. I don't think we talked much about that. We didn't talk about that at all. Can you please walk us through that? No, no. Yeah, sure. So, and I'll give, I'll save a little bit of the backstory of how we got here for Brian. But we, so what we have is this process for applying to oxide that involves submitting a set of materials. These materials are a combination of demonstrating one's prior work and then a questionnaire.

And the questions that we ask in terms of work, whether it's like work sample, analysis sample, presentation sample, these sorts of things, those will vary by role. So, I mean, as you can imagine, like a work sample, an analysis sample for engineering, it can be straightforward, you know, and also can be a great opportunity just to like see how one thinks about taking apart a problem. And then in a, but in, you know, a sales capacity, it might be a little different. So in the materials where we're asking for an analysis sample, it might be something like, how would you analyze a prospective customer? How would you conclude that this is a potential company that you should reach out to and why? And this could be an example from a prior company. If you want, you could kind of take a swing at how you would think about it in terms of oxide. And in that answer, oftentimes you can get

some real good insight into, you know, just how curious someone is, like how far they go and which directions to kind of, to better understand who this company is and how you assess how they might be a good fit to reach out to. And in some cases, you can kind of hear them thinking about it being a two-way street and trying to be empathetic about whether or not the product and service is a good fit for them or not. So you're not trying to force it on them. You're not trying to convince them or position it in just the perfect way to close them. But you're really deeply interested about what this all speaks to is a long-term relationship.

It's not a transactional salesperson who is about hitting quota and throwing it over the fence to the account management team or the support team, but someone who's thinking about building a longer-term relationship with someone. But then the bottom half of these materials are the same for everybody. And then the bottom half of these materials are

the same for everybody. And these are a set of open-ended questions that are an opportunity for someone to just reflect a little bit on what they care about, what's important to them, and what they want going forward in their career. And so the questions include things like pick an oxide value and talk about where that has shown up in your work. So someone might talk about responsibility and say, you know, here's an example of where responsibility shown through in my work or where I've seen that sort of show up in where I've been previously. Pick an oxide value and talk about where, you know, talk about where it was violated in a previous stop.

And so it's like, well, you know, transparency was violated at this company because, you know, everything was under, you know, it was all cloak and dagger and, you know, no one, no two people in the company could do the same thing. And this is where it kind of how it manifested in real issues. And, or we had the siloed organization and engineering was not allowed to talk to the customer. It had to go through the product team or whatever it would be. And then things like,

tell us about a time you were happiest in your career. Tell us about a time- That's a very good question. Oh, you'd be amazed. It's so basic. It's so basic. Wow, I did not think of that, but it's outstanding. Yeah, what have you been happiest in your career and why? It's just like, it's so basic it's so basic wow i did not think of that but it's outstanding

but yeah what have you been happiest in your career why it's just like it's amazing how revealing that is what have you been unhappiest when you've been unhappiest and why and and but the happiest is is is a great one because um and we are always testing this we're always checking in with folks because we we want to make sure that um if if oxide is the right fit for someone, you know, we have found that someone kind of gets excited about going through this process and like reflecting on kind of where they've been, where they are, where they're going. But we also, you know, want to be sensitive to the fact that it's not a lightweight process for someone to

apply to oxide. And so we'll always check in and just say like, hey, you know, realize this is asking a little bit more than most places. How did you feel about it? And it is heartening when, when you hear from folks that say, even some folks that never applied to Oxide that are like actually sitting down and taking a couple hours over some coffee to like put my thoughts together about when I was happiest, really like re-centered me and helped me understand like what I want to go do next and and or when I was unhappiest kind of helped me I was asking myself questions about like where was I where was the headspace I was in what was what why was I so unhappy in this particular time and so it's been it's been a really really helpful way for for for you know just finding making sure that like oxide's a good fit for them and that they are a good fit for Oxide.

And then so the materials come in and then we review the materials. And for folks that we move forward in the process, the next step is to have a series of conversations with team members of Oxide. And this was not original insight because actually someone who joined the company a couple of months in, an engineer who had come over from Google, Cliff Biffle, he got through the process, and then he found out once he was on the other side that – yeah, correct me. He was on the other side.

Oh, he was in the middle. It was before he had the conversation. That's right. That's right. It was before he – Cliff was – I was talking to him about the materials. He was very excited to do all this. And he said, like, it's amazing. You said that everybody at the company has done this.

I'm like, yeah, everyone at the company has done this. Like, including, like, you and Steve did this. I'm like, yeah, Steve and I have done this as well. We have done the materials. And he's like, could I see yours? Yeah, that's right. And I'm like, that is a very good idea. And the company, we got super lucky because the company was just small enough that I'm like, okay, I need to go like check with everyone individually.

But if like the nine people that work here are all cool with this, like that's our process now. And so in our process, before you have those conversations, you see the materials of the people you're going to speak with in advance. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. Okay. So, okay. I want to double click on this process and also talk more about how you got here. So the materials on the questions you described, these come before or after someone hits apply and you filter out the candidate and only the people who are filtered this comes as part of this is part of when you apply you have a resume you have the materials that and that constitutes your application I think it's a nice filter right because if you don't want to put in the work then you probably don't want to take the time oh oh oh yes okay i mean steve how many times

have we had the conversation with someone who was like oh i'm like really interested in oxide like i and you know they've been in they've been recommended to us by an investor like oh this person's a beast like they're amazing and you talk to them and you're like, yeah, okay. Like, I don't know. But they're like, okay, yeah, yeah. I'm interested in Oxide. Like, okay, great. Well, you know, here are the materials. Never hear from that person ever again. Well, furthermore, you've got, you have this apparatus on the go-to-market side where it's very recruiter led. And so recruiters are like Oxide. You cannot have this sort of process for salespeople. This is not how salespeople move around companies.

What happens is you have a hot salesperson and they're thinking about leaving and we intercept them and we steer them to take a look at your company and it's got to go fast. It's got to be like a two-week end-to-end process or you're going to lose them. And this whole writing thing, like, sorry, I don't know where you guys come off thinking that this is going to be part of the process for salespeople, like doesn't work that way. Sorry. And we're like, well, I'm sorry, this is kind of a constraint. And what we're actually not looking for is the salesperson that just did a seven figure W2 at this company because they crushed their quota. They want to get out from under the quota increase coming next year and do this every two years and look on paper like a remarkable

talent. And yet like the real talented sales folks can demonstrate success over five years, seven years, nine years, ups and downs. How did they do when there was a product issue at the company? Did they flee and go somewhere else or did they stick by their customers and try and help the company overall, like navigate that issue and make it, make its way through there? Um, where there were times in which the company was more competitive and times in which it was less competitive. How did they do in those times in which it was less competitive? Because it, you know, it is, and I've got very good friends who are very successful sales leaders who have done very, very well financially.

