Distinguished Eng On Stack Ranking, Competing with Bezos, Regrets | Bryan Cantrill

25:22It's like, then maybe you shouldn't be in this industry at all. Like 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 happier. You'll have meaning doing that. Quit your job at Meta and become a podcaster, you know? Oh, well, I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

25:44Bryan Cantrill:Well, it's interesting you say that because there's this subreddit, subreddit this community that's all about uh financial independence earning enough and i'll see a very regular post that says guys i did it and i don't know what to do now yeah yeah i did it 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 the even when the goal is has meaning this is a problem this is right 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 rack of 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.

26:47It's like the thing I want, like now I'm not even like, I got like, what am I 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 and 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

27:08Bryan Cantrill:aspire to right i i well what would you say because i i do know someone who is genuinely happy just doing nothing and by doing nothing i just mean like uh relaxing in bed you know watching their shows you know going to hanging out with friends and stuff 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 knew a guy who, I actually did know a guy who did this, who, as I'm thinking about people who made money, 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.

27:54And he was like a pothead. He was like, this sounds like the level of work that I'm, 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.

28:32And he like, at the start, he owned like all of Yahoo in terms of like surfing. Because the way Yahoo worked, you may be wondering what the hell I'm talking about. Yahoo was a curated directory of links. This is again where I sound like it. Oh, pre-Google. Very much pre-Google. This is like pre-Google. This is not just pre-Google. This is like pre-Lycos, pre-Hotbot, pre-AltaVista. 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.

29:05And 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, 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 the 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.

29:34Bryan Cantrill:Right. You said earlier there were these ratings, superlative, excellent, good. Excellent, good, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I noticed you didn't mention there's a bad rating. There was a, yeah, no, there was not, basically not. not sun did not um the the idea of like a pip or the the whole like rank and yank which is what intel famously did um the um rank and yank is that was was that just stack ranking and it was it was their name for stack ranking yeah it was rank and yank um yeah stack stack ranking is organizational cancer it is it is very very very bad news when you especially if you are going to terminate a bottom end percent that is um that's death i i really think that is just a wall-to-wall terrible idea because you've incentivized people to have dead weight on their teams um that they can that oh is that oh so they have fodder they got someone to throw into the wood chipper uh wait 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 like they don't they don't seem to be doing anything and someone kind of took me aside 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 i'm 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 the my big belief is that that teams do extraordinary things and that everybody should want to be serving the team it is 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 percent yeah trading below our cash at one point i mean was there not some management at some point saying hey we gotta it's time to oh i mean mass layoff oh no no sun did i mean sun resisted layoffs for a little while scott was kind of famously did not mcnealy famously did not want to lay people off but that which was a mistake he waited too long for that um but no once the layoff started i mean i I think at one point I counted the number of layoffs that had the rounds of layoffs.

32:10It was like 35 layoffs, 35 rounds of layoffs over like eight years.

32:14Bryan Cantrill:I mean, it's more than for a year. 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, uh, uh, 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, 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 1500 people or that's 3000 in today's OVITs.

33:01Bryan Cantrill:Was the company aware that you had that access to that data? Uh, it's Sun. Sun's strength and weakness was that no one was truly in charge. So, um, I mean, I think it would not have been, I would not have been surprising. Um, but, um, I mean, Sun to its credit, um, 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 the org tool, which was the tool they had to show you kind of organizational layouts. And we weren't doing anything untoward. But it was a way for us to know, like, what's happening in the company.

33:37So, no, it was layoff after layoff after layoff after layoff after layoff.

33:40Bryan Cantrill:I mean, 35 layoffs. It's crazy. But that was everybody, too. Again, that was not like – Oh, okay. I mean, it is hard to express the period from the dot-com bust when, you know, kind of pets.com creators in the spring of 2000, they kind of ran on momentum until the end of 2000. And at the end of 2000, the dot-com bubble truly, truly burst for everybody, for Sun 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 – Y Combinator is I think 2006. I see. And starts to form, I think in part because I think – to get Graham's perspective on this.

34:36But 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.

34:50Bryan Cantrill:Slightly off topic, but I was stalking your Twitter and I saw that Paul Graham had blocked you. Do you know? Paul Graham blocked me. He did block me. I think he, yeah, that was a point of pride. 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, what do you think that was 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.

