Robin Sloan writes, on the news of Oxide Computer — still one of the most interesting and ambitious startups out there — having landed a really big fundraising round:1
I’ll confess, I dream of a little consortium of nerds pooling our money to buy an Oxide rack, all of us running our blogs and apps and experiments in its cozy confines. The numbers don’t remotely pencil out — the racks are VERY expensive — but it’s fun to imagine.
There are dozens at least two of us! I have had this thought an unreasonable number of times. I also keep thinking “maybe someday Vanta will edit to go on-prem instead of all-cloud and I can talk us into using Oxide”. So happy for the good folks at Oxide.
(The pitch for Oxide: what if you didn’t have to choose between the developer experience of cloud and the cost and control benefits of on-prem? It’s a good pitch.)
Notes
I’m generally not a big fan of venture capital funding models, even despite the way it may play out nicely for me, because of the not-so-great incentives it sets up — but most of the concerns apply much more to Software as a Service products than to doing what Oxide is doing. Hardware is harder. ↩︎