Bringing the Cloud on Prem  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: Bringing the Cloud on Prem - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/30bb057f-d0bd-4f5e-8de8-61d4462384bf ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Missed Podcast, Missed Show Expertise** - Adam Stacoviak missed the first podcast with Bryan Cantrill, where the "Silicon Valley" show was discussed. - He is considered the biggest fan of the show among the hosts, unlike Jerod Santo and Gerhard Lazu. Transcript: Jerod Santo I should have never invited Gerhard. Yeah. This is a blowback for Jared. Well, Adam is here. Brian is here. Do you want to get it out of the way? I mean, I'm sure Adam will bring it up. It's going to be the whole show, Jared. The whole show. The whole show is still coming. Steve, are you a fan? Steve Tuck I mean, no, I've been. Bryan Cantrill Brian's been hazing me for the better part of the last year and a half because I got to season. I got through season four. I had not gotten through season five and six. And so he would fire references and he's just like, I can't work like this. I can't. I I finally powered through the rest of season five and season six in the last like six months. So that's that's the part that I have in state. Seasons one through four. It was it was a while ago. Jerod Santo I've taken the other tactic. I just refuse to watch it now just so that Adam can't. Adam Stacoviak It's so good. It's so good. It's easy. You think you're hurting Adam, but you're not hurting Adam. Jared is hurting Jared by doing that. That's right. Jerod Santo I'm hurting myself. Adam Stacoviak It is so extraordinary. And it's extraordinary for all the reasons that great satire is extraordinary in terms of it's very much a reflection of the satire that we're living called Silicon Valley. And it's just very, very well done. Bryan Cantrill Well, the number of people that will say, I can't watch it because it hits too close to home, tells you it's perfect ([Time 0:02:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e3e4f5dd-0cb6-46a1-a92c-24ab99c91f5b)) - **Sales Before Product** - Oxide's sales team was built before product market fit, mirroring a common startup mistake. - This mimics a "Silicon Valley" plotline, where Pied Piper follows the same pattern. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Let's not give me too much credit because it took years of ongoing shame to get Steve like finally over the line. Oh, okay. But there is a great, the scene that Steve's alluding to is something, again, is very close to our own lived experience where they build out sales effectively before they have a product. Yeah. And so Richard walks in and there is this sales team that is already built out, but they don't have a product yet. And the sales team, and again, we've seen this over again, you see this over and over and over again in startups where they build out sales and marketing before having product market Fit. The sales and marketing folks are slick. They seem like they're charismatic. They've got this kind of customer Rolodex. They've got all of these. Next thing you know, you have all of these RFPs and MSAs and you've got all these trials going on and it feels like very promising. It feels like a pipeline. POCs, exactly. It feels like a pipeline, but in fact, it's not. It's all a fiction and because there's no product. And as customers discover that there's no product, then the sales folks are like, well, the problem is the product. And like, they're not wrong, but they're also not right. It's like, actually, the problem is that we poured a lot of our scarce resources into building sales and marketing. Yeah. Before we had resounding product market fit. ([Time 0:07:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/77e7afbd-be8c-48ef-a2c0-52a7bb1b79eb)) - **First Rack Shipped** - Oxide has shipped its first physical rack, a significant milestone. - This was announced via a tweet showing an engineer wrapping the rack, sparking discussion online. Transcript: Jerod Santo Guy hey this guy you guys sold a box didn't you let's segue didn't you guys sell a segue yeah we are we've uh we're shipping well you shipped we shipped. Steve Tuck We have shipped. I saw the tweet. Was that you? Now that I see you in person, was that you wrapping this thing? That is not me wrapping this thing. You look similar to whomever that is wrapping it. Adam Stacoviak I'm not sure if he's going to be insulted or I'm going to be insulted by that. I don't know. I think I look similar to Robert Keith. I don't have any in particular. So that's our engineer, Robert Keith. OK, now that I assume I'm disagreeing. I didn't open up big. It small on Twitter. I call back to another Silicon Valley scene. When Robert Keith joined the company, among the very, very few people at Oxide were a Robert and a Keith. And I'm like, look, I don't know how to tell you this, but we can't call you by either your first or last name because we are. And he's like, it's fine. I've been known by RFK before. I'm like, all right, thank God. The two name problem, which in Silicon Valley was because of a second Jared. Exactly. So RFK, our engineer, he one of the questions that we got on Twitter. So he's wrapping the rack. Well, one, there was like a very weird strain of like, I can't believe the amount of plastic that you are using to wrap the rack. And it's like, do you want to know how anything works or is built? Like, trust me, the plastic that this thing is being wrapped in is the least of the resources being consumed. I mean, it is a computer. It