35:25And 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. But yeah, I mean, Paul Graham is complicated for me. He, and there are a couple of 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 you're just like, well, I feel 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 of people like that.

36:00Bryan Cantrill:I understand that Sun Microsystems was eventually acquired by Oracle. Yes, invaded, yeah. And I just want to know, 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 their – because they almost wanted to buy Sun punitively.

36:40They 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 necessarily controversial. It took a while to close. Um, what, I mean, to, to the contrary, I mean, there's nothing like really controversial about Oracle because Oracle is what it is. Um, Oracle is just, there's not a lot of depth to Oracle. Um, Oracle is just an octopus that knows how to feed itself. And the, um, the sun was very much not that way. Sun was, there 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.

37:27Sun 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 it tended to attract people that wanted to do that, that wanted to do – that wanted to be bold. And 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 Solaris and then all the technologies that I worked on, you know, all these things came out of Sun. There were so many of these like seminal technologies that came out of Sun because of that kind of that passion and independence.

38:06Oracle doesn't have 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 me about Sun is that Sun, in terms of business execution, Sun fell down a bunch of times. And I thought we would have someone in Oracle 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, asphyxiating competition, and then raising the rent on its customers.

38:50Like that is really what Oracle wanted to go do. And it's not a company I wanted to work for.

38:56Bryan Cantrill:I see. Because there's a talk that you gave that where you really, I mean. You know, I didn'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 same slide. Yeah, 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 lie part of? Of Oracle. Yeah. Oracle has made many promises to its own customers that it does not keep.

39:36Oracle 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. Yeah, the making that slide without crying bit was not about Oracle. That was very much about Sun. And that was Scott McNeely's epitaph for Sun. Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computing forever.

40:00Bryan Cantrill:Yeah, you said that. Yeah, that was the bit that – like it still chokes me up a little bit just because it's true. It was true. and we um when we started oxide it's like adopted that as our own mission because that that's exactly what we wanted to go do with oxide um and i thought was a very uh concise distillation of that and that was just not oracle oracle was not interesting when when a lot of the top engineers it seems like there was a an exodus a big exodus where people confiding with each other like were you talking to other high-level engineers say hey we gotta get out of here oh yeah oh yeah i mean it's not even like, I mean, you're just like, you're in a burning building.

40:38Are people confiding with one another that 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 do you, uh, and no, I mean, it was pretty clear. 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 son employees that were not going to be oracle employees uh aqua laid off like they wouldn't there wouldn't be a

41:14Bryan Cantrill:existing company they're just right that's right so they would they would lose their job 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 you like i lay me off first um this was not me this was not us. We were, I, I, I was, I mean, in many, 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. Uh, 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 salary or whatever it was.

41:51Um, but we, no, I, um, 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, um, that we could combine the best of both companies or what I perceived to be the best of both companies. And as it turns out, that's not the case. So

42:07Bryan Cantrill:what'd you see? Cause you left really quick. So, Oh 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, I, and 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.

42:45Our 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 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.

43:21I 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.

43:35Bryan Cantrill:You mentioned people were eager to get themselves laid off. How do you even do that? Oh, you tell your manager, look, there's a list. Put me on it. Yeah. Oh, there is a list. Okay. Who else is on it? Like, I want to be on it. I mean, it's 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 a courtier kind of whispering about trying to figure out like, what's the scuttlebutt? Who's going to get laid off? I thought you'd have to like really, you know, underperform and like. No, no, no, no, 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.

44:10Could you, I mean, it was much more like Oracle's not interested in what I'm doing, right? And then you get like, Oracle is interested. You're like, oh, God damn it.

44:18Bryan Cantrill:um uh so okay so i i get why you left oracle and and obviously sun was acquired yeah and so i the next place you worked at was uh joyant yeah and i understand that this company competed with aws that's right yeah and uh 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 Amazon at its height was so relentless on execution. And what made Bezos really, really good is that, and I would say, and when I say its height, I mean Amazon hits the mother load. And they hit the mother load not because they're lucky.

45:05There'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 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 operator, 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.

45:54So it was 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. Analysts would ask in the call. They're just like, yeah, we're not talking about that. It was 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 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, the margins on this thing are great.

