The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Oxide is crossing the chasm (Friends)

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Bryan Cantrill returns in the wake of Oxide Computer Company's $100M Series B. Bryan tells us how he's avoiding an appearance on Silicon Valley (ding), why their uniform compensation is working, where Oxide fits in the AI datacenter, what scaling to 50+ rack orders looks like, and more. (GitHub has no CEO and saving Intel)++

Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, a weekly talk show about booking a 50 rack. Thank you to our partners at fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship. Learn more at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Okay, friends, I'm here with a friend of mine, Hardshot Gill, CEO of CodeRabbit, AI code reviews, so awesome. So the explosion of AI for developers is very real, as you know. Some call it hype, some call it the future Hardshot.

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You can get started today for free, and it's also free for open source. Learn more at codrabbit.ai. Again, codrabbit.aI. Well, let's start this show where we should start it. where should we start? Sure. Yeah, where should we start it? Which season are you in?

Oh, God. What a great question. I thought it was over. I thought it was over. No, no, no, no, that's not, he's asking for, in the analog of Silicon Valley that Oxide is living. Where do you show up? What reason are we currently portray?

Oh, Oxide in France. Yeah. This season are you guys. Okay, better question. I thought you meant like, what are you currently watching? I thought you were saying, what are you watching? I'm like, that is, that is a great question. You know, it always merits of rewatch.

You cannot rewatch that's too many times I mean it is so prophetic too It's amazing They just like I feel in particular That the AI episodes are almost chilling I mean they they seem to They seem to a little outlandish Now they're just like oh my God

The AI did it over the lunch Season 6 is coming to fruition 100%. Yeah if anthropoply just disappears We know why Yeah exactly right You know I feel that we are Because I also view it obviously

It obviously is a cautionary tale right And I think that there's so many And there's so many times when I was watching it with my my now 18 year old where I would kind of pause it and explain that like, okay, this is a real concept. Like they're presenting this in a very humorous way. But, you know, I still think that that season two episode one, Sandhill Shuffle, is one of the most important single episodes for an entrepreneur watch.

Yeah, the nagging is obviously wildly entertaining. But when the guy, he raised too much money, right? And he didn't realize that he could have raised. Richard asks, could you have raised less money? And he's like, oh, right, I could, and he, and they do such a masterful job of the guy kind of replays the history of his own startup in his head of like, okay, like, we would have, like, yeah, we would have raised less. And then we would have been at this other milestone.

And like, yeah, it would have been difficult, but we could have pulled it off. And like, and then he's like, you know, it realizes that his company was lost because he raised too much money. And we're very mindful of that. That's a very real phenomenon. And, you know, we are, you know, we obviously just raised 100 million bucks. And we were very mindful about that. And making sure that we, I mean, because the flip side, at least for oxide is that it is, we have always believed that if this company can cross the chasm, it is a generational company.

It's a huge company waiting to be built. And the number one risk for the company actually is running out of money is actually capital. I mean, VCs hate to hear this, right? They're like, oh, that's your number one risk. It's like, yeah, that's why we're here. I mean, it's like, we've got. That's why we need money. It's like, oh, all right.

Well, is there any other way we can be helpful? It's like, no, you can be helpful by like, you know, by actually money and check. It's like, wow, God, okay, that's kind of boring. We love to introduce you to, like, can we introduce you to potential customers? Like, no, no, that never works. No, you don't even. We're going to go. Yeah, we're good to go.

We actually need. So that is, you know, I think that I would skirt the question by saying, you know, we're mindful of all seasons of Silicon Valley and all stages of a company that represents. And how do we, how do we be the company we want to be without reliving some of the seasons of Silicon Valley without instituting Piper Pulse, without, you know, which I still think is one of the, and actually, did you know, the system at Facebook was actually called Pulse? I'd not realize this. Got some X meta folks.

You're like, you realize that that is like actually real. And that's real. And also the chairs ad, do you know, they're the tables. That's based on a chairs ad. Tables. Tables, which is a spoof ad. And you're like, this is such good satire and so biting. And it's like, oh, that's because actually Facebook paved the way.

They have a chairs ad that has to be seen to be believed. It's just amazing. So it's like, how do we, how do we be the company we want to be? And obviously venture backed. I mean, we're very grateful for venture capital. It's very important for what we, this can only be a VC based company. I mean, I think it's like, it's easy to be very cynical by venture capital, but it does allow you to do something extraordinary.

You get this like, you get this huge amount of cash to go build the thing before you have customers, before you have, I mean, that before you have a business. And, you know, that's a, that's a magical thing. And then you've got to hit, you know, the clutch and the gas just right. So we're very mindful of it all. I hope we are not, you know, I hope we're reliving the good bits and not the bad bits. I love to believe, but, but mindful of it all for sure. So why is 100 million for a series B?

Yeah, big series B. Like, why is that the right? Why is that the right number? Yeah. And I think that, you know, when we, uh, and the, we were not necessarily raising, right? So when we had raised a series A and, you know, when you are a venture back company, you always have to be willing to take. the right meetings with venture capitalists because you always need that next round and especially a

series b i think is the most difficult series to raise um because you're kind of a teenager as a company um you are you know teenagers can be tough because they've got adult needs but they don't have adult strengths you know they're not like they're they're not actually like contributing yet they're they're on the cusp of it they're they're close but you are you know i got two kids in college, so I'm definitely, you know, I'm feeling this right now. You're just like, okay, or what I tell you what? Why don't I give you my bank account and you just give me whatever is left over? How well, let's do it that way.

Um, but you know, you're kind of a teenager at a series B and you need to have. So you're constantly like trying to find the right partner for that and the right. And we, you know, we had a bunch of firms that in that there are a bunch of firms that are just like not very good, you know. So you're kind of, you're not taking every meeting by a long shot. But we, the, this firm that really wanted to get to know us. And you know, the first meeting was fine. But then they came by for a second meeting. And that second meeting was really good. And they've done a lot of homework. And this is USIT. And, you know, the third meeting was real, you know, and you kind of have, it's courtship that happens over a long period of time. And, you know,

they got to know us really well. And they felt like, you know, when you're thinking about your next kind of financing, we think you guys need to go big. And we and it was bigger than we were like, wow, okay. But really the way they structured it was great from our perspective and kind of de-risks some of the risks that we saw of taking that much capital. And it gave us, it was really important because, again, like the way, still to me, the greatest risk to oxide,

is that we just don't make it. We run out of capital before we're able to build. It's really hard to build a business. It's especially hard to build a business where it's like we're selling big machines. You know, this is not a lot. This is not a home laver, right? Even though the home lavers would love us to do something for them. It's like, I'm so sorry, but they are not your customer.

No, they're not. And it's like, and the sales cycles are long. And, you know, you button it, the flip. of that has been like if we get there if we and when we were talking to customers uh and you know god bless our early adopters and early customers love them all they've been terrific and a couple of them have gone on the record even better is so grateful for them um or tweeting it out that's also great it's like we had customers like are we going to be able to talk about the fact that they're a customer they're going to be like oh my god Toby at shopify just tweeted it out it's like oh my god okay thank you

I guess that cat's out of the bag. I guess the CEO just tweeted it, which is great. But, you know, we are so, so, so grateful for those early customers. But we've talked to so many who are just like, oh, man, I love everything about this. I love everything about this. This is absolutely the right thing we should go do. I just, like, no, totally. I was just, we were talking like, God, I just need another, I need a Fortune 200 retailer

to have adopted this. And we're like, you're a Fortune 200 retailer. 200 retailer like you're the one to adopt it and no no I know I know I know I am and I would love to but I just need someone else to adopt it you're like okay all right it's like I but I love this if I do that like I'm all in and you're like okay so you much risk it is in the risk is and you get it right the risk is like you guys go away the risk is you're acquired I do love people like I'm really worried you're going to be acquired by Dell and I'm like now I don't want to neg myself do they know about your path of you know exactly exactly right

I don't think we're part of the podcast. You're like, no, never again. Yeah. That's why I built this. I think Dell would not want us. We are, we, we, we would, we're a bit of a kind of a skunk there from, from Dell's perspective. I don't think Dell's interested in us.

And, you know, the, you know, the hotel HP, we are, we are so disruptive. It's like that we are, that is not, that has never been the, the, the, the strategy. But you people are understandably worried about it because people can rattle off companies that have disappeared. favorite startups that have disappeared into Dell or HPE and I've been acquired and we you know I get it

and we obviously that's not what we aspire for for ourselves but you also there's only so much arguing you could do something because like they got a really good point right so the only way it's just like earning how do you earn someone's trust it's like one day at a time you know you can't you can't like

gas it on on earning someone's trust and that's where it blows down to people trusting and not just trusting us. People trust us personally. It's more that like, I need to trust that you're going to exist. I need to trust that you're going to be there. I need to trust that this is going to make it. And, you know, I think that this is a big part of, and we've already seen that where people are like, oh, wait a minute, $100 million. People are like, I think you guys are going to make it. Like, oh, thanks. We think we're going to make it too. But it's great to

hear it out of someone else's mouth. Like, oh, my God, like you guys are actually going to make that. Like, I actually, okay. And I, wow, this is great, you know. And so I think that the capitalization is not just the capital that we need to go expand manufacturing and to go, because the other, I mean, the other really significant aspect of this is that we, and we knew this was going to happen, but it's been fun to see it happen where a customer buys one rack, maybe two, and they're like, hey, what would 10 look like? What would 50 look like? What would 100 look like?

