FAQ Friday

And the short answer to that is yes, but there’s a longer answer. The longer answer is that we actually had a little bit of reticence around that. We believed that we needed to do our own switch, but I mean, we are not so crazy that we didn’t realize that is kind of crazy.

So we did have some reluctance around that and we were definitely concerned. I was concerned that we would get this question when we were initially raising capital for the company. In fact, anytime that an institutional investor had the, I have a technical question for you, I’m like, here it comes. They’re gonna ask us about the switch. I’m gonna have to confess that we believe we needed to build our own switch and they’re gonna walk away because it’s just too crazy, too ambitious.

But amazingly we got all the way through Sand Hill without getting that question. We didn’t survive completely without getting that question though, because talking to one of our earliest angel investors, someone who’d been at the hyperscalers for many, many years, and I was explaining what we wanted to go do with Oxide, and I got maybe a minute into the pitch and he interrupts me and says, Bryan, what are you doing about the switch? Like, damnit, Tom was able to survive all of Sand Hill Road without getting this question, and I can’t even survive a minute here without you asking the question that of course we are asking of ourselves, what are we doing about the switch?

And what I thought, God, I’m gonna lose him as an investor, but I gotta tell him what we’re actually thinking. I’m like, Tom, I know you don’t, this is not what you want to hear, but we believe we need to do our own switch. And thought for a moment. And he said, okay, if you’re doing your own switch, I’m in. I’m thinking, like, okay, maybe crazier than we are. And he said, look. At the hyperscaler that he spent his career at, this hyperscaler did not stand on its own two feet with respect to cloud computing until they kicked out their switch vendor and did their own switch.

And that gave us a lot of confidence that we weren’t crazy. I mean, yes, we were crazy, but also not crazy, crazy like a fox, that we needed to go do our own switch to be able to achieve our mission, which is deliver cloud computing to the on-prem enterprise.

Thanks, and see you next time.