And they, you know, will say like, no, no, no, the move is you hop every two years. That's the way, that's how it's done. And, and that is, you know, that's, that, that can be how one could build a company to flip. But that's not how you build a durable company that's going to be here in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. And that is, that's why it's so important, maybe most important in sales and, you know, some of these customer facing roles that we're able to get a better understanding of like, is this somebody that wants to come in very early where there's all sorts of opportunity to grow in a whole bunch of different directions from a go-to-market perspective and is thinking about this being somewhere they want to go spend a huge chunk of their career? Or again, is this someone who is trying to find somewhere where

they've got something that has a real differentiation in the market which is also here and can go make a bunch of money and and it's not that these have to be mutually exclusive but it you know we're not a great fit for someone who's only looking for the latter and that that, so the materials process is super, super helpful in that regard. But it's funny because we, I mean, we built out, I mean, as you would with a kind of product led company, we built out the engineering team right before we built out the go-to-market team. And I think that, you know, so many startups make the mistake of building out

the go-to-market team too early and you can burn through a remarkable amount of capital. If you're ever looking at an impact creator of a startup and wondering how did they burn through $110 million, it's like they probably had a pretty big go-to-market team. It probably had a pretty big engineering team too, but people will burn capital really, really quickly. So we had kind of built this and we started from engineering and building out and i knew this was going to be this was the right process for building out engineering um and we were fine tuning it but as we as we expanded into go to market i definitely was wondering i'm like is this and a part of me i was like getting a little bit of self-doubt and it was very helpful to have steve be like no this is absolutely the right process for like i do even more and one of the things that we do is we change the portfolio questions

based on the role. That makes sense. And I think if it's a role that's totally new to us, we will find the people in the industry that we feel are like the people that are unhirable for us, but that we think are like the best in this. And we will sit down and just have them brainstorm with us what are the portfolio questions we should be asking. And more than once, we have had terrific questions come out of that. And then we have also had like the person that we thought was unhirable being like,

okay, here's the question that I think you should be asking. And also, I think I might be interested in applying. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. That's great. And we feel so lucky that we, I mean, we created a product assurance role. And we, which was sitting in between, we wanted a role that sat between kind of product management, quality assurance,

had a real customer focus. And, you know, we'd worked a previous colleague of ours, Angela Fong, and we would, we knew Angela was unhirable, but wanted her perspective on this. And she had such great contributions in terms of like what the portfolio would be and, and actually getting that curiosity. So one of the questions that she had is describe when you've had to ramp up on a new technology and kind of your process for doing that. And, and then it was like, also, I think it might be interesting for flying. And so Angela is now, and I mean, it's, I think there might be interested in applying. And so Angela is now. And I mean, it's been, and I think there are many things that are delightful about Oxide. But one of the things that Steve and I have both really, really loved is when we have someone we've worked with in the past.

We've worked with Angela at Joyent. Our boss at Joyent, Scott Hammond, had worked with Angela at his previous company. And I think the world of Angela. And it has been when Angela applied to Oxide, people were like, wow, these materials are really great. And then when Angela comes to Oxide, everyone's like, Angela's amazing. And it is so gratifying to hear, to be able to introduce someone who you know well and think highly of to someone else that you know well and you think highly of. And to have those two meet and to be like, you know, we, and we, you know, we just had this, we had a large customer in here for a very intense workshop this past week. And we had two colleagues who really were helped,

orchestrated all aspects of this. And I mean, Steve, I love the fact that Izzy and CJ were both spending their time being like, oh God, thank God for CJ. You know, CJ is the reason we pulled this off. CJ's like, God, thank God for Izzy. When teammates are, and that's when you've got a team that is really like, really at kind of its peak efficiency is when everyone is spending their time being, working for one another, right? Is really, and so the materials have allowed all, that has been load bearing for us to build that kind of a team. And what we have found is that the people that we've worked with who want to come to Ox, this process is not beneath them, right? If anyone is just like, no, you should just be hiring me based on the fact that we've worked together.

It's like, well, if we, you should, then you should love this process because it's going to get, give you a chance to, to reflect. And it's going to give you a chance to reflect. And it's going to give the chance. And actually, honestly, part of the reason that we started this from the jump at Oxide is because we were pulling in some of that first tranche of employees who didn't necessarily know one another. We knew them each individually, but they didn't necessarily know one another. And we wanted them to introduce themselves to one another was a very kind of important aspect of it. And as for why it's all written down, Steve has been very generous and charitable about speaking

around the fact that we came to a written process because I made the worst hire possible, basically, at Joyent. And we don't need to belabor you on that story, but let's just say that many people believe that they have made the worst hire. And I love having this conversation, especially in Silicon Valley, because everyone's like, oh, well, that's funny. I've made the worst hire. And I'm like, I'm not wedded to the crown here, and I would love to give this up. but you should know that my guy presented himself under an assumed name and had just gotten off of parole for violent felonies from San Quentin. And that's not what made him a bad employee. So if that's what – But that wasn't the one.

The one was the person who brought him in knowing who this person was. And this person on paper was a very successful VP engineering in Silicon Valley, worked for a number of very, very well-known companies who on paper looked great and interviewed extraordinarily well. Right. And, and so again, it's like, how do you net that person through the traditional process of like background check, reference checks, which by the way, no one gives bad reference checks. You know, their, their work that is public where there's like so many disincentives to any kind of negative feedback on folks just generally. And then someone who is, you know, very good and very personable in person.

And it's like, you know, the people that can kind of grift their way through that process gets way harder when you're having to write stuff down. Absolutely. And by the way, folks that are on the go-to-market side tend to be charismatic, right? They tend to be actually awfully good at interviewing. And in fact,

I remember at one point we had this go-to-market leader inside of Joyent who had built a very large team, but the team had delivered absolutely nothing and very charismatic. And I remember thinking, like, I think that, like, he's very good at selling. The problem is what he's very good at selling is himself. Like, that's actually what he has sold. And we bought it, by the way. We enjoy it. Hook, line, and sinker.