is a good one. It's one that we've designed to be efficient. You had static versus anti-static Twitter. Bryan Cantrill So there was a big group that was just like, oh my God, you're wrapping it in something that's going to create static electricity. Wow. And it's actually anti-static. But my favorite was medical Twitter that was just spiraling over his right foot about to plant where his ankle's going to snap. Steve Tuck Oh, no, gosh. Bryan Cantrill Really? And it's worried about like what happened to his ankle. Adam Stacoviak Well, so when you actually talk to RFK about this, because I'm like, you know, RFK, one of the burning questions we got on the Internet is like, is this guy about to eat shit? Because it looks like it. And it does actually, you zoom in on the right foot, you're like, it does look like you're about to trip. And he's like, I can't remember, but I can tell you, I definitely did not. Like, I do not recall sprawling all over the floor. So I think, you know, RFK is a coordinated guy. He did not trip. But yeah, that was us. So that's our engineers on site with our contract manufacturer in Minnesota, putting the final touches on that rack as it goes into the truck and ships out to the customer number one. ([Time 0:11:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc0b77c4-1e36-4f41-9dee-6e58f8ab6b6c)) - **Enthusiast Value** - Oxide's "nerd cachet" attracts homelab enthusiasts, though they are not their target market. - This enthusiasm translates to valuable word-of-mouth marketing within larger companies. Transcript: Jerod Santo But does that even translate into anything of value for you all? Yeah. How so? Yeah. Bryan Cantrill I was just going to say, it's like that contingent. Many of those folks are in companies who spend a lot of money on infrastructure on-premises, which again, is kind of this like forgotten corner of the technology world. It's like, oh, does anybody do on-prem compute anymore? And it turns out like just listen to an AWS keynote from, you know, two years ago. And Andy's on stage talking about 95% of infrastructure sits outside of the public cloud. And so you have this kind of overlooked area that is much, much larger than the public cloud, but has none of the access to the same benefits that we are all intimately familiar with, which Is like, why would you consume infrastructure any other way than at the end of an API that is a set of elastic services? And yet, if you want to own parts of your infrastructure for the right reasons, you have regulatory compliance reasons or latency or security or, you know, for any of these types of things, Which are good reasons to run portions of your infrastructure on-premises, you're doing the same thing that folks are doing 20 years ago, 30 years ago. You're taking a, you know, a metal rack, and then you're figuring out what server vendor to put in there, who, by the way, is outsourcing firmware and a bunch of other stuff in that set Of boxes. And then you're figuring out what do you do for storage and what do you do for your networking? And then you have to do the software part. Are you going VMware? Are you going Red Hat? And you have to basically build that whole thing together over months just to deliver what AWS has at the swipe of a credit card, which is a set of elastic services for developers. And it's a tragedy because you shouldn't have to, you know, Brian and I were at a cloud computing company and just realizing how tough it was for those that were not running a cloud computing Company to actually get this kind of clean water to their end users, to developers. So to your comment, Adam, it is definitely like expensive for home labbers. But the interesting thing that you find is when we're talking to, you know, enterprise customers and they're comparing it to their current stack of putting all that into a rack, it actually Becomes really, really attractive, even from an economics perspective. Right. Adam Stacoviak Well, and I think that that kind of appeal to that enthusiast demographic is super important to us because so many of those enthusiasts that are home labbers at home, they're the ones That are going back to work and making an IT decision. So we love having that. And I think that like, that's always been really important to technology in general is that that playful tinkering that's happening where people are kind of following their natural Curiosity is a really important way that technology is developed. So even though we're never going to sell to Gerhard and the home labbers, we love the support, the engagement, the discussion, the enthusiasm. It's not our market, but it's a really important element of who we are. ([Time 0:19:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb6b8324-e62f-422c-bf73-083340ea9346)) - **Drobo-like Device** - Jerod Santo jokingly suggests Oxide create a smaller, consumer-focused storage device. - This would cater to the enthusiast market and provide a tangible product for fans. Transcript: Jerod Santo But you know what you guys could do in the meantime and maybe just forever is to throw us a bone, you know, is to like have a drobo kind of a thing. Just like it's an oxide storage thing that can sit on my desk. I'm a YouTuber. It can be in the background. It can glow green or whatever. And like, I think we'll all shut up and just go on with our life. If you guys provide something that we can buy off of the website, you know, ([Time 0:24:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7d9a84fb-2c40-46a2-b625-49ad06c3e3d5)) - **On-Prem Neglect** - On-prem infrastructure has been neglected due to the focus on cloud computing. - This has left companies with outdated solutions, lacking the flexibility of cloud services. