The Peterman Pod - Distinguished Eng On Stack Ranking, Competing with Bezos, Regrets | Bryan Cantrill

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Bryan Cantrill was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and has now founded his own company called Oxide Computer Company. We discussed his career experiences through boom/busts, what competing with Bezos was like, and career regrets.𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:• YouTube: https://youtu.be/qhSL-5GtmQM• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/distinguished-eng-on-stack-ranking𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:• Link to the part in the talk on Oracle/Sun we discussed - https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?si=eExjIMZROGjJcDsw&t=1977𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:00:00:00 - Intro00:00:42 - Working at Sun Microsystems00:10:17 - His growth to distinguished eng00:19:14 - Why goaling on promotion is bad00:29:34 - Stack ranking and layoffs00:36:00 - Why he hated the Oracle acquisition00:44:19 - Why Bezos is the apex predator of capitalism00:48:04 - Differences between CTO and VP00:49:58 - Starting his own company01:02:37 - Grilling him on his past01:11:57 - AI boom and bust advice01:14:41 - When he was happiest in his career01:17:22 - Top career regret01:19:21 - Advice for younger self01:20:57 - Outro𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝘆𝗮𝗻:• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-cantrill-b6a1/• Twitter/X - https://x.com/bcantrill• Personal Website - https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/• His company - https://oxide.computer/𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Static ranking is organizational cancer. This is Brian Cantrell. He was a distinguished engineer at the original Sun Microsystems, and I asked him about everything he learned over his 30-year career. Performance review is not about you performing better. It's about us measuring your performance. He had interesting stories from competing with Jeff Bezos. He is not merely a predator.

He is an apex predator in capitalism. This is what makes him so good. The stories from when he started his own company, Oxy. You go to hang up on a VC. They'll be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, right. It was like, oh, okay. And he even let me grill him about his past. He raised this long thing and you reply with just a few words.

You say, have you ever kissed a girl? We actually, I mean, this is dark, but we... Here's the full episode. Your career started at Sun Microsystems, and that's kind of a legendary company. It was before my time. What was the industry like when you first entered it? Was there feying equivalence at the time? What was Sun Microsystems like?

What were the other? companies like. Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny because there's always been like a fang kind of equivalent, you know, in the in the 60s, it was called the bunch, Burroughs, Univac, NCR, control data, and Honeywell were the bunch. It was IBM and the bunch. So the, for kind of every era, there's always, you know, some hot group, some, some growing sector. And in my day, though, so things were, I mean, I think in a bit of a divot. So I graduated. 96, so I was really interviewing in 95. And there was, there was for sure on-campus interviews happening.

But they, Microsoft was very dominant in that era. And I definitely knew I was not going to go to Microsoft as a kind of a point of principle. What was that? Oh, I, I, of you, Bill Gates robbed me of my childhood. Microsoft had such garbage. I mean, they really did. In what sense? Their operating system was, you know, I,

I came up in the personal computer era, so I came up in the 80s, and it wasn't until, you know, I went to university in 1992, and it wasn't, you know, I had just been accustomed to kind of like garbage on the computer. And it's like, it's garbage in a way that is kind of unfathomable. Now, DOS itself, the disk operating system from Microsoft, had no memory protection whatsoever. So if an application misbehaved, the machine would just reboot. And this is, this just became like part of life. It's like the machines reboot. Boy, you got to save your work because you'd be in WordPerfect or WordStar, whatever. This is why I sound like a true, like living fossil. I feel like I'm relaying like coming across the Oregon Trail or something.

But the, you'd be in your word processor, you know, working on your English paper and all of a sudden the machine would reboot. And the, and actually that was just, that was life. And you hope you saved it. hope you had a hard copy. And it was only when I got to college that I realized, like, wait a minute, hold on, there was actually something called, there's memory protection in the microprocessor. And for much of my adolescence, there had been memory protection present. And it, DOS didn't use it at all.

And Windows used it. I mean, with Windows, it gets complicated. But the answer, the short answer is Windows didn't use it either. And so it wasn't until I got to, like, Unix on a workstation. And I just remember being like, you know, 18 years old and having like having a command line shell up in one window, having an FTP to Wu Archive downloading some like EGA game that I would want to go play back in my dorm in another window, having something else going on in a third window, having a compile in a fourth

window. And having this happen magically concurrently was just mind bending. It's like how is this even possible? I mean, again, it sounds and I appreciate how. I appreciate how. old this sounds, but this is what it was. And then looking back, I'm like, why do I have garbage from Microsoft? And it's, Microsoft was just not an operating system company. They were the dominant operating system provider, but in their DNA, the most fundamental, like the nucleotide base pairs of Microsoft are compilers. They were a compiler company, not an operating systems company. And Apple was, you know, Apple, what was Apple at that time? I mean, Apple had, this is long-fired Steve Jobs. This is the Apple was kind of, the Mac was really honestly not that much better.

It was like cleaner, but also didn't make use of memory protection. So this is just like unconscionable to me. And there was just, and this is like aside from all the bad behavior from Microsoft. And there was plenty of bad behavior from Microsoft. Microsoft was very anti-competitive. And, you know, the findings of fact in the Netscape case, you know, years later would be just very underhanded, very, wanting to like to, It was not a company that had the best technology. It was a company that jockeyed for position and then would kind of abuse its position.

What's the TLDR of that abuse? So what Microsoft would do, and this is a pattern you would see repeated sense, but what Microsoft would do is they would announce, you know, you're a promising company that has something that is, that's an application that people might use. They would announce that it's going to become a forthcoming feature of the operating system. And then, but as it turns out, then it wouldn't show up. It was vaporware. The term vaporware, I think, if it didn't originate with Microsoft,

Microsoft definitely perfected the art of vaporware, of announcing something that didn't exist. And they were kind of dominant with this mediocrity. Now, to their credit, they also, when they went, and so, for example, Microsoft Word, which, I mean, still exists, but Word perfect was really the dominant word processor. We're perfect in WordStar. But Microsoft Word was very bad. And to their credit, it would get better over time and ultimately supplanted were perfect, in part because they started bundling it with the operating system. So they were very deeply anti-competitive, and that's not like an opinion.

That's like a judicial finding of fact. That's a Judge Alsup finding of fact. And that changed a lot when Gates, I mean, Gates, when he hit middle age, that company, changed a bunch and after the antitrust case in the late 90s. But I was not going to work for Microsoft. I saw in your goodbye post for from Sun Microsystems. Yeah, yeah. When you were leaving the company, you wrote a public post.

And you said that, uh, you, when you joined the company and you interviewed, you only knew two things that you, one, you wanted to work on an operating system, kernel development. And two is that you didn't particularly want to work for Sun. But it looks like. You had an amazing time. So what flipped the switch from going from? I don't want to work here to, I love working here. So the, when I, I had kind of talked with other groups at Sun, and I just, like, the people

I dealt with at Sun were fine, but just not where, it didn't feel energizing. And, and certainly PBM did not feel energizing. And, you know, I was kind of accustomed to being the youngest person in a group, but, you know, you don't want to be completely by your lonesome. You want to feel like there are other people that have that kind of that same shared passion. And when I met Kevin Clark and Jeff Bonwick, it was like a bolt of lightning. Those two were energized, passionate. Really, they saw all of the same things that I saw in terms of the potential for operating systems to be innovative and were, and wanted to go, like, rip out broken code and replace it with beautiful code and all that same.

verve that I felt. And yeah, it was absolutely meeting those two. You're just like, okay, I, I, there are, I am going to work for son. I remember actually very vividly coming back from that tripping like, oh my God, I'm going to go work for son. If they make, they're going to make me an offer and I'm absolutely going to go work there. I saw that eventually you grew to a distinguished engineer there. Yeah.

What was the career ladder like? It would be interesting to know where the kind of member of technical staff, staff engineer, senior staff engineer, distinguished engineer comes from. I think it might come from Sun. I think it's possible that Sun is the originating company. It's also possible from Xerox Park. You'd have to kind of take it apart where, and I actually remember when I, you know, I had interacted with some folks at Sun and they'd give me in a business card.

