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

Bryan Cantrill was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and has now founded his own company called Oxide Computer Company. We discussed his career experiences through boom/busts, what competing with Bezos was like, and career regrets. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/qhSL-5GtmQM • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/distinguished-eng-on-stack-ranking 𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • Link to the part in the talk on Oracle/Sun we discussed - https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?si=eExjIMZROGjJcDsw&t=1977 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:42 - Working at Sun Microsystems 00:10:17 - His growth to distinguished eng 00:19:14 - Why goaling on promotion is bad 00:29:34 - Stack ranking and layoffs 00:36:00 - Why he hated the Oracle acquisition 00:44:19 - Why Bezos is the apex predator of capitalism 00:48:04 - Differences between CTO and VP 00:49:58 - Starting his own company 01:02:37 - Grilling him on his past 01:11:57 - AI boom and bust advice 01:14:41 - When he was happiest in his career 01:17:22 - Top career regret 01:19:21 - Advice for younger self 01:20:57 - Outro 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝘆𝗮𝗻: • LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-cantrill-b6a1/ • Twitter/X - https://x.com/bcantrill • Personal Website - https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/ • His company - https://oxide.computer/ 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻: • Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/ • X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/ • Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman • TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Static ranking is organizational cancer.

• 0:02Ryan Peterman?

  This is Brian Cantrill. He was a distinguished engineer at the original Sun Microsystems, and I asked him about everything he learned over his 30-year career.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Performance review is not about you performing better. It's about us measuring your performance.

• 0:16Ryan Peterman?

  He had interesting stories from competing with Jeff Bezos.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  He is not merely a predator. He is an apex predator in capitalism. Now, this is what makes him so good.

• 0:24Ryan Peterman?

  To stories from when he started his own company, Oxide.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  You go to hang up on a VC, they'll be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's like, oh, OK.

• 0:31Ryan Peterman?

  And he even let me grill him about his past. You raise this long thing and you reply with just a few words. You say, have you ever kissed a girl?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  We actually, I mean, this is dark, but we...

• 0:42Ryan Peterman?

  Here's the full episode.

• 0:48Ryan Peterman?

  You know, your career started at Sun Microsystems, and that's kind of a legendary company. It was before my time. What was the industry like when you first entered it? Was there FAANG equivalence at the time? What was Sun Microsystems like? What were the other companies like?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny because there's always been like a FAANG kind of equivalent. You know, in the, in the 60s, it was called the Bunch. Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell were the Bunch. It was IBM and the Bunch. So the, for kind of every era, there's always, you know, some hot group, some, some growing sector. And in my day, though, so things were, I mean, I think in a bit of a divot. So I graduated in 96, so I was really interviewing in 95. And there was, there was for sure on-campus interviews happening. But they, Microsoft was very dominant in that era.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  And I definitely knew I was not going to go to Microsoft as a kind of a point of principle. What was that? Oh, I view Bill Gates robbed me of my childhood. Microsoft had such garbage. I mean, they really did. In what sense? Their operating system was, you know, I, I came up in the personal computer era. So I, I came up in the eighties and it wasn't until, you know, I, I went to, to university in nineteen ninety-two. And it wasn't, um, you know, I had just been accustomed to kind of like garbage on the computer. And it's like, it's garbage in a way that is kind of unfathomable now. DOS itself, the disk operating system from Microsoft, had no memory protection whatsoever.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  So if an application misbehaved, the machine would just reboot. And this is, this just became like part of life. It's like the machines reboot, you gotta, boy, you gotta save your work because you'd be in WordPerfect or WordStar, whatever. This is why I sound like a true like living fossil. I feel like I'm, I'm relaying like coming across the Oregon Trail or something. But the, you'd be in your word processor, you know, working on your English paper and all of a sudden the machine would reboot. And the, and actually that was just, that was life and you hope you saved it, hope you had a hard copy. And it was only when I got to college that I realized like, wait a minute, hold on. There's, there was actually something called, there's memory protection in the microprocessor. And for much of my adolescence, there had been memory protection present and it, DOS didn't use it at all.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  And the, and Windows used it, I mean, with Windows it gets complicated, but the answer, the, the short answer is Windows didn't use it either. And, uh, so it wasn't until I, I got to like Unix on a workstation. And I just remember being like, you know, eighteen years old and having like, having a, a command line shell up in one window. Having an FTP to Woo Archive, downloading some like EGA game that I would want to go play back in my dorm in another window. Having something else going on in a third window, having a compile in a fourth window. And having this happen magically concurrently was just mind bending. It's like, how is this even possible? I mean, it, again, it, it sounds, and I, I appreciate how old this sounds, but, but this is what it was.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  And the, then looking back, I'm like, why do I have garbage from Microsoft? And it's, Microsoft was just. Not an operating system company. They were the dominant operating system provider, but in their DNA, the most fundamental, like the nucleotide base pairs of Microsoft are compilers. They were a compiler company, not an operating systems company. And Apple was, you know, Apple, what was Apple at that time? I mean, Apple had, this is long fired Steve Jobs, this is the, the, the Apple was kind of, the, the Mac was really honestly not that much better. It was like cleaner, but also didn't make use of memory protection. So this was just like unconscionable to me. And there was just, and this is like aside from all the bad behavior from Microsoft.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  And there was plenty of bad behavior from Microsoft. Microsoft was very anti-competitive. And, you know, the findings of fact in the Netscape case, you know, years later would be just very underhanded, very wanting to like to, it was not a company that had the best technology. It was a company that, that, that jockeyed for position and then would kind of abuse its position.