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Exactly. It's like, okay, so no, you've already committed to doing this in 2050. I'm just pulling in the date at this point. Yeah, give us our roadmap. High level, high level. Just one of the milestones. Steve Tuck That's not what I'm saying, but okay. No, seriously, how do we get there? What is the state of on-prem? You guys are building amazing hardware for this market that you said, Steve, was sort of like, I forget your words, but basically just unpaid attention to. It's been an afterthought, basically. Under the radar. Under the radar. Thank you, Jared. Bryan Cantrill It has. I mean, and the worst is it's been ignored by the companies that are serving that market yeah and that is largely because you know the last 10 years all the focus has been on how do we is collectively Move to this public cloud computing model and forget everything else i mean if you were going to give it the most charitable treatment it's like well no that should be the first focus It's not in spite of everything else. It's just like, that's where you should start. And that's actually not entirely untrue. And that has been the focus for most companies over the last decade. And we were certainly in the midst of it running a public cloud computing company. I think now the question is, okay, well, we've moved most of the good use cases to the rental model of the public cloud, because a lot of people think about cloud computing as this rental Service model, this kind of hotel model for living, rather than the actual what it does, which is providing abstractions over a bunch of complicated infrastructure under the surface, And making it accessible via APIs. You know, I think now companies are rightfully asking, like, how do we get that same service model everywhere the business needs to run? And there's no good answers right now. You know, over the last 20, 30 years, the industry has split hardware and software. You've got hardware providers over on the left and software providers over on the right. And if you want to bring those two together, it's each individual company's job to go do that. You know, any company that is building cloud-like infrastructure on-prem has to do all the assembly and the integration and the troubleshooting. ([Time 0:31:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/80092291-c0b0-43de-a008-887e37322edc)) - **Oxide vs. Traditional** - Switching to Oxide racks from traditional Dell setups offers improved value, density, and economics. - The switching cost is low due to compatibility with existing developer tools like Terraform. Transcript: Jerod Santo How different is what you guys are doing? So if I'm a CTO and I have two proposals on my desk and I have to decide a direction we're going to go you know with a new data center we're building out or whatever and i can go with oxide racks Or i can go with whatever is currently there stack a bunch of dells and some switches together and do what i've been doing for the last decade what kind of switching costs am i looking at What kind of lock-in is Do I have huge risk to pick you guys or is it like everything you're doing is so low level that at a point where I'm going to care about it as a company who's rolling Out some services, it's all good? How different is it? Bryan Cantrill So in terms of, I mean, we would propose in terms of value and density and economics and services, it's very, very different. In terms of switching costs, I think one of the big benefits and why the timing was right for Oxide now versus Oxide, say, five, 10 years ago, is that where companies have oriented and Really invested a lot of resources is sort of developer-friendly tooling for cloud computing. So by that measure, the switching costs are extraordinarily low because you're now able to leverage the same kind of Terraform frameworks and the models and workflows that you become Accustomed to are stitching into Oxide because you can think about it as kind of another cloud that you now kind of own and operate on-prem. And it's leveraging all that investment you've done over the last five years, getting to more cloud-first type models and workloads and development practices, but being able to leverage Those on-prem. And then in terms of thinking from a data center operator perspective, where this solution meets the rest of the data center is obviously at the network handoff. And so we speak, you know, BGP to the network. We come with gifts to the network operators and engineers, which gives them a whole kind of new world of visibility so that they can not only be in defense mode, but actually be proactive And be able to anticipate where there's congestion and be able to kind of help give users better experiences. ([Time 0:41:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a005839a-5c60-469f-82ef-8d0b9685dc4b)) - **Rack Boot-up Process** - Setting up an Oxide rack involves connecting to technician ports, uploading a config file, and SSH'ing in. - A terminal-based UI guides the installation, showcasing Oxide's focus on user experience. Transcript: Steve Tuck You walk us through exactly what it's like to boot for the first time this oxide rack is it assuming the the sad data center person has walked us to where it will go and says this is where Your oxide server rack will go uh watch the box assuming that's already taken place we're there jared let's say jared and i are there we're the