And I remember, like, coming out to Sun being like, and not really knowing what my rank was. And I'm like, because I was going to make business cards. I'm like, I'm an engineer and I'm on staff. So I think I'm a staff engineer. So, and, you know, I kind of go to make business. cards and then I kind of like didn't complete submission on the form or whatever and then of course it wasn't that long afterwards

everyone was like oh wait a minute that was like that would been like saying I hate got tenure like I definitely am not a staff engineer I'm a member of technical staff I was an MTS3 so the there was the you would kind of climb up through those ranks and then to staff engineer senior staff engineer distinguished engineer and three was the start of the

no I mean it's supposed I think it did start at MTS 1 no most call tires would start MTS2 but they but I was an unusual college higher in a lot of ways. Interesting. So they brought you on two levels deep as a new ground. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, I'd had a lot.

So Sun was actually not the first company I worked for. I worked for a company called CUNX in Canada. And I had done kernel development there. So I had done OS development at CUNX for two summers. And it's actually some work that I was that I still think is actually, I love that. I love working for CUNX. I love being in Canada. and really, and I had decided that I didn't want to go back to CUNX professionally,

that I did want. The other thing I would say is I decided that I wanted to come out to Silicon Valley. I did not want to be, I'd gone to school in the Northeast, had worked in Canada, but I really wanted to come out to Silicon Valley. So then when you look at your journey growing from, I guess, this MTS3 to up to where you grew, if you were to break down that, I guess, the story behind that growth and kind of, what are the highlights that that stuck out to you that made you grow yeah so i mean i was not i was very much not focused on my my my my my grade my rank or promotion that was not on i was not interested in that

my view was always like i would much rather be under promoted than over promoted um i'd much rather be doing work where people are like wait a minute why is why why why are you back here like what happened to you you know i i i that's just I am not interested in being kind of doing work performatively. I was always going to do what like what I felt was the most important thing to go do. And, you know, Sun was a company that was very accommodating of headstrong engineers. And so I, that's why I, what I wanted to do was solve the problems that our customers had, make the operating system. What I believed it could be, kind of realize that vision for what the OS could be.

Sun was the only company, honestly, in 1996 that was really invested in the operating system. Every other company was mortgaging its future to Microsoft and Windows. And all these computer companies were giving up on their own operating system, giving up on Unix. It was really Unix's darkest hour. And being in that group in Solaris Kernel development during those years was enormously energizing and allowed us to do all sorts of things. And then along the way, you get promoted, right? along the way, like promotions were just the kind of thing that happened as you went along the way.

The, I mean, Sons became, I learned, I would say, I took away a lot of life lessons in terms of what works and doesn't work. I found that the, because of course, we had formalized performance review. And I found this is like not a deep thought, but that formalized performance review never resulted in me having higher performance. and this is like this is one of these things that you kind of like feels very naive to say because it's like you know dummy like performance review is not about you performing better it's about us measuring your performance it's like well that's not what it should be about it what it should be about is like what feedback is great like we should be making everyone be the best that they can possibly be and the the formalized the annual cadence of it I felt was very broken you know we would have you'd submit a self-review, of course. And then your review is like, oh, wow, my review looks stunningly like my self-review, albeit with grammatical errors introduced. And, you know, that,

in every review, even the reviews in which I was promoted, they were just not uplifting. Like, that was not when I look back up the moments of, like, what were the highlights for me during that progression. It was never being promoted. It was always doing a significant body of work or nailing a hard bug or working with someone on something that we thought was impossible. Like that was the stuff that that was really catalytic for me. And then it's like Sun just kind of had to promote me along the way. The one exception though I would say to that is that the promotion to distinguish engineers was very regrettable and stupid.

I mean, not my promotion, but just in general, like the process. The process for being promoted at Sun was, I would say, very traditional in that, you know, you're taking your folks that are performing very well and you're promoting them up to the next grade. The son did have a very silly process thing that, you know, they had three grades they would give you, superlative, excellent, and good. And then I think there was like a, you know, like 70% good, maybe 20% excellent and 10% superlative, something like that. And they had this thing where if you were superlative, they had to promote you. Like that was like the index for promoting you. Like if you got that superlative grade they promote you.

But also, they had to promote you if they gave you that superlative grade. So I had these reviews that were like apologetic being like, look, I have to give you an excellent grade, even though like the work that you've done over this past period has been extraordinary and innovative and actually better than the work that you did two years ago or a year ago. But I can't actually give you the superlative grade because if I give you the supportive grade, I would have to promote you. And we just promoted you a year ago. and it's really like we don't want to promote people any faster than every 18 months.

And you're like, okay, this doesn't make sense to you? I mean, this doesn't like, I was just like, okay, if like if you're satisfied with this, like, fortunately, like, I just don't care one way or the other. So like, sounds good. Okay, can I get back to work now? Are we, are we done here? It's like, are we, and then again, trying not to be trolled by the grammatical reviews in my, in the review that's being handed to me.

So now, the difference for that was the, and, you know, the promotion of staff engineers was a big deal and like great fine actually it was funny because all the staffage years so son had this thing called keep the key employee incentive program and keep was effectively like an annual dividend it was like a bonus so that you know and there was like a keep pool that was set across the company and you know kind of a traditional thing right and the the metric was based on like company performance that's the and so i did hear when i was you know an mts3 mps4 the staff engineers like you know they would get their keep bonus. And if the keep bonus is really good, they take everyone out to dinner. And it was kind of like, you know, it was like being at the mining town, right, when there's a

big ore strike or what have you, a gold strike. So I was like, okay, wow, this is like, this will be great. So of course, I mean, just like, of course, like, when do I get promoted to staff engineer? It must have been in, like, 2000, 2001. I get to promote to staff engineer as like the dot com nuclear bomb goes off. And the keep bonus was, I never got, like, keep bonus was zero from then on out. Sun lost 98% of its value in the public markets. And like, I never, so it's a good thing that I wasn't doing it for the keep bonus because the key bonus was zero. But then getting, so that's was staff engineer, a senior staff engineer, and then distinguished engineer was really unfortunate in that there were, there were kind of two paths in to distinguish engineer. And this may be true

of a lot of companies. I don't know. I mean, I don't have ranks at Oxy for this reason. Like, I think ranks are corrosive. I don't think they get people to do their best work. I'm not interested in them. But at Sun, there were two ways to be a distinguished engineer. One was, of course, to be promoted from a senior staff engineer to a distinguished engineer. And that was a very, very, I mean, I would say rigorous, but it's giving it far too much credit. It was a very political process. The DEs would vote on whether you should be admitted to this country club of distinguished engineers, which is a terrible idea.

This is like the wrong place for democracy in a society, right, for so many different reasons. And the, but so that's how you would get promoted to the distinguished engineer. Very hard to get promoted. The other way to become a distinguished engineer is Sun is buying your little company, is Aqua hiring your company. And your, the company's got just enough leverage during that process to be like, oh, by the way, our CTO needs to be a DE. So you would have these like, DEs just kind of like pop in the side. You're like, who is this? Like, oh, yeah, we, yeah, then we acquire their company.

So. And there was definitely a difference in, like, you knew the homegrown D.E. versus the ones that had been had been aqua hired in. But when I actually like, and this is like, I just do not want to even think about this process. Like, you know, I'm not really a political person. Like, the last thing I want to do. Fortunately, we had, I'd done work that was kind of so indisputable at that point that it was going to be, it was pretty clear that if Sun is going to have such a rank, I was probably worthy of it. But again, I didn't want to deal with it.

Sun's CTO at the time, Greg Poppidopoulos, very grateful to Greg. Greg had chartered this group that we'd developed in San Francisco first admission called Fish Works where we had developed a new storage product storage product was going gangbusters was a great product although a great product

if an asterisk on it wasn't as great as we thought it was and we shipped it we learned a lot about it but the product was doing really well Greg again I was not in the meeting so this was told to me second hand but your DE case needs to be presented by someone another DE. Well, Greg

presented my case. And so you had the CTO of the company and someone was not a very hierarchical company and Greg was not a very hierarchical person. But Greg put apparently my materials up and it's like, I don't expect anyone to vote against this. Take your vote. He said that. Yeah, and apparently it was unanimous. So it's like, thank you, Greg. Deeply appreciative.

So Greg, I didn't have to deal with that bullshit because Greg was dealing with it for me. And it was kind of like, you know, honestly, it was kind of a validation of my hypothesis. Like, Greg honestly viewed it more of a reflection on company than reflection on me. It's like, great. I had done work that was at some level kind of indisputable, and that's kind of the way I had wanted to chart my career. I think there's two schools of thoughts on how people structure their careers within these, I guess, ladders. If a really ambitious new graduate engineer comes to you and they say, hey, I want to be a distinguished engineer one day,

I have two ideas. One idea is I'm going to just focus on the work and just, you know, promotions will be a byproduct. Or I'm going to do the other thing where, you know, I talk to my manager. I'm like, hey, how do I get to that next level? And, hey, what are those things that the next level needs to do? And then I will do work that molds to that mold. Yeah, I would try to steer someone to a third path. What's the third path?