Hook, line, and sinker. Like we bought the professional services package. We bought the upgrade, the extended warranty. Like we bought it all. Um, and by the time you realize that like, oh, he doesn't actually know how to sell like actual product. And by the time you realize that it's often too late for a company. And many, many, many companies die because they do not understand go-to-market. And it takes them just too long to get there. And they're fixated on things like

CAC and LTV and these sort of mechanics that are the blueprint as you come out of yc and you're building and uh and and yet it's like what does you know what does actual long-term like lifetime value of a customer and and actually long-term value of a customer relationship mean and uh and cost of acquisition doesn't stop when you get a purchase order. That's like when the sales process starts and it's just, there's a lot of hard lessons that, you know, it takes a couple laps to, to, to really appreciate and understand. And, um, but again, I think like the materials process has just been invaluable, not, not just in the hiring, but also years in it's, it's remarkable when you've got, you know, let's just any company under, under pressure and over the years, there's going to be tension filled

moments. And when you've got two team members that are kind of just not seeing eye to eye on something and are kind of just really like dug in with different perspectives on something. And it's pretty contentious being able to have them both go back and read each other's materials from the beginning when they made the choice to hire this person. And we're so excited about this person coming in. It's amazing how much that helps to get things back to like, all right, what are we actually really talking about here? And that's really good. That's all. Yeah. It, it, it's, you know, and again,

these are not things we anticipated early on it. It part of it was to hopefully net the sociopathic bad hire. That's all I think. Yeah, it's, you know, again, these are not things we anticipated early on. Part of it was to hopefully net the sociopathic bad hire, but. So far, so good. So far, so good. Yeah, and I also love, like, people are like, oh, didn't you do criminal background checks? And I'm like, okay, before you shame me. Like, obviously not. And I had one in particular, I won't name them, but let's just say a fang that was just an employee at a fang that would never happen here.

And as it turns out, like that person ended up washing up on the shores of that company and all of a sudden was working there. I'm like, hey, guess what? You don't do criminal background checks either. And there are many, many companies do not, because we sort of do that in software engineering generally. We obviously do do that. We do criminal background checks. We change that. But it's much deeper than that, right? And it's actually really getting a chance to know someone deeply. And it's, you know, a lot of what, the reason we've been able to build this team, and it is, I mean, I think one of the things that's frustrating

about, you know, the kinds of questions that people ask about Oxide, like investors and so on, is they don't appreciate, like it's the actual team that builds the thing. And we are, Steve and I are both very, very team oriented. And this has really allowed us to build a superlative team. Nice.

Okay, so I asked myself, if I could only ask one question about the materials, would I ask about what the happiest moment in people's career, like what they say, or like the opposite? I'm gonna go with the happiest. What were some of the answers that you guys have heard?

And the reason that you should ask the happiest and not the unhappiest is all the unhappiest basically all rhyme with one another. I mean, all the unhappiest are basically like the people who were responsible for execution knew the right thing to happen

and bad leadership, bad management was preventing it from happening. That is basically the story of every unhappiest. The happiest is way more interesting and can be way more difficult to answer. And the origin of that question in particular for Oxide comes from someone asking me that question. As I knew I wanted to start something with Steve, but he's like, why? Why do you want to do this? Like, what are you seeking?

And, you know, we talked about this last time about like wanting that team. And for me, the happiest moments of my career are the team. The extraordinary team coming together to do something really special. And that is, and, but those happiest moments definitely vary for people, but they're very revealing, I think, when people talk about those happiest moments. So when you were starting to build this process for Oxide, Oxide is a startup. When you started initially,

not many people would have known about the company. So when you're adding this process to the mix, you're kind of adding a little more friction intentionally. 100%, yep. Well, one good part is you're, just by the nature of application process, filtering out, as you mentioned earlier, so many candidates who would not be interested in this. By the way, I totally agree that the company to flip that has never heard of that before, but makes real sense. I don't think it works in like not just the hardware part or even infrastructure engineering

overall. I don't know how much change one can do in like two years. But coming back to how you build this process, can you walk us through how you decided to say, okay, we're going to have this process and how you decided the questions you would ask? So that, I mean, it came out of this very bad hire at Joyent. So we had kind of, we had put together the bones of some of this at Joyent. Oh, I see.

And then, which was very helpful. I think with many things, I mean, Steve and I have an unfair advantage. We are not starting this company early in our career. You know, we are both later in our career. We've been through a lot. We've been through a lot together, which is also very helpful to have that shared experience. But we also come from different perspectives. And we've seen a lot that's been done incorrectly.

And there's a lot of what Oxide does correctly that comes from this kind of scar tissue from previous experiences. And the hiring process is a good example of that. I think you're definitely right about the friction. And I think, you know, there's different friction at different times. When we first started the company, I mean, we did have, we were fortunate in that, like, we do have notoriety. Like, as my kids say, I'm nerd famous. I'm not actually famous, but I'm nerd famous. It did actually, it does kind of delight me whenever i was kind of explaining to to steve that you know i get recognized like on the streets

you know every once in a while he's kind of like give me a pull me a break and then we are we're like preparing our documents to to start the company and this guy we're at like kinkos or whatever and this guy comes like are you i'm sorry i have to ask are you brian can't drive watch a bunch of your youtube talks and steve's like are you kidding me like get this guy out of here well no no no i was i actually in the parking lot was asking him how much the TaskRabbit cost to have this guy show up and represent like, oh gosh, are you Brian? I was convinced that this was like a bit actor. But no, no, it was genuine.

And then we actually were talking to one VC who was definitely not interested in Oxide. We're like, okay, well, because he was for a bunch of reasons, like this is like way too nuts. And we were joking. Well, like we were also thinking about doing a, like a celebrity sighting service where you could have a service like a task rabbit, where you could pay for someone to come up to you on the street and lose their mind. Like,

like, and understand your, you do it like on a first date or whatever you could. And he's like, now that, tell me more about that. And you're like, I was joking. That was not, that's not actually a story.

Those are the moments where you are truly in Silicon Valley. You're just like, this is an episode from Silicon Valley where, of course, that would be a fundable idea. But so we had, I mean, that's a true, that's a gift, right? And I mean, I'm lucky to have, I love the fact that my talks have resonated with people. And that is, so that, that's like a, that's a tailwind, that gave us a tailwind. But still, when the company had like no employees, it was still a challenge. And I viewed my job as like, my job is to persuade people to get them excited enough about oxide that they would do the materials.

Later in the company, things shifted. And now it's like, I don't have to persuade any engineer to do the materials, really. But as we're hiring folks for go-to-market, Steve definitely had to go. I mean, now Steve is in that role because it's like this is an idiosyncratic process for engineering. For sales, you're just like, what? Yeah.

Like this is just totally – and there were moments, again, where it's like it was great to hear Steve say like this is the right process. Because I wasn't – I was a little concerned and because like you get like you're getting when you see like oh man we're seeing like a lot of materials that are just not great and Steve was like just like be patient and then sure enough you know we start getting those materials there's like okay wow this is amazing and but Steve spends a bunch of time talking to folks to persuade them effectively to engage in this process. That's a bold move, by the way, like you said. I mean, even for engineering, I would say I can imagine a bunch of engineers like, I love writing code. I don't like writing. So you know what?