administrators the operators whatever You want to call us we've got to provision this thing you say it takes a few hours we slide it in maybe it takes a small forklift or several people maybe it's got wheels i have no idea this Thing is not short so let's just say it's there it's there we're not worried about door spaces how wide we got to be nothing like that we're at the rack it's not plugged in is rfk with us do We have rfk here or are we on our own rfk's unwrapped it because he comes to unwrap it and we're ready to plug it in to the network to power etc and then boot it for the first time are we you know Attaching our ethernet cable to a port on this thing or a console port like what is the exact interface the real details yeah the real details so if you look at the rack and i think you maybe Adam Stacoviak You'll be able to see it on the website but there are technician ports at the front of the switch so that is where you are going to plug in your laptop cable effectively is going to plug in To the switch and ethernet port in ethernet port you are have got a configuration file that will specify that bare minimum that we are going to need to be able to connect to your broader Network. That's going to be uploaded over that technician port. And then you are going to SSH into that technician port. And you've got an install screen that's going to walk you through the actual installation of that rack. And then you're going to, we've got to get a video out there of this so people can kind of see it. And this is also where it's just like, we've got a very demo based culture. And so we do every Friday, we've got, we call it Demo Friday, where anyone can just demo anything to the company. That's been really, really important for us because it allows people who are doing things that are like pretty, maybe pretty small in the stack to kind of get that appreciation of the Peers. But we had the demo on Friday of one of our engineers making this thing that is already gorgeous, like even better. Steve, I don't know if you got a chance to watch John's demo, but it's just like absolutely eye popping. So, but we got to put a video of it out there so people can actually see it. It was demoing yesterday. Bryan Cantrill Oh, nice. And we didn't even have the latest. Back to where we started, we were with a customer. And John was like, well, as he started to go in on that early setup, he's like, well, you should take a look at my laptop really quickly. And again, it is fun to watch customers get delighted by these low-level kind of small implementation details because back to the fact that they've sort of been ignored, having folks Around them that really, really care about what is most painful or frustrating about their daily jobs and seeing a little bit of care and thoughtfulness go into these parts of the stack Is really fun. And Wicket is kind of part of this sort of set up service on the rack that gives you a visual of how many sleds do you have? What is up? What is not up? And this is like, we're not over the web right now. We can't be right. So this is all over SSH. Adam Stacoviak This is a terminal app. So this is where actually one of those like strange bounties of Rust. So this is based on Rust 2E, which is a terminal user interface builder. And you can build like really easily, you can build really robust, eye-poppingly beautiful terminal-based apps. And so this is a, yeah, this is a terminal-based experience. I love it. And I think it's a, to Steve's point, it's like one of these things where we are going into these like little details that matter a lot to people who've been suffering. And one of the things that we, that is really important to us at Oxide for the virtual machine. So you provision a virtual machine. How do you get into that virtual machine? If it itself, the guest has borked networking or screwed up or even screwed up the image in some way, it's like you need a great serial console. The irony of the cloud is that the serial console is actually like more important than ever. And the serial console was something that actually even the biggest public cloud providers don't take very seriously. And we have taken the serial console really, really seriously. And one of the things that kind of fell out of our implementation is you can have many people watching a single serial console and participating in a single serial console. All right. So you can share effectively. And I think this is going to be one of these things that is just like our customers are going to absolutely love because it is when you're dealing with one of these like low level issues, That's annoying. It's like, oh, I've screwed up cloud in it in some way and it's hitting the wrong thing or what have you. And no one else can log into it because like, that's the problem. The ability to like share out a serial console where everyone can log into the same serial console and begin to get this thing debugged, which is a problem that everybody has like in the Public cloud, this is a problem that we have. Right. And it's, I think it's going to be one of those little touches that we think people are going to really love because it's meaningful. It's not little. I mean, it's actually like really, really significant and it's going to have a material effect on the way people are able to do their jobs. ([Time 0:49:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a8a8a4a8-2991-46ff-8682-be3108de2a5f)) - **Software Update Importance** - Oxide prioritizes robust software updates as crucial for long-term product success. - They draw parallels with