Why? Why do you want to be, what does it mean? Why do you want to be distinguished engineer? Because if that's the goal, if the goal is to be a distinguished engineer, you get there. be a distinguishing engineer. Now what? I mean, do you like, you, you know, you, you, you, you can be so fixated on that. It's like, it doesn't, at some level, it doesn't, that doesn't actually, that's not the thing that matters. That's, that doesn't give you meaning. And to me, if I had a young engineer, like, I'm, I want to be a distinguishing engineer. I'm like, that's a recipe for a

midlife crisis. So, well, let's try to dial you differently. And I think that what, I think what you, what I would, what I would, what I would, someone to is what's get you on a path that has meaning where you're going to be developing and what drives meaning for you? What's important to you? And it's like, well, what's what's important to me is to be as a signature? I'll be like, okay. I mean, you'd want to tease it apart. Get them on the couch a little bit. Like, why? I mean, are you not loved enough as a child? Like, what's going on? Like, you know, you're, and you know, and you kind of work through some of these issues because you don't want to be dependent on that kind of external validation. You, I would want to be like, let me introduce you to people who've achieved what you are

putatively setting out as your goal and are miserable. Like, let me introduce you to some miserable dees. You want to be wealthy? Let me introduce you to some miserable wealthy people. So you know that it's like, that's, that can't be it. It's, there's got to be something else that that is that the fuel in that furnace. And like, let's go find that thing. And then we, then, then the, like, the promotions will happen.

And the work will happen. Okay, but let's say, okay, mentee comes to you and says, you have a good point. I want financial independence. A lot of people, I think, want that, is they want to. Yeah, what's financial independence, though?

I mean, because, like, we are in such a well-compensated domain. It's like, you and I right now could go out and get a cup of coffee that is the best cup of coffee in the war. We're in San Francisco. We're in the mission. We can get some coffee

that is like some Ethiopian coffee, some amazing coffee. that is like the and that is attainable to you and me and and basically everyone else. It's like a $6 an hour cup of coffee. Right? Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, well, let's say you define it as you don't need to work for money ever again. But then what?

This is like, okay, you don't need to work for money ever again. I get that. But so you can go off and do the thing that actually motivates you, well, then go off and do the thing that actually motivates you. But what if it doesn't make money? Well, I think, and I, well, this is where I, you want to take it apart. And so, you want to find a way, I mean, certainly you're going to have things like the, the, the difference that you want to make, the meaning that you're going to find is going to be something that's like, yeah, this is, this is just not a career path at all.

Like, I can't actually sustain myself at all. So then you need to find a way to balance that, I would say, with your career. And you want to keep that balance. I think, I also think it's a mistake to be like, I'm going to achieve financial independence. And then I'm going to do the thing that is meaningful to me. It's like, and again, you just, and I definitely had the blessing of no, most people were like me, made a lot of money on paper in the dot-com boom and just lost every penny of it. I mean, I had a, I had a lost carry forward for so many years that I actually, like,

one year I lost track of my loss carry forward. So, but I had a loss carry forward. And I was, you know, I had like fond memories of the dot-com bubble when I would take my, whatever it was, $3,000 a year against my, from a lost carry forward. that was most people around here. Most people kind of like lost at all, but also were fine. This is the other thing. Like the dot-com bust was super helpful because if you had geared yourself to be really

economically motivated in 99,000, 98, 99, 2000, which would have been easy. 2001, 2002, 2003, like that was not why you were here. Because this place was nuclear winter. and you had to find something else. And I knew like, so the funny thing I knew, like lots of people that like had to remind themselves why they got in this and it wasn't money. I also knew people, I did know people that made a bunch of money in the dot-com boom. The people that made a bunch of money in the dot-com boom weren't that interested in tech to begin

with. So when it went up in, you know, late 99, 2000, they're like, I'm selling it all. Like, I actually don't want to do this. and those people, and there are a couple of them that I knew, and some of them really, really struggled in the next decade because they didn't have to work for the rest of their lives. But now what? Like, you don't have to work, so like now what do you do?

And they were on their own search for meaning and like not easy. And going through periods of like, oh, like I'll buy six houses. Then you were as like, six houses are kind of like a pain in the ass. It's like you and I could go drink six cups of coffee concurrently, but you're just like, what am I doing here? Am I just like proving that I can buy six, So why do I want six houses? Then you scale that way back.

I mean, it gives you, like, it really opens your eyes about what matters and what doesn't matter. What doesn't matter as much. Certainly, you need to be able to provide for yourself and provide for a family. You want to be able to raise a family and so on. So you want to be able to have that. But you want to do that in a way that's honestly sustainable. I think that too many folks are focused on like, I'm going to do this so I can leave. It's like, then maybe you shouldn't be in this industry at all.

Like, go do something. go do the thing you would do when you left and find a way to do that in a way. And go pursue that dream. And because you'll be, you'll be happier. You'll, you'll have meaning doing that. Quit your job at Meta and become a podcaster,

you know? Oh, well, I did. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well,

it's, it's interesting you say that because there's this, there's this subreddit, this community that's all about, uh, financial independence earning enough. Yeah. Oh, Jesus.

I'll see a very regular post that says, guys, I did it and I don't know what to do now. Oh, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I did. And also, like, I gear. I mean, I think this is like, this is a problem, by the way, in engineering, not even in, even when the goal is, has meaning this is a problem.

This is what I call postpartum in engineering. When you are really focused on shipping something and you're just like shipping this thing is just the lens through which you're doing everything. And when we shipped our first racket oxide, I was very concerned about like, we are going to have postpartum. And there are going to be people who are like, I was working so hard and pulling so hard for so long.

And now we shipped it and like, now what? And I'm, I, so even when the thing you've done is obviously meaningful and you've achieved something extraordinary, you're going to have that. When the thing you've also achieved is like, well, I can like buy any cup of coffee. The thing I want, like, now I'm not even, like, I got like, what I'm supposed to do?

It's just easy to see. how you people wonder what the meaning of it really is. And then there are some people that just like snip all the wires. They're like, well, the meaning of it is to get even more. And then just like, you know, then you get like Larry Ellison or whatever. But like that's also not something that people should aspire to. Right. I, well, what would you say?

Because I do know someone who is genuinely happy just doing nothing. By doing nothing, I just mean like relaxing in bed, you know, watching their show. you know, going to hanging out with friends and stuff. Yeah. I think they had a billion dollars. They just do that every day. Yeah. But what you said doesn't work in that case

because that doesn't earn anything. You know, I actually did know a guy. I actually did know a guy who did know a guy who did this who, as I'm thinking about people who made money at the dot-com. I knew one of, I believe one of Yahoo's, like, first employees, but not because he was like crazy sharp or anything. Because he like, they wanted to hire a, web surfer. And he was like a pothead who's like this like this sounds like the level of work that

I'm a good. So he gets a job as like a web surfer one at Yahoo, but as like employee number like single digit. He gets the equity grant as part of like joining the company. Never gets another equity grant, but makes a king's ransom because he's very early at Yahoo. Never promoted above like web server rank one or whatever and was complaining to everybody about how much his job sucked. And it was like, you surf the web for a living. Like, you've somehow managed to, like, win this insane lottery where you're getting paid to do, like, very close to nothing. And when it started, he owned, like, all of Yahoo

in terms of, because the way Yahoo worked, you may be wondering or what the hell I went to talking about. Yahoo was a curated directory of links. This is, again, where I sound like. Pre-Google. Very much pre-Google. This is, like, pre-Google. This is not just pre-Google.

This is, like, pre-Likos, pre-HotBot, pre-Alta Vista. This is like basically pre the ability to search the internet. You would have these curated directory of links. And someone needs to go like find this content. And it was like this guy, Yahoo employee number six or whatever he was. And so he originally like owned the entire directory. But he's like not very good and not very energetic. It was like, you know, stoned all the time.

So they kind of like carved. And finally he, I believe at the end before he finally quit, he owned only like snowboarding in northern California. That's what it was his like responsibility to. It's like, this is a job. And so that is a kind of person who was, and you would like to think that he found something that was actually meaningful to him,

but clearly it was not the work or work for that matter. Right. You said earlier there were these ratings. It was superlative, excellent. Excellent. Good. Something like that. Yeah, yeah.