• 5:08Ryan Peterman?

  What's the TLDR of that, that abuse?

• 5:12Speaker 00

  So what Microsoft would do, and this is a pattern you would see repeated since, but what Microsoft would do is they would announce, you know, you're a promising company that has something that, that is, that's, that's a, that's a application that people might use. They would announce that it's going to become a forthcoming feature of the operating system. And then, but as it turns out, then it wouldn't show up. It was vaporware. The, the term vaporware, I think, if it didn't originate with Microsoft, Microsoft definitely perfected the art of vaporware, of announcing something that didn't exist. And they were kind of dominant with this mediocrity. Now, to their credit, they also, when they went, so for example, Microsoft Word, which I mean, still exists, but WordPerfect was the, really the dominant word processor.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  WordPerfect and WordStar. But Microsoft Word was very bad. And to their credit, it would get better over time and ultimately supplanted WordPerfect in part because they started bundling it with the operating system. So they, they were very deeply anti-competitive, and that's not like an opinion. That's like, that's a judicial finding of fact. That's a Judge Alsup finding of fact. And the, and that changed a lot when Gates, I mean, Gates, when he hit middle age, that company changed a bunch and after the antitrust case in the late nineties. But I was not going to work for Microsoft.

• 6:32Ryan Peterman?

  I saw in your goodbye post for from Sun Microsystems.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:38Ryan Peterman?

  When you were leaving the company, you wrote a public post and you said that you, when you joined the company and you interviewed, you only knew two things that you, one, you wanted to work on an operating system kernel development. And two is that you didn't particularly want to work for Sun. But it looks like you had an amazing time. So what flipped the switch from going, I don't want to work here to I love working here?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  So the, when I, I had kind of talked with other groups at Sun and I just, like the people I dealt with at Sun were um, fine, but just not where it didn't feel energizing. And and certainly PB had did not feel energizing. And you know, I was a kind of accustomed to being the youngest person in a group. But you know, you don't want to be completely by your lonesome. You would, when you want to feel like there are other people that have that kind of that same shared passion. And when I met Kevin Clark and Jeff Bonwick, it was like a bolt of lightning. Those two were were energized, passionate, really. They, they saw all of the same things that I saw in terms of the potential for

• 7:48Speaker 00

  operating systems to be innovative and were and wanted to go like rip out broken code and replace it with with beautiful code and all that that same verve that that I felt. And yeah, it was, it was absolutely meeting those two. You're just like, okay, I, I, there are, I am going to work for Sun. I remember actually very vividly coming back from that trip being like, oh, my God, I'm going to go work for Sun. If they make, they're going to make me an offer and I'm absolutely going to go work there.