And, you know, for a long time, that was just kind of. of like, I just kind of pillow talk, you know, we were kind of dismissing it. You know, it's like, it's great.

We always, always took it seriously. But as time has gotten on, like those questions and conversations, but like, no, no, I'm like,

I'm like, I'm like, I've got budget. I've actually used this thing. I know what this thing actually is and isn't. And like, I've got this new project coming up, but this would be perfect for it. And these are the kind of numbers I need.

And you're like, those numbers get significant really quickly. And you do actually need a head of capital to be able to secure the financing that you need to be able. I mean, there is a fly. wheel that you need for which you need to like this is not on the one hand hardware is not as capital intensive as people think because it's not like we're building our own plant right we're not benchmark electronics is our contract manufacturer and like they like they've got their

own ITAR facility we're not building a manufacturing line we're not doing there's a lot of things we're not doing that people kind of associate with hardware but on the other hand it is also capital intensive because yeah you got to go procure a bunch of DRAM at a bunch of CPUs and a much of boards and like you can't invoice someone on that until it's actually been like shipped and so there is like there especially as the numbers get large um the financing angle becomes really important so yeah that's there's a point where you do go build that stuff or is it just so far away that you're not even thinking about it that's a great question i man i would kind of think never i mean you know on all that stuff we always try to keep an open mind and i think that you know we've got a

really great partner in benchmark because benchmark allowed us to do some things that are, I mean, like, look, we're an idiosyncratic company, right? As you guys know, and we are idiosyncratic, tip to tail. And, you know, one of the things that was really important to us is that we actually own all of our own manufacturing software. So we wrote all the software that runs on the line. And this is really unusual.

Most companies don't do this. Most companies don't really consider this aspect of it. Most, and I mean, what's funny is like the companies that do consider it are the ones that are like, it's the kind of the SpaceX's and the apples and the I mean the companies that take manufacturing really seriously do consider it but companies at our scale generally don't in part because maybe they don't have the luxury of doing it but it was very important us to own all of the software involved in manufacturing line but because we do that like we have like we've got it is a truly

great partnership where they're doing the things that they're good at that I don't necessarily know that we want to be good at and we are able to do the things that are very important us like software manufacturing companies are not great at software this is you know I don't feel that this is a newsflash. And we are in our DNA. We are a software company. Obviously, you do software and hardware together, but our, and we've got software engineers with a strong hardware sympathy, hardware engineers with a strong software sympathy, but we

have got great software expertise at this company. And because we can, we control all that. I don't think so. I think that this is something we would really look to partner or continuously. Gotcha. It's a wild ride. $100 million. It is.

I don't even know what do, what kind of class do you go to to manage that kind of purse? like who says Brian here's 100 mil spend it wisely right well this is I mean I think this is this is IT does apparently well I know this is so this is something that people don't realize about because it's it's it's kind of easy to complain about aspects of VC but the and the process can be you know any entrepreneur will tell you it's an arduous process it's like I mean it is like coupling it's like dating it's like actually although you know my uh my my My son plays college baseball, and it is, I will say that you're playing, playing NCAA varsity sports does look a lot like raising around.

If you've got an NCAA varsity athlete, they are definitely, because it's like the, it's a lot of options. A lot of options. And you're kind of like, everyone is trying to like find the right pairing, you know, and you are, you're trying to really find the right partnership. But, you know, with VC, like, they're going to give you a bunch of cash and they actually don't have a whole lot of control over what happens. You know, I mean, it's like, yes, you've got kind of like the board, you've got, you know, some aspects of what you've got a board seat or what have you. But like, you're really trusting the company to build itself in a way that is wise and proper.

And that's part of the reason why they take a long time to do their diligence. It's part of the reason why you take meetings with a VC firm when you're not raising. because they want to get to know you and they want to get to know you so they trust what you're going to go do with it. So they know that it's and, you know, I think that, you know, I think if anything for us, I think, you know, we were very much children of the dot com bust. So we are, if anything like the comfort zone we have to get out of is, is getting a little more aggressive on things that we would do. And because my, you know, my overwhelming bias is towards a bit of caution because I, I think that, you know, we, as one of the advisors, our advisors to the company who I've known for a long time, one of the first people I pitched on oxide laughed hysterically when I pitched him on oxide, like belly laugh, like really hard laugh in 2019. And then I kind of came back and saw, you know, came by 2020, 23 about what we built. you'd be like, wow, this is, this is amazing.

Yeah. You'd be a real shame to fuck this up now. And I'm like, it would, and I just remember Steve and I both. A lot of pressure. Yeah, because it's like, we both, like, this is the, like, I'm not a serial entrepreneur. This is not like, I'm not going to take, you know, five more trips to the well. Like, this is it. And, and like, this is your one here.

This is it. And we got to make this one work. And so it's, it is, it's a lot of, you know, that pressure is a privilege, of course. but so I know and in some ways Adam like the almost like comfort something we need to get out of is is being willing to knowing when to push harder in and fortunately I'm you know blessed with the terrific co-founder and Steve and you know and he and I both have the same disposition and yet the same need and desire to go push ourselves as well so so I'm kind of fascinated about the mechanics of this kind of thing do you actually take custody of $100 million or do you have access to $100 million like how No, they like it, like it will like wires into your account. Like you raise around. Yep. You raise around.

Oh, yeah. Oh, well, actually, so it's, I, I will, I mean, kind of a funny story in this regard in our series A. So, uh, not only does it, it wires into your account, but is actually not yours until the round is closed. But it's like literally sitting in your account. Okay. It doesn't go to an escrow account. It's not like buying an escrowed. Like, you have it.

own it. But people will be like, it's in escrow, but like, you're like, it's, okay, you keep saying it's an escrow, but it's like, just kind of like, set. Eskos are real things that you can do, but like, no, no, it's going to do it. So the, but there is, this is where, and things get super, like when you're raised, so you're raising around and you're, you're raising a price round and, you know, people are going to invest at. And, you know, people are investing conditional on other investors. So you need to wait until you kind of like hit, the number that you got on the paper before, like, the roundy is closed. Like, you're not closed.

So you can be, like, waiting on a wire and you're not closed or you can. And, you know, one of the things that we did in our series A when we're extremely grateful to our investors for accommodating an early close. So we were going to raise, you know, we ultimately ended up raising, what, $44 million in our series A. And our investors did an early close at 30, which was great because we, this was 22. it was really brutal. I mean, the environment had turned very, very brutal.

And we were, you know, so then you know, like, okay, once I cross this, like, this $30 million threshold, then, like, every, and not surprisingly, one of the larger investors, institutional investor, is like, look, we wire last. Like, that's the way we operate. So we are going to operate. We are going to wire last. And I'm like, I'm kind of sympathetic. to that. Like, they want to make sure that everyone else has already wired before they

wire. Well, they, they go to wire and you're like, hey, you guys are $23 short. And we're like, oh my God, we're $23. And like, how do you end up $23? And of course, everybody is like, oh, I'll pony up $23. Like, is that, are we short $23? Yeah, it's like a bunch of like grad students out for dinner or something. It always comes up short. You're like, okay, who did, there are only like four of us here. Who didn't throw? in. Everyone kind of swears that they paid it up. And I'm like, of course, you know, it was it speaks highway to oxide. Everyone's like, I'm in for $23. It's like, no, no, unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. We can't just like put, you know, put a couple of, of bills on the table.

The reason we're short is because of share math and shares get, shares will get rounded down and you end up. And you have probably, presumably you have many rounds that end up being short by a share or some very small number of multiples of shares. So it is. kind of like, and most people don't care. But in this case, like that investor's like, no, I'm not wiring until you have like the $23. And we're like, okay. So now we need to go back to another investor and basically get them to buy an additional share of oxide. So we can get to the threshold that we need.

And, you know, to be fair, like that investor is kind of frustrated with their own treasury department on that, on that kind of. process that I'm really like I'm really like I think it's it's understandable to be pedantic because when that wires like we talk about like wiring information you want to have correct it wires gone yeah you double triple check that we yeah we had a uh we were talking to an institutional investor or that uh corporate venture capitalist uh cbc uh it was late to a call I hate it when venture capitalists are late hate it hated hated hate it hit hit it do not be late because I'm going to be here on time like I'm going to be here on time as an entrepreneur. You need to be here on.

Like, you as a VC kind of have one job, but it's called show up on time. I hate it when VCs are late. So VC is like six minutes late, but comes in very apologetic. I'm like, I'm so sorry I'm late. It's very out of character for me.

We just had an eight figure wire that went to the wrong account. Oh my gosh. And we're like, do you need more time? Like, we can reschedule. I'm so sorry.

You need to do with that right now. Yeah, you go do with that. But it's like, I mean, in this kind of stuff, like, when you get to the actual like,

mechanics of the money moving you're like oh wow this is just like and it's a super manual process and it is like you know people making phone calls and it's like on the one hand you're like oh god this is so manual and the other hand like maybe this should be manual maybe this is not a bad idea for this to be pretty manual because you don't do it very frequently and it is super super super high consequence so we when you're in when you're on like that kind of it is really tough and the part of the reason by the way when you know this is the real. reason that like people you know opening up to a large number of investors for example it makes these issues become more complicated you know you've got to have net now you've got yeah more people

that need to wire more people that need to get chased down for paperwork so um we there is a big mechanical aspect to it and it just doesn't feel like you're not done until you're done um but fortunately what you need is like a cap table salami attack you know like someone just sitting there go ahead shave those off onto my on my account totally right I know I'm down on my account I'll take I'll take the 23 bucks worth. Exactly, right? Yeah, when it was. Because it would be a lot simpler if you could just have that on there.

