Inside Oxide (Friends)

29:20So we are asking, you know, especially for roles that our customer are facing, we want to see evidence of real customer curiosity and depth. Because, you know, it's great. We obviously wanted to build a company that employees would be proud to work for. It's great. We also want to build a company that is equally, if not more important, that customers love to buy from. We, it was very important to us from the outset that we build a company that, because we're talking about trust as a management philosophy. It's true. Trust is also a customer and market engagement philosophy. Because, you know, I was at Sun during some very, very dark years.

29:59And we had a non-competitive microprocessor. And one customer told me, he's like, you know, I got to tell you, like the products you make are not competitive right now. there are a bunch of things about Sun that are really difficult for me to deal with but I really want you guys to make it and the reason I keep you in here is because you guys never lie to me. The only ones never lie to me come in here, if your products are not the right products you'll help me find something better you always want me to succeed and I gotta tell you that also seems like a low bar, like look you guys don't lie to me Oh, I know.

30:39I think you would be surprised. But that's it. It's typically transactional. And what you want is you want, I mean, yes, like sales is about transactions, but it cannot be transactional where someone is thinking about their quarterly number. I mean, yes, you absolutely want them hitting their goals, but thinking the long game with these customer relationships. And you find that those that have played that long game and have built trust with customers have these longstanding relationships with customers. even if they went to two companies three companies and so how do you understand how they think about being not just the representative but the steward of the company with those relationships and the materials are a great place for that to take shape and uh we've and we then we've gotten great feedback from candidates they've done the materials they're like hey you know what else would be great to talk about in here.

31:31And just, again, we feel very fortunate that the founding sales team here are big believers in the process and want to carry that forward. I got to say, like, when we were first trying to hire for sales, my own conviction was kind of wavering. I'm like, Steve, is the materials process the right process for sales? And so, yes. Steve's like, emphatically, yes. We just haven't found the right people yet, and we just need to like be patient and well and also you got to do more than that like because for some roles yes we are very oversubscribed for other roles like like we got to go out and like really shake the tree and you got to be willing to go find the people and have the pre-conversations with them i mean steve and i've had many conversations with candidates like i don't know about oxide like look let me hop on the phone with you and what i want to close you on is digging further into the company to get you to the point where you're submitting materials.

32:26So we are happy to get engaged. But I will say, when we got early in the process with sales candidates, one of the things we kept seeing was these materials that were not great because it was salespeople just pounding their chest. And if you think about what they are predisposed or conditioned to be able to talk about, it is how I crushed my number, how I was the first person to close this size deal. And like, great. I mean, a lot of people are involved in closing big deals. What we want is story time. We want to hear about like, when things didn't go great, did you run towards it or run away from it?

33:04Did you, you know, how did you deal with, how do you treat your peers when you're working on a large, complex customer engagement? And it's funny because we've had candidates that have submitted materials that were just all about the headlines of success metrics, which is how folks have been trained. we had to get better at how do we ask the right questions to get them just like just the stories you tell around a campfire right about the like the scar tissue that you have with tell us those stories so where did that conviction come from he was wavering why did you believe so much that that was still the right path for sales when it was a struggle at first to find the right people like oh because it's not about sales i mean it's it's it's it has nothing to do with a particular whether it's solutions engineering, support, sales, finance.

33:55I think, again, back to folks that have shared passion, shared values, and a shared disposition about building something meaningfully with people they love working with for a long time and doing it the right way. That's what you're looking for. And then when you find that, it doesn't matter what particular team or role or anything. I mean, I think you all have started to feel that across the company. And that's where the flywheel starts to take shape. You just got like, you know, it's not about these siloed organizations where you have to do things differently because that's a certain type of animal.

34:32And then, you know, thankfully, we started to see like, holy shit, that's an incredible salesperson that loved the process. And like, just go read the materials. And that is whenever you're doing something that kind of takes conviction that's contrary, you need those early omens that like, okay, I'm not totally on the wrong path. Reinforce it. And to reinforce it. And it's like, I mean, when I say like my conviction was wavering, I mean, I don't think I needed much in the way of convincing. But it was, but it actually was extremely helpful that Steve was so emphatic because I think that we've all, I mean, for us, the proxy, especially in sales, How much of your sales is like understanding what a customer needs and then sculpting what you've got for that customer?