• 8:15Ryan Peterman?

  I saw that eventually you grew to a distinguished engineer there.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:19Ryan Peterman?

  What was the career ladder like?

• 8:22Speaker 00

  It would be interesting to know where the kind of member of technical staff, staff engineer, senior staff engineer, distinguished engineer comes from. I think it might come from Sun. I think it's possible that Sun is the originating company. It's also possible from Xerox PARC, you have to kind of take it apart where, and I actually remember when, you know, I had interacted with some folks at Sun and. And they give me a business card. And I remember like coming out to Sun being like, and not really knowing what my rank was. And I'm like, because I was gonna make business cards. I'm like, why? I'm an engineer and I'm on staff, so I like, I think I'm a staff engineer. So. And you know, I kind of go to make business cards and then I kind of like, didn't, didn't. Complete submission on the form or whatever. And then, of course, it wasn't that long afterwards. Everybody was like, oh, wait a minute. That was like.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  That would have been like saying I had got tenure. Like, I definitely am not a staff engineer. I'm a member of technical staff. I was an MTS three, so the, there was the. You would kind of climb up through those ranks and then to, to staff engineer, senior staff engineer, distinguished engineer.

• 9:17Ryan Peterman?

  And three was the start of the.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  No, I mean, it's supposed, I think it did start at MTS one. Um, no, most college hires would start at MTS two. But they, um, but I, I was an unusual college hire in a lot of ways.

• 9:30Ryan Peterman?

  Interesting. So they brought you on two levels deep as a new ground.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Um, I mean, I'd had a lot. I, um, so Sun was actually not the first company I worked for. I worked for a company called Cunex in Canada. And I'd done kernel development there. So I had done, um, OS development at, at Cunex for, for two summers. And I'd done some, actually some work that I was, that I still think is actually, I love that. I love working for Cunex. I love being in Canada. And really, and, and I, I had decided that I didn't want to go back to Cunex professionally, that I, that I did want. The other, the other thing I would say is I decided that I wanted to come out to Silicon Valley. I, I did not want to be. I'd gone to school in the Northeast, had worked in Canada, but I really wanted to come out to Silicon Valley.

• 10:11Ryan Peterman?

  So then when you, when you look at your journey, growing from, I guess, this MTS three to.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:17Ryan Peterman?

  Up to where you grew, like if you were to break down that, I guess, the story behind that growth and kind of. What are the highlights that, that stuck out to you that made you grow?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, I mean, I was not, I was very much not focused on my, my, my grade, my rank or.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Promotion. That was not on, I was not interested in that. My view was always like, I, I would much rather be under promoted than over promoted. Um, I'd much rather be doing work where people are like, wait a minute. Why is, wait, why, why are you back here? Like, what happened to you? You know, I, I, I, that's just, I, I am not interested in being kind of doing work performatively. Um, I was always gonna do what like, what I felt was the most important thing to go do. Um, and you know, Sun was a company that was very accommodating of headstrong engineers. Uh, and, um, so I, um, that's why I, what I wanted to do was solve the problems that our customers had, make the operating system, what I believed it could be,

• 11:19Speaker 00

  kind of realize that vision for what the OS could be. Um, Sun was the only company, honestly, in 1996 that was really invested in the operating system. Uh, every other company was mortgaging its future to Microsoft and Windows. And all these computer companies were giving up on their own operating system, giving up on Unix. It was really Unix's darkest hour. And the, being in that group, in Solaris Colonel Development during those years, was enormously energizing and allowed us to do all sorts of things. And then along the way, you get promoted, right? Along the way, like promotions were just the kind of thing that, that happened as you, as you went along the way. Um, the, I mean, Sun's became, I learned, I would say, I, I took away a lot of life lessons

• 12:02Speaker 00

  in terms of, of what works and doesn't work. Um, I found that the, because of course, we had formalized performance review. And I found, this is like, not a deep thought, but that formalized performance review never resulted in me having higher performance. And this is like, this is one of these things that you kind of like, feels very naive to say, because it's like, you know, dummy, like, performance review is not about you performing better. It's about us measuring your performance. It's like, well, that's not what it should be about. What it should be about is like, what, feedback is great. Like, we should be making everyone be the best that they can possibly be. And the, the, the, the formalized, the annual cadence of it, I felt was very broken. You know,