Tesla's success and VW's struggles in this area. Transcript: Steve Tuck That you've just delivered your first rack. So congratulations again. How did you know you're ready to deliver? How did you know this was hardened to the point where you can deliver on that promise? What did it take to get there? How bloody are your knuckles? How upset are people on the inside to some degree to get there? How do you know? How did you know? What did you do to know? To know that this was mature enough to do that? Adam Stacoviak Yeah, I mean, so I think you always have a problem when you're co-designing hardware and software. You've got the things that you can kind of revisit and the things you can't revisit. And you kind of said this at the top that when you ship that hardware, that hardware leaves. Steve Tuck Yeah. It's out of your control. Adam Stacoviak So the hardware has to be absolutely right. And you really need to drive that to be correct. And there are huge numbers of challenges there in terms of getting the hardware is hard. And I think actually more directly, the details really matter. And a very small detail can be the difference between hardware that works and a worm brick. And so getting those details right takes a long time. There's a lot of iteration involved. We actually have been pretty transparent about that whole journey. So we've got our and friends, Oxide and friends. Steve Tuck The OG and friends. Adam Stacoviak The OG. Yeah, exactly. I think we can all be and friends. We're all friends here. Steve Tuck We're all friends here. Yeah. I was telling you, I'm like, this is amazing. They have this podcast called Oxide and Friends. How novel. Yeah, exactly. Adam Stacoviak Yes. We've loved getting the team on there in their own voice. So we've been able to shed a light on some things that really have not had a light upon them. So getting the EE team talking about BringUp, Tales from the BringUp Lab have been extraordinary. And getting compliance, regulatory compliance. So when you have hardware, you can't just like ship hardware. You've got to actually have the FCC has to certify that you have not made something that's going to interfere with all the electronic equipment around it. And that's that's compliance. Bryan Cantrill And by the way, the FCC has fixated on the state of the art, which are these 1U, 2U systems. So it turns out when you're building a rack level system and you walk in to go get compliance, they are measuring you against these much smaller systems. And if you push back on that, you're like, well, wait a minute, there's, you know, there's the density of two racks running inside this one rack. This is the product. They kind of shrug. They're like, I don't know, pick it up at the FCC. Jerod Santo Oh. Bryan Cantrill And you just find, you know, time and time again, there are few in the industry that are thinking at the rack level. In fact, the only demographic that has to think at the rack level are these end customers. Steve Tuck Yeah. And that's not where you want to think about it at. No. Because that's where it's already baked. That's the cake, you know. Right. Adam Stacoviak You know, as we went through this, it's like you can see why this is hard and compliance was hard. And we got a great oxide and friends talking about all of our adventures in compliance, which, by the way, people never talk about because what happens to compliance stays in compliance Historically because of all of the for any company going into compliance is tough because you're going to find things where it's like, we are emitting, we got this emitted at this particular Frequency. We have this emission that we need to go understand and patch up. And so there's a lot of work. And, but once that's done, you've got to have the software ready to go. And in particular, the software that is the most important software to have ready to go is the ability to actually update the software. So there are two elements of software that have to be perfect when you ship. One is the actual root of trust and the ability to actually indicate that this is oxide firmware, to actually sign that firmware and to put it on the root of trust and to lock down the root Of trust such that it can't be impersonated. That has to be done correctly. And that's actually super complicated because that requires the generation of a secret, namely the private key that we generate that is ultimately used to sign that firmware. That's a secret. And how does Oxide keep that secret? And I'm convinced that many other companies our size are like, just like lock it in the CEO's drawer and don't ever talk about it again. But it's like, that's not really good enough because if this secret is going to be used, if you could impersonate Oxide firmware in perpetuity with this, you actually need to go solve A really thorny problem, which is how you generate this securely and how you store it securely. And that's a whole thing. And so there's something called a ceremony. And this is a technical term, right, in security spaces. And Steve, this is something you and I learned a lot about, do not appreciate the complexity. You've got to have that exactly correct. And that's a whole thing. You've got to have the ability to update the software. That's got to be correct. The software's got to be able to bootstrap itself. And then you've got to know the software that constitutes that minimum viable product. Bryan Cantrill And there's a whole lot. And by the way, software update is enormously difficult. This is very difficult for Amazon. It's very difficult for a good example