35:15It's like, well, we're being very explicit with you about what we need. And it's like, this is a very good proxy for a customer relationship. And if you're not reading the RFP thoroughly and you're kind of shooting your mouth off, it's like, well, you're not going to work. Then how rigorous are you going to be on the thing that you're submitting to that CIO? And you're going to be like, oh, well, I rushed through it because, you know, I was on a plane. It's like, no, what? So it gives you. And I will say that the other thing about this company is that like we, this is where you get to that trust.

35:48Like we, this company sticks it. Like we know that if someone is out there representing oxide in any capacity, sales, finance, operations, engineering, we know that they themselves are going to hold themselves to a high standard of execution. But I would say like the reason that it's reasonable to ask like how could this scale? It is easy to see how these things don't scale. Meaning like there was real investor pressure early, especially around sales hiring, where it's like, I want you hiring faster. Why aren't you hiring faster? It's probably this materials process. You know? And so you can totally imagine scenarios in which you're like, okay, there's just like too much external pressure.

36:30Yeah. you've got to relax these constraints. And that's not to say that you don't need to adjust and modify things as the company gets bigger and you are. But the foundation is so, so, so important. And sticking it out just a little longer, you get these omens. And you're like, okay, all right, actually, no, stay the course. And then you get the down the road, it's like, oh, man, what a great model. And this happens because I do, I mean, I end up reviewing a lot of materials. And you just get numb as you're reviewing materials. And then you can have a candidate that's just a bit better than the others.

37:08Like, oh, this person's great. No, no, no. I'm just like, I'm numb from these others. And then you begin to like, God, maybe this is unreasonable. Especially when it's a new role. And then you get that superlative candidate. And you're just like, oh, thank God. Thank God. All right. Yes. Yeah, it still works. There's still hope. There's still hope. So on that vein, fast forward 20 years. You guys are retiring from oxide. 20. You forget to, we're youngsters still. Okay. Fast forward 40 years. 40 years. Okay, fine. You've built a generation of computer companies. The next generation is running it.

37:43You guys are ready to hang them up. Are you still, does Oxide still do uniphone compensation? Predict it. Oh, boy. Hard to know. I genuinely, hand on heart, don't know because I just don't know. I think that we, it's easy to, I can easily go either way. I can easily be like, no, no, of course not because that generational company has to have 10 ,000 employees. I'm like, no, God, that would never work. And then I can go the other side of like, yeah, that generational company only had 500 employees, only had 600 employees. And I just don't know. What do you think, Steve? Brian doesn't know. I don't know.

38:25I think the kind of like the foundation behind uniform compensation still remains and which is what uh transparency for sure transparency is that there be tiers maybe still uniform but like tiered uniform like uniformity that does that make it non-uniform well look i'll give you an example so like we we do not have uniform construction of compensation at oxen right we have we have salespeople that are putting something in the middle where if they do not achieve their target, they make less than everyone else at the company. And if they overachieve their target, they make more than everyone else at the company.

39:07And we've definitely had open conversations about whether others are interested in putting something in the middle. It gets a little interesting when you're like, okay, well then what's my pull requests? Right, or how many soldering on a board they're soldering. Right, right. And the... But again, if we're thinking about everyone having an equally important role in the company, I think that's foundational as well. Where a lot of people are just like, oh, you can't possibly pay the same for a support engineer. Always support engineers. Support. They always get respect. They always get kicked. They're the first example.

39:46It's like, I got to kick one of these. So support, get over here. You know, I'm going to kick you. And so, look, I mean, is there a future where we want to be building folks that are earlier in their career? That's what I was thinking about. The farm team. The farm team, yeah. Look, I don't know. Don't know. But I think the things that start to, that eventually you're asking questions around are, I mean, we already hit this first, like, is it rigid in all regards? Or is it the foundation of transparency and equal weighting of value of job, which is kind of like the first two important pieces. And then sales was the first time that we broke it being completely rigid and uniform across everything, but landed on transparency and kind of equal weighting.

40:36and so yeah the things that will open the question is you know how will we address folks that are earlier in their career as we get further along and international I mean I don't know I would like to believe that that we're going to be able to hold true to the foundation of this thing regardless of international and some of the other things that will and I think The other thing that we've been told so frequently, like, oh, this doesn't scale, this doesn't scale. It's just kind of a waste of time to think about it. Yeah. Because it's like, actually, the only thing I care about is, like, does it scale to, like, the next 10 hires?

