Innovating in Hardware, Software, and the Public Cloud with Steve Tuck, CEO/Co-Founder of Oxide Computer

In this episode, we cover:

00:00:00 - Reflections on the Episode/Introduction

00:03:06 - Steve’s Bio

00:07:30 - The 5 W’s of Servers and their Future

00:14:00 - Hardware and Software

00:21:00 - Oxide Computer

00:30:00 - Investing in Oxide and the Public Cloud

00:36:20 - Oxide’s Offerings to Customers

00:43:30 - Continious Improvement

00:49:00 - Oxide’s Future and Outro

Links:

• Oxide Computer: https://oxide.computer
• Perfectlyboring.com: https://perfectlyboring.com

Transcript

Jason: Welcome to the Perfectly Boring podcast, a show where we talk to the people transforming the world’s most boring industries. I’m Jason Black, general partner at RRE ventures.

Will: And I’m Will Coffield, general partner at Riot Ventures.

Jason: Today’s boring topic of the day: servers.

Will: Today, we’ve got Steve Tuck, the co-founder and CEO of Oxide Computer, on the podcast. Oxide is on a mission to fundamentally transform the private cloud and on-premise data center so that companies that are not Google, or Microsoft, or Amazon can have hyper scalable, ultra performant infrastructure at their beck and call. I’ve been an investor in the company for the last two or three years at this point, but Jason, this is your first time hearing the story from Steve and really going deep on Oxide’s mission and place in the market. Curious what your initial thoughts are.

Jason: At first glance, Oxide feels like a faster horse approach to an industry buying cars left and right. But the shift in the cloud will add $140 billion in new spend every year over the next five years. But one of the big things that was really interesting in the conversation was that it’s actually the overarching pie that’s expanding, not just demand for cloud but at the same rate, a demand for on-premise infrastructure that’s largely been stagnant over the years. One of the interesting pivot points was when hardware and software were integrated back in the mainframe era, and then virtual machines kind of divorced hardware and software at the server level. Opening up the opportunity for a public cloud that reunified those two things where your software and hardware ran together, but the on-premises never really recaptured that software layer and have historically struggled to innovate on that domain.

Will: Yeah, it’s an interesting inflection point for the enterprise, and for basically any company that is operating digitally at this point, is that you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. You can scale infinitely on the public cloud but you make certain sacrifices from a performance security and certainly from an expense standpoint, or you can go to what is available commercially right now and you can cobble together a Frankenstein-esque solution from a bunch of legacy providers like HP, and Dell, and SolarWinds, and VMware into a MacGyvered together on-premise data center that is difficult to operate for companies where infrastructure isn’t, and they don’t want it to be, their core competency. Oxide is looking to step into that void and provide a infinitely scalable, ultra-high-performance, plug-and-play rack-scale server for everybody to be able to own and operate without needing to rent it from Google, or AWS, or Microsoft.

Jason: Well, it doesn’t sound very fun, and it definitely sounds [laugh] very boring. So, before we go too deep, let’s jump into the interview with Steve.

Will: Steve Tuck, founder and CEO of Oxide Computer. Thank you for joining us today.

Steve: Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

Will: And I think maybe a great way to kick things off here for listeners would be to give folks a baseline of your background, sort of your bio, leading up to founding Oxide.

Steve: Sure. Born and raised in the Bay Area. Grew up in a family business that was and has been focused on heating and air conditioning over the last 100-plus years, Atlas. And went to school and then straight out of school, went into the computer space. Joined Dell computer company in 1999, which was a pretty fun and exciting time at Dell.

I think that Dell had just crossed over to being the number one PC manufacturer in the US. I think number two worldwide at Compaq. Really just got to take in and appreciate the direct approach that Dell had taken in a market to stand apart, working directly with customers not pushing everything to the channel, which was customary for a lot of the PC vendors at the time. And while I was there, you had the emergence of—in the enterprise—hardware virtualization company called VMware that at the time, had a product that allowed one to drive a lot more density on their servers by way of virtualizing the hardware that people were runnin...