of a company that does it really well in Tesla and a company that is struggling because they don't do it well in VW. It has these very, very, very long shadows if you cannot do a good job of versioning and updating software. And it sounds trivial. I mean, it was the feature that we had to make sure we had gotten right before shipping. And everything beyond that, while obviously there's a huge amount of software that ships in this system, it's more software than hardware, which is a bit counterintuitive because We've got a big hardware rack on the website. And it's easy for folks to think about it as a hardware product, which it certainly is. There's a whole bunch of software on there, but update is the fulcrum. I mean, that is the thing that allows for all of the rest of the software to continuously be improved, to go fix things that are wrong. And we were, again, very, very fortunate that we were able to attract folks that had been working on this problem for their career, very passionate about this problem, that were front And center on working on that. But as Brian points out, that's like one of a couple of really, really critical things that we had to get through Gates before we knew we were on the path of shipping. Adam Stacoviak And then I think, Adam, importantly, you go like, how do you know? We've got a great luxury at Oxide, namely the product that we're making is one that we ourselves want to use. So we've got an Oxide rack that runs our software that we are constantly updating and running on ourselves. We are the first customer. We are the first customer. And this is always essential. You know, when you buy a product from someone and it feels like, are these guys using their own product? Because it's like, this thing kind of sucks. And if the engineers were forced to use their own product, I think it'd be a lot better. And we are a big believer. It's something that was instilled in me early ([Time 0:59:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f96948b3-6a26-4cc2-ace1-702c5c2c3649)) - **Social Audio and Transparency** - Bryan Cantrill advocates for social audio and transparency in engineering. - He believes sharing details humanizes technology and inspires future generations. Transcript: Jerod Santo We're on the podcast conversation, you know, there's a, I think podcasting is moment has kind of passed in terms of like, there was a time where it was like everybody had to have a podcast, You know, and I feel like people have kind of moved on the general consensus but brands have wanted to have podcasts some have podcasts it seems like it's a great thing for a brand so many Of them make podcasts that nobody wants to listen to and you guys have a podcast that everybody wants to listen to you're also a brand so to speak you're a company and I'm just curious like Do you have a strategy is there like a strategy around this, yeah, you just like to talk on microphones or like, is there a content strategy going on here? Or is it just like, we like to talk on the microphone? Bryan Cantrill We should talk about on the metal first, because I think that was the first version of the podcast was on the metal. And the strategy, such as it was behind that, because it was also selfish in that we wanted to talk to people that had been there as computers were built over the last couple decades and Found that there was not a lot of recorded history of it. I mean, obviously, thousands of books written, but there wasn't a lot of audio kind of telling the stories of computing in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and even more recently. And we were seeking and kind of were fortunate to run into or know folks that were at that hardware software interface in the earliest days of Honeywell and Intel and getting them on record Telling those stories. I think we had a pretty good instinct that this was going to be content folks would want to listen to, but that historical themed kind of how we got here, like why we are in the state we are Adam Stacoviak Was really compelling. And I think was strategically the thing that was clearest in our mind was that there are other technologists out there that would like to join us. And they're going to be folks that we've never met. They're going to be out of our network. And the podcast was a way of putting the content in front of them that we knew was compelling. And we think that they would find compelling too. So kind of like the, such as like the initial strategic thrust was, this is a way to help build the team. Yeah. It felt like it was a bit of a bet, but not much of one because it just felt like this was pretty obvious. I don't think we were expecting just how quickly it would bear fruit. So we got that first episode out of On the Metal with Jeff Rothschild, who, extraordinary technologist, founder of Eratos, early, very early Facebook, first VP of engineering at Facebook. Early Intel. Yeah, it was early Intel way back in the day. And Jeff's extraordinary. And he was so generous with his time and really just terrific conversation with Jeff. That podcast drops. And six hours later, I've got someone coming in on LinkedIn saying, I just listened to the podcast. I am leaving Facebook. We've got to talk. And that was Arjen Rutzauer, who is one of our founding engineers. Arjen was the first one that was like totally out of network for us. But Arjen is such an important part of who Oxide is. And we share values with Arjen because he was attracted by the podcast that we put out there. And he's like, you know, the folks that make this, I want to talk to these