41:14And the answer to that is yes. So we've kind of figured it out. And I think that the other thing that, you know, the esprit de corps that we have here is so sacred that we, and it's not unrelated, right? Because people don't, when you, whenever you tie compensation to people's individual actions, then people will adjust their individual actions accordingly. And what you will, it's like, well, if I, if I'm doing this, like, is this what I'm on? Has this been my OKR, my MBO? Is it yes or no? And like, we want people to make the right decision. And we want them to do that when we trust them to do that in the moment.

41:59And so we don't want to lose any of that. So anything we would do that we want to be very careful about anything we would do because we don't want to lose any of what we've got. Because what we've got is lightning in a bottle. I mean, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a team this large with this kind of breadth and this kind of depth that has this kind of a spirit of the Lord. And by the way, throughout, we've been wide open to the questions. And we would never do anything where it was, you are unable to serve your customers appropriately without X. You are going to hurt the company or put a limiter in front of where the company can go because of Y.

42:35And we've had the good fortune of like, when it comes to this topic, we have never had to compromise or make sacrifices around our customers and the growth of the business around that. And I just hope that'll be the case for a long time to come. one of the things that you said in our conversation initially brian with even doing this even being here was you wanted to capture this this special thing you have papers materials the whole process and expose it you want to kind of i think you said the word infect or something like that to other companies out there that you hope that you can be a leader in that front yes we're gonna put something out we're gonna share the inside of something that's right you'll prove it of course yeah but it's it's to be a version that you can showcase what's happened here what do you hope happens what do you hope people do that changes maybe the the goliaths the googles the whomevers you'd think though they probably won't change but maybe the next version of the fangs will be reformed one funeral at a time sure to paraphrase thomas kuhn uh the um i did that there's there's no salvation i think for those companies um i think that the you know uh jared diamond's collapse is very instructive in this regard um and you companies when when the when the culture is wrong fixing a culture is such a gargantuan amount of work that you would have and so thankless in so many regards and there are so few people that are capable of true cultural change you'd have to ask yourself why would someone do that why would someone sign up for that job and this is like look no further than than intel like intel has had a an acute deep cultural problem for for decades and the and they've got i mean really the first person in they've got their first outside ceo in their history in lip boudin and not coincidentally it's the first person who's trying to fix the culture problem it is far too late and the far too late to that company i mean good luck to them but it's like the kinds of things you need to do.

44:44I've got a big new investor. That's what that is. Oh, God. Yeah. You and me. Yeah. When's the board meeting? That's right. Do we get to go? I said, I didn't get a choice on this one. No, no. I guess I invested. Oh, I guess we invested. Yeah. Anyways. So I think that we're, that I think you kind of have to give up on. I think you can have, what I think is possible is around new company formation and inspiring a rising generation. And one of the things that, you know, I've got a lot more, I've got a lot of faith in the rising generation. I think that the, you know, maybe just from my own kids and their friends and kind of the approach that they take, I think that young people have, yes, they've got flooded with a lot of dis and misinformation, but they've also got the ability to go find, like, Really information that is a real source of truth for them in a positive way.

45:43And I think that we can be an inspiration for that new company formation. I think we can tell people there's a different way to do things. And people, and I think to a fault, have mimicked some of the bad behavior in Silicon Valley. And that bad behavior has kind of reinforced itself. A TV show? A TV show or Silicon Valley like the place, right? that you've seen, that behavior around here is degraded. And there is... Well, and I think people are just by nature moving fast, looking to copy things that are around them, pick up stuff that probably worked or sort of is the way you do things. So I think part of getting it out there is giving another little blueprint that one could follow.

46:27And even if they're not rigorously evaluating it, they're like, that seems plausible. we had also the ecosystem around new company formation so a recruiter that we used was one of the parties that was just like this materials thing is bonkers you guys are just wrong I can't work with this I can't work with this, you understand I'm working with like 50, 60 companies talking to hundreds and hundreds of candidates across these companies you'll never hire someone this way this is not how it works and it took some time and some like to get them around the bend to agree to work with us on this and kind of like kind of like work together to help them with how we operate through this process and some good feedback for us just in terms of or let's say we we landed on a good process here we go there we go and uh and uh by the end of it we uh we had a candidate come aboard that they were uh that they had worked with and uh one i would say very key moment in that path they would have a candidate that they're very hot on we would talk to them seems possible yeah this is good we have a good conversation they submit materials materials are terrible terrible terrible materials and i i mean it'd be interesting to talk to these folks but like we would send the recruiter the materials and the recruiter is a smart person yeah i mean and so like on the one hand like had yes had the conviction of their own beliefs but is it is an intelligent individual and they would read the materials and be like oh oh those are bad right well and i think it also like maybe like challenging some of your priors like actually maybe I thought that guy was really good.

