FAQ Friday

Actually, when we first started the company in 2019, if you want to entertain yourself, go back into the Hacker News comments on our announcement of when we started the company, because that was a question that came up a lot.

Who is the target customer for this thing? Well, when we started the company, we knew that the target customer was really anybody that wanted to run cloud computing on-prem, and we knew that would cut across a bunch of different industries. We didn’t know exactly how that would unfold, but we knew from our own experiences that once you are running compute at a certain scale, it makes sense to own it, not rent it all.

And as things have unfolded now, six years later, been in market for two years with this rack scale computer and what we’ve seen is across a bunch of different verticals. There are some that you would of course imagine— regulated industries for sure. Actually, one of the things that I was a bit surprised about—you know, when you start a company, you kind of don’t think you’re gonna target government buyers as your first buyers.

Well, it turns out for those people that needed to operate across an air gap and that needed cloud computing, they were absolutely desperate for an alternative, and more or less kicked our door down. And we were like, well, you know, I don’t know if we wanna sell to kind of the, you know, aren’t government buyers don’t they move more slowly?

Well, don’t underestimate the amount of pain that some of these folks were in, and they were able like, no, we want this so badly. We will make sure that we get it in, and so they did. And actually our first customer, Idaho National Labs, very, very grateful, Idaho National Labs never would’ve thought that our first customer was gonna be a federal customer.

They’ve been followed by lots and lots of others in regulated industries, but it’s not just regulated industries, it’s anyone running compute at scale. People say, okay. So I guess it’s like financial services. Yeah, it’s financial services. There are a bunch of folks in financial services for sure, but it’s also not just financial services.

In fact, one of the things that we’re seeing you know, obviously there’s a lot of AI build out. There’s a lot of general purpose compute in AI build out. Those folks don’t wanna rent all of that. They want to own it. So we’re for those folks that want cloud computing, they want on-prem, they come to Oxide.

So we’re seeing this across a bunch of different industries. It’s not just one industry. What all these folks have in common is that they want elastic compute. They want it in their own data center or colo, and they are cloud aware.

You are cloud aware. You want modernity in your own data center. You’re looking for Oxide. Thanks, and see you next time.