I noticed you didn't mention there's, there's a bad rating. Right. There was a, yeah. No, there was not, basically not. Sun did not, the idea of like a PIP or the whole like Rankin' Yank, which is what Intel famously did, the... Rankin Yank. Is that just Stack Ranking?

It was their name for Stack Ranking and Fire at the bottom. It was their name for Stack Ranking. Yeah. It was Rankin. Yeah, Stack ranking is organizational cancer. It is very, very, very bad news. When you, especially if you are going to terminate a bottom end percent, that is, that's death. I really think that is just a wall-to-wall terrible idea

because you've incentivized people to have dead weight on their teams. Oh, is that? Oh, so they have foddered to... They've got someone to throw into the wood chipper. So you think that a manager is strategically keeping around... Oh, I know so. I mean, that definitely happened at sun, for sure. Oh, yeah, for sure.

I mean, there were people that were like, why are they still here? They don't seem to be doing anything. And someone kind of took me aside and, like, yeah, that person is in your best interest because... like do you know what that person's rating is it is always like good like they they get a good so you can be an excellent or a superlative and again i'm like does this make sense to you like why are we okay so you know all sorts of perverse incentives all sorts of perverse incentives with stack ranking was that stack ranking fundamentally you that stack ranking teaches you that your team are

adversaries and that's a bad idea that is and it's just not the way i want to operate like the My big belief is that teams do extraordinary things and that everybody should want to be serving the team. It is the team that wins or loses, the team that succeeds. And I think that stack ranking really operates very much contrary to that. You mentioned that Sun, I mean, the stock price went down by 98%. 90%. Yeah. Trading below our cash at one point?

I mean, was there not some management at some point saying, hey, we got a, it's time to Oh, we did. I mean, mass layoffs. Oh, no, no. Son did. I mean, Sun resisted layoffs for a little while. Scott was kind of famously, did not, McNeily famously did not want to lay people off, but that which was a mistake.

He waited too long for that. But no, once the layoffs started, I mean, I think at one point I counted the number of layoffs that had the rounds of layoffs was like 35 layoffs, 35 rounds of layoffs over like eight years. I mean, it's more than four a year. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, it was brutal. That's insane.

Well, you get these like small layoffs, big layoffs. I mean, this is actually before the Warn Act, I think. But you would get, we actually, I mean, this is dark, but we, you could, you could, you could, there was an API effectively to the, although this is like before the era of rest APIs, but there was a way to get the employee directory programmatically. And so we would run what we called the. obits and the obits would run every day and would tell you who is no longer at the company. And so you would see these small layoffs that were not actually like, you would see, you know,

a group that was like, oh, or you would see. And then you would see like, oh, my God, like that's 1,500 people or that's 3,000 in today's ovates. Was the company aware that you had that access to that data? It's son. Sun's strength and weakness was that no one was truly in charge. So, I mean, I think it would not have been, I would not have been surprising. But, I mean, sent to its credit was a pretty transparent company.

So I don't think that we would have, I think that we weren't violating any kind of policy. We were accessing a, we were accessing the org tool, which was the tool they had to show you kind of organizational layout. So we weren't doing anything untoward. But it was a way for us to know, like, what's happening in the company as the, so no, it was layoff after layoff after layoff, after layoff, after layoff. I mean, 35 layoffs, that's, it almost, yeah, it's crazy. But that was everybody, too. Again, that was not like, oh, okay.

I mean, the, it is hard to express the period from the dot-com bust when, you know, kind of pets.com craters in the spring of 2000, that they kind of ran on, on momentum until the end of 2000. And at the end of 2000, the dot-com bubble truly, truly burst for everybody, for, for son included. And then 9-11 did not help. Right. So what was and the economy was, tech

was basically dead for five years. And Y Combinator is formed kind of at that, why Combinator is I think 2006. I see. And starts to form it, I think in part because I think

to get Graham's perspective on this, but the I mean, there was a there was a capital deficit at that point. There were like people that could solve interesting things and there was like no way to start a company to go do it. So it was really, really bleak here for many, many years. I see.

Slightly off topic, but I was stalking your Twitter and I saw that Paul Graham had blocked you. Do you know, is... Paul Graham blocked me. He did block me. I think he... Yeah, that was a point of pride that I did feel like I really arrived when Paul Graham blocked me.

Yeah, Paul Graham blocked me. Yeah, I definitely feel like I'm on the right side of history on that one. Well, when do you think that was for? for? No, I know what that was for. That was for, I think that Paul Graham was defending some of the worst behavior of Richard Stallman and the worst behavior of Richard Stallman does not age very well. It's truly, truly, some pretty gross kind of behavior. And he was defending that and I was attacking him for it and he was blocking me for that. So like, all right, I'll take that. Yeah, I mean, Paul Graham is complicated for me. He, and there are a couple people like this in Silicon Valley

that are complicated in that there are, says some things that I really strongly agree with and some things that I really strongly disagree with. Often in the same sentence. So often, and you're just like, my brain's getting zapped. Like, okay, this is like wrong but also not wrong. And so, yeah, you see he's a complicated one. There are a couple people like that. I understand that Sun Microsystems was eventually acquired by Oracle.

Yes, invaded, yeah. And I just want to know why. Why was it so controversial at the time? There's even a Wikipedia page that says the acquisition of Sun microsystems, and it's almost like an obituary, and there's a lot of top-level engineers. Well, it was dramatic. There's actually a really interesting SEC filing because it's a public company, that IBM and HP were both jockeying to try to buy Sun,

and each was trying to sabotage the other, and each was trying to get the kind of, because they almost were, wanted to buy Sun punitively. They were both competitors with Sun. And while they were kind of screwing with one another, Oracle swept in and bought the company. So Oracle, that happened really quickly. The actual acquisition itself was necessary controversial. It took a while to close.

I mean, to the contrary, I mean, there's nothing like really controversial about Oracle because Oracle is what it is. Oracle is just, there's not a lot of depth to Oracle. Oracle is just an octopus that knows how to feed itself. And the Sun was very much not that way. Sun was, there was a level, I wouldn't call it purism, but there was, Sun was always endeavoring to do the right thing by its customers. Sun was endeavoring to solve hard, interesting technical problems that had commercial relevance and it gave its engineers us tremendous freedom to go do so and and it tended to attract

people that wanted to do that that was wanted to be bold and it was it was a great place for that reason because it rewarded that kind of technical boldness so that's why you know NFS and spark and Java and and soares and then all the technologies that I'd worked on you know all these things came out of Sun. There were so many these, like, seminal technologies that came out of Sun because of that kind of that passion and independence. Oracle is in any of that. Oracle is just like Oracle truly is focused on really on one thing, namely its own profitability, which is like, I thought when the acquisition happened, I'm like, well, this will be interesting because we'll get someone with like great business savvy maybe. One of the things that was frustrating to me about Sun is that Sun on terms of business execution,

Sun fell down a bunch of times. And I thought we would have someone in Oregon. that would be just better at the execution of a commercial enterprise. As it turns out, I was really overestimating Oracle. Oracle really is about being able to get effectively a monopoly, a natural monopoly over its own customers, asphyxating competition, and then raising the rent on its customers. That is really what Oracle wanted to go do. And it's not a company I wanted to work for. I see.

because there's a talk that you gave that where you really, I mean. You know, I don't even, yeah, I know you're talking. The talk is crazy. The Lisa talk from 2011. Yeah, before you even got to talking about it, you said, I'm going to try and make it through this slide without crying. Oh, that was on the side. Yeah, yeah.

And then I think when you were talking about Oracle and you said that they screw customers and lie, I guess you explained the screw customers part. But what's the? live part of Oracle. Yeah. Oracle is, has made many promises to its own customers that it does not keep. Oracle does not, has not earned the trust of its customers. If you ask customers, do you trust Oracle? The answer to that would be no. And I would kind of let that speak for itself. The, yeah, the making that slide without crying bit was not about Oracle. That was about very much

about Sun. And that was the, and the Scott McNeely's epitaph for Sun, kick butt had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computing. Yeah, you said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the bit that's, and like, it still chokes me up a little bit just because it's true. It was true. And we, when we started Oxide, it's like, adopted that as our own mission because that, that's exactly what we wanted to go do at Oxide.