48:20And you guys talked to the guy and you guys also thought he was really good. And now all of us can agree that based on the materials, it's terrible. Maybe I've been like, maybe I'm not gauging this correctly. Is that like talking versus walking though? Because like papers, the materials, I keep saying papers accidentally, the materials are kind of like walking. You can, yeah. Show me your papers. Show me your papers. You know, you can talk a lot, but can you walk? The materials is like the walk. Yes, but in the case of this recruiter, by the end of the process, they said, and we've seen this across investors, recruiters, where they are now like taking that process and begin to implement.

49:04So this particular recruiter is like, if you don't mind, I want to start kind of like educating some of our clients on this process. because I'm now seeing value in being able to get higher quality candidates further along with these engagements. So there's an example of like, we'd love that. It'd be amazing. And anywhere we can help where this helps others begin to do hiring, add elements to their hiring process that helps them get better people at work. I almost wanted to, if it's not a byproduct of how we force hiring like i know people looking for jobs like i submitted everywhere oh right yeah on email.com you kind of have to gunshot your opportunity because one you're between things you're desperate maybe it can be that situation where you got laid off and your position is not of your own doing necessarily you may have been upset about where you were at maybe you would have changed and you love oxide or whatever but it's almost like the hiring scenario is is forced to go gunshot.

50:06Let me put my, let me put who I am everywhere versus go super deep on where I truly can apply. And what you see - It's got to be both sides though. The company has to do what you all do and the candidate has to be willing to do what you ask them to do. And in particular, what you have is a lot of companies and I think it's a mistake. Companies are thinking like, well, you know, this is a lot of like tedious resume review. This is a great task for LLMs. Let's put LLMs in charge of this and let's relieve the human of having, because they only do resume review. They don't have any other materials to look at.

50:38So the cynicism that you see from JobUp, it's like, look, these guys just use the AI anyway. So what you need to do... Play the game. Play the game. Play the game. And it's like, it's basically random whether you get a... The kind of conviction from the candidate is it's random whether you get a call or not. And I don't know that they're wrong for a lot of companies. So it's like, if it's random, AI slop your resume up such that an LLM can actually identify. At some point, the LLMs are going to start writing. It's going to be like, my resume, this is not even in alien rooms. It's like, yeah, but the other LLM can read it and it's like, for whatever reason, it's selecting it.

51:15It's more efficient that way. The art is like the white space has like a... And then you scatter shot your way out there and then you get that call because it's random. And I've never seen that or I said, that is the wrong way to get a job. And I do feel that like look yes we're exos okay we've seen shitty job markets we've seen job markets way shittier than this one way shittier than this one and it's and the like yeah like what do you need to do to find a job in a shitty job market it's hard i mean i i've got total sympathy especially people that are suddenly laid off and are are scrambling but you need to figure out what you need to do next and why do you just get a job okay okay take a half a step back because you've got to find what's what is going to be if like if you truly need to like pay the bills you should like get literally any job that you can use while you're actually formulating your proper job search i used to listen to bruce williams as a kid you know like was it bruce williams was on talk net It's like AM talk radio.

52:24I'm dating myself. Even Steve is like, you are on your own, pal. No. Is this like Sally Jessie Raphael? This is before she had a day time talk show. I was thinking of a very weird turn. Before she had a day time talk show, she was an AM radio call-in kind of advice show. And I used to listen to this as a kid. And Bruce Williams gave us really good advice. People would call in, and he would call in with their financial problems. And he's like, look, if you need to find a job, what you need to go do is work the overnight shift at a convenience store. And, like, get a paycheck. And then use your days to go interview and find the right job.

53:04And this was in, like, 1982. The recession in 1982 was super, super deep. And, like, what you need to go do if you're job searching is, like, you actually need to figure out what you need to go do, what you want to go do. and you've got to then find the company, whatever it is, that is like, I want to work there. And then you've got to be like, okay, I'm going to focus my efforts on wanting to work there. And it's like, yeah, maybe that's oxide. We can't take you. But hopefully that process has sharpened you in terms of like, now these are, and you should not be spraying prey. Spraying prey. That is what everybody's doing.