• 12:45Speaker 00

  we would have, you'd submit a self-review, of course, and then your review is like, oh, wow, my review looks stunningly like my self-review, albeit with great grammatical errors introduced. And You know, that in every review, even the reviews in which I was promoted, they were just not uplifting. Like, that was not when I look back at the moments of like, what were the the highlights for me during that progression? It was never being promoted. It was always doing a significant body of work or nailing a hard bug or working with someone on something that we thought was impossible. Like, that was the stuff that that that was really catalytic for me. And then it's like Sun just kind of had to promote me along the way.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  The one exception, though, I would say to that is that the the promotion to distinguished engineers was very regrettable and stupid. I mean, not my promotion, but just in general, like the process. The process for being promoted at Sun was, I would say, very traditional in that, you know, you're taking your folks that are performing very well and you're promoting them up to the next grade. The Sun did have a very

• 13:52Speaker 00

  silly process thing that, you know, they had three grades they would give you. Superlative, excellent, and good. And then I think there was like a, you know, like 70% good, maybe 20% excellent and 10% superlative, something like that. And they had this thing where if you were superlative, they had to promote you. Like, that was like the index for promoting you. Like, if you got that superlative grade, they'd promote you. But also, they had to promote you if you they gave you that superlative grade. So you would I had these I had these reviews that were like apologetic, being like, look, I have to give you an excellent grade, even though like the work that you've done over this past period has been extraordinary and innovative and actually better than the work that you did two years ago or a year ago.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  But I can't actually give you this superlative grade because if I give you this superlative grade, I would have to promote you and we just promoted you a year ago. And it's really like, we don't want to promote people any faster than every 18 months. And you're like, OK, does this make sense to you? I mean, this isn't like, I was like, OK, if like, if if you're satisfied with this, like, fortunately, like, I just don't care one way or the other. So like, sounds good. OK, can I get back to work now? Are we are we done here? It's like, are we? And then again, trying not to be trolled by the grammatical reviews in my in in the review that's being handed to me. So now the difference for that was the and, you know, the promotion of staff engineers was a big deal. And like, great, fine. Actually, it was funny because all the staff engineers, so Sun had this thing called KEEP, the Key Employee Incentive Program.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  And keep was effectively like an annual dividend. It was like a bonus. So, you know, and there was like a keep pool that was set across the company and, you know, kind of a traditional thing, right? And the, the metric was based on like company performance. That's the thing. And so I did hear when I was, you know, in MTS3, MPS4, the staff engineers, like, you know, they would get their keep bonus. And if the keep bonus is really good, they take everyone out to dinner. And it was kind of like, you know, it was like being at the, the mining town, right? When there's a big ore strike or what have you, gold strike. So I was like, okay, wow, this is like, this will be great. So of course, I mean, just like, of course, like, when do I get promoted to staff engineer? It must've been in like 2000, 2001. I get promoted to staff engineer as like the dot com nuclear bomb goes off.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  And the keep bonus was, I never got like, keep bonus was zero from then on out. Sun lost 98% of its value in the public markets. And like, I never, so it's a good thing that I wasn't doing it for the keep bonus because the keep bonus was, was zero. But then getting, so that was staff engineer, senior staff engineer, and then distinguished engineer was really unfortunate in that there were, there were kind of two paths in to distinguished engineer. And this may be true of, of a lot of companies. I don't know. I mean, I, but we, I don't have ranks at Oxide for this reason. Like, I think ranks are corrosive. I don't think they get people to do their best work. I'm not interested in them. But the, at Sun, there were two ways to be a distinguished engineer. One was of course to be like promoted from a senior staff engineer to a distinguished engineer.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  And that was a very, very, I mean, I would say rigorous, but it's giving it far too much credit. It was a very political process. The DEs would vote on whether you should be admitted to this country club of distinguished engineers, which is a terrible idea. Putting like, this is like the wrong place for democracy in a society, right? The, for so many different reasons. And the, but so that's how you would get promoted to distinguished engineer. Very hard to get promoted. The other way to become a distinguished engineer is Sun is buying your little company, is Aqua hiring your company. And your, the company's got just enough leverage during that process to be like, oh, by the way, our CTO needs to be a DE. So you would have these like DEs just kind of like pop in the side. You're like, who is?