And I thought it was a very concise distillation of that. And that was just not Oracle. Oracle was not interested in that. When a lot of the top engineer, it seems like there's an exodus. where people confiding with each other? Like, were you talking to other high-level lunche and say, hey, we got to get out of here? Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's not even like, I mean, you're just like, you're in a burning building. Are people confiding with one another? They should leave the burning building? It's like, no, actually people are just like running for their lives. I mean, you're just not like, oh, what do you think of the burning building? Like, do you think the building is burning? What are you?

And no, I mean, it was pretty queer. And there were, actually, the real true jockeying came from those engineers before it actually closed, there were going to be some engineers that would be laid off before it closed. But as the acquisition closed, in other words, there were some people that were worse on employees that were not going to be Oracle employees. Aqua laid off. Like, they wouldn't, there wouldn't be an existing company. They just, that's right. So they would, they would lose their job. Okay, okay. But they would get, like, a pretty rich severance package. So you had, like, an absolute line at the trough for, how can I get laid off?

Like, lay me off first. This was not me. This was not us. We were, I, I, I was, I mean, at least to the credit of the, like, the people lining up at the trough, at least they knew what was going to happen. And there's still people to this day that are a little resentful of people who are like, that guy, oh, that guy got laid off. And I, I mean, I quit because I could not work there in good conscience after 45 days.

That guy got laid off and got a year of soury or whatever it was. But, no, I was not that. I was, we were at this Fishworks Group in San Francisco and I was really optimistic that I'm really optimistic, somewhat optimistic, that we could combine the best of both companies or what I perceived to be the best of both companies. And as turns out, that's not the case. So what did you see? Because you left really quick. So. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, it was really clear to me that, but this was a very, very different company. I mean, Oracle gave me, like, I decided like, I can't work here anymore. and the time between I decided that and I actually left,

which was only like 30 days, a little longer than that, maybe 45 days, Oracle gave me like four other reasons to be like, oh my God, I just can't, I can't stomach working here. I mean, it was a bunch of things. One, it was Sun for all of its faults, and there were many, many faults of Sun. Sun had the trust of its customers. Our customers actually were rooting for us at Sun.

our customers wanted us to prevail. Why? Because they actually, they trusted us. And they, even when it wasn't in our own best interests, like we would, we would be straight with our customers. And I think that that was, we did not lie to our customers, right? And that was something that our customers found very, very appealing. That was not Oracle. Oracle does not have the trust of its customers. And I realized something very important about myself. I can't work for a company that has that kind of profound distrust. I mean, in terms of what we're talking about meaning, that so eroded my own sense of meaning, I felt ashamed.

I felt ashamed to work there. And I had never felt that. I've never, you know, for Sun, I was embarrassed from time to time, but never ashamed. And with Oracle, I was ashamed. You mentioned people were eager

to get themselves laid off. How do you even, how do you even do that? Oh, you tell you manager, look, there's a list. Put me on it. Oh, okay. Oh, there is a list?

Okay, who else is on it? Like, I want to be on it. I mean, just like, all the ways that you, I mean, it's not like, you don't fill out a web form. I mean, you're obviously like, you know, you're, you're, you're a courtee, kind of whispering about trying to figure out like, what's the scuttle button? Who's going to get laid off? I thought you have to like really, you know, underperform and like, no, no, no, no, no.

I think that they were, no, it was all about like, hey, I'm, I have no value to Oracle. Could you? I mean, it was much more like, Oracle's line. Someone I'm doing, right? And then you get like, Oracle is interested. You're like, oh, God damn. So, okay, so I get why you left Oracle and obviously Sun was acquired. Yeah.

And so the next place you worked out was joyant. Yeah. And I understand that this company competed with AWS. That's right. Yeah. And I listened to some of the conversation you already had. And yeah, interesting quote. You said, Bezos is the apex predator of capitalism.

Yeah. What makes you say that? They're just Amazon was, Amazon at its height. was such, so relentless on execution. And what made Bezos really, really good is that, and I would say, like, and when I say it's height, I mean, they, Amazon hits the mother load. And they hit the mother load not because they're lucky. There's luck involved.

You know, they allow S3 to be developed, right? They develop EC2. Then they realize what they're on to. And they're on cloud computing before anyone has figured it out. And the, the, the, the, the, the, those reinvents in like, from 2010 to say 2015 were relentless. Every reinvent was a price cut. It was price cut and it was a bunch of new services. And if you're a customer, you're like, this is awesome.

I love this. This is great. Like, why would I not? I mean, so it was so, and that's what I mean by the apex prior, because he was on something that was wildly profitable. he pulled off a just an absolute move of moves in that Amazon did not break out their revenue. So it's just like Amazon, it's like you got the dot-com side, you have AWS, they're not breaking out any of that. They're just like literally like, this is how much Amazon's making.

Analyst sort of asking the call, they're just like, yeah, we're not talking about that. Which apparently you can get away with as a public company. And so they actually created this idea, especially with the relentless price cuts, people are like, oh, the cloud's a terrible business. Like no one, no one should get into the cloud because it's a terrible business. And so people didn't. And meanwhile, like what we knew, because we did compete with Amazon, we did have a public cloud. And we knew it's like, no, the actual margins on this thing are great. Like, this is actually a great business.

And Amazon, Amazon was executing very, very, very, very well. And they did extraordinarily well in those years. And I mean, they are still, obviously, it's a, it's a very profitable company. but they have, Amazon has, is not what it was in those years. I'm not sure when the last price cut was announced at ReInvent, but it's been a while. It is not, that's not what you get at ReInvent. You don't get the kind of the new services that you can't live without. So it's a different company.

AWS was early and they already had, I guess, a dominant market share. Yeah. Why would Jeff Bezos continue to just like ruthlessly keep going? keep going instead of milking it, you know? Because he is not merely a predator. He is an apex predator in capitalism. This is what makes him so good. It's like, I'm not going to, no, like, I'm going to, I'm going to press my advantage.

Like, I'm going to make it so no one can compete with me. And I'm going to make it so no one wants to get into this business. And I'm going to do it, honestly, like, the right way. I'm going to do it by like giving a great product at a reasonable price. It's like, damn, yeah, that's good. That's like, that's a win-win. That's a win-win. And it was like essential for innovation during that era of companies that were cloud-borne.

And it was really, and it was very, very hard to compete with Amazon. I'll tell you that. You had to really like find a lane. And we found lanes where we could go compete with Amazon. But it was, it was brutal. Their execution was extraordinary. At this company, I saw that you started out as a VP and then you transitioned to CTO at some point. Yeah.

What's the difference? in the roles. That's a great question. I actually gave a talk on this with joint CTO at the time on the contrast between BP of Engineering and CTO. And, you know, I'm not sure how much I buy the difference now. I mean, I think both in both capacities, you're serving as an engineering leader. And I think that, you know, I guess you can argue that the CTO is more outward looking for sure. Chief travel officer is kind of the pejorative for it. You're on the road talking to customers a lot. You are, or BP, engineering may be more focused on some of the necessary mechanics that you have in an engineering

organization. For me personally, I mean, they brought me in as a VP of engineering because they frankly already had a CTO. So, I mean, again, it's just like the grade I was at at Sun. I didn't particularly care. What I did care about is when the, you know, the CTO had left and then another CTO that we had a CTO who had been a founder of the company and when he left. So there was kind of like the the empty CTO position. I didn't care. What I did care was that we didn't hire externally for that because I did. So that I did care about a lot about like, look, if there's going to be a CTO, I'm happy

to be VV Engerring in perpetuity, but like I would rather like if there's going to be a CTO, I would like to not hire externally for that, please. Or let me be involved in that anyway. But yeah, I was later with the CTO. And why not hire externally? I just didn't want to deal with like having to bring in. I didn't need that. That's not what we needed.

that time. What we needed at that time, especially, well, we had, we got rid of the CEO, and we really were, we needed really a terrific CEO, which we, which we later got. So. And so then you started oxide. Start oxide in 2019. Yeah. And what's the story behind you starting your own company? Well, I knew, again, I kind of had in my mind that, like, I want to start a company. And the thing that I knew is, I want to start a company with Steve. Steve and I worked together at that point. Steve was the, when I went to Joyant,

I'd not talk to Steve prior to going to Joyant. And I was going to join in part because I was running away from Oracle. And it was going to allow me to hire folks and so on. But I didn't talk to Steve until after I came to join in. And I'm like, this guy is amazing. And Steve and I just worked very closely together. Steve came up on the good of market side, on the sales side. And I knew I'm like, I definitely want to start a company with this guy.