I'm not going to bother. There are other options I'll go apply for. And same would happen for like go-to-market folks as well. Have you found certain things that make it easier to convince them otherwise and say, hey, this is worth going through? And of course, there will be some people who won't go through and you probably don't even want them to go through that process. But for some people who might be at the edge of it, what have you found to work in that case? I mean, I think it helps to kind of self-select for the right people because the folks that get excited about the opportunity at come in and not be a account executive in this zip code where any deals that come in outside of this zip code have to kick over to this other team that are excited about the fact that they get to work really closely with the engineering team

and the operations team. And they get to be front and center to understand like, what are the supply chain requirements and manufacturing requirements to go scale the business? And what are the kind of trade-offs as you're thinking about how do we prioritize prior things we wanted to do in the product, current bugs that we're facing, current new customer features? Like what is that process of having to have more to do than you have time to do? And how do you prioritize and think through that? And just being able to have kind of a front row seat to what is a much to go do what's right for the customer when I didn't have that right. I may have taken it and could have lost my job for it. But I think it's so folks that are excited about that, um, turns out their materials are great.

And when they join the company, they're the kind of people where the engineering team is like, wow, this is a different type of person. This is awesome. I'm really excited that we, that I get to go, you know, this is the person that is responsible for these critical relationships on the federal government side or, or the financial or this large cloud SaaS company that we have to go make wildly successful. And so I think there's another side of it, which is understandably this person has financial commitments and they are trying to assess how easy or hard is this to sell and how, uh, what are the gaps in the product and how, what, how do customers think about the, the, the benefits and the capabilities that are differentiating. And then also the

things that they would like to see kind of fill in over time because they're trying to assess, I mean, no one will say it out, out loud but, you know, salespeople are looking for things that are easy to sell, you know, and, and, and that's, well, I mean, I think, I mean, another way to phrase it is like, they are trying to assess product market fit themselves. Like you do not want to come in on a go-to-market team on a product that is like nowhere near product market fit. That is not like you're just going to be uphill the entire time. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's super great to hear. And I know, Rana, is also part of the recruiting process, right, is the comp. And I think you guys do some pretty creative, you know, solution there, approach there. So but before that, just one quick question. And this is actually interesting. You brought up like go to market and engineers being surprised, like, oh, it's a different type of go to market people. I think engineers have a lot of misconceptions about sales and exactly about go to market. Like for me personally, I felt like I've, I read two books books one's called spin

selling and then the other one is the mom test i feel like that had like helped me get over the um sort of the uh the very transactional right like stereotype of sales to now it's more about exactly like you said oh it's like trying to find alignment of like the product and the customer. But just to show how naive I am still, like when you said the, like the conversation, right, at the call, like at the beginning of this conversation, when you got the call, like for me, in my head, it was still very much about like, ooh, like, what was that call like, right? Like, what did you have to say to convince them to like, you know, get this big order? And then, you know, when you said like, right,

like now I understand it. It's like, oh, that call was pretty straightforward. Just like, oh, hey, these are like requirements. What's super hard about it is all the things that happen after, right? It's like, how do we like cheat and steal to get all the things done? So, but it's all, yeah,

it just all centers around trust. It's like, can I trust this person to do, you know, what's right and do in, in this particular case, like what's, you know, can I, can I, I I'm putting a lot at risk in everything I do in kind of any dimension. It depends on the company you're in and obviously organization, organizational dynamics, but, um, a lot of, I mean, the, the classic, you know, you don't get fired for buying IBM. You don't get fired for using AWS. You don't get fired for, you know, like those things all start with not getting fired. How do I not get fired? Which is like, in, in, is obviously how you hope people are not having to live their life and think about,

but if you flip it around to the positive and say, you know, um, how do I affect change in the company? Like the things that I care about personally, how can this person, can this company, can this partner help me in that journey? And the, and that, that starts with trust. Can I trust that this is someone I should spend time with? Can I trust that this person, I can delegate things to this person and they're going to actually come through for me? And as an engineer, it's like, can I trust that this person is not misrepresenting the product to get a deal done? And say like, oh, I can do all this stuff and then come back and say, hey, by the way, we have to go build this. It's like, sorry, what do you mean we have to go build this? It's like, it's what they bought. It's like, what do you mean it's

what they bought? It's like, well, they, sorry. It's like we, in the, you know, again, HBO Silicon Valley, right, where they have, it absolutely is. And it's like the, that's a real challenge to make sure that you are, that you're being honest in terms of like, you need to be forward looking and optimistic and at the same time, realistic and have that responsibility to the customer. And boy, it is a balance at all. I mean, it is a real balance. And it's a challenge. And folks on the engineering side do not understand go-to-market. They view it as like, this is a magic lamp that I will rub the magic lamp and out will come sales.

And as a result, like they don't know how to assess those folks. They don't know how to assess those folks they don't understand and there's a reason that so many companies fail because they miss hire around to go to market and also it's like they're disinterested in it they look down on it which i always find like just despicable to me is when it's viewed as kind of less than and that the because ultimately like we are all here to serve our customer and their customers like that should be the entire focus and go to market is very important that support is very it is very important i mean like all that you know and the idea of of kind of denigrating support which which is endemic in our industry,

is also ridiculous. Finance. Finance gets a bad name because these are the folks that are trying to cut costs out of the business at every turn. And in fact, the very, very best folks in that domain

are trying to figure out how to maintain a durable company long-term to better serve customers and are thinking about, you know, not how can we charge the most and spend the least, but are again, thinking about viability of the company. And so you can, you can look at, you know, any domain and QA is a great one where it's, it's, you know, it, again, in, in the wrong kinds of companies can be denigrated as like not the engineers that built it and yet are like, you know, holding things up or letting things through. And in fact, man, that interface that sits between what got built and before customers deploy it, you could argue is the most loadaring place in a company for successful customer relationships.