53:39That's what everyone's doing. I know because we've talked to people recently, like people literally who are listeners of our show that we've recently met. We had a live show in Denver, by the way. I don't know if you knew that. We did a live show on stage, kind of like this, and we invited people out. They bought tickets. They're fans. They listened to the show. It was cool. And a few of those folks did not have employment at the time. Yeah. And they shared how challenging it is to be so skilled, to have such intention, to be great people, and have this challenge. Yeah. And, I mean, again, heart goes out to them because it's really hard.

54:14You've got your own self worth being chipped away at. And it's really hard when you've got someone who's then, that person has set their whole being on being at oxide. Right. And then, you know, I'm the one that's got to be like, no. But spray and pray is not going to, that's not the right way. I would love to keep going deep on this subject, and I'm sure we can because, you know, we're passionate about it. It's the defining, one of the many defining factors about your business. but we haven't mentioned at all where you're at yeah this is a scale moment i know there's some things we can say and can't say you share what you want yeah but can you speak to your personal feelings to being at the moment where you have to do a heck of a lot more in a month than you've done previously i mean it's it's definitely exciting to be in the situation that we had been building for and hoped for, which was struggling to catch up to fulfill demand, figuring out how we can stay in front of customer opportunities that are going to push us really, really hard, being able to not prepare ourselves to scale, but actually to go scale and supply chain and manufacturing and delivery and logistics and field service and all that stuff.

55:37Different kinds of fears and stressors. But yeah, I mean, it's exciting. It's exciting because I think we, you know, last year we were excited to get the product, you know, first year fully in commercial market into customers' hands and be able to prove out that we could ship reliably, build reliably, ship software updates every eight weeks. And last year, a year ago, we had to raise. We were very upfront about that with the team. I mean, we're not trying to get anyone to throw up in their mouth, but like, hey, folks, we run out of cash in May, June, or July, depending on which model you look at.

56:17So just FYI. And so we have to hit the milestones that we need to go raise. And that's not where we are this year. Right. We're a whole different ballgame. A whole different ballgame. It just shifts from what are the milestones to raise to what are the milestones to stay ahead of these large customers that are growing. To deliver. To deliver, to delight our customers, and to not lose track of who we are. Right. And you guys are a hardware company. You know that. Systems company. Hardware and software. I like that. Systems company. Yeah, sure. I think there you are, but we all know that. I'll just lay that up as a contrast to a pure software company.

56:59Yes, yes. Because you are not in control of every aspect of your business, supply chain, I'm thinking of specifically. Oh, sure. As a pure software company, you could just write the software and deliver it. But there are so many more moving parts that are moving around the world. Yep, undoubtedly. How much is your ability to deliver on the demand that you've found outside of your control? Oh, I think it's— Put it on a percentage score. There are things that are outside of our control, for sure. And things that happen. One thing that this team gives us the confidence in, we've had so many of those things already happen.

57:36Right. And, you know, Steve and I were talking about the things that, like, are biggest single sources of stress in the history of the company. And for Steve, rightfully, it was the SDB failure. Right? SDB failure. We had to wire payroll on Tuesday morning. It's Thursday and there's a run in the bank. That was a crisis moment. It's Friday and the bank has failed. Right. It's like we had to wire payroll on Tuesday morning. My view was, you know what? It'll be fine. It'll be fine because Janet Yellen cares about this problem, the SVD problem. We were not the only ones that had the SVD problem. Everybody had the SVD problem.

58:12Right. And it's like it will be disruptive in the short – versus some of these other issues, you can die alone. Yeah. So my biggest sources of strain were stress, were in the development, especially of our first product, where it's like, yeah, this CPU will come out on reset. We don't know why. Janet Yellen does not give a shit about that problem. Like, nobody cares about that problem. You are out here in the wilderness, and you can die. And alone, really, because you're inventing it. 100%. So on the one hand, that is scary. On the other hand, we have now hit so many of those. And we have found our way around them.

58:49that, of course, I'm like tempting the gods. You are. You did your keynote, too. You're not done with it. But I think that there are things that are out of your control. But when you have those things, you're like, okay, who do we know at this laminate? Right. But also, by the way, when you say a hardware company, then most hardware companies would have a bunch of third-party hardware in their system that they are reliant upon. So they would be like, what if we have an issue with our third-party switch or software? What if we have a firmware issue in this component? How do we go solve for that?