• 17:30Speaker 00

  This per- like, oh, yeah, we, yeah, then we acquired their company. So, and, and there was definitely a difference in, like, you, you knew the, the homegrown DEs versus the ones that had been, had been Aqua hired in. But when I, and I, I actually, like, and this is like, I just do not want to even think about this process. Like, again, I'm not a real political person. Like, the last thing I want to do, fortunately, we had, I, I'd done work that was kind of so indisputable at that point, that it was going to be, it was pretty clear that if Sun is going to have such a rank, I was probably worthy of it. But again, I didn't want to deal with it. Sun's CTO at the time, Greg Papadopoulos, very grateful to Greg. Greg had chartered this group that we'd developed inside, actually in San Francisco, for Sun Mission, called Fishworks, where we had developed a new

• 18:15Speaker 00

  storage product. Storage product was going gangbusters, was a great product. Although a great product with asterisks on it, wasn't as great as we thought it was. We shipped it. We learned a lot about it. But the product was doing really well. Greg, again, I was not in the meeting, so this was told to me secondhand. But your DE case needs to be presented by someone, another DE. Well, Greg presented my case. And so you had the CTO of the company, and Sun was not a very hierarchical company, and Greg was not a very hierarchical person. But Greg put, apparently, my materials up, and it's like, I don't expect anyone to vote against this. Take your vote.

• 18:52Ryan Peterman?

  He said that.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And apparently, it was unanimous. So it was like, thank you, Greg. Deeply appreciative. So Greg, I didn't have to deal with that bullshit, because Greg was dealing with it for me. And it was kind of like, you know, honestly, it was kind of a validation of my hypothesis. Like, Greg honestly viewed it more of a reflection on the company than a reflection on me. It's like, great. I had done work that was at some level kind of indisputable, and that's kind of the way I had wanted to chart my career.

• 19:14Ryan Peterman?

  I, I think there's two schools of thoughts on, on, you know, how people structure their careers within these, I guess, ladders. If a really ambitious new graduate engineer comes to you and they say, hey, I want to be a distinguished engineer one day. I have two ideas. One idea is I'm gonna just focus on the work and just, you know, promotions will be a byproduct. Or I'm gonna do the other thing where, you know, I talked to my manager. I'm like, hey, how do I get to that next level? And hey, what are those things that the next level needs to do? And then I will do work that molds to that mold.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would try to steer someone to a third path.

• 19:54Ryan Peterman?

  What's the third path?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Why? Why do you want to be? What is it? Why do you want to be distinguished engineer? Because if that's the goal, if the goal is to be a distinguished engineer, you get there, be distinguished engineer. Now what? I mean, you like, you know, you, you can be so fixated on that. It's like, it doesn't, at some level, it doesn't, that doesn't actually, that's not the thing that matters. That's, that doesn't give you meaning. And to me, if I had a young engineer who's like, I'm, I want to be a distinguished engineer. I'm like, that's a recipe for a midlife crisis. So let's try to dial you differently. And I think that, I think what you, what I would steer someone to is, let's get you on a path

• 20:38Speaker 00

  that has meaning, where you're gonna be developing. And what drives meaning for you? What's important to you? And it's like, whoa, what's important to me is to be a distinguished engineer? I'll be like, okay, I mean, you'd want to tease it apart, get them on the couch a little bit. Like, why, I mean, are you not, were you not loved enough as a child? Like, what's going on? Like, you know, and, and you kind of work through some of these issues? Because you don't want to be dependent on that kind of external validation. You, I would want to be like, let me introduce you to people who've achieved what you are putatively setting out as your goal and are miserable. Like, let me introduce you to some miserable D's. You want to be wealthy? Let me introduce you to some miserable wealthy people. So you know that it's like, that's, that can't be it.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  It's, there's got to be something else that, that is the fuel in that furnace. And like, let's go find that thing. And, and then we, then, then the promotions will happen and the work will happen.