Like, yeah. Well, and so, by the way, so there, actually, there have been things that have been invented to make this simpler. So this is why, like, the safe is a great construct. So a safe is a simple agreement for future equity. It pains me to agree with Paul Graham, I think, although Paul Graham, I'm like super complicated about Paul Graham right now because he says things that I really strongly agree with and the things that I really strongly disagree with, like often at the same moment,

I kind of my brain just kind of buzzes. Yeah. I agree that. The, um, but one of the things that Y Combinator got really right is this idea of a safe. And a simple agreement for future equity, what that says is like,

look, let's not deal with all this. We have no idea how much you're worth. We got no idea how much you're worth. And let's also like not wait until everyone's ready to wire and this kind of like waiting for the like, tell you what, we're,

I'm just going to invest this amount of money. I'm going to invest you 500K. And then we at some point, you're going to have. have a priced round or you're going to have an event that happens in acquisition or what have you we will price it then and when we price it because I'm doing this in advance I get a discount on that or I get you know there are different ways that people kind of structure those things to incentivize them but a safe is is a or there's a cap I mean that's another thing that

people do we'll say all right the uh I'm one of the so you get this so like I'm going to invest but I'm really worried that I'm going to invest 500k and then you're not going to raise for like years and then you're not going to raise for like years and then you're you're going to raise at this multi-billion dollar valuation. And I'm only going to own a little sliver of this. So to prevent that from happening, I'm going to put a cap in place. So if you raise at above this valuation cap, I get it as if it's at that valuation cap. And it's also a way for them to kind of be able to model it.

But the safes are great for that because you can just like go right now. They can also be too great. They're kind of like candy. And entrepreneurs can raise too many safes. they don't understand that how their safes are stacking and they go to raise their price round. It's like, whoops,

you got washed out because you didn't keep track of the safes. So this is actually something. This is what we need like these Silicon Valley outtakes for, because the HBO Silicon Valley, I don't think it really hit on the, this is one of the rare things that they need as a new season. I mean, there's so much new fodder.

They definitely need this. Aren't we living the new season right now? Are we convinced that we didn't just like pass into fiction and we are just like, we're living the new season right now? We're there for sure. I was thinking about some of the money. that's throwing around right now because I was reading this Ben Stancel piece

all about, you know, and to individuals, you know, like hundreds of millions to steal an AI researcher from this, from, you know, from Apple to meta or whatever. And, you know, with that stuff, you turn them down. Well, and on that stuff that you got to know, like, what did you turn down exactly?

I think this is where you're just like, can you show me the paper actually that you got? Because it'd be, I mean, this is not a hundred million dollars cash up front. It's just like, like, and I, On those things, I'm like, I always kind of wonder what they actually look like. But there's no doubt. There's a lot of money being thrown out.

Still, the numbers that we talk about now, you know, you just said 500K. And that was like, because you're trying to think it was a number to say. Yeah. Like an individual might do or something. That's right. That's pretty much free money at this point. That's right. Yeah.

It's just, it kind of boggles the mind how quickly it can't all be inflation that we've ramped up our numbers. Yeah. I mean, I think that we've got, well, and it's going to be interesting to watch what happens because I think the other problem is that we've got these companies that aren't going public. And, you know, we might start to see some of that where, but like, ultimately, like, I mean, certainly the aspiration for oxide is to be a public company. That is what we, that's what we want to go do. That's that.

I assume that. When you said generational, I assumed, well, that's going all the way right there. That's going all the way. Yeah. Yeah. We want to be a public. How close are you? So you're actually going to cross the chasm.

I'm in a board meeting. Are you just raised our series B? No, no, no, no. I don't mean like in raises or whatever. I just thinking like in your mind somewhere. Yeah. There has to be like, maybe not a roadmap, but like you're talking about crossing the chasm to a generational company. And like what is still in your way?

I think, yeah, I do think we're going to, I think we're close. I mean, you always want to knock on wood and everything else. Sure. But yeah, I think we're going to, I think we're going to do it. Are there hard problems unsolved? Are there the things where you're like, we have to figure this out first? Um, the, the, the problems we need to figure out are, now are, um, there are, for sure plenty of interesting technical problems that remain, no question.

But it's, the questions are not around can we build that at all, which by the way, was a huge question. I mean, we don't want to, you know, that's why your friend laughed at you. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, the other line he had is like, you realize that if you pull this off, it's going to be illegal to buy Dell. And it.

And, and, and. that's it. You know, that's it. And so we, but it's a big if. And so there's so much we need to go explain that. Why is it illegal? Because like you just, you would never architect what Dell offers. Like that's not the way you would build it. If you're trying to solve rack scale compute at scale. So they say like, I don't want to buy just one rack. I want to buy a hundred racks. I want to have a last to compute in my own data center. I would not be like, okay, let me start with a one you or two you server and AC power supplies and each one of these things. And like running, like, let me go invent UEFI.

Like, you just wouldn't do any of that stuff. You're like, let me, what you would actually do is what the hyperscalers have done, which is like, how do I engineer this thing as a whole? And how do I think of it holistically? And the, like, nobody likes the pain that they're in in LHP super micro. And it is just an enormous amount of pain because it's not fit for purpose. It's just not what it's designed to do. And people that are trying to build, because we did this, we did this at joint,

people that are trying to build Elastic infrastructure on HPS of Microdel are trying to do their own oxide on the cheap effectively and it doesn't work out well you know and this is where you discover that like the you know

you discover drive for not only discover drives that you've not qualified as I discovered a joint I didn't even know Tishiba made hard drives until I went I was I had such a vexing IO latency problem I'm like you know and I'd finally over a course

of like weeks and weeks whittled it down to like coming from like the absolute lowest layer of the stack, the I-O layer. And I'm like, you know, I wonder, do I have a different version of HGST firmware on this drive?

And I like pulled the drive info. I'm like, Tashiba makes hard drives. I mean, it was literally like this moment of like, this is not even like a company. I like what? It's like having like a Chevrolet hard drive.

You're like a Wilson driver. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're like, what? What? here? Like, that doesn't even make it. And you just realize that like, oh, I'm just being

thrusted this thing because of some sweetheart deal. It turns out all the cheap of hard drives are basically bought by Dell and then just thrust it into that you don't control your bomb with Dell. And that stuff is so deeply frustrating. And that is a deep frustration that people are all feeling. This is not like theoretical. And I think one of the things it's, it has been like, it is definitely vindicating. I think it's like a little bit surprising to even our proponents where they're like, you know, I was talking to someone today, and they said that like these firmware problems that you've solved are really significant and important to them. I'm like, you know, you don't have to sound surprise. Like, obviously we know it's important

because we solve that. But like these pain points are really deep and really important and the people running at scale or the ones have suffered from it. And a lot of why people have moved to the public cloud is because they were sick of dealing with all that. And it's like, I didn't have to deal with any of that. I never had to deal with a bias upgrade when I'm running on AWS. Thank God. And now, but now I'm dealing with this bill. is just like out of sight and growing all the time. And it's like, oh, man, it's like, can't I own this infrastructure and still have all this delightful stuff that I get from the public cloud?

And that's the market that VCs didn't believe existed. Believe it or not, they just didn't think it's there. What's up, friends? I'm here with Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of Depot. Depot is the only build platform looking to make your builds as fast as possible. But Kyle, this is an issue because GitHub Actions is the number one CI provider out there. But not everyone's a fan. Explain that.

I think when you're thinking about GitHub Actions, it's really quite jarring how you can have such a web, popular CI provider and yet it's lacking some of the basic functionality or tools that you need to actually be able to debug your builds or deployments. And so back in June, we essentially took a stab at that problem in particular with Depot's GitHub Action Runners. What we've observed over time is effectively GitUp Actions when it comes to like actually debugging a build is pretty much useless. The job logs in GitHub Actions UI is pretty much where your dream go to die. Like they're collapsed by default. They have no resource metrics. When jobs fail, you're essentially left playing detective, like clicking each little drop down on each step in your job

to figure out like, okay, where did this actually go wrong? And so what we set out to do with our own get-up actions of observability is essentially you built a real observability solution around good of actions. Okay, so how does it work? All of the logs by default for a job that runs on a depot get-of-action runner, they're uncollapsed. You can search them. You can detect if there's been out-of-memory errors, you can see all of the resource contention that was happening on the runner. So you can see your CPU metrics,

your memory metrics, not just at the top-level runner level, but all the way down to the individual processes running on the machine. And so for us, this is our take on the first step forward of actually building a real observability solution around GitHub actions

so that developers have real debugging tools to figure out what's going on in their builds. Okay, Frang, you can learn more at depot.dev get a free trial test it out instantly make your builds faster so cool again depot dot dev they're starting to believe though they're starting to believe they are starting to believe and it's it is funny when you know you'll have like a VC that you know pass on us or whatever and they will send us a report like oh i just read this report about like you know cloud repatriation and like they send it to me i'm like why are you saying you

I think it to me. Like, you should be sending this to your past self. Like, I know this. Like, this is not news to me. I mean, are you, we also had another investor that passed on us that was like, hey, I, you know, this Rust thing seems like, you know, do you guys use Rust at all? I'm like, do you use it all? Like, yeah, we, yeah, we use Rust a lot.