59:23So there you end up having 10x the surface area of supply chain problems. And because of the way that we've designed the system and taken a lot more of it first party, we've shrunk that surface area. And then with the key suppliers, being able to go deep with them and demonstrate to them that we're not treating them as a vendor, that we're just like, you know, one of four that we're going to partner with. there has been so many so much time that we've been able to punch above our weight where yes there was like a shock to the system and yet they were like oxide we got you and so i think you know we've done this in manufacturing manufacturing software taking control the build process right like a bunch of the stuff that we now which took years uh making sure we had control over um yes you're down to like inventory tariffs you know stuff like that but those are problems that can be solved by, you know, banking relationships and capital and manufacturing partners.

1:00:17And so it is good to be in the place of - We have spent a lot of time building those relationships. So one of the things that we, very strong disposition that we had, so we were at Samsung together, Samsung bought Joyant. And we thought, oh, this would be great. Like, you know, we're a little tiny Joyant and we've got these relationships with these various folks, but like Samsung must have these great relationships. What we learned is like, everyone kind of hates Samsung's guts because Samsung wants to dual source absolutely everything and cares about one metric, price, that's it. Gotcha. And what we discovered is, and we had like folks confide in us, like, look, we really like you guys.

1:00:55So we're going to like continue to talk with you. You should know that like my boss doesn't want me to spend any time with you because we always put Samsung at the back of the line. I'm like, that's, it's kind of eyeopening because you would think like, oh, dual sourcing, that makes sense for everything. And it's like, when you do that, you're sending a message that like, I actually don't value our relationship at all. And there are things where we have a true like vendor relationship. It is not a partnership relationship at all. Right. And like, you know, FedEx versus UPS. And FedEx reminds us of this whenever they toss one of our packages in the bushes.

1:01:24And, you know, it's like, they're like, oh, we actually don't have like, there's no partnership with FedEx. Yeah, exactly. But for the component choices we've made, we really sought true partnerships. How do we find, instead of like trying to dual source lowest common denominator everything, how do we pick the right partner and then go deep with that partner? And, you know, we were talking to our fan provider, San Yudanky, and they're like, San Yudanky, we had them make a very important modification to our fans to lower at 0 % PWM, lower the RPM from 5 ,000 RPM to 2 ,000 RPM because it would consume much less power, which they did.

1:02:01and they did in part because they're like, we've never encountered someone for whom like this relationship, I'm used to just getting beat up on price. That's it. And it's like, then when you build that relationship, by the way, when you need to have a pricing conversation, it's a much easier pricing conversation. They want to help you. They want to help you. And they were like, all right, look, Hey, let me be transparent with you. And like, here's what we're, you know, and we want to make sure that folks have the margin that they need, but we need to have the margin that we need. We need our customers to need the price that they need.

1:02:28But you can have those conversations that are easier to have those conversations when you actually have a solid foundation of real partnership. Yeah. And these are risks. I mean, yesterday was the sixth anniversary of Oxide. So we got to celebrate with the team. Happy birthday. Thank you. And it was fun because we got to go back and think about, like, what was going on six years ago when we had, like, a couple slides, Google slides. I think it was PowerPoint slides. And we were trying to raise money for the company. And we had been in that mode just to your question of, like, how does it feel now at this point looking forward?

1:02:58We've been in the mode of thinking about the four big risks that investors are always thinking about for companies and their evolution. There's team risk. And I think we feel pretty good that we've knocked down team risk. There's technology risk. And that was ever-present over the last, you know, certainly. I mean, there are still elements of the present. I don't know if they're still present. But we have de-risked a whole bunch of the technology risk. there is then market risk and we now have kind of crossed into where we are getting pulled by the market versus where you are trying to push yourself into the market to get pulled and push and then the fourth is capital risk and this latest fundraise was to make sure we secured our capital future combined with things that we will do with lines of credit and everything else to for a hard-working company that you have that balance right which does leave you in the privileged position, there's still plenty of risk, but it's execution risk.

1:03:56And so now, you know, we get to go focus on doing the thing in front of us that is dead ass clear. And I think that's what's exciting for the team and why, you know, we are entering this kind of next chapter for the next six years. Can you do that with the side of the team you have now? I guess it kind of comes back to the hiring process. We're growing. You are growing. You are growing. Are you actively non-AI generating new job roles. You should have seen the show of hands of people that weren't at the last one of these, people that joined in the last three months. We've got a bunch of folks that are in conversation that just couldn't quite get, we weren't quite there that would join us here.