• 21:35Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, but let's say, okay, mentee comes to you and says, you have a good point. I want financial independence. A lot of people, I think, want that. They want to.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's financial independence, though? I mean, because we are in such a well compensated domain. It's like you and I, right now, could go out and get a cup of coffee that is the best cup of coffee. We're in San Francisco, we're in the Mission. We can get some coffee that is like Ethiopian coffee, some amazing coffee, that is like the, and that is attainable to you and me and, and basically everyone else. It's like a six dollar cup of coffee, right?

• 22:13Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, well, let's say you define it as you don't need to work for money ever again.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  But then what? This is like, okay, you don't need to work for money ever again. Like, I get that. But, but so you can go off and do the thing that actually motivates you? Well, then go off and do the thing that actually motivates you.

• 22:30Ryan Peterman?

  What if it doesn't make money?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Well, I think, and I, well, this is where you want to take it apart. And so you want to find a way, I mean, certainly you're going to have things like the, the, the, the difference that you want to make, the meaning that you're going to find, is going to be something that's like, yeah, this is, this is just not a career path at all. Like, I can't actually sustain myself at all. So then you need to find a way to balance that, I would say, with your career. And you want to keep that balance. I think, I also think it's a mistake to be like, I'm going to achieve financial independence, and then I'm going to do the thing that is meaningful to me. It's like, and again, you just, and I, I definitely had the blessing of no, most people were like me. Made a lot of money on paper in the dot com boom and just lost every penny of it.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  I mean, I had a, I had a lost carry forward for so many years that I actually like, one year I lost track of my lost carry forward. I'm like, and I just, so, but I had a lost carry forward. And I was like, you know, I had like fond memories of the dot com bubble when I would take my, whatever it was, $3,000 a year against my, from a lost carry forward. Um, the, that was most people around here. Most people kind of like, lost it all, but also were fine. And I think this is the other thing, like the dot com bust was super helpful because if you had geared yourself to be really economically motivated in 99, 2000, 98, 99, 2000, which would have been easy. 2001, 2002, 2003, like you, that was not why you were here. Because this place was nuclear winter.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  And, and you had, had to find something else. And I, I knew like, so the funny thing, I knew like lots of people that like, had to remind themselves why they got in this and it wasn't money. I also knew people, I did know people that made a bunch of money in the dot com boom. The people that made a bunch of money in the dot com boom weren't that interested in tech to begin with. So when it went up in, you know, late 99, 2000, they're like, I'm selling it all. Like, I actually don't want to do this. And those people, and there are a couple of them that I knew, and some of them really, really struggled in the next decade because they didn't have to work for the rest of their lives. But now what? Like, you don't have to work, so like now what do you do? And, and they were on their own search for meaning and like not easy.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  And going through periods of like, oh, like I'll buy six houses. Then you were like, six houses are kind of like a pain in the ass. It's like you and I could go drink six cups of coffee concurrently, but you're just like, what am I doing here? Am I just like proving that I can buy six cups? So why do I want six houses? So again, then, then you, you scale that way back. I mean, it gives you like, it really opens your eyes about what matters and what doesn't matter. What doesn't matter as much. Certainly you need to be able to provide for yourself and provide for, for a family. You want to be able to raise a family and so on. So you want to be able to have that, but you want to do that in a way that's honestly sustainable. I think that, that too many folks are focused on like, I'm going to do this so I can leave. It's like, then maybe you shouldn't be in this industry at all.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Like go do something, go do the thing you would do when you left and find a way to do that in a way. It like, and, and go pursue that dream. And, because you'll be, you'll be happier, you'll, you'll have meaning doing that. Quit your job at Meta and become a podcaster, you know?

• 25:40Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, well, I did.

• 25:43Ryan Peterman?

  Well, it's, it's, uh, it's interesting you say that because there's this, um, there's this subreddit, this community that's all about, uh, financial independence, earning enough.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:54Ryan Peterman?

  I'll see a very regular post that says, guys, I did it and I don't know what to do now.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Oh, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I did. 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.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  I was 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 be 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 aspire to.