Absolutely. So one part I would say is like, in a way you were fortunate to find each other and work with each other where you got to develop respect for these different roles. And Brian, like you said, engineers have this weird perception of considering some of the other domains less than engineering, which is absolutely wrong, I would say. But for folks who might not be able to interface with, let's say, go-to-market people or people in finance, what's a way for them to get a sneak peek into what this looks like or have a better understanding of this is what the value that this specific person or role is adding to the business. Have you found certain things that people could go read about, learn from to develop

this perspective? Or is it more like you just have to have that experience? I mean, I think the first thing is just go seek out someone in your company and ask them what's the hardest part about their job. And I always think the ones that, the most difficult sales processes are usually the most instructive. And I think inevitably, they're gonna have a bunch of questions

as they're listening to this story about why it took nine months to get to someone saying no. Because when you think about like, uh, you know, kind of sales basics, you've got obviously a, a quick yes is the best, uh, a, uh, and, and the worst is a long no, but it doesn't necessarily always follow and is kind of counterintuitive, but actually a quick no is better than a long yes in many cases. And so you have this sort of matrix where, you know,

these very long sales cycles usually are an indicator of not getting to critical information early enough in the sales process both ways. And I think an engineer will appreciate the kind of a science of trying to get to that information. How do you how do you research and how do you unearth the this critical load bearing information that leads to these long, long, long sales processes? And you can actually kind of like put a framework around that. You can you can really like dissect it and take it apart, and that's where I think you find there's a lot more alignment in engineering and sales than many people think and give it credit for.

Yes. And, yeah. And get curious. You know, it goes back to that curiosity of like, you know, the curiosity does not – we should be technologists because of that curiosity of like, you know, the curiosity does not, we should be technologists because of that curiosity, because we want to understand how things work. I don't think that is true of all technologists right now. I think that there are plenty who are technologists because it's because mom and dad told me this is the way I was going to be able to get a job after

college. And I think that like, you really need to get to and stoke that curiosity, curiosity about the way the world works. And the way the world works does not end with the technical details of the product. The way the world works goes all the way through how that product is actually delivered to the customer, how the customer deploys it, how it's used by their customers. I mean, there is so much to learn. And it's super interesting. These details are really, really interesting about the way this stuff works. And so I think that, like, people, you need to stoke that curiosity. And, you know, and you two are, I think, as I told you last time,

particularly good with kind of the questions that you ask, really thoughtful questions. And I think that go, just as Steve said, go in your, you know, if you have a job, you work at a company, you've got people with different kinds of roles, take someone out to lunch from a different part of the company

and ask them about their challenges. And like people will be, are gonna to be, they like to be asked and someone cares about the kind of problems that I have over here in operations. Cause God, let me tell you about the supply chain nightmare that I'm dealing with right now. And it's like super interesting. And you, and you might find that it's like, oh, wait a minute. Actually, I can actually help with that problem. I mean, in many ways, like it's so gratifying when you in a large organization, you kind of reach out across a large organization, discover like, wait a minute, I can actually do something over here that's going to help you over there and really build those connections. I mean, I think that one of the things that was valuable about Sun is that Sun kind of encouraged those direct connections and you know I made so and got to be with our customers with our folks in go to

market and I mean it was funny in terms of like the the way I viewed sales folks I when I first came into Sun I remember one of the engineers saying just you remember, our salespeople sold Solaris 2.3 on Sun 4M. That's a shitty operating system on a shitty microprocessor. And those people built a growing company. It's like, at this company, like, don't you ever hold these people in the highest regard. Because they have seen, and as Steve had said about seeing a company through tough times. And part of the reason that the upside of Sun was so explosive is because

there was an entire team that had gone through the very, very, very difficult times and had earned the trust of the customer. And how do you earn that trust the customer over time? But I think getting to your question of like, how do people learn about these other domains? Get curious and ask people. By the way, as you were saying this, I one thing you said before kind of click in my head, which is at times when you have

people at the company and you're hiring thoughtful people through the entire materials process when they are disagreeing on something you sometimes have them go read their answers have you ever do you go through this process again while the person is at the company and maybe not go through all the questions but maybe have them write about the time you were happy time you're not like in the last yeah we did Yeah, we did. And we actually did this. We were a remote company. But we have an office and we're making hardware.

So it's like there's a physical component to it. But ahead of our last meetup at the end of last year, we had people write about the things that they were proud about. And what are you proud of? What are you anxious about? It's a really important question to ask. What are you excited about? And what are you thankful for? Like what have your colleagues, something your colleagues have done that you appreciate? oh such good questions uh i i want to use this for my own team at linkedin um yes and not necessarily i don't think i can but i want to go through this process just for the team itself uh it can where is a good place to find some of these questions uh that so so yeah if you actually want in terms of like an established company because this actually came up at joyent. So Joyent was bought by Samsung. I had a very, we had a very understanding director of HR who, when she first came into the company, was like, this is all, like, you're insane, basically. began to realize like actually like you the this team is a really functional team and the and i

really she really defended a lot of what we were doing to samsung but at some point samsung is like look we just we have this like process like we have to have some stuff in writing from employees like we can't just be can't just be kind of like a montessori school over here. So like we need to, can we get something? And so I'm like, all right, if we're going to have like, if we need to get something in writing, let's get it from employees. Because when in formalized performance review, which I put performance in air quotes, because so much of that has got nothing to do with actually improving the

performance of employees, but rather like it's actually about stack ranking a team which is really corrosive to a team it's like i mean can you imagine like a professional baseball team being like okay so we're gonna spend actually a quarter of the season determining listing our players in order it's like why it's like you actually it doesn't actually matter. And with like, the goal is to like, win the World Series. Like, why are we spending a bunch of time stack ranking ourselves within one another?

Because it doesn't actually matter if we have a losing, put a losing team on the field. And I feel like a lot of companies waste their time stack ranking themselves when that actually doesn't, it's like our customers that matter. And we should be focused on building the thing that they need. But when we, so, you know, I think the traditional performance review is basically there's little to be said in defense of it.

I do think it's helpful to have people kind of write down their own thinking about how they like reflecting back and asking them these questions like, what are you proud of? Where did you struggle? Asking people where they struggled. And how did you deal with that? When you ask engineers, by the way, what they're proud of, actually, if you ask anyone, I should just limit to engineering. Asking people what they're proud of in the last period of, that there may be like little details that actually, you know, I'm really proud of this because we pulled off this larger thing as a result. But I know that like this detail that I had was actually pretty important for that. And I'm proud of that fact. I don't need to like, you know, kind of thump my chest over it because I've got that that very intrinsic gratification from it.

But if you're asking me, yeah, I'll talk to you about that detail. And that detail is really interesting. So I think these are all I think questions that we should all be asking ourselves. And it's it's an opportunity to reflect. yeah we i think it's in um at one point i uh i i did get trolled at some point you're like all right look you're always like you know denigrating performance review like what do you do and i actually talked about this and outlined this whole thing and and outlined kind of the history of this and how we got to these questions um but found that the the answers were reviewing i also think that if you if you're insist insisting on stack ranking your team which i don't recommend but if you're insisting on stack ranking your team uh the answers to that

will be extremely revealing um and i think that you can probably go through those and you can find the high high performers and the people that are struggling pretty easily by asking them to answer the to reflect on on what they've done point taken uh good good advice so i have a bunch of notes here and we'll i know we have a hard stop in about 30 minutes so we'll jump around a little bit because there's so much in this conversation or so many threads you want to pull on and we'll try what we can contain. But I'll list three. And, Guang, you tell me if you don't agree. Disagreed.