I mean, we, and he's like, oh, wow, okay, he runs that. I'm like, yeah, the company's name is Oxide. You're just like, oh, it's kind of like, oh, God. Yeah. Oh, boy. Anyway. Well, like you said, they're always late, you know, a little bit late. Well, and I think that they are, I mean, to kind of be sympathetic about it, like, they are, the concern that VCs always have is product market fit is that you, like the failure mode that they, I mean, there are two failure modes that they're worried about.

Failure mode number one is this is going to be an outsized return and I'm not going to be a part of it. that is actually a and that's a real fear that's that's that's fomo that's the fear of missing out for sure and that is a very real fear and they fear that more than a zero because it happens less frequently like it is totally it is very frequent that VC's fund a company that is a zero that happens all the time what happens less frequently and really gets under their fingernails is when they pass on a company that they could have invested in that then has returns a fund for somebody else right that's the stuff that really drives them crazy so So they've got like, that's kind of fear number one.

Fear number two in terms of like they are, I mean, they're not in the business to have zeros, right? So they actually don't want to have zeros. The way you have a zero is that you have a company that built something that no one wants to buy. Like that's the concern that they have. And that you built. And especially like if you got someone and I get it. Like you get someone who's like, no, no, like people have built this all wrong and I'm

going to build this much better thing. You're just like, okay, now I'm like, you know, antibodies are coming up. And you can see why people pass on oxide. But because they didn't see the market was there. And then also, it actually strangely, the, there is no other startup doing what oxide is doing, which makes them more nervous. You would think that you're just like, and this is what holds them in like quantum superposition between fear and greed. And we have had VCs who are literally like overwhelmed with fear and greed. reed with oxide and they're just like, God, there's no one else. Oh, God, there's no one else.

It's like, you know what I mean? Like, there's like, God, the mode is so deep. Like, oh, my God, there's no one else because you guys are like wrong. Um, and so it, you know, as that has been, um, yeah, it has been kind of amusing as people realize like, oh my God, there actually is, there is a market there. It's like, there is a market there. There's a market there. There's so much, I don't know if like, I'm still just not sure who you're, you know, product market fit is specifically. I think it's on-prem because it's kind of clear. Own the cloud.

That makes sense. But there is so much on-prem out there required. Yeah. That they're just like, thank you, Jesus, that Oxide exists. And they care about the things you cared about from the Toshiba Drive. You never knew was there. The mismatch of firmware, how a sound could change I.O. And your care for that level of detail.

Yeah. Not just the hardware level, but the software that controls. all that. I think that's the beauty of it. I would, I mean, I don't know how you phrase it, but I would probably phrase it as if you are the only people who could do it. And maybe now that you are doing it, you have someone enter that is also highly capable. And because you've done it, they would compete. And maybe because you've done a lot of stuff at open source, they can maybe leg up because of open source. Who knows? But, you know, that was always our assumption. So my assumption was, so when we raised in 2019, my assumption was,

one of the myths, the first myth that we are going to dispel is that you cannot raise for this company. And I had many people tell me you cannot raise. You will not raise for this company. No venture firm will ever fund it. And it turns out it's more complicated than that because it's so contrarian that it's actually that FOMO, it does like kind of light BCs up because like, oh, this is like a big potential. And the problem we had actually was much more that VCs is the next bell, y'all. totally that's right that they would be attracted to it but then also terrified by it and they would be kind of locked in that kind of again that kind of superposition and we actually

tried to actually this is funny Adam you appreciate this that like I did try and I can tell you that like this is where you know season two episode one definitely has some truth to it you do actually want to disqualify from these used to be like no this is like you should not be doing this like this is not something you should invest in like you're a bunch of software investors. And they're like, oh, no, no, now we want to invest much more. You're like, no, God damn it. Like, I'm not actually trying to neg you.

I'm not, I'm not trying to do what Ehrlich did to you. I'm actually literally trying to talk. And actually, there was a, there was a VC firm in particular that was so adamant. And I was like, I'm like, these kinds are just like not kind of technically lightweights. And they just did not appreciate the technical risk. And I'm like, you're never going to get over the line. And I'm like, you don't understand. We are going whaling.

you should be fishing from the pier. Actually, you should be shopping in like the fish section and Safeway. Like that's, that is as close to it. And they're like, no, no,

no, we want to go whaling. We want to go whaling. I'm like, no, God damn it. Like, you don't actually,

no, you don't actually want to go whaling. Like, we are going like multi-year mission to far away ocean. So, but we assume like, we're going to dispel this. We're going to show that you actually can raise.

And there'll be a company that raises behind us. And so we were kind of geared for that from the beginning. that there'll be another company that raises behind us. And so we did, one, after we were completely done with our seed, we're like, eh, that was actually harder than I thought it was going to be. It's like, eh, maybe. And in particular, one of the things we definitely did do with our series is like, well, our seed rather, I'm like, I'm definitely going to find the investors that want to invest in this

because they believe in it outside of oxide. And we're going to get those folks on the cap table. We're going to conflict them out of investing. So we will definitely have the best investors for this, which we did. I see. So that's like a hedge against competition or what is that? A total hedge against competition is a little, yeah, a little sneaky hedge. Yeah, that's an interesting play.

The other sneaky hedge that we did is like, I want to make sure that we structure a company such that anybody who's attracted to this who, like, I want to go to go to do this, looks at Oxide is like, I'll just go join Oxide. I just like, I could go like deal with the whole VC's thing. Or actually like, this company is going to give me the freedom and the age. and the autonomy to realize my own personal vision of how this, and, you know, one of the things I'm really proud about is like, we have attracted those folks. And we've got a bunch of people at different, you know, and at any kind of slice of the stack, I can introduce you to the technologist who's got a chip on their shoulder about that slice. It's like, no, this slice, whether it's the security of the system, whether it's the efficiency of the system, networking

of the system. The system software it's like, no, no, I have got an opinion about this and I I want, I'm coming to Oxide to kind of exert that. And, you know, at this point, it's like we're, you know, we're going to be six years old here in September. It's like, yeah, you're welcome to the race behind

us, but man, there's a lot of work to go do. Yeah. And we, you know, we're still continuing, and we got a lot in front of us still technically, but technically this has been now de-risk. I mean, you're asking to her, like, what are the obstacles? Like, what what it stands between us. We've got a product.

It works, you know, and we've got, I, I no longer hold my breath on an install or an update, right? Of course, because I'm saying that there's going to be an install that go. The next install is going to go wildly wrong and we're going to come back to this about,

you know, the time that I, but we, and so we're able to kind of level up and level up and level up and get to those, those next customers, the bigger customers, more ambitious customers. So it's exciting.

And the problems in front of us are, of that kind of scale variety. Scaling, scaling, scaling, scaling. Yeah. Back on the working for oxide thing, you guys are famous for having the egalitarian salaries, right? Like, everything's, I don't if that's what you call it,

but everybody gets paid the same amount. Yeah, I call it, yeah, uniform compensation. Uniform. Yeah, because people are like, oh, you think everyone's equal.

Like, I definitely don't think that. Well, that's why I was trying to get at with, just thinking about raising money and, like, you know, people getting a slice of the pie. I'm sure there's equity involved in these people.

It's not all. compensation. And so how does that play out with that? Yeah. You do get people who are like, oh, you're not talking about the total compensation because you're not talking about equity. Well, first of all, everyone in Oxide has got equity. Very important. That's just like important principle for me that everybody has equity in the company. So that's just like bad rock principle. The equity also compensates for risk and risk in the company goes down over time. And there was way more risk in for employee number one than there is employee number 100 and it's like those are not going to be and you know it is kind of funny that people are like

oh like you know everybody in the company should have if you say they should have equal compensation which I'm like again not the word we use they should also have equal ownership and you're like how does that work you just like walk me through how that works like I don't know like you know you can do this it's like you can have an employee owned cooperative I think you know go down to your local organic grocery store, employee-owned cooperative. And, you know, it's like the, I'm reminded of that old onion headline, local Applebee's hotbed of Machiavellian maneuvering. You know, I think that just like, there are a lot of challenges. It's like, we're sorry, we are not an employee, but that's not our objective.

And I also think, by the way, this idea that equity is part of your compensation is misplaced. and this is a problem and this is something that these large companies with product market fit that are public use the fact that they can kind of print these Confederate dollars in terms of their equity and they use that as part of your compensation because if you view equity as part of your compensation it means that you are selling your equity all the time like you're a net seller on your company you know you are you're not buying hold on that and I just don't think I just don't think I And I get where people kind of come from with it. But the people don't understand startup equity is not liquid. Your Google equity and startup equity shouldn't use the same word because they're not the same thing at all. Like they are literally on. You can't sell the other.

You can sell one with infinite liquidity and the other one has got zero liquidity. I think people don't often understand what zero liquidity means. And, you know, one of the, it's not real. It's not. Or it's real. it's not real yet. Yeah. And actually,

you know, in many cases, like from a liquidity perspective, it's not realized. The worst thing that happens is success, right? Because, you know,

company kind of like stumbles and exits. And there are plenty of companies that exit for greater than their preference stacks. They pay out to the common. You get your money back. And it was like, you know, you may be disappointed with that.

It's not the venture return that a venture capital is running. But an angel vest to be like, oh, this is great. Like, you know, I gave you 75K and I got back like, you know, 91K.

quite great you know and yeah uh but like not if a company's successful like i gave you 75k like where's my 75k it's like oh it's like sorry we're six years in we're 10 years in we're 12 years in and you know that that liquidity event doesn't necessarily happen for a longer time so it's like these are not in the same ballpark and it's like for a startup the like your startup equity it's very important everyone has it very important everyone has a share in in that kind of generational future. It's also important that like that's not what actually pays for the kids summer camp. What pays for the kids summer camp is cash compensation. And so that cash compensation is very important of us. So how do you do it then? Do you just offer opportunity for them to buy?