• 27:09Ryan Peterman?

  Right. I, well, what would you say? Because I do know someone who is genuinely happy just doing nothing. By doing nothing, I just mean like relaxing in bed, you know, watching their shows, you know, going to hanging out with friends and stuff. I think if they had a billion dollars, they'd just do that every day.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:30Ryan Peterman?

  But what you said doesn't work in that case because that doesn't earn anything.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  I, you know, I actually did know a guy. I knew a guy who I actually did know a guy who did this, who I was thinking about people who made money in the dot com. I knew one of, I, I believe one of Yahoo's like first employees, but not because he was like crazy sharp or anything because he like they, they wanted to hire a web surfer. And he was like a pothead who was like this, like this sounds like the level of work that I'm a good. 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

• 28:17Speaker 00

  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. And 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-

• 28:43Ryan Peterman?

  Uh, pre-Google.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  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, 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. And 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

• 29:28Speaker 00

  like to think that, that he found something that was actually meaningful to him, but clearly it was not the work, or work for that matter.

• 29:34Ryan Peterman?

  Right. You said earlier, there were these ratings, superlative, excellent and good.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:41Ryan Peterman?

  I noticed you didn't mention there's, there's a bad rating.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Right. There was a, yeah, no, there was not, basically not. Sun did not, the idea of like a PIP or the whole like Rank and Yank, which is what Intel famously did. The-

• 29:58Ryan Peterman?

  Rank and Yank?

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Rank and Yank.

• 30:00Ryan Peterman?

  Is that, is that just stack ranking?

• 30:02Speaker 00

  It was, it was their name for stack ranking. Yeah. It was Rank and Yank. Yeah, stack ranking is organizational cancer. It is, it is very, very, very bad news. When, especially if you are going to terminate a bottom end person. That is, um, that's death. I, I really think that is just a, a wall to wall terrible idea. Because you've incentivized people to have dead weight on their teams. Um, that they can, that.

• 30:26Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, is that, oh, so they have fodder to.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Someone to throw into the wood chipper.

• 30:31Ryan Peterman?

  Uh, so you think that a manager strategically keeping around.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Oh, I know so. I mean, it definitely happened at Sun for sure. Really? Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, there were people that were like, why are they still here? Like, they don't, they don't not seem to be doing anything. And someone kind of took me aside and 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, 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 this is not the way I want to operate.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  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, I think that stack ranking really operates very much contrary to that.

• 31:36Ryan Peterman?

  You, you mentioned that Sun, I mean, the stock price went down by 98% at some point.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, trading below our cash at one point.

• 31:45Ryan Peterman?

  I mean, was there not some management at some point saying, hey, we gotta, it's time to.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Oh, we did, I mean.

• 31:51Ryan Peterman?

  Mass layoffs.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no, Sun did. I, I mean, Sun resisted layoffs for a little while. Scott was kind of famously did not, McNeely 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 layoffs started, I mean, I think at one point I counted the, the number of layoffs that had, the rounds of layoffs. It was like 35 layoffs, 35 rounds of layoffs over like eight years.

• 32:14Ryan Peterman?

  That's, I mean, it's more than four a year.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, it was, it was brutal.

• 32:19Ryan Peterman?

  That's, that's insane.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Well, you get these like small layoffs, big layoffs. I mean, this is actually before the Warren 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, well, though 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 obits.

• 33:01Ryan Peterman?

  Was the company aware that you had that access to that data?

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Uh, it's Sun. You 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. 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 a, 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 as these. So no, it was layoff after layoff after layoff after layoff after layoff.

• 33:40Ryan Peterman?

  But I mean, 35 layoffs, that's, that's, it almost, yeah, it's crazy.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  I, um. But that was everybody too. Again, that, that, that was not like, oh, like, oh, okay. I, I mean, the, it is hard to express the period from the dot com bust. Um, when, you know, kind of pets.com craters in, in the spring of 2000. The, the, they were kind of ran on, on momentum until the end of 2000. And at the end of 2000, the dot com bubble truly, truly burst for everybody, um, for Sun included. Um, and then, uh, and nine 11 did not help, right? So what was, and the economy was tech was basically dead for five years. And, and Y Combinator is formed kind of at that, Y Combinator is, I think, 2006.