46:26Like this is actually a great business. And 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 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.

47:00Bryan Cantrill: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 and keep going instead of milking it? Because he is not merely a predator. He is an apex predator in capitalism. This is what makes him so good. He's like, I'm not going to know. Like 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.

47:37It's like, damn, yeah, that's, that's good. That's like, that's how, 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 born. And it, I mean, it was really, and it was very, very hard to compete with Amazon. I'll tell you that. You had to, you had to really like find a lane and we, you know, we found lanes where we can go compete with Amazon, but it was, it was, it was brutal. Their, their, their execution was extraordinary.

48:03Bryan Cantrill: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 Joy and CTO at the time on the contrast between VP of engineering and CTO. And, you know, I'm not sure how much I buy the difference now. I mean, I think in both capacities you're serving as an engineering leader. And I think that, you know, I guess you can argue that a 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.

48:39You are a VP of engineering, maybe 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 Sun, I didn't particularly care. What I did care about is when the CTO had left and then another CTO that we had, the CTO who had been a founder of the company and when he left. So there was kind of like the empty CTO position. I didn't care. What I did care was that we didn't hire externally for that because I did.

49:19So that I did care about a lot about. Like, look, if there's going to be a CTO, I'm happy to be VP of engineering 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.

49:32Bryan Cantrill: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 at that time. What we needed at that time, especially, well, we got rid of the CEO and we really were, we needed really a terrific CEO, which we later got. And so then you started Oxide. Started Oxide in 2019. 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 had worked together at that point.

50:13I mean, Steve was the, when I went to Joyent, I had not talked to Steve prior to going to Joyent and I was going to Joyent 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 Joyent and I'm like, this guy is amazing. And Steve and I just worked very closely together. Steve came up on the go-to-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.

50:50And so now it's like, all right, well, now what? Now we've got to figure out what we want to go do. And we had these long walks in the city because we were 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.

51:24You 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 it 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, and I had always known venture capitalists and had gotten lunch with them over the years, but had not really, like, you know, kind of gone deep.

51:53And I'd known the venture capitalists associated with Joyent 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 just got in 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 uh come 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 lunch with you today I just want to remind you I will fund literally anything you put in front of me.

52:31I think like, wow. And I was like, Steve, you know, reminding myself of this guy's email address. He said, he will fund literally anything we put in front of him. 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 funded? And I'm like, yeah, I think so. And, you know, that was very much in our heart. That was what we had lived at. He had lived at, Steve had been at Dell prior to Joyant.

53:18He'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 was truly in our marrow. And we found like, okay, we can go. And as we started talking to VCs about this, about building, and we, again, envisioned rack scale design. We wanted to do our own board design, do our own switch, do our DC bus bar based design, do all of our own software. Build the machine that we ourselves wish we could have had at Samsung after Samsung acquired Joyent. 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, going to the open compute summit and looking at like Tioga Pass.

54:05And you're like, what is this? Like Tioga 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 what we discovered is this was very contrarian. But things that are contrarian are attractive to venture. So we would get this and 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.

54:45We actually talked 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 at Oxide. He's like, Brian, Brian, stop, 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?

55:18I was probably like, I don't, did 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 go over to 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, you go to hang up on a VC, they'll be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I was like, oh, okay. He's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Because I'm like, fine. Got it. He's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

55:41wait, 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. 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.

56:14Optimistic 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 gotta 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 gonna be like, and one zero that like looked a lot like oxide. And so he's like, look, I'm not gonna find it. I'm like, again, I knew that, but I do wanna help you. like okay that'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 i knew how he could help i had a very concrete idea it's like one of those zeros um i want to talk to him i want to talk to the i want to talk to the founders i want to understand everything that went wrong.

57:11And I 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 that company had made, and again, had a thesis that looked like oxide, but they, 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 at oxide is a rack. It's big. Took us three years, three plus years to develop. They developed something a little bit faster, but as much smaller as basically it, You could view it as like Nitro circa like 2013.