people. And early on with those stories, we knew would be attractive to the kind of technology. Because what we knew, like the thing that we knew that I think investors didn't necessarily know is that the world, technologists, customers, knew that it was time for this company. And that if we could put the bat signal out there saying, hey, here's what we're doing, come join us. We knew that technologists and customers would raise their hand. And so that's kind of the strategy such as it is behind the podcast was it's a way of getting that bat signal out there. By the way, it's doing it in a vector that we just love. We love podcasts. We love listening to them. We think it's a really important vector. So yeah, On the Metal was huge for us. Bryan Cantrill But we didn't talk about Oxide at all, except for a couple of advertisements that listeners, because we just recorded a couple of tongue-in ads, and listeners, after they had listened To, you know, the 10th on the metal 12th and got the same ads, they started just protesting, like, please God change the ads. We actually had one listener submit a ad for us. Just use this, like we'll start creating ads for you. But we didn't talk about oxide at all. And I think the morph into oxide and friends was not specifically just to talk about oxide more. There's plenty of topics on there that have absolutely nothing to do with the space and some of the problems in computing and cloud computing. But to provide a forum where we could go deep in the areas that no one talks about. No one talks about bring up because bring up is ugly, especially on first boards, first systems. And no one talks about compliance because again, there's a lot of warts. It's ugly. And folks are scared to expose that to their customers. They're scared to expose that to the market. And what we've found is that that transparency has actually endeared us to this demographic of customers because they love that they get to see it all. They kind of get to see where it came from, how it was built, who built it, why they built it. And that level of transparency where like, you know, even myself, like five, 10 years ago in my career, you're always like, ah, do we really want to share this? Do we really want this out there? And you're thinking of all the downside, right? And once you start sharing stuff and you see that positive feedback loop, it emboldens you to want to share more and more and more. And I can say, we are definitely not at risk of sharing too little. No, not at all. I mean, it's all contextual. Steve Tuck That's the problem. Like people get so scared about sharing. I mean, obviously the printed secret with the dot matrix, that's when you keep, you know, very close, but like your ideas, some of them are worth keeping close to the vest, but not like Secret forever. And they're all contextual. Like what you are doing is maybe drastically different than what most are doing. And they're not in the same space. So they can't just like transplant this great idea I heard on this podcast from Steven Bryan and bam my company successful it's just not like that you know so many people are just not building In the public and not like literally sharing every possible secret thing ever like there's some things that you do keep that just should remain private but like most of it just put it Out there because you'll probably attract the better people you want to work with anyways you just made a really important point, which is like someone that you might worry about wanting Bryan Cantrill To take an idea and go do it. You find that some of those people actually join the cause. They want to join you. Or they become customers instead of wanting to go build for themselves. Steve Tuck They're like, hey, I don't want to take on all that risk you all did. Like everything you all did, that's amazing. Adam Stacoviak I just want to work with you all, not instead of you all. 100%. That's right. And I think also we knew that our customers, because we'd been our customers, that the customers in this space for on-prem computing have been gaslit by their vendors. ([Time 1:22:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1c98ed73-f307-4c24-9538-d8fd7ad34e72)) - **The Secret's Location** - Oxide's "secret" signing key is stored securely in an unspecified location. - This key is vital for ensuring the integrity and security of their firmware. Transcript: Jerod Santo No, man. I like that answer a lot. Steve Tuck All answers are good answers. Adam Stacoviak We are big, big social audio proponents, not on Twitter spaces anymore. Thank you. No, thank you on that. I want to get off Mr. Musk's wild ride, but we are on a discord that we then record. And that's been a really actually that's been really important because it gives you a chat vector. So you've got people can type comments and then you've got people speaking on stage. And which is really, really helpful because it allows people to participate. There are lots of people that want to participate in the conversation, but don't actually want to raise their hand and speak. And on Twitter spaces, the only way to participate in the conversation was to actually like take the mic and speak. It's really nice on discord to have people be able to like point to links or contribute to the conversation in a way that doesn't require them to do that. And then if they want to get on stage, they can get up on stage too. So it gives you that flexibility, proponents of social audio. ([Time 1:33:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2d6740b1-864b-4beb-8d55-f431bb4e4c78))