We make sure. I mean, everyone when they, when they join the company, gets it gets equity as part of their package. And then, you know, we re-up people over time again to kind of, because it's important that employees have a share in that. And then from a cash perspective, you know, You know, we have, I mean, it's been a little bit tough. We've been in an inflationary environment, obviously. We did just give one, give ourselves a raise. So we are now, I'll make it, I'm, I'll make it 235. Which is funny because like this is, you know, the fourth or fifth raise we've had.

And, you know, when compensation is completely disconnected from, you know, performance review processes and all those other kind of bullshit, like, even I will like, I know, like, I know, like, you know, kind of got final approval too big. Oh, yeah. and the all hands like by the way everyone got a race like oh that's great and someone's like literally will have gotten up and go to the bathroom or we did actually have this happen a couple ways to go where people like there's a discrepancy of my paycheck I got paid too much so no no we actually gave one we gave ourselves a raise like when did that happen like oh it happened like oh it happened

like two all hands ago it's like oh crap I was out and I didn't catch the recording it's like well that's the one sorry you got to got to pay close attention to when you get a raise around here um but the the the um and that you know it's been funny because like That's not a point of principle necessarily, although the transparency is a point in principle. The, that is something that we have just always done. And then when we were really struggling to hire,

struggling to hire bluntly double E's, struggling to get outside of our kind of immediate network. And, you know, one of our engineers is like, I think we should talk with the compensation. And we talked about it. And this is in March of 2021.

And that is in many ways, the most important single thing we did in the history of the company because it brought in so many new folks to the company. And not because they were drawn to the, the, it's, it wasn't the fact that it was uniform per se. It was the fact that it represented a different way of conducting ourselves. It's what it represents that's important that like, and the reason that our engineer was advocating, we talk about it.

It's like when I talk about oxide values to friends and family, they think it's bullshit until I talk about the comp. and when I talk about the comp, it's like a record scratch. People are like, you're serious. Oh, you're really serious. Well, no one else does that.

Does anybody else doing that? No, not to best my knowledge. Not at our time. No, and we've been told over and over again that like won't scale, won't scale,

won't scale. I'm like, I don't know, maybe. I, whatever. I don't know. I was told that when we were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,

we're now at 70, we'll be. And, and, or 80, on our way to 90. We, And I would say that it is playing a more important role, not a less important role. Because the thing has been, it's had so many, like, interesting side effects.

One of the super interesting side effects is everybody is hiring a peer. And when you tell people that they're going to hire a subordinate, their standards for that person are going to be a lot lower. And they're maybe going to overlook a bunch of things that maybe they shouldn't overlook. You tell someone they're hiring a peer and they're like, okay, I want to make sure. sure that this is like worthy of us. Right. And so it's like, yeah, it's, it is not easy to get a job at Oxide. It is, we are very oversubscribed and we've got people that take hiring extremely seriously.

And I think the other, like, you know, the other thing that's been very important is that it tells us in a very concrete way the importance of every role at Oxide. and you know because when we first did this it's amazing this because we first did this obviously announced at March 2021 we don't have a product and people are like yeah but are you going to pay support people that and it was always like support people like this is like a cast in tech they're less than and you're like and you're kind of take it apart you're like really we're going to like do you feel that I want you to think of the very best support people you've ever worked with Are they worth it? Oh yeah, of course they're worth it. Okay, well, what if we only hired the very best? Like, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess we'd make it work then. Like, all right, that asshole, I guess that's what we're going to go do.

We're going to go hire. And so it's like, and why do you always, like, why is it always support? Like, so I'm so sorry, like support is so hard and so important. You are. The front lines. It's the front lines with a customer. Like, what is more? and like you have got a it's highly technical it is by the way like under fire you've got like

always yeah we're calling you because something is wrong by the way overwhelmed overwhelmed and like multitasked multitasked the ability to have the empathy the ability to have the ability to go technically deep and then to have someone for whom like no that's my calling that's what I want to do I because I mean there is an upside to it it's like the gratification you get is as a high high, right? When you feel like, oh, like that is really. And what if you attract people that are drawn to that? And it's like we have got the best support people you can find.

And I love our. And our support folks have been like, it has been such a relief. And we had, you know, one of our folks joined us relatively early was like, you know what? I've been told my entire career that I needed to be, I need to go into quote, software engineering to advance my career. my heart was always in support and I left support and I went into software engineering but God I would love to be back in support because that's where my heart is and I can do it here and you look at what they've been able to do here because like there is when you do that

like no one has to feel like I am doing wrong by my career by supporting a customer no one but conversely no one also needs to feel like well I need to defend the throne room and I better or not let this support engineer contribute back to the source base because what would that mean that we'd have to like change their pay grade so as a result like we have our support engineers very much contributing to the thing we're building and it's like and then you expand that to not just to support but you you expand that to these other roles the operations roles that the QA roles roles that like people sadly like look down upon fact QA is really challenging we've got an open QA role right now that we're not calling QA because QA has been so like just absolutely

looked down upon that we can't even call it QA even though it's so we call it product assurance maybe we should if you're listening to this and you yeah PA we do we if you're listening to this and that and that is your calling like you should be looking to oxide because we are that that's what we're um and it's been a real it's watching folks come in with that kind of versatility and be able to do the kind of extraordinary things. I mean, this is not surprising. And it's just also not unrelated to the compensation bluntly. There's just a very strong sense of teamwork.

And because we have disconnected compensation from because the reality is everyone loves the idea of like connecting compensation to individual performance because like it feels like, of course you would. Like you want like, you know, but the problem is that just leads you down to a primrose path where whenever anyone does anything, they think to themselves, does this advance my focal package or not? Is this something that I use my promo package or not? And great folks will not think about that too much. And they will do the right thing even when the company is not rewarding the right thing. And we ask people, when are they been most unhappy and why? And

almost invariably, it's when they are doing the right thing and management is discouraging it. And to be in an environment where it's like, no, no, we're going to separate all of that. And now allow people to do the right thing all of the time. So much more of the right thing just happens. Now, of course, you got to hire carefully. And that's what we do. But we hire people that have that disposition. But man, you build a whole company that way.

And it's extraordinary. It really, you know, as I tell people, it's like, it's lightning in a bottle. Don't you dare take this for granted? It's almost like all politics go away, really. Like a lot of the politics get removed that could be there. They're just pointless. The politics are like, you know, I had one guy. It doesn't get you anywhere.

You don't get anything different because you can't politics. It's not the scenario because you just can't, it's not a lever you can pull. It's not a lever you can pull. And you know, I had one guy, I've come from Google. It was like, and I think, you know, I, I think this is one of the real unfortunate things about companies like Google, Amazon, others that take people who have an intrinsic excitement for the technology and they break them a little bit and get them to like, no, no, what you should actually care about is that marginal 10, 15, 20 percent of your compensation. And you should distort your

life and make yourself unhappy. You should just like be thinking about that for everything you go do. And as he said, like, I didn't realize how much of my brain was dedicated. to thinking about compensation until I didn't have to think about it anymore. And I can just think about doing the right thing. And that's really, really, really empowering. And it's been extraordinary. So yeah, I wrote an update on it about how it's going and talking about the support engineering example.

Literally the top hacker news coming. I could not believe this. So I'm like in the blog entry, I am effectively saying, you know, How could anyone, why do we single out support people this way? And kind of like shaming people who do that. Top hacker news comment. It's like, interesting blog entry, but I'm sorry, no support person is worth over 200K a year. And you're just like, you kidding me.

And fortunately, one of the respondents to that new one of our support engineers. And it's like, actually, best support engineer I've ever worked with that works at Oxide. And hey, Will, you're worth every penny with their payment. Don't listen to these guys. Well, not listening to the Hacker News commenters is an age old tradition that I've been following for a long time. I'm believing everything you're saying, and I'm buying it. I'm super buying it. I'm believing and buying.

I might become, I might, at that being said, I might be the guy that says does it scale. And I recognize that it's continued to for up to 70. Yeah. Fair question. How many people work at Dell? How many people work at Dell? Because, I mean, you're going to get, if you guys cross the. chasm like you're going to be how many people have to work it though i don't know this is a different

question no it's a different question no it's a different question no it's a different question because they you know and i had i i i did i had an investor who turned me at one point is like you know because they kind of forget that we've done this our investors like they don't mean it's not something they really think about they know that our team is very good they know we don't have attrition problems they know and also if they looked at one point early on we're doing this one of investors like, you know, we did the math. And like, the what you're paying people is like dead on the median like salary per employee that we have in our portfolio company. So it's like, you, you guys are not like off the mark one way or the other. So it's fine. Like doing it differently,

like, fine, knock yourselves out. So the VC's like kind of no care. But one of these investors turned to me, is like, oh, because we in particular, one of our investors was like, was talking to Steve, and it's like, you know, Steve, you've really done a terrific job. And, like, you, you basically deserve a race. And Steve's like, that's, that's great news. That means we're going to give the whole company a race. And it's like, oh, right, this. Oh, right.

You people. You people and, you people and, but we did, right? We did the whole company race. And it was great. But the investor turned to me is like, okay, you realize, like, you won't be able to do this at 600 people. And I'm like, you know, I don't know that will ever be 600 people. I don't know that.