57:42Nitro from the Antiparone acquisition at AWS 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 we're gonna sell like you know two dozen of these things like we got it 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 uh they that wasn't a zero it they were acquired but they were acquired in a way that left the founder extremely bitter um and really felt um like he like the vcs had pumped too much capital and i'm 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 to do at oxide he's like that is a suicide mission and i just remember writing down a little notebook almost like writing down suicide mission kind of underlining it like

59:05Bryan Cantrill:okay we're on a suicide mission that's fun when i think of rack scale compute especially these days i think of racks of gpus yeah right more than cus yeah is that something that you're building yeah right yeah a very reasonable question and when we set out we're like we i mean again set out in 2019 the gp gpu 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 storage, general purpose networking. And our belief had always been like, that's what we actually want. There is so much to go build there and go differentiate there.

59:44And of course, along the way, people are like, what about an accelerator? What about an accelerator, a 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 transparency at that hardware software interface. and we want to write that lowest layer of software. We are, the company, I mean, ultimately we are building a hardware software co-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. NVIDIA is a pretty proprietary company.

1:00:15Executes well, but a very proprietary company. And what that meant is there are effectively two doors for Oxide. One is labeled compete with NVIDIA and the other is labeled partner with NVIDIA. And I didn't want to do either of those things. I have not wanted to do either of those things because I certainly don't want to compete with NVIDIA. And I think that 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.

1:00:46So 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 that's 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 well-executing company in terms of NVIDIA. 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, Supermicron, 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.

1:01:29So over and over and over again, we have had people come to Oxide that we think like, 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 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 ChatGPT 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.

1:02:06That is a CPU that's surfing 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 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.

1:02:38Bryan Cantrill: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 a 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 their 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. So first one, which is actually really famous, when I saw it, I kind of did a double take.

1:03:21Bryan Cantrill:So in 1996, as a new grad, there's this, I don't even know what Usenet 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 a part of it too it's it's not nice either this i saw there's a line in there it says linux is lightweight solaris is a pig which solaris is what i guess the sun was yeah yes and then he writes this long thing and you reply with just a few words you say yeah have you ever kissed a girl yeah oh first of 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.

1:03:59I'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 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, it was 96, it was 96 or 97. Certainly like, I'm like 22. too. Like I'm, 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? No, no. Trust me. It's like the world gets weird. You're going to be asked about this. I, the, uh, so it was actually a, okay.

1:04:40This is, I'm not defending it. I just want to be sure that I want to be clear that like, it was a mistake. Um, the, uh, it was actually a reference to a Saturday Night Live sketch. So there's an SNL sketch that is from an era of Saturday Night Live that it's like you can't even find the video. But they have – so the – William Shatner is guest starring on Saturday Night Live. 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 that, of course, like, you know, in episode, you know, this season, this episode.

1:05:18what 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? Like, 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.

1:05:35Bryan Cantrill:You, have you ever kissed a girl? That was where, you know, going to a 30, going to John Lovitz when like Vulcaneers, John Lovitz, do you know? Yeah, no. Yeah, I've done that. I was like lost to 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's definitely in the regret department. What did he say back to that? Oh, he had a whole lot to say about 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've said here is actually wrong.

1:06:19And so like really going through kind of point by point, I think, you know, I've actually never, I've never met him. They're talking about that. So he's a very, very talented guy. I think he actually, I actually did read, 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, 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.

1:06:52But yeah, that was definitely, that was a life lesson. I would say that history forgot about that though.

1:06:58Bryan Cantrill: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. He 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 that. That's it. I agree with that guy. He's onto 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 subtweeting Paul Graham there somewhere, I think.

1:07:32That must have been it.

1:07:33Bryan Cantrill:But - 2022. I'm curious. Do you think that's true? Yeah. 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 1983 and is invaded 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 Sun. And you got, you know, so I don't view, I do not view Sun as a failure. Sun is like, Sun did not, I mean, arguably did not, or not maybe inarguably did not succeed to the scope of its own ambition.

1:08:17But Sun to me is not a failure. Sun is a success.

1:08:19Bryan Cantrill:Was its collapse at the end, I guess, changeable in hindsight with different leadership? I think so. 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 are a bunch of reasons. I think that the – I think that there's a degree to which Sun got very strung 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. we kind of thought of ourselves I mean the company itself became fractured the layoffs didn't help I mean I think we at Fishworks 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 Sun 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 – that's not what we had.