So three threads that I'm thinking of that we go on in the next hour, a half hour is you mentioned a a couple of time, many startups fail because they build the go-to-market team at the wrong time. So when should one build? What's the right time? That's one. Second, I wanna talk about attracting talent and also club some of the compensation parts because what you do is very unique.

Not many companies- My vote is on the money, but you go ahead with the third point. I'll answer the third one. The third one is mostly about marketing itself because something that Steve, you mentioned earlier, where one of the investors told you to not do podcasts

and you still, well, one, you have your own show, which is pretty amazing. Highly encourage folks to go check it out. Oxide and Friends. And I think I forget the name of the other one. Okay. There is another one too on the metal so and third you're here so thank you

Guang disagree with these three threads no no no that's great you guys pick which one do you is it more interesting for you guys what do you think Brian and Steve oh I thought that was I thought we were going to get through all three awesome yeah we can probably get through all three awesome so let's let's start with the attracting talent since we were talking about uh performance reviews and the materials for hiring so in this case um can you share more

about how you've gone about attracting talent especially and i'll put some context here something we touched on last time what you're doing at oxide is hard it's not an easy thing you're not just building software you're building hardware and software and you're packaging the entire thing together uh one of the hardest things for anyone to do and we have seen so many companies try to do hardware and not succeed for many different reasons and when you talk to a lot of the people, and if you ask them, hey, what do you want to do? Rarely people say, I want to go build hardware. That's not the first instinct that people have, especially when you're trying to make the two work together. And the other part I would say is you also have a unique compensation structure,

which you blogged about. When I first saw this, I think, I forget exactly when you published that blog, but I saw it right around when it came out. And it was fascinating. Like, I was like, wait, there is companies actually do this? I couldn't even comprehend that this is doable. So can you talk a little more about like how you go about attracting talent and how this compensation structure has played a role in that? Yeah, they're related. They're actually very related because we, you know know i came up on the software side always at the very lowest layers of software so always hardware facing software but ultimately like software engineer i and i i have not i'm not a double e right i'm a computer

my degree is a computer science um when we built out the company, it was actually attracting low level system software talent was relatively easier based on my own network and so on. What we were really, really struggling with was attracting double E's, true hardware team. And when we started the company, we were looking for to find outside services to do that um and we realized like that's a that was not what that model was not working um and we really needed to to get like a to get a much broader cross-section of folks um we were also just trying to get a just trying to attract more people just a more diverse cross-section on any axis you choose we're trying to attract the company and we had been we had had this model for compensation since the beginning but we hadn't

talked about it and the um one of the engineers suggested like you know what i whenever i describe oxide to folks i describe the principles and the values and people think it's bullshit because, you know, it's just like corporate bromides or whatever. And then I talk about compensation and they're like, wait a minute, what? That is weird. Like, okay, are you guys, so are you like, is this values thing like for real? Are you like, yeah, exactly. She's like, I think it would help for us to talk about it. And I'm like, I could write a blog entry on it. And this is one of these moments where being like being a remote company is helpful because in a remote company, you can have everyone in a virtual room where you can see everybody's body language at once in a way that's really hard in a physical room. And you could see everyone's body language, just like lunge at it. Like, yes, write the blog entry. I'm like, okay,

well, I mean, compensation, like, Oh, not a hot topic at all. I'm sure there'll be no thoughts on this. I'm sure like, sure. No. So kind of no, no, no, yeah. No one cares. Who cares about compensation? I mean, it's only, so knowing that compensation is the hottest of all hot issues, like you can't get any hotter because it's not just like the meals that people put on their tables and how they care for their families. It's also the way they think of themselves and the way they value their lives. I mean, it's like you've got absolutely

everything swirling around compensation, right? So wrote the blog entry describing our approach to compensation, which is transparent and it's also uniform. And I know that it was going to be, I kind of, and that blog entry, by the way, is written very defensively. Like I tried to short circuit every hot comment I know I would get, like some will say this and here's our response to that. Some will say this, some will say it doesn't scale. And it's like, but you know, I, uh, I have a very complicated relationship with Paul Graham because he is able to say things that I very strongly agree with and things I very strongly disagree with. So I don't like, but one of the things that he has said things i very strongly disagree with so i don't like but one of the

things that you said that i very strongly agree with is startups should do things that don't scale and startups often and so like just put that in that bucket i think the uh the irony is or the thing it's kind of the the interesting uh next chapter on that is it actually has scaled pretty well. And as we have added new roles to the team, it's been really, really important. So to your question of like, how do we attract talent? That blog entry, as it turns out, you know, you can only know these things in hindsight. pivotal moment for the company because a uh a double e an electrical engineer who worked for for ge medical in wisconsin uh who was disaffected at his job read that blog entry and it's like i'm really interested in that approach and uh applied to oxide and it's nathaniel Hoffman. And we Nathaniel is superlative.

And when we hired Nathaniel and immediately one of Nathaniel's former colleagues also applied, Eric Austin, also superlative. I remember talking to Eric and being like and talking to him about Oxide. He's like, frankly, I was going to see what you did with Nathaniel, because if you if you didn't hire Nathaniel, I knew you didn't have any idea what you were doing. And but when you hired, Eric is, these two are such a great pair and they love working together, but they're very complimentary. And Eric is very, very blunt. Nathaniel is very nice and Eric is very direct. And of course, like Nathaniel is also direct and Eric is also nice. But like, you know, ultimately there and Eric is just like, I knew if you didn't hire Nathaniel, I know what you're doing. And I'm like, well, I'm really glad that we hired Nathaniel.

Thank God. Thank God. And that and, you know, we got very because we've been looking for double E's in all the wrong places. It had not occurred to me that like, actually, if you really want a double E pushing the state of the art, get out of the business that has not advanced the state of the art in terms of computing and go to a CT device. Like these guys were making CTs.

They're making CAT scanners. And so that has allowed us to attract the talent. As we have added more roles to the team, that model has allowed us to really concretely express how important we think support is, how important product assurance is, because it's like, and as a result, like, yeah, when we open up and, you know, right now,

that, you know, we're hiring for support engineers. It's a very oversubscribed position. We've got a lot of applicants for that. We are, as a result, we are able to pull in the best support folks because they're, because also, like, they are attracted to the model of, like, oh, this is, in fact, we've got a guy that just joined who's, like, actually, I've been being told that to advance my career, I had to move into development. But what I actually, I want to be at that customer product interface. That's what I want to do. And I'm good at it. I mean, he doesn't say this because he's very modest, but he's very good at it. And Oxide now gives him, so it's been very, very important as we've grown. So one follow up on this,

we have kind of a titles hierarchy that results in compensation differences too. And at many companies that becomes the way of authority in a sense, someone with a higher title. And not just, I'm not talking about just managerial positions, but this is also engineers. Like a staff engineer has more authority than a senior engineer.