• 34:28Ryan Peterman?

  Hmm.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  And starts to form, and I think in part because I think, I mean, to get Graham's perspective on this, but 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 the, it was really, really bleak here for many, many years.

• 34:50Ryan Peterman?

  I see. Slightly off topic, but I was stalking your Twitter and I saw that Paul Graham had blocked you. Do you know, is?

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Uh, 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.

• 35:08Ryan Peterman?

  Well, what do you think that was for?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Uh, no, I know what that was for. Um, that was for, um, 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, uh, some pretty gross kind of behavior. Uh, and he was defending that and I was attacking him for it and he was blocking me for that. So like, all right, uh, I'll take that.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, Paul Graham is complicated for me. He, uh, and there were, 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. Um, often in the same sentence. So often then you're just like, I feel like my brain's getting zapped. Like, okay, this is like wrong, but also not wrong. And, uh, so, um, yeah, you see, he's a complicated one. There are a couple of people like that.

• 36:00Ryan Peterman?

  I understand that Sun Microsystems was eventually acquired by Oracle.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Invaded, yeah.

• 36:05Ryan Peterman?

  And, uh, I just wanna know, why was it so controversial all the time? There's even a Wikipedia page that says, "The acquisition of Sun Microsystems", and there's, it's almost like an obituary and there's

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:18Ryan Peterman?

  a lot of top level engineers.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Um, well, it was, uh, 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. They 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. What I mean, to, to the contrary, I mean, there's nothing like really controversial about Oracle. Because Oracle is what it is.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Oracle is just, there's not a lot of depth to Oracle. 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. Sun was endeavoring to, to solve hard, interesting technical problems that had commercial relevance. And it gave its engineers, us, tremendous freedom to go do so. And, and it tended to attract people that wanted to, to do that, that wanted to do, that was, wanted to be bold.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  And it was, 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, and Soliris 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, of, of that kind of that passion and dependence. Oracle doesn't have any of that. Oracle's just like, Oracle truly is, is focused on really on, on one thing, namely its own profitability, which is like, I, 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, um, on terms of business execution, Sun fell down a bunch of times.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  And I thought we would have someone in Oracle that would be just better at the execution of a commercial enterprise. Uh, as it turns out, I was really overestimating Oracle. Oracle really is about, um, being able to, to get effectively a monopoly, a natural monopoly over its own customers, asphyxiating competition and then raising the rent on its customers. Like that is really what. Oracle wanted to go do, and it's not a company I wanted to work for.

• 38:56Ryan Peterman?

  I see, because I, there's a talk that you gave that where you really, I mean.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  You know, I didn't even, yeah, I know you're talking.

• 39:04Ryan Peterman?

  The talk is crazy.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  The Lisa talk from 2011.

• 39:07Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, before you even got to talking about it, you said, I'm gonna try and make it through this slide without crying.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Oh, that was the, the Sun slide.

• 39:17Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah. And then I think 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?

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Of Oracle?

• 39:30Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Oracle is, has made many promises to its own customers that it does not keep. Oracle does not, 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. The, the making that slide without crying bit was not about Oracle. That was about, very much about Sun. And that was the, and the, Scott McNeely's epitaph for Sun. Kick butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computing forever.

• 40:00Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, you said that, yeah, yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was the bit that's, like, it still chokes me up a little bit just because it, it's true. It was true. And we, when we started Oxide, it's like, adopted that as our own mission because that, that's exactly what we wanted to go do at Oxide. And I thought it was a very concise distillation of that. And that was just not Oracle. Oracle was not interested in that.

• 40:23Ryan Peterman?

  When, when a lot of the top engineers, it seems like there was an exodus.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  A big exodus, yeah, yeah.

• 40:28Ryan Peterman?

  Where people confiding with each other, like, were you talking to other high level engineers, say, hey, we gotta get out of here?

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, yeah. I mean, it's not even like, I mean, you're just like, you're in a burning building. Are people confiding in one another? 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? And no, I mean