I don't know that you, like, really? You can't build a billion dollar, billion dollar company with lessons. I mean, like, nobody has ever done even what we have done. Nobody has even been at this, at this relatively small scale. So like, I'm just like not, I, the right answer is we don't know.

Yeah. And there are, will things change? Maybe. I don't know. How many support people do you have like per rack or per customer or some sort of metric that you could take? and then multiply to say, like, well, at some point, because I looked it up Dell, I'm fully admitting that they're probably overly bloated, et cetera.

They got 100,000 people working there. So 600 seems small at scale. Maybe it's not, but it's just like, that's not scaling up oxide very much from here. That's a 10x, basically. Totally. Yeah, totally. And so I think that, like, a fair question. I also think that, like, how many support people would Dell have if they thoughtfully engineer their products, made sure that every, I mean, the number of people that Dell dedicates to telling customers that you're the only one's problem.

I've dealt with Dell support. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I have to. And it's like the, you don't need very many people at a company to support a, I mean, it's the old Maytag, the Maytag repairman. right we're not I'm among friends on this one right you are you are you guys with me on this I know may tag but I'm not sure okay so the may tag repairman was an ad from the 80s and the may tag repairman had nothing to do and you had nothing to do because may tag may tags work this is but when washing machines used to work so you know those you have a modern appliance know that this is not

true but it used to say they don't work anymore they don't work anymore um because it's a terrible economic model I think that the uh or that's what companies convince themselves of we want to build something that works. And the way you build something that works is when it doesn't work, you jump on it and you understand it in totality and you fix it so the next customer doesn't have that problem. If every problem is only seen once because you've got such an ACE's support team and ACE's engineering team that they jump on it and they root cause every single thing from the very first failure and they don't need to see a thousand failures, 10,000 failures. How many support people they need? A lot less than Dell has. So that's the,

that's the experiment we're doing. Right. So how many do you have now? Four or something that. Four or five? Something like that. Yeah, yeah. I think that is a small amount. Yeah. And it's, and, you know, we will continue to hire, but like we're going to continue to hire extraordinary folks, you know? Sure. And that's the part that I say, how far does that go? You know, you have to be incredibly vigilant in your hiring, which right now you are. And at a certain point, you might have the demand for hiring and you might actually be like, we compromise a few times and we're getting now to the mediocre people, you know? Nope.

Nope. Not going to do it. Not going to do it. Not going to do it. That is when and this is where you and again, not to God, it's like not to praise Paul Graham a second time, but this is where the founding. Two times, PR. Two times.

I know. Founder mode. 100% founder mode. 100%. And this is where Founder Mode is actually extremely helpful. Because if you look at those companies, why does that essay exist? Because Brian Chesky woke up and suddenly there were a bunch of people at his company, he didn't recognize and he didn't hire.

And the failure mode is always the same. The failure mode is that they lose control of their hiring because they don't have good processes to begin with. The processes suck because they don't take it seriously. They know it's like, oh, we want to have a great team, but no one actually understands what that hiring process looks like. They don't actually, admittedly, I have had some advantages of making some grievous mistakes in my past

that forces have a very good hiring process. The not an ox side, but they lose control hiring. They hire, I mean, I don't want to say middle management is the root of all evil, but, you know, it's, you know, maybe a little too reductive, but the problem is that middle management grades their career on the number of reports in their organization.

It's like if you hire software engineers based on the number of lines of code that they write, if that's how they value themselves, like you're going to get a lot of bad code and you're going to get a lot of it. If you hire management that grades their career

based on the number of reports in their organization, guess who needs more wrecks? That manager is hired. Really? We can't do it with fewer people? No, we can't. I need more people. Okay, you're trying to advance your own career.

I get it. And this metastasizes and you wake up and you have too many people and they all do it. And so I turn to this investor. I'm like, you know what? I don't know if we're ever going to get six hundred people. And you know what?

We are also the only company in your portfolio that is not overhired. He's like, that is true, actually. I'm like, you don't have to say actually. And you agree with me, by the way. You don't say actually. But the, and we have not overhired. And we are not going to overhire. Yes, that's going to mean that it is painful and requires very,

vigilance and but we've got a we the very writing intensive hiring process we believe it can scale and uh we are not gonna we are not going to delegate ultimately like every hire is ultimately that decision is ultimately made by Steve and yes it's informed by everyone else but like he bears responsibility for and and and that's not going to change and that's just called founder mode mother that's what that's called huh that's what it's called it's I'm always reminded of the scene from Pulp Fiction. I want a wallet that says founder mode on it. Oh, yeah, man. That's a good one. That's a much better reference than Silicon Valley. So, by your tongue. Imagine your IPOing.

We need, okay, we need a, we need a, we need a new season of Silicon Valley directed by Quentin Tarantino. That's what we actually. Oh, okay. I mean, now you're on board. How great would that be? Oh, my goodness. Like kill Bill as, as a startup. You know what I mean? Like this. I do know what you mean. Umma Thurman entrepreneur. I just feel like, where can I put my money to make it happen? Absolutely.

Absolutely. I'll bank roll that thing. I don't have very much, but I can borrow some right, Brian? Exactly. Yeah, I got tons of money. I got tons of money.

Yeah, who needs money? That actually makes me think about, you know, money management with $100 million in your bank account. Like, certainly, it's real. Like, that's real money. You could just buy government bills and, you know,

millions of dollars a year. How do you, do you have money managers or how do you? What is that? You're reading my LinkedIn. I mean, the number of LinkedIn connections I have had as just gone nonlinear

because of course you, I mean, you advertise that you've done this raise. And many, many people are offering. They would love to manage that money for me. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So I just gave it to the first person that came along. So how do you have? Oh, you know, there's, I mean, there's an issue. Like,

how do you manage it? Where do you bank? You know, we've got a. Silicon Valley Bank. Is that the one? We were at SVB. We were at SVB when as, and I think, you know, Steve will still say the most

stressful moment of the company for him was when SVB, we were concerned that weekend and we had payroll to make on Tuesday, had a $453 or whatever it was, $1,000 payroll that check that we needed to go out. And, you know, this is where you really, really, really know who your investors are because the, the ones are just like, I'll write a personal check. And you have, that's just like, I'll write a personal check. You're like, great, I'm going to need that.

And you're like, don't you have any of one else who can write? Sorry, that was like rhetorical flourish. And then you get that one's like, I'll write a personal check. I'll write it now. Don't cash it if you, if you don't need it. And we did have investors who do that. That's pretty cool. And so, I mean, where you bank is a huge issue.

And like, then that becomes a cash issue because you want a real banking relationship because you got all this, you know, you want to have PO based financing and AR based financing and like you that gives so some of that you offer up as kind of a carrot to who is going to really own this banking relationship like okay you we're going to bank with you you're going to get this large amount of money but then in return we are going to get some services from you whether it's venture debt whether it's a RPO P.O based financing what have you so there's a whole like science to all that yeah even credit lines too I mean you don't need cash I mean that's right but you have to have some credit lines because you can't spend your

cash, you got to spend it differently. That's right. Tell about how you spend your cash, well, perceive cash, you know, the bill that you're creating for yourself. It gets, uh, you have a CFO or you just manage that yourself or what, how do you do it? Uh, yeah, I mean, we got some of the, we, we hired someone that, you know, to, to, to, to, to, to, do a great job and did the same thing, did a process for someone in finance, right? Same thing. Same compensation. Same process. Same material's process. Same. Did it all. And, uh, got someone. terrific there. It's got coming. Yeah, exactly. Coming from Lenovo, having had done a lot of this

stuff and has been, you know, I think it definitely has, we've given Todd plenty to do at Oxide. So speaking of big money, there's been lots of big money going into data centers proposed and otherwise. I think Apple just said another 100 billion in the States. I'm not sure what that's going to actually be, but they're going to build something somewhere, Kentucky, I think. I think their glass is going to come from Kentucky. Obviously, that's not a data center. But manufacturing state side you have projects is it stargate what's the open a i one star something you have x a i saying they're going to put out 50 million GPUs in the next five years i could just be talk but they're certainly going to be deploying lots of things does oxide have

opportunity in this new GPU based you know yes heavy model training and inference world that's like blowing up right now do you guys have a role in that at all yeah so i mean i think for sure. Something to know about that world is it's really easy to focus on GPUs and they're important. There are a bunch of GPUs. We obviously don't have, we do not have an accelerator-based sled. We will at some point for sure.

Something we've definitely got our eye on. When we do that, it almost certainly will not be focused on those training workloads. We focus on inference on and then we can kind of talk about that. There's a lot of talk about it in terms of inference. But I would say that one thing that people, should be aware of is that there is a lot of general purpose compute involved in what people view as an AI workload. So, I mean, I've been, I'm sure as you've been mesmerized by watching these things

show their steps. And the number of times, like, if you give chat GPT or quad an image to do some, like, I want to recognize some things in this image, it will write a Python program. You know, I mean, you can watch it like write Python programs, run those Python programs. get the results of that it will obviously search the web it will do all sorts of things like yeah it didn't happen on GPUs that's happening on CPUs standard servers and APIs etc etc yeah blowing so it's like and also then like need to be containerized right need to be like you especially if you're going to have something where like I'm running general purpose compute at the behest

of a user of this thing as a best the internet and you know we had Simon Willis and on our, on the podcast, on our predictions podcast, which is great. And he was talking about Claude Compute. The first thing he had Cloud Compute do is download a UEFI vulnerability root kit. And it's like, okay, I'll go execute this thing. And you're just like, you know, so that is, there's a lot of general purpose compute out there. And I think that one of the, and I think with the rise of test time compute and, you know, the way these kind of models are going, there is more general purpose compute.