And fortunately, he felt the same. So we both felt like, all right, whatever we do next, we do it together. And so now it's like, all right, well, now what? Now we got to figure out what we want to go do. And we had these long walks in the city because we're working in San Francisco. And we had so many bad ideas. I mean, it was just basically one bad idea after another. So then we're trying to come up with ideas that, like, were a better match for the kinds of things that people would fund. And we recommend people not do this. It's understandable.

I did it. I don't understand. But we're trying to, like, come up with things that people would fund. And coming up with things that were just, like, not in our heart, you know what I mean? Like, this is like, okay, I can do this, but like, really? I mean, it would be fun to do it with Steve, but just doesn't feel like that's not going to, I want to do something that is like, that is this next long chapter of my career. And so as we're kind of struggling with that, and I was trying to figure out like, okay, we actually need to start talking to venture capitalists at some point.

We need to like start like get this ball rolling and understand like I had always known venture capitalists and I got lunch with them over the years, but had not really like, you know, kind of gone deep. And I'd known the venture capitalists associated with joint for sure. And so I got, I was reminding myself of the email address of one VC in particular, actually a very famous VC. and but someone I had known since early, early, early in his career. And he and I had just gotten lunch periodically through our careers from when he was first in venture and I was in engineering and we, it's like, and he'd kind of become, become pretty famous. And I was just wanting to remind myself the email address.

And the last email he had sent to me, which was maybe, you know, 18 months prior, was like, hey, Brian, really enjoyed getting lunche for you today. I just want to remind you, I will fund literally anything you put in front of me. I think, like, wow. And I was like, Steve, you know, reminding myself of this guy's email address. He said he will find literally anything we put in front of them. So like, we should just go big.

We should do the thing that is in our heart. And Steve's like, what do you mean? I'm like, we should build the computer that we want to build. We should build a rack scale machine. And he's like, yeah, that'd be amazing. Like, do you think we can get that funding? And I'm like, yeah, I think so. And, you know, that was very much in our heart.

That was what we had lived that. He had lived that Steve had been at Dell prior to joint. He'd been at Dell for a decade. I'd been obviously at Sun for 14 years. And then together at Joyant for another decade. And this is we, this was truly in our marrow. And we found like, okay, like, we can go. And we, as we started talking BCs about this, about building, and we, again, envisioned rack scale

design. We wanted to do our, our own board design, do our own switch, do our, DC bus bar base design, do all of our own software. Build the machine that we ourselves wish we could have had at Samsung, after Samsung acquired joint. And what was very catalyzing, actually, was going to, you know, you were at what would have been Facebook at the time before they renamed it. And going to their open compute, they'd go into the OpenCute Summit.

and looking at like Tioga Pass. And you're like, what is this? Like, Tyoga Pass, like, I mean, it was like, I would liken it to discovering Unix as an undergrad when I had been living with DOS and be like, what is this? And you go look at Tioga Pass. You're like, this is what a computer can be. Like, this is gorgeous. This is amazing. We got to go build this for the enterprise market.

And we, what we discovered is this was very contrarian. but things that are contrarian are attractive to venture. So we would get this thing where people would actually be pretty interested in it. And I mean, you don't have to tell you how the story ends, but we went back, we'd actually talk to a bunch of venture capitalists before I went back to that same VC that sent me the email. And I get maybe 45 seconds into describing the problem we want to go solve an oxide. He's like, Brian, Brian, right, right, stop, stop.

If you are talking about starting a computer company, I want nothing to do with it. And I'm like, you know, it's funny. You sent me an email years ago that said you would fund literally anything I've put in front of you. And he said, doesn't sound like me. I'm like, well, okay, what do you want me to do with that one? I'm like, you sent me the email? It's like, is your admin writing all of your emails? Like, you have your kid write the email?

I don't know what to do with that one. Like, you didn't send me the email. Are you calling me a liar? I mean, and I'm like, all right, fine. And it's like, fine. And we were over the phone. I go to hang up on him. And of course, like VCs, this is just like, it's in the animal brain, right?

If you go to hang up on a VC, they'll be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Because I'm like, fine, got it. He's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm not going to invest. And I'm like, I know you're not going to invest. And I knew the reason I knew he wasn't going to invest is he's had some big zeros in this department. And when a VC has had zeros in something that looks close to what you're doing, they're like, I want nothing to do that again. Like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, was in a bad relationship with one of those.

Don't want to do that again. And in part in their defense, it's often because, like, actually, I understand this problem a lot better. And now I understand all of the headwinds. And now I can, I mean, in some ways, like, you need VCs to be, and they need themselves to be, like, naive at some level. Optimistic is a better way of phrasing it, where they can, like, envision the world as it could be, as opposed to getting all mired in the way the world is. You've got to be kind of blind to the odds to a certain degree. And I knew that he was not blind to the odds because he'd had two big zeros. And so I knew that he was going to be like, and one zero that, like, look,

a lot like oxide. And so he's like, look, I'm not going to find it. And I'm like, again, I knew that. But I do want to help you. Like, okay, it's great. And I always tell people like when you are, VCs will ask this a lot, especially a VC that's like, well, you're not a fit for them. You're not a portfolio fit for them.

You're not a thesis fit. Whatever it is, you're not a stage fit. If they like you, they'll be like, look, I'm not going to invest, but how can I help? And you always want to have an answer to that question of how you can help. And I had an, I knew how you could help. I had a very concrete idea. It's like one of those zeros, I want to talk to them. I want to talk to the founders.

I want to understand everything that went wrong. And I did. He did. He's like, okay, that I can do. He made the intro, and it was really, really interesting. And like the mistake that they, that company had made, and again, had a thesis that looked like oxide, but they didn't raise a lot of, they raised kind of arguably too little capital.

They got something working that's smaller than what we built at oxide. Minimum viable product that oxide is a rack. It's big. took us three years, three plus years to develop. They developed something a little bit faster, but it was much smaller. It was basically, you could view it as like Nitro, circa like 2013.

Nitro from the Antipurna Acquisition at AWS. It does a lot of really important offload for AWS. So you could view it as like very early Nitro, but it didn't really have a market, but they had a customer, and they got a customer, and they're like, great, and the customer was happy, and they wanted to use it in particular on their active directory servers. Great.

We have product market. fit, raised a bunch of money, hired a huge go-to-market team. Problem is, that customer, huge bank, only wanted to run it on, like, their six active directory servers. So they were going to buy, like, quantity six. And this is one of the world's largest banks. You're like, uh-oh. So you're like, how many world's largest banks are there?

Like, well, they're like, a couple of others, but like, or you're going to sell like, you know, two dozen of these things. Like, we've got to. And they, by the time they realized that, they had a lot of mouths to feed on the on the go-to-market side. And they, that wasn't a zero. They were acquired, but they were acquired in a way that left the founder extremely bitter and really felt like the VCs had pumped too much capital and at the wrong time, had gotten him to do the wrong thing and was then trapped at the acquiring company and was really not happy about it. He was also the one, so I was

describing what we were doing an oxide. He's like, that is a suicide mission. And I just remember writing down a little notebook, I was like writing down suicide mission, kind of unaligning it, like, okay, we're on a suicide mission. That's fun. When I think of rack skill, compute, especially these days, I think of racks of GPUs more than CIPs. Yeah, right. Is that something that you're building? Yeah, right. Yeah, a very reasonable question. And when we set out, we, I mean, again, set out in 2019, the GPGPU is, was around obviously and important, but that's not what we were focused on. We were really focused on general purpose compute, general purpose compute, general purpose networking. And our belief had always been like, that's what we actually want, there,

there is so much to go build there and go differentiate there. And of course, along the way, people are like, what about an accelerator? Like, what about an accelerator, GPU? And the problem is that the way we want to build systems, we want to really build systems from first principles, where we have components that have, that have transparency at that hardware software interface, and we want to write that lowest layer of software. We are, the company, ultimately, we are building a hardware software code design product. In order to be able to do that, you need to be able to write very low-level software. The problem is that's really not compatible with Nvidia.

VIII is a pretty proprietary company. Executes well, but a very proprietary company. And what that meant is there are effectively two doors for OXID. One is labeled compete with InVID, and the other is labeled partner with Invid. And I didn't want to do either of those things. I have not wanted to do either of those things because certainly don't want to compete with Nvidia. And I think that's getting more plausible now, but we can't partner because we just have a very different view of how systems should be built. And Nvidia wants to like,

their view is like, we should own the whole stack. Like, forget you, whoever you are. So like, okay, that's fine. We're going to be, we're going to focus on general purpose CPU. We got plenty to do over here. I think the thing has been interesting and a bit surprising is that because the GPU landscape is so cluttered. I mean, you've got this very aggressive, the very executing, the well-executing company in terms of VDIA, you've got a lot of competitors around it. It's a little, it's gory, right, over there.