1:09:26And in hindsight, it was probably time for a change. It was – it's like kind of the way a forest fire – in a normal healthy forest fire is kind of a part of the life cycle of a forest. And you need that to have rebirth. And I think that that – I mean ultimately I think that sun had succeeded but had also run its course. and it was it was time for had its time it had its time absolutely had its time um okay and that

1:09:57Bryan Cantrill:next past take of yours you you wrote in 2022 um 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 yeah i actually don't even know what's going on twitter because it's private excuse me i'll i will thank you to not refer to spacex that way oh right it has been acquired by xai and then xai has been rolled into SpaceX. So like we're now, I guess Gwen Shotwell now runs, runs Twitter. So I guess, do, do you still agree that it's run poorly? Oh God. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I definitely agree that. I mean, cause it, yeah, definitely.

1:10:34It's so, I mean, yeah, yes, yes. I mean, yes. I really, I 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, they, they're all, 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 see. It's like the level of racism, bluntly.

1:11:16I mean, crazy racism, crazy, crazy racism, crazy anti-Semitism, crazy and crazy 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 so deeply offensive and reflective. 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. We're just not going to do that.

1:11:57Bryan Cantrill:And you lived 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 going to be built and then shut down.

1:12:31Like 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 us. I remember thinking this, like, you know, you're just like, and of course, looking back at it 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 what I would say is like you got to be really careful about listening to other people.

1:13:09People will tell you that this is going to be the future or that thing is dead. And you 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. People tell us you can't start a computer company in 2019. I'm really glad we didn't listen to them. VC firms, we only fund SaaS. Those VC firms are like, well, that's like SaaS is struggling right now. But I would also say similarly, like if SaaS is in your heart, as an example, where people are like, right now people are like, SaaS is going to be, the Gen AI, the LLM-assisted coding is going to really put a squeeze on the SaaS companies.

1:13:53And I think there's definitely truth to that. But if one's heart is in that, you should 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, this is, to quote Steve Jobs, this is the dent I want to kick in the universe.

1:14:41Bryan Cantrill:I notice your career, almost everything's driven from fulfillment and intrinsic motivation. is there a time in your career that you look at and say that's the happiest time of my career yeah that's a great question we ask this at oxide we ask you when have you been happiest and why um for exactly that reason and i would say that like there it's not the it's not necessarily an era um it is it is the it is times that i've been happy i mean bluntly like i'm pretty happy right now. Oxide's great. We have the moments for me, and this was an important kind of question for me to reflect on as we were starting Oxide.

1:15:20And 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 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 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 me 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.

1:15:59Like this is actually too difficult to pull off. And then everybody works together, compliments one another and you pull it off, man, that is, that feeling is extraordinary. And the times that I'd had that, I'd had it with D-Trace. I had had it at Fishworks. I'd had it at Joyent 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.

1:16:37And 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? Heist 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. We built a company around that. And it's extraordinary.

1:17:12It 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.

1:17:22Bryan Cantrill: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 hire in human history because I feel I have made the worst hire 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.

1:17:55I think you've made the worst hire. I'm like, thank you. Thank you very much. Um, that was a bad experience. It was also very eyeopening because everything I was doing about hiring was wrong. And we, after we rectified that situation and got him out, we stripped hiring to the studs and really rethought hiring from the, 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 Oxide. and there was a moment where I'm like, oh my God, like this extraordinary team at Oxide, 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.

1:18:37I 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 know if 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.

1:19:14I mean, if I go to the time machine, maybe I would take away the Usenet post and maybe that wouldn't have any long-lasting consequences, but boy, that's about it.

1:19:21Bryan Cantrill:Awesome. And then last question is, if you can go back to the beginning of your career, knowing everything you know now, what advice would you give yourself? Jesus, don't fuck it up. Don't fuck it up. I would just think, because I feel 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 controvertising 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 have been able to do so much with so many extraordinary people.

1:20:08I'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 say, like, just, yeah, I don't want to screw anything up. Like I just, because I feel that I feel really, really lucky. And it wasn't always because, because again, it's like I made mistakes along the way, but the mistakes became load bearing and important. And I wouldn't want to not make those mistakes.

1:20:39Bryan Cantrill:Those mistakes were really important. Well, it 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.

1:21:13Bryan Cantrill: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 Grigorik 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