Not less. So, yeah, there's, there's, you know, we kind of assume that like, oh, if we don't have a GPU, like there's not like a place for us that's interesting. And, you know, it's always nice when, when customers tell you you're wrong. And, you know, we had our, our first customer, God bless them, Idaho National Labs. Idaho National Labs had to kick our door down because we're like, you're a super computing facility. We're not making accelerated compute. We're not taking your call.

And they're like, can we please explain to you why we're interested in oxide? And, like, and finally, Steve's like, I'm just going to take this call. These guys won't leave us alone. I'm like, it's a waste of time, but fine. And he gets up and call, they're like, okay, can we talk for a second? Because, yes, we have a supercomputer. We also have a bunch of Dell VMware that does a bunch of stuff that we need that's not the supercomputer. And can we, don't you guys replace the Dell and VMware?

It seems like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. We didn't take your call. Yes, we were replaced it. That's what we do. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. And so there is, that analog is where we are, I am learning.

that I need to not judge companies by what I, my perception of what they need is because I have been disabused of that notion more than once. Well, when you're running like you were at the time, you need to be focused. And so every customer interaction that was not your core audience or even close to it was a waste of your time. Because you were worried about not being able to even be generational. That's right.

To be able to succeed. So you had to have that. that position. And now that you don't, then you don't probably. I'm curious how all this flavors into sales. Are you in sales mode? What mode are you in now? Yeah. We're, we're down. Oh, yeah, for sure. We've got all on sales. Sales as much possible. Yep. Yeah. And we've got and again, you know, we're these are always customers are all no one, you know, everyone has a rack or a small number of racks, but with the idea of like, if this thing works, I'm going to go big with this. So, and they, this has all been true for a couple of years now. So it's like we've got,

we're now kind of at that go big moment for a couple of these different customers, which is exciting. So, but we are, we are in sales mode, but like we're really focused on customers that really need what we offer, which is, you know, not even like a customer that's only going to buy a rack or two. Like, yes, we'll get to you in a while when we truly are, we truly have the chasm. But we, it's, it's the customers that are like, no, no, I want to talk to you about 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. That those are the ones that are, that are, um, our customers that are, that are we're, and we're blessed to have. So, so, exciting. How big is your sales team now? God, you know, something like four or five people. Yeah, exactly. Small. Gosh. Yeah,

small. Yeah, that's tiny. And, and, you know, we've got this very writing intensive process. And is this the right hiring process for sales? Kind of a question I had. Steve felt adamant. Like, no, this is absolutely the right hiring process for sales. And it's been really interesting because you hire. Because again, it's the way people feel with support. Like you can't possibly do this support. You can't possibly expect sales people to write a sentence.

That is like they're animals and beasts. I mean, like honestly, people like, you want a sentence. What do you mean? But like, right a sentence. Like, no, this is an animal like, you know, rips apart customers? It's like, is it really an animal though? really and what we have actually found is that for sure it's different and it's not you know but the people that are attracted to that are really attracted to that so we've got sales folks

that were are terrific and are the ones that you know the ones that that that can model themselves on Steve right in terms of like part of the Steve's disposition has always been about how do we not just find new customers but make customers delighted, delight customers, find that next use case for, look out for customers, be that trusted advisor for customers. And we want a sales team that go to market team that represents that. And we're really blessed with that. How do you have salespeople make a salary, not I assume a commission? Yeah, no, actually, then there is an asterisk. So the on sales, and we do talk about this publicly, but on sales, there is a commission component. And,

And it was funny because we when we, you know, it was a change to roll out because it means sales is commission based, right? And so people are like, oh, well, I want that too. I like, why should the engineers get that? Like, okay, well, they're base salaries less. So, yeah, you can like, you also can make less. Like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want that. Like, okay. Yeah, yeah, you don't want that.

In other words, like, you're taking a risk. You are, you're going to make potentially less and potentially more. I can tell you everyone at Oxide wants our sales folks to make. make a ton of money because they know that like if they make a bunch of money it's because we're selling racks so what happens if today one of your sales team just goes out in books like a 50 rack order a can you fulfill that B how long would it take and see how would you go about it 50 racks they want right now they got the money 50 would be smaller than some of the numbers our customers you're talking about okay well give me a number that would scare you that

well no I mean like that number does scare me but like all the the the the Uh, we, we've, we've already had to do this exercise for larger numbers. You have. Yeah. All right. So across that cas. I mean, that's scale. Well, well, the, I mean, let's ease up.

But not, not, not across that casse, but it. Let's just, but it's, but in the, okay, you're, out of, out over it. Out over it. Out over it. Out over it. Um, and it requires, I mean, this is where it is like, it actually is hardware shipping, right? So it actually, this is where you need to go into the supply chain, right?

You need to go find those log, lean time parts. You need to go and we lean on or leverage partnerships that you've got. And when you talk about like big numbers like that, there's also a challenge of like the numbers get big, right? So now you're like, okay, well, we've got a lot of approvals that we need to go

through internally. And there's a bunch of, you know, understandably, like you're going to actually like, this is a big number. And, you know, like, okay, when can we get it? It's like, well, you know, it's like we need to get the PO before we can, you know, but we, we, we, How do we kind of kick stuff off without having a PO in hand? Because like you don't, and this is, you know, very mindful of, we're very mindful of history in everything we do.

But the history of the Osborne computer company, right? Famously, Osborne went belly up when it actually had product market fit. Now there's a bunch and there's a great book, great is it maybe in air quotes, but a book called Hypergrowth out of print where Adam Osborne gave his version of events, but operation, they lost it on operations is kind of the, the, the TLDR is like, they had a product that people wanted and they died because they screwed up the operations of it. And they ended up with too much inventory of the wrong stuff at the wrong time, and they just

went insolvent. And so like, that can definitely happen. So when you have a customer is talking like, hey, I want 50 racks and I'm serious. I want 50 racks and this is not just like pillow talk. This is like, what does this look like? give me a quote, I need to go like, I'm going to go through my approval process. Then you need to be like, okay, we got to go light up bus parts, racks, rectifiers, compute sleds.

We need to go figure out exactly what this thing is going to look like. We need to figure out where the long lead time parts are. We need to go on the inventory that's cheap. You just procure that. That's easy. And then you've got some decisions to make on, on, you know, people buying at that scale need some skew control. You know, maybe I want different tims or I want, you know, you've got to,

and you've got to afford them that. That's a back and forth. So, you know, it's, it, it, there's a whole galactic amount of detail. There's an entire galaxy of detail that is not the building of the thing, which already has enough detail, but it is the actual, the operations piece of this is extraordinary complicated. And it's why, you know, when you've, it's why our operations team is, you know, we've got, our operations team is terrific.

Talk about, like, you know, being just as important as anyone else in the company. And boy, when you go do one of these exercises where it's like, it's serious and we're going, this is like, this is not a drill. And you really appreciate it. Like, wow, this is just extraordinary resourcefulness and agility and being able to, you know, probably unsurprisingly, we've got a couple of our operations folks have got, operations experience from the service. I got some, you know, X Air Force folks that, you know, are used to just like,

how do we go deal with, like, very large-scale operational issues and having to make up a bunch of stuff on the fly in terms of, like, okay, we can't, like, your facility, your, you know, your facility in Toronto can't do this. But there's another facility that you've got in Malaysia. What does that look like? Oh, and then you, oh, by the way, then you have, like, the Joker in the White House spinning the tariff wheel. Can we, like, this is hard enough, by the way, without being like, there is like, okay, there's a tariff. There's not a tariff.

Now there is a tariff. No, no, no, now we're going to have a tariff later. If we're going to do this, right of that, it's like, okay, this is actually hard enough when everything stays still. But, and it's all challenging. And it's a lot of detail, you know, you just have to get, and you've got to embrace that detail and you've got to go headlong into it. And then I think the other thing that's been important for us is then be transparent with folks about where we are and where we're not. Like if we, you know, if and when we hit a snag, we're going to be transparent about what it is and we're not going to present this to you as like, hey, this is a problem. We don't know what to do.

It's like, here's the problem. You know, we've had an issue here. This is what we're doing to resolve it. Just we're letting you know. And, you know, that is the way we've operated as a company with that deal of transparency. But if you are a Dell HP super microcustomer, you get these same delays, but it's just like you don't have any transparency of what's going on. It's like, where's this thing I paid for? It's like, oh, you know, I don't know.

No one will tell me. It's like, no, no, we want to be sure that we are giving people that kind of transparency. But it's difficult and it's detail oriented is the answer. It's got to be hard to plan that that far ahead. I mean, do you just spend a lot of cash like holding stuff? How do you reserve your dims? No, you know, no, you can't do that, right? You just made to order.

Just in time. Yeah, you kind of want to be like at neither of those extremes. You're making pizza over there? Yeah, exactly. We're making pizza. How many you want? How many you want? I got to, yeah.

No, and it's like you want to like hit that balance. Like you don't want to be made to order and you don't want to hold inventory. And so the answer is like the kind of like the answer kind of depends on the part, right? So you've got parts that are with thin supply chains that aren't that expensive. Like, yes, stock inventory. It doesn't matter. Fortunately, the parts that like you would not want to stock as much are parts that are more commodity, right? So it's like dims and CPUs, you don't want to have to stock those.