That's just the nature of things. And many times people are just trying to get to that next title. And I've had many conversations with folks where they're like, how do I get promoted? And I'm like, you're asking the wrong question. The question you should be asking is, how do I do good work? how do i get promoted and i'm like you're asking the wrong question the question the question you should be asking is how do i do good work how do i get better how do i get better how do i improve so you're asking the wrong question and uh but to the contrary of the contrary side of that is like if there is a well-defined path to

acknowledge you are doing better because promotion at least in my opinion is nothing but a byproduct of you getting better a byproduct of you having enough impact where the business is recognizing that you're doing well but when you have this equal compensation structure what motivations i mean obviously there are lots of folks who are motivated by doing good work and take a lot of pride in that. And that's the kind of folks you want to have at the company, too. But some of that clear paths, like if I do X or if I do this better, I know I'm going to be recognized and rewarded for it versus, well, I can continue doing better. It's still all going to stay the same. Like from a combination standpoint, it's going to stay the same.

How do you see it play a role in how people work and wanting to excel? It gets to when you've been happiest and why. And maybe these folks would never apply to Oxide, never had someone who said my happiest was when I got promoted. Just not. And the, and, and often like, I feel like one of the real problems with those levels is you have what I call the N plus one shithead problem, which is you, you are at a level and you're looking at level N plus one. And inevitably there is someone who's been promoted to that level

who didn't deserve it for whatever reason. Or you think they didn't deserve it or they're a bozo or whatever. It's like you might not know the whole picture or whatever. And it's tempting to be like if bozo is a staff engineer, well, I'm sure as hell a staff engineer. And like, well, it's like Bozo's a staff engineer. And actually by the time like you're promoted to a staff engineer, Bozo's already been promoted to a senior staff engineer, by the way. And so by the time you get promoted, you're just like pissed about it. It's just like about time.

And it's just not what makes people it's just not what makes people it's not what drives you and what what drives you what should drive you you know last time we talked about the topi tweet oh yes it's like that that ain't a promotion that's not a that's just like the deepest sense of gratification well i think that's interesting because i think people actually a lot of people are driven by validation that's why they're seeking the promotion right so that's right we're looking for people that are driven by like happiness and that's what interesting for sure for sure but it's like that validation should, I think, is not climbing that kind of that corporate ladder. That validation should be in delivering something that in doing something that someone else finds valuable wherever you are in that company. And when you like that gratification and it's, you know, we've got, you know, one of the reasons we need to jump here in a little bit is because we do a weekly demo Friday.

And in demo Friday, anybody can demo anything. And pretty often someone is demoing something that they've been working on that they know a colleague of theirs would love. And, you know, it is that sense of like, I demoed this and, you know, I knew that this was going to make Sean's life so much better. And Sean is just like, won't stop dropping heart emojis into these, like, you know, flooding with heart emojis because he's so grateful that someone else has solved this problem that has been like, you know, has been a real thorn in his butt, but he's been focused on something else. And now as if by magic, someone is solving this problem and Sean loves it. And you, the engineer who developed this, that gratification, you get that, like,

I've just enabled Sean to do better work faster. Like. And usually it's not one engineer. It's like, you know, eight other folks are just like, oh, this is amazing. I'm so excited. And you say that every once in a while this happens. This happens like every week. It's people building tools for other people. And you get this. And there's a reason why then you end up with a tweet where, you know, someone is excited about using a particular product.

You can kind of walk it all the way back down to folks that are excited to help others. And they get lifted up by, that gratification stems from helping colleagues not trying to figure out how they, you know, are demonstrating stuff they have done and getting accolades for that in hopes of a promotion. Right, right. Internal versus external validation. That's what I should have said. Yeah.

Yeah. Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. And you want to build something that has utility and value, but it's because it stokes that internal fire. Love it. So switching gears a little bit, I want to talk about the marketing piece. So at the start of this conversation, Steve, before we actually started, you mentioned that you got some, I don't know if advice or suggestion, a strong suggestion from someone to not do a podcast. And then you would hide the podcast at times and you have two amazing podcasts. Why did you still choose to do podcasts?

Well, I mean, I think we, a couple reasons why On The Metal came together. And this was the first podcast and why we ended up, we were talking before this, we were trying to get like our mics working and had some, some audio technical difficulties. Um, but we had known, you know, and, and always had shared a lot of curiosity about the history of computing. Uh, and there were just a lot of untold stories about the kind of that nexus of the early days of computing and that kind of hardware software interface to come on and share their stories. And it'd be fun if you could get those stories laid down. Like, wouldn't that be interesting and engaging?

It had nothing to do with Oxide, other than, you know, a lot of why Oxide exists today can be found in the annals of sort of what transpired in the computing history over the last couple of decades. But another kind of motivation behind it was that the kind of people that would be well-suited to come join us and go build this company would be equally attracted to the stories that these technologists would have to tell. And we were very lucky in the fundraising process because VCs will usually have these kind of like big guns in their arsenal of technologists that they bring in to vet companies and in some cases kill companies.

And while we were going through the fundraising process, we were talking to the folks at a prominent VC, and they asked Jeff Rothschild to come in and do diligence on Oxide. And so Jeff, founder of Veritas, he was the first kind of engineering manager at Facebook, very distinguished career in technology. And by the tail end of this, where he was kind of brought into, you know, to hard qualify, maybe out oxide, we found ourselves having a delightful conversation. He had so much wisdom that he imparted just in that conversation about the importance of transparency. And I remember him talking about, you know, no closed door meetings, like just, just allow everyone into every meeting. And, you know, people fear that, oh, but, you know, no closed door meetings, like just, just allow everyone into every meeting and you, you know, people fear that, oh, but you know you know, what if someone wants to listen

into something that's a, that's a private confidential, you know, it's, it's information that like can't be shared broadly. First, ask yourself the question, why, why can't this information be, be shared more broadly and solve? It's usually a subset of that. It's not the entirety of the topic. It's maybe like one particular characteristic of the topic. And maybe you exclude that, but you can cover everything else. Two, he said, people aren't going to show up to these meetings. Most people, what you find is people, by not being invited to these meetings, they get wrapped around the axle and they spend a bunch of time thinking about

what might be going on in the meeting. And once they know it's an open meeting that anyone can hear, they're like, oh, I can go back to doing my job. And so I remember that one very specifically. It was like a great, great, great piece of advice. So anyway, at the end of the day- We did that one, actually that particular one, because I think we do something that's very important that we don't have necessarily talked about enough.

