Our $445M Series D (oxide.computer)

On the other hand I like meeting a lot of people that I’d be working with. It’s nice to start day 1 knowing who people are.

In my experience with this format it isn't like you are coding for 9 hours. It starts with soft HR stuff, ends with a sales pitch to you, and most of the middle is just pleasant conversation with interesting people.

Oxide can obviously impose a 9 hour interview process because they're a good enough company that lots of smart, motivated people want to work there and thus good candidates are willing to endure that process. Lesser companies obviously can't impose that process because there aren't enough good candidates willing to endure it.

My main point being, different strokes for different folks. If you think that process is too long, great, find a company with a less time consuming process. But Oxide's process obviously seems to work well for them, so I think it's pointless to complain about it (note I don't really think that's what you are doing, but a bunch of reply comments certainly are).

My blocker has been the initial written answers to the questions. I've had the questions half-answered for nearly a year now. I want to do it properly (sans AI) but other things come up and I question the EV of spending the time, especially since I'm not a strong writer in the first place※.

For Oxide, it makes sense to demand a strong writer due to their culture, so even if technically qualified I might not be a good fit, assuming I even get an interview.

※ - I write unambiguously, but use point form whenever possible and am not great at naturally writing concisely.

I’ve also done interviews that were brief 30-60 minute casual discussions followed by an offer during the hiring craziness that happened in a few years in the past. Anecdotally, coworkers at those companies were a completely random range from smart and kind down to the meanest, most clueless people I ever worked with. They had high turnover both because they were always firing bad hires (hire fast only works if you also fire fast) and people were burning out from the perpetual stream of bad hires being randomly injected into the company after they talked their way through the short interview.

Looking back, the interview processes that took the longest were certainly not perfect, but the companies that had them were much better about maintaining a coherent culture and high bar for the coworkers I would get. Every new hire felt like someone amazing who I was happy to be working with.

Everyone has different priorities, but looking back I think the relatively small amount of time I invested into long interview processes (relative to the 2000 hours I work every year) was time well spent.

I did an interview process that was 6 hours, one hour per week, then flew me in for a 6 hour on-site. They decided not to take me at that point and provided no reason.

At some point, there becomes a mathematical impossibility of too many pages of applications for too few evaluators who also have to do the rest of their jobs. Either they don't get quite that many applications, or the initial evaluations must be based on some incomplete reading (looking just at the resume, reading a subsection, skimming, or randomly discarding), or the backlog keeps growing.

Fwiw I also applied and the auto-reply said I should expect to wait 4-6 weeks, which has recently passed without hearing back. The application is a ton of work, and I don't mind doing it with a significant chance of being considered, but I think it's a normal reaction to be devastated if you put all that time and energy into crafting your materials, which manifest all your experience, behavior, and personality, and it turned out nobody read them. I still have a little hope, but I'm sorry you never got a response.

We're building racks over here! And all our software is open source.

You could be a hero. A legend. The internet might even write poems and sing songs about you.

As to why we're paying taxes: while tax minimization is certainly a thing (and we have taken advantage of things like R&D tax credits), we're paying taxes because we're profitable.

Raising a Series D is an attempt to permanently increase the velocity of their enterprise. The change in the cap table is negligible if they succeed.

Raising debt right now would be a massive unforced error given they were able to shore up half a billion dollars in funding. If the funding well were dry then it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.

Can you imagine if they raised $445M of debt?

When you sell shovels, even slight downturns are massively exaggerated because the shovels can be resold, and if some of their customers go under, it's not just that demand that goes away, it's all the demand that can be satisfied by their customers purchasing second hand servers from the bankruptcies instead.

No-one can really say how long this bubble will last. Might pop tomorrow, might be a decade. But if Oxide funds inventory on debt, and the bubble pops, they go with it. Whereas if they fund on equity, and it pops, they will come out the other side just fine. The cost of this is that the old stockholders have a slightly lower upside.

In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand. It's just not a good metaphor. That's not how buying shares in a company works. Investors don't invest using bearer instruments of totally unknown value. They invest using cash. Cash always adds the value of the cash. That's intrinsic to it being cash.

A much better way to think about it is that you have something in your hand that's worth X dollars and has Y shares. If somebody were to give you X dollars in investment in exchange for Y additionally issued shares, then at the end of that operation the company, by definition, would be worth $2x, and your Y shares would be exactly half of that value, meaning that you start with X and you end with X.

As mentioned, knowing exactly what the company is worth in dollars is a little tricky, but that's the premise, and it completely makes sense.

Back to your lottery ticket example: let’s say you had a company with assets consisting solely of a winning scratch-off lottery ticket worth $1,000, and then you agreed to sell half the company to an investor who contributed $1,000 in cash. At the end of the exercise you would have a company worth exactly $2,000 (the company's assets include the lottery ticket and the new $1,000 of invested cash) and you would own exactly half of it.

If you have a unique skill at buying scratch-off lottery tickets and can turn that $1,000 in cash into more than $1,000 in lottery tickets, then you and the investor win from the transaction. That's what the investor is betting on.

If you can't get those results then the investors shouldn't invest in you and you shouldn't seek investment.

Your lottery comparison isn’t logical. I think you’re just repeating the same misunderstanding I was trying to dispel above.

If you want to force the analogy, you would have to imagine a lottery where your win and the investor’s wins are tied together. Either you both win or you both lose. But to make the analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a lottery where their ticket purchase increase the winnings proportionally.

So in this bad forced lottery analogy, you would have a smaller number of the overall tickets, but the same odds of winning as before and the payout would be the same as before.

You’re making the common mistake of assuming that the company could get the same outcome without taking investment money. It’s common to imagine getting that your 0.1% of a sweet $1 billion IPO without ever getting diluted along the way, but getting a company to that IPO point requires a lot of cash. If a company is lucky enough to have all the cash flow they need to get there then they can do it all without dilution. Most companies need to raise some cash to get there, though.

So raising the money actually lowers your variance of getting a large payout, because the cash is what enables the growth to that liquidity event.

Loans are a lot better when you're in a more stable scenario - lower growth and/or lower risk of implosion due to just being more established.

As well as Oxide is doing, startups are still volatile and taking on debt that might need to restructure or be defaulted can create a lot worse outcome for shareholders than just "we diluted and then stopped growing as much".

you buy one or more of the data-centre-rack-sized computers, hook em up to each other / your datacentre network, and you now have essentially a cloud services platform like AWS/Azure, in your own datacentre, under your control, with full visibility of what every part of the platform is doing (hypervisor, underlying bare metal kernel, firmware, bootloader, etc), because it's ALL open source, written from the ground up by them

I think it's pretty neat!