And just a lot of money to stock a bunch of those. So you need to kind of need. And then this is where you also need partners that are going to really, and it's been, you know, it's been fun because we've had a lot of people that have believed in us from the beginning. But we've always been like, obviously, we're weird. We're idiosyncratic. And all of a sudden we have these demands show up. They're like, oh my God, this is actually like, you, you, you, you, not jobs actually you might pull this thing off, and you actually do need, like, big numbers of, you know, of dims or of disks or, or, or, you know, of boards or of chassis or what have you. So it's actually fun to go reward folks who have really believed in us for a long time.

It's like, okay, now we've got a big order. Let's go. How many are you building right now? Like, what's the, can you reveal versions of numbers, not the exact number? You know, I'm not going to review our exact run rate. But let's just say that we're on this knife edge the entire time of, like, trying. to figure out how to expand our capacity as quickly as we possibly can. Have people not, we want to make sure that we're hitting the expectations for when these

things are going to arrive. We don't want to have long lead times. We want to, and, you know, especially in the supply chain crunch, we have some very long lead times. So, yeah, I would say it's something we are spending a lot of energy. If you go to the jobs we're hiring for, you will notice that there are several in the operations area. So this is an area where we are very aggressively expanding, because.

It's, um, we've got a terrific operations team. Mm-hmm. Do more there. What is the lead time? Like how, how do you quantify that to us? If I said, hey, I want to buy, I'm, I'm super interested. Yeah. I want to buy 50.

Yeah. I mean, fortunately. The general response to that. Yeah. So I'm super interested. I want to buy 50 is like, not exactly the conversation because like that number is so big that, like, that, like, that's not a, like, there's the casual I need four. How about I need four?

Yeah, I'll buy four. Right. And then you like, okay. So we start to get, we need to get to a PO, and then we would be working with our operations team, be like estimating a time. If you were to buy those right now, I mean, our goal is to be at like eight to 12 weekly times. So we would be, and in general, we have been, yeah, exactly. In general, we have been able to move faster than our customers mostly.

That is no longer becoming the case. the numbers get bigger and the urgency gets higher that is not going to be the case. But it has been the case that like, no, like we're ready to ship it. We need an address from you. They're like, oh, we still don't know which DC it's going to and, you know, or what have you. So it's like we've been able to block on. But yeah, we want to be at that kind of eight to 12 week kind of lead time. We don't want to be longer than that.

I know you kind of educated us on like general compute in data centers. Jerry mentioned like Starlink, not Starlink. It was star something, Jerry. What was it called? The one of the Avalene Texas. Stargate. Yeah, huge data centers, mostly GPU base. Yeah, I mean, is it, though?

Is it that, I mean, do we know what that is? They're telling us. I don't know. I'm just reading the headlines. I'm just reading the headlines. It's like, do that, that, do chat GPT make that up? Is that a hallucination? You just have like constant, you know, deliveries to Abilene, Texas?

Yeah, I mean, and so when you get to a certain size, that's what it looks like. Right. When it gets to, you start talking about, you know. Tim, rock size, just right there. Just, look, those beautiful. 10x. I was just sitting there. Exactly. There's 50.

Oh my gosh. 50 right there waiting to get installed. Yeah. And I think it begins to look more like, okay, these things are just like streaming in effectively because you are you are buying them as fast as we can make them. And, you know, we got a couple of folks who are on the cost for doing exactly that. We've been super deep in, I suppose, money and fulfillment and operations and support. very little on the tech, though. And I'm really curious, like,

what are the major technical feats that you've just accomplished that's enabled this world for you? I know the integrated staff, but, like, what are some major, like, things are truly, truly, like, I can die tomorrow because we did this. And I'm happy, yes,

we accomplished the goal. What is that? Yeah, just for the record, I don't want to die tomorrow. So just, yeah, I want to get that out of there. You could. Yeah, it's right. The things.

You're just going to some of euphemism. Yeah, 100%. And there are a bunch of things. I mean, what we've been able to do, and it's just sad. It's sad state of the industry that the bias, a construct that dates back to when I was a child, and I'm 51 years old,

being able to boot an X86 without a bias is like a man on the moon. And that was extraordinarily difficult. And that was one of those things. It's like, you don't pull it off. You've got nothing. You don't have a product at all. Being able to, the approach we took to holistic boot is something that the hypers

haven't even done. The approach that we took to the switch, the programmable switch, we and being able to integrate that in with the rack is extraordinary. And I can't believe we got it to work and then Intel killed the part, right? Intel, we were using Intel Tafino, Intel killed the part. And so we have had to go to We had to go find another part And we were really excited about the part we found

The Excite Labs called the X2 Which we're really excited to go build on And then the stuff we've been able to build On that X2 is very exciting That's not what we're shipping the day It's really extraordinary The things we've been able to do With the control plane

With this distributed system That was, you know We had done several control planes in the past And really wanted to improve on them and actually seeing that come to fruition, being able to do an update and being able to dynamically update this thing. Because we take a distributed system that we update across an air gap. And, you know, the fact that you, that we are, and when we shipped our first product, it was important that we could update this thing at all.

We had something that we called the update, the minimum update, that minimum update required the rack to be parked. You would stop VMs, update the software, and start the VMs again, which is like great. that you could update it at all, obviously not, like, that's not the cloud experience, right? And the ability to build the true distributed system to allow that thing to be updated truly dynamically and to watch that unfold over. I mean, that is a, that was a long, long, long software project and required just extraordinary work from a bunch of people and, and great, and so watching that come to fruition is amazing. What we've been able to go do on the service process and getting rid of the traditional

BMC, what we've been able to go do with the root of trust, having a true root of trust, being able to attest all the way up the stack, having the root of trust truly attest the SP, having the SP attest what runs on the host CPU, pulling that together into a trust quorum where you have, I mean, what we're pulling off is really extraordinary, where you get this group of sleds together and they themselves decide there are enough of us to share a secret. So in other words, if you just walk off with a sled, you don't have anything. You know, the ability to do this with distributed storage. The ability to stitch all this together and then get the power observability that we had always.

There's so many things that I had always wanted and I didn't understand why I didn't have them. And now I understand why I didn't have them because it's really hard. hard. It turns out a lot of this stuff is really hard. But to be able, you know, the vision for oxide dates back so long. It dates back, you know, for aspects of it over 20 years. And the, and it's not just, you know, it's a vision for a lot of people have had. And watching that come to fruition in so many different dimensions is extraordinarily satisfying. In terms of like the thing that like truly fills me with pride, this is going to sound corny, but it's, it's hand on hard true. It's not the technical artifacts. I'm proud of the technical artifacts for sure. The thing

that I am like tears in the eyes proud of is the team that built it. And, you know, when you walk into oxide, there is a panel from one of the first oxide machines signed by everybody at oxide. And that's the first thing that you see when you walk in. And that to me is the most important thing that we've built together, is this extraordinary group of fearless, fearless technologists who are wanting to actually go kick the dent that we want to kick in the universe together. That is what is, I think that, and as I told people, it's like, this is lightning in a bottle. We, if oxide were to stop tomorrow, we would all look back on this period of our careers as the apex. as this unique time period in our careers.

And that is the thing that is like unequivocal that we've achieved that can't be taken away. Now, we've got a lot further we want to go. We want to go. But that is the thing that I am most proud of is that, because when you are, when you convince someone, and this is why, I mean, hiring is such a, it's amazing to me how frequently this gets outsourced to people.

Because when, when you're coming to Oxide, you are giving to all of us the most precious thing you are giving your finite time on this earth and you're going to give that to us and we are going to give ours to you and that is that is sacred in the words of you know james carvel has got this uh in the war room the the documentary that follows james carvel and george stepanopoulos he's got this phenomenal speech at the end of the election where he talks about how sacred this is and it is so important and you know the most important kind of sale that I make we make is convincing someone to to cast there a lot with us and God that is so amazing and that is the thing that and I am proud of course of all the things that come from that

and of all of these technical artifacts and these breakthroughs that we've had and the breakthroughs that we will have. We got a bunch of exciting stuff in our future, but it is the, it is the crew that did it that I am hand on heart most proud of. That's awesome. It's good to be a part of that kind of crew, too, because, I mean, just being able to be that kind of fearless person with a small cadre of people. You didn't have to hire thousands thus far to get there. You had to be in the sub one hundreds even now to get to that point, which is, which is just wild. I would say that also the Fearlessness is very complimentary. There are so many things that I'm terrified about,

but then someone else at the Huxley will be fearless about it. I'm like, oh, thank God. Hold me. Hold me right now. Let me weep on your shoulder. Tell me it's going to be okay. Stronger together. I think I wet my pants. Well, if you're looking for a secretary,

I can answer phones for 235. There you go, exactly. I'd love to be part of the crew, but I probably can just say, hello, Brian's not available right now, but leave me your name. and I'll make sure he calls you back. There you go.

Yeah. Well, should we close? Let's close down to Friends and let's do a plus plus bonus. I got some current events. I'd love to get your guys' takes. Oh, yeah, let's do it. I got two things on my mind. All right.

Oh, I got, I hope you, I hope it's one of, one of my things. My friends. All right, my friends. Stay tuned, Plus Plus People for another 20 plus Minutes of Brian. The current events that we discuss, Thomas Domke, stepping down as GitHub CEO and the downfall of Intel. Can it be saved? Brian has lots of opinions on that one.

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