And meanwhile, on the general purpose CPU side, it's like HP, Dell, Supermicros, the same companies that are doing the same kind of junk, honestly, that they have been doing. And so we are by our, lonesomes in terms of a hardware software product over there. So over and over and over again, we have had people come to OXide that we think, like, no, no, no, we're not a fit for you because you, like, you do a lot of GPU.

You've got a ton of GPUs, like you company famously have a lot of GPUs. No, no, no, we do have a lot of GPUs. We also have a lot of CPU, as it turns out, because the, certainly the emergent AI workloads, not just AI workloads, but certainly AI workloads, but high performance computing workloads. There's a lot of general purpose CPU that's attached to the special purpose compute. You know, when you're sitting there on chat GPT and it's surfing the web, you got the little spinny saying it's surfing the web, that is not a GPU that's surfing the web. That is a CPU that surf in the web. And the CPU is really, really important. So for us, we are more focused

than ever on the general purpose CPU. And there's a, there is a ton to go do there, fortunately, to get this product to be where we believe it can be. And I think we will do an accelerator at some point, but, you know, I've been kind of saying it's like 18 months away for a while or 18 months that we would really start thinking about it. And, you know, again, I know we'll do it in the limit, but boy, not in the foreseeable future. We've got a lot to go do as it is. I think coming to the end, I want to ask you some career reflections and kind of just all over the place type of questions. You wrote a tweet a while ago. I thought it was really interesting idea, which was, you said it would be interesting to have a conference called in retrospect,

where presenters revisit talks that they've given prior and describe how her thinking has evolved since. And I pulled a bunch of stuff that you've, I guess, written or said in the past. I'm curious if your perspective has evolved since then. So we'll go through each of those. Sure. So first one, which is actually really famous, when I saw, I, like, kind of did a double take. So in 1996, as a new grad, there's this,

I don't even know what you used, Usnet was. I had to do research, actually. Yeah. But there's a guy who, he writes this long technical response. David S. Miller.

Yes. And part of it, too, it's not nice either. I saw this a line in there. It says, Linux is lightweight, Solaris is a pig, which Solaris is what,

I guess, the son was. Yeah. Yes. And then he writes this long thing and you reply with just, a few words, you say, have you ever kissed the girl? Yeah.

Well, first of all, I want to know the context behind it. And then also knowing what you know now. Oh, definitely in the regret department. If that's what that's asking. I've got very few regrets in my career, but like, you can put that one, like, pretty firmly in the regret column. Yeah, no, that, that was, that was, that was, and also had no idea that this was going to live in perpetuity.

That, I mean, if you could have told me in, I think 1997 is maybe when I posted, maybe it was not anything. It was 96, it was 96 or 97. Certainly, like, I'm, like, 22. Like, I'm very young. If you had told me, like, oh, by the way, 30 years in the future, you're going to be asked about this. I'd be like, what the hell? Like, no, no, trust me.

It's like, the world gets weird. You're going to be asked about this. The, so it was actually a, okay, this is, I'm not defending it. I just want to be sure that. I want to be clear that, like, it was a mistake. The, it was actually a reference to a Saturday Live sketch. So there's an S&L sketch that is from an era of Saturday Live that it's just like you can't even find the video.

But they have, so the, William Shatner is guest starring on Saturday Life. And the skit is that William Shatner is at a Trekkie convention. And the Trekkies are asking him all of these questions. And they're asking him questions. And of course, like, you know, in episode, you know, this season and this episode, What was the combination on the safe? He's like, what? I don't know that.

I don't know that. Why would I know that? Why would I know that? That's not even, and he's like, these two people are kind of arguing themselves. And they're asking him questions that are like this, that are all about like the kind of the canon of Star Trek. And then he's like, hey, can I just say something?

Get a life, people. You, have you ever kissed a girl? That was the, that was where, you know, going to a 30, going to John Lovitz when like Vulcaneers, John Lovitz, do you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter. This is like lost history. Why am I doing this?

And kind of like looks down at himself. And so like it was actually like an obscure Saturday Night Live reference, which again, like I'm not, it doesn't make it any better. The, yeah, that was, that was, that's definitely in the, in the regret department. What did he say back to that? Oh, he had a whole lot to say about back to that. And I actually did have a longer post kind of taking apart what he had said about the, about like, all right, like a lot of what you. you've said here is actually wrong. And so like really going through kind of point by point. I think, you know, I've actually never, I've never met him, never talked about that.

So he's a very talented guy. I think he actually, I actually did read it. I think it was in the, with the rebel book about Linux. Remember him reading that he's like, yeah, I kind of like was shooting my mouth off and a son engineer kind of put me in my, put me back in my place. And I'm like, man, if that is his read on it, he's being very generous to me. So I'd like to believe that Maybe he and I both regretted a little bit. We were both like a little, you know, a little young and excitable. But yeah, that was definitely, that was a life lesson. I would say that history forgot about that, though.

So on another tweet. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, here we go. This is great. This is like the cleanse. Yeah. Okay, this is in 2022. You wrote a tweet.

You said, if you're tempted to blame a team for a startup's failure, please don't. Success is often due to a great team, but failure is almost always due to bad leadership. I wrote that. That's a good one. That's a good one. I don't remember writing out. That's it.

I agree with that guy. He's on to something. I guess the question. What was I responding to? I wonder. I missed something that day on the internet. There's some weather on the internet. I'm sub-tweeting Paul Graham there somewhere, I think.

That must have been it. But I'm curious, do you think that's true for Sun? Because Sun ultimately failed. So, okay, I don't agree that Sun failed. I don't agree that Sun failed because Sun, again, Sun is founded in 1980. and is invaded in in 2008, 2009. That's a good run.

That's a really good run. Sun was a public company. Sun was in the Fortune 200. Lots of people like kids went to college because their parents were able to work for son and you got, you know, so I don't views, I do not view Sun as a failure. Son is like, son did not, I mean, arguably did not, or not maybe inarguably did not succeed to the scope of its own ambition, but Sun to me is not a failure.

Sun is a success. Was its collapse at the end, I guess, changeable in hindsight with different leadership? I think so. I think that there are, I mean, this is a classic power game

of like, why did Sun ultimately not survive as an independent entity? And why is that? I think there were a bunch of reasons. I think that the, I think that there's a degree to which Sun got very strong

out on the very high margins during the dot-com boom and never quite like got off of that never like we embraced x86 too late um we um we kind of thought of ourselves i mean the the company itself became fractured the layoffs didn't help i mean i think we at fishworks where we were developing a storage appliance i felt that we could have been an example of an exemplar of what the kinds of products i felt sun could develop an independent son could develop but it was going to be there's a lot of like stuff that needed to be changed for that. And you needed leadership that really was very, very interested in that. And it's like that just wasn't like that.

That's not what we had. And in hindsight, it was probably time for a change. It was, you know, it's like it's kind of the way a forest fire in a normal, healthy forest fires is kind of a part of the life cycle of a forest. And you need that to have, to have, to have rebirth. And I think that that's, I mean, ultimately, I think that that Sun had succeeded but had also run its course. And it was time for...

Had its time. It had its time. Absolutely had its time. Okay. And that next past take of yours, you wrote in 2022, perhaps this shouldn't have been surprising, but Musk has absolutely no idea what he's doing. And this is about the takeover of Twitter. And I actually don't even know what's going on on Twitter because it's private at this point.

I will thank you to not refer to SpaceX that way. Oh, right. It has been acquired by X-A-I and then X-A-I has been rolled into SpaceX. So, like, we're now, I guess Gwen Shotwell now runs Twitter. So I guess do you still agree that it's run poorly? Oh, God, yes. Yes, yeah, I agree that, I mean, yeah, definitely. It's so, I mean, yes, yes, yes.

Like, I literally feel dirty being specific. about that. But when, I mean, when there's a lot of, there's rampant bad behavior on Twitter. Community notes, yes. Community notes, great. Everything else pretty much a tire fire. What's your number one thing that is tire fire? The number one thing of tire fire is that they, oh, we'll tell you this. The reason that we at OXide don't engage on Twitter, I can't have an oxide tweet that is sitting next to some of the tweets that I've seen. Oh. You just, You see. Okay.