We record every meeting at Oxide. Right. And that has allowed that to take that same kind of zeitgeist to the next level of like, hey, because, like, God, I really want to talk about this update software we're working on. but there's a storage conversation happening at the same time that I actually have to be in. And now I've got like, you know, having a panic attack because I think that the, well, now it's like you can actually be in one meeting and listen to the recording of the other and catch up on anything that is like, and just that sets people at ease of like, okay, I know that I can, this information is all available to everybody. And you can catch up at 1.5x, which I will tell the three of you, the previous conversation the three of you had at 1.5x was getting up there and challenging. Which was good. It was good. It was very good.

I cannot speak English, so 1.5 makes it even more. Yeah, I mean, we all know who he's talking about. He says the three of you. We know who that's directed at. So we asked him at the end. We said, hey, we were thinking about getting people together, telling some stories about the history of computing. He had some really, really interesting stories

because he was early at Intel. And we talk about this extensively in the first episode of On the Metal, which is definitely a great, great one. But he was hired into Intel to go solve this problem. And then he sees in the quarterly earnings readout that this problem that had caused like $200, $300 million of backlog sales at Intel had been solved. And so he's like, oh, well, I guess I don't have a job at Intel after all. And he goes to his hiring manager and he's like, his boss, he's like, hey, I guess you solved the problem, so you don't need me. And he's like, yeah, we solved the problem. We hired you. You have to go figure this out in the next couple

weeks. And he's like, oh, Jesus. So it talked about just how stressful it was because this problem had been solved. But anyway, so, so we record this episode with Jeff. It was phenomenal. It was like two and a half hours. He gets off it and said, man, I haven't told a bunch of like, my family's going to appreciate this. Cause my, like I, a lot, like I haven't talked about a lot of these stories in, in, in my career. So we kind of knew we were onto something. We're like, okay, we, we got to go capture as many of these types of stories as we can. And again, back to like thinking people that would be interested in this would be great fits for Oxide. It turned out to be kind of a recruiting vehicle because one of our earliest engineers listened to that episode

and then came inbound to... Steve, I actually went back to our dms yeah and i'm like when did because i i just remember us us having like the podcast idea like out of the womb i just don't remember us ever not doing it and indeed it was when our earliest conversations about starting the company um i said also just an idea i've been listening to a lot of podcasts recently i've been listening to the pitch in particular, which I liked. It was very helpful when we were starting a company. One thing I think would be incredible would be for us to host a podcast at some regular cadence where we interview computing and low-level software pioneers about interesting machines. Could be a great way to get exposure for our nutty venture, both to recruit early employees and to build brands.

So that was, I mean, that is like 11 months before we started oxide so we kind of had this idea from the outset by the way i learned about oxide through on the metal uh yes here we go yes case in point and many many many many of our employees have i was actually giving a talk on the importance of social audio. And I, like, nearly every employee is like, hey, just so you know, like, I learned about it. I learned about it. The thing I do think is kind of funny is that I did say, Steve, a little bit later in that conversation, moments later, I promised not to pivot us into a podcasting company. That wasn't a little i don't know if you want to go full promise on that i intend i do not intend to pivot us i was joking with one of

our recent investors that she's like she's like you're you're basically like a podcasting company that makes a computer for a content generation like not totally not totally wrong. I mean, like, it feels a little reductive. But it ties into the question around, like, when to build go-to-market. Because, you know, when one is thinking about, like, okay, when do we build go-to-market? When do we start getting these kind of customer-facing and these folks focused on marketing?

And those engagements with prospective customers, these folks are going to be getting at, like, why should this company exist? You know, what came before it? And what other alternatives to solve maybe this problem that I have or that it proposes that I have are there? And what are the things in this market that make it either difficult or easy to provide these sorts of solutions to customers? And so by way of about the history of computing, it kind of was already starting to set up where the company is and what it's providing and what it's doing. And I mean, you all, obviously you, you have an opportunity to,

in a very lightweight and economical manner, reach a huge and broad audience. And then you allow for people to kind of self-select in, whether it is for hiring, whether it is for, you know, potential customers. And you get to learn like, well, who are the kinds of people that were so intrigued by, you know, these stories or with Oxide and Friends where it actually, you know, on the metal had nothing to do with Oxide specifically and directly except for our terrible advertisements for Oxide that we would put in there that people would beg us to change up a little bit because we had the same ads. I mean, so much so that a listener submitted an ad for us on our behalf to try and diversify the content there in the ads for a little bit.

But in Oxide and Friends, it's back to talking about the team because that is actually what Oxide is, is the team and getting they really understand who we are, what we're building, why we're building it. And it has allowed us to gather a lot of really important information about what is important to the market without having to do it with like, you know, 120 people in the field. And it's not to say that we will not have 128 people in the field at some point on the horizon, but it is, you know, I think we, in those first couple of years, because you have the tension, especially in hard tech, where the build process is going to be a long process. So how do you instantiate conversations with customers and how do you keep that relationship alive? Over multiple, multiple, multiple quarters, we have nothing to sell. And you're actually asking for the privilege of their feedback on what you're building so you can

fine tune what you're building so that when you launch, it's the best, it kind of hits the sweet spot of what folks need in the market. And to be able to do that, you got to give something. And giving kind of a transparent look into what it takes to build a computer company for us was incredibly important. It, yes, reached a broad audience. It allowed people to kind of self-select in. It also allowed us to kind of educate and warm up a bunch of folks that would be future customers and served a really important medium to be able to go do that. And now- It's also fun as hell. It's fun as hell. Well, we would love to continue going here for hours, but I know we have us top and we do hope

that we get both of you back on the show again. We would love to talk to you a bunch more about so many, I know both Guang and I took so many notes on the topics you wanna cover, but we didn't get to today. But what I will say is that not only are you rethinking and questioning every part of how to build a server or rack or even a network switch for that matter, you're also questioning and rethinking how to build a server or a rack or even a network switch for that matter. You're also questioning and rethinking how to build a company.

And from the sidelines and just reading about Oxide and how you are building the company itself, it's been fascinating. I'm enjoying it a lot. And I'm sure many, many, many folks who are listening to this podcast will get to learn as well. Brian and Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. This was awesome. Thank you so much.

Love your approach, love the questions, love the discussion. This was so much fun. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. All right. All right. Take care, guys. Thanks, guys.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at softwaremisadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.