1:04:35So yeah, no, we're adding folks as fast as we can find terrific folks. So yeah, we've got whatever, 13 open roles right now. Multiple hires. Where do you go to get that? Is there a URL? Is it Oxide? The website. The obvious URL. And again, we write those job descriptions carefully. We are, you know, one of the things that we've got a lot of vigilance is like we are not hiring recklessly. We are hiring. We are not just selecting carefully, but we're also very careful. One of the things we've just already learned, when we open a new job description, there are so many people that just want to work for Oxide.

1:05:14if we don't write that job description carefully we can get a flood of folks and it can be really hard to actually we want to be very crisp about what we're hiring for and we want to make sure it's a few people like i want to work for oxide and they kind of look at the roles they're like oh okay like this is this sort of like you know do you have any of anything else like this is not like this stuff all seems like really hard it's like well yeah yeah we actually have it's really hard to stop what we need to go to. So yes, we, and we, and we need to be very, very careful about how we expand the team.

1:05:48Um, but a part of that also is when we open up a job description, we would like to hire someone there. If we can't find someone that is worthy of this team, we will not hire someone there. We are, it's not like we're going to, well, we got to find like the best of whoever applied by Wednesday. It's like, nope. If we don't find someone that like, conversely, if we find two, three people, it's probably better that way. I'm honest. But we'll hire more than one person. And like, boy, one thing that we've done, right? Yeah. That, I mean, not that we were ever really second-guessing ourselves, but I remember a couple of times we would have a JD open and we get two really superlative people.

1:06:26Like, God, how do we decide between two supporters? Like, let's hire both of them. And we would hire both of them. That's good. Absolutely. And we have... And those were some of the best decisions. Some of the best decisions. That's right. Well, my favorite is... Why not both? Why not both? Why not both? Why not both? Let's close here because I know we're getting close on our time. We got food to eat. I think the Computer History Museum buses are taking off. Oh, yeah. Let's do it in one second then. Give me one minute of this. Yep. We're here. You got this next phase. We've been privy to some information.

1:06:56I'm not sharing it. You all share it. Give us a glimpse. What version of a glimpse can you give our audience? It's going out, what? Not this Friday, next Friday? So not this week, next week. What glimpse can you give? In terms of where we're going? Yeah, the horizon. The horizon, as you all know. What glimpse can you give us? I would say that for a long time, as Steve mentioned, certainly prospective investors thought there was a lot of market risk. We believed in our heart that there was not that market risk because of what we knew. But ultimately, you only de-risk that market risk when you have signed P.S.

1:07:35that's what you reset market risk and what i would say is where we are now we can say with absolute confidence that that market risk has been de-risked and it is interesting to watch the doubters become believers um when and we now absolutely know that market risk is off the table it is just execution so going on location to oxide as an adventure seeing everybody behind this awesome company is just breathtaking honestly a lot of great people a lot of great culture a lot of great thoughts and i swear an elite team is so hard to beat when it's oxides team it's just amazing what they're doing they are truly crossing the chasm as we speak a massive po sign a massive check for a series b and clearly it's just about execution at this point so when i say that we're fans we're fans fans of oxide and i want to say a big thank you to my good friend brian cantrell and obviously steve tuck as well but the initial call with brian and the initial vision was what set off this thing we're doing we're peeling back the layers of oxide going inside oxide these podcasts are one part of this inside oxide peak and uh it's kind of cool so we got to sit down with them obviously you heard the pod but we also got to take a film crew with us and shoot a lot of footage of oxcon and this three-day event the computer history museum the baseball game the ballers oakland ballers and just so much fun stuff we're producing a 10-minute documentary about this moment in oxides history we got some interviews coming up that are on their youtube channel a teaser coming out very soon and i can't wait for you to see what we've done it is so cool but a big thank you to brian and a big thank you to steve for trusting us to come out there and listen capture and ultimately share this story so i hope you enjoyed the show today a look inside oxide a look inside their culture what makes them tick it's good stuff i enjoyed it hope you enjoyed it too thank you to our awesome beat freak and residents break master cylinder those beats are always banging.

1:09:52Thank you to my good friend, Brian Toro, and also Austin Myers for coming along with us out there to Oakland, California. I can't wait for y 'all to see this. It's going to be epic. All right, this is it. We're done. We'll see you next week.

1:10:28Thank you.