It's like the level of racism, the left, bluntly. I mean, crazy racism. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy racism. Crazy. Crazy. And crazy.

The anti-Islam. Like, just crazy hate. Crazy levels. The kinds of things that you literally could not say. And they're like, oh, it's free speech. It's like, it's not free speech. It's not. It's so deeply offensive and reflected.

It's like it's so deeply offensive that I don't want my content to be anywhere near it. I don't want someone to be looking at that and looking at my content. I'm sorry. I'm just not going to do that. And you live through a bunch of booms and busts. And honestly, I don't even know exactly if we're in a boom or a bust right now. I mean, AI is going crazy and there's all these layoffs. Crazy.

Yeah, that's a good point. But what advice would you give, given your experience through the booms and busts for people who are in today's market? Yeah. And I would say that some of this I do think is endemic. I mean, when I first moved out here, I'm like, oh, this is great. My grandfather was a petroleum engineer. And so I kind of grew up with stories of, like, plants that were going to be built and then shut down or pipelines that were to rebuild and then shut down. Like, everything tracking the price of oil, right?

The oil patch is very boom and bust. And I'm like, oh, this is great. I'm in software. Like, I'm immune from booms of bust. I remember thinking this. Like, you know, you're just like, and of course, looking back and now, you're like, oh, my God, no, no, we are. They are a bit endemic. And they're endemic for reasons that are somewhat endearing in that, like, we get so optimistic that we kind of get ahead of ourselves from an optimism perspective.

We also get ahead of ourselves from a pessimism perspective. And the, and what I would say is like, you've got to be really careful about listening to other people. people will tell you that this is going to be the future or that thing is dead and you've got to be like just be your own judge i had people tell me that operating systems are done in 1996 i'm really glad i didn't listen to them really glad i didn't listen to them when people tell us you can't start a computer company in 2019 i'm really glad we didn't listen to them that you i VC firms so we only fund saz those VC firms are like well it's like saz is struggling right now um but i would also say similarly like if SAS is in your heart as an example where people are like right now people are like SAS is going to be the Gen AI, the LLM Assessed Coding is going to really put a squeeze on the SaaS companies. And I think of like definitely truth to that. But if one's heart is in that, you should ignore the, ignore the pessimism or treat the

pessimism and the optimism with a grain of salt. Be your own judge. and be true to what you want to do. Don't do the things that like, well, I'm doing this because it's like a hot space. It's like you should do this because I think it's, and there are plenty of people for good reason. I mean, these things are amazing. I mean, where we are with respect to these LMs is just bonkers.

And you can easily say I want to be very, find a great deal of intrinsic appeal to that. But that's the reason that you should be going into these systems is because you think like, no, no, no, no, this is. is, to quote Steve Jobs, that this is the dent I want to kick in the universe. I notice your career, almost everything's driven from fulfillment and intrinsic motivation. Is there time in your career that you look at you say

that's the happiest time of my career? Yeah, that's a great question. We ask us at Oxide. We ask you, when have you been happiest and why? For exactly that reason. And I would say that, like, it's not the, it's not necessarily an era. it is the it is times that I've been happy I mean bluntly like I'm pretty heavy right now

oxy that's great I mean yeah right the we have the moments for me and this is an important kind of question for me to reflect on as we're starting oxide and this is actually due to a friend of mine who had been at a startup and he and I were taking a walk in San Francisco as kind of of Steve and I are talking about bad ideas and he was like you really need to answer for yourself why do you want to do this what what is drawing you to start a company. And because it wasn't financial return for me and people should not start a company for financial return. That's just not a good, that's not good life advice. But what was drawing, I'm like, well, the thing that's drawing me actually is that the moments that have been the happiest

have been working on an incredible team. And being on a team that where everyone individually is like, I don't think we can pull this off. Like, this is actually too difficult to pull off. And then everybody works together, compliments one another. and you pull it off, man, that is amazing. That feeling is extraordinary. And the times that I'd had that, I'd had it at Fishworks, I'd had it at Joint a couple of times with LX with Triton.

Those times have been like, oh, that's what's amazing to me. And so, I mean, in many ways, like the bedrock of oxide is like, what if we found a company around, part of the reason we were appealing, the larger problem was appealing to us, is like, we're going to be able to attract an extraordinary team. And we have a team that is,

it is so uplifting to be on a team. I've always said that the organizational model for OXide is a heist movie. You know, you've got your safe cracker, you've got your getaway driver, your demolitions expert, right? Hise movies are great because of that.

And like, because it's the group coming together, everyone's skill sets kind of coming in at exactly the right moment. And, man, I love that. I love that so much. And Steve loves that. I mean, that's part of like, our shared bond is he and I are both very, very team-oriented.

And we built a company around that. And it's extraordinary. It is truly, truly extraordinary. It's why we've been able to pull off what we've been able to pull off. With the small team that we've got, I think people are kind of shocked at how small a team that we've got, given what we've been able to pull off. You know, when you look back on your whole career,

is there a particular top regret that you have? I mean, I made an extraordinarily bad hire at Joint. I think the worst hire in human history, many people in Silicon Valley will say, like, well, that can't be the worst higher in human history because I feel I have made the worst higher in human history. And as I tell people like, look, I'm happy to give up the crown. But you should know that my guy presented himself under an assumed name and just got off parole for violent felonies from San Quentin. And it's not what made him a bad employee. And usually people are like, no, no, no, I think you've made the worst hireful time. Mike, thank you.

Thank you very much. That was a bad experience. it was also very eye-opening because everything I was doing about hiring was wrong. And after we rectified that situation, it got him out, we stripped hiring to the studs and really rethought hiring from the very first principles.

That hiring process, a very writing-intensive process, one that really gets to intrinsic motivation, became the hiring process at OXID. And there was a moment where I'm like, oh, my God, like this extraordinary team at OXID very much, I think, related absolutely to the hiring process that we have, this hiring process that I built because I made the worst hiring hire of all time. I needed that guy.

So you don't regret it. I don't regret it. I don't regret it. In fact, I'm even like to kind of go back into the time machine and remove it, I think oxide, I don't think no of oxide makes it. Because I would have continued to hire the way I was hiring, which was naively. It was hiring not rigorously. It was not selecting people based on their values.

So, no, I absolutely needed it. So I think, and I view that way of a lot of things that have maybe not gone the right way, but all of those failures were really, really important. And it's very hard to go back. And you don't want to take those away. I mean, if I go to the time machine, maybe I would take away the Usenet Post, and maybe that wouldn't have any long-grossed consequences. But boy, that's about it.

Awesome. And then last question is, if you can go back to the beginning of your career, knowing everything you know now, what a difference? advice would you give yourself? Jesus, don't fuck it up. Don't fuck it. I would just think because I feel like so lucky. So I've been so lucky in so many regards.

I've been in the right place, at the right time, so many different times over. And I've trusted my gut when sometimes that was not the thing that when that was kind of a controversial thing to do. I mean, I would be scared to give myself advice because I would be worried that I would somehow tamper with what I feel has been an extraordinarily lucky career where I've I've been able to do so much with so many extraordinary people. I've been blessed with so many incredible colleagues. And I, that has been so essential for everything that I've done and I wouldn't want to do anything

to endanger that. So I'd be going back to my past self, I'd be like, I got nothing to, like, just, yeah, I don't want to screw anything up. Like, I just, because I, I feel that I, feel really, really lucky. And it wasn't always because it's like I made mistakes along the way, but the mistakes became load-bearing and important. And I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to not make those mistakes. Those mistakes were really important. Well, doesn't get better than that. And thank you for your time today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for the thoughtful questions. Really great conversation. And thanks for doing the hall of shame here on the past tweets. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the podcast. It's a passion project of mine that I really enjoyed building. Another passion project that I've been working on kind of in secret is building an ergonomic keyboard that I wish existed and I finally have a prototype so I'd love to show you what we've built. It's ultra low profile and ergonomic and I couldn't find anything like it on the market. So that's why we built it. I'll put a link to the keyboard in the description. You can take a look and learn more about the project there. We could definitely use your support. Also, If you have any feedback for me about the show, I'd love to hear it. Comments on YouTube have led to guests coming on like Ilya Gregorik and David Fowler. I wasn't aware of them until someone dropped a comment. Also, feedback in the comments helped me learn to reduce the number of cliffhangers in the intros. So your comments definitely make a difference. Please keep letting me know what you'd like to see more of in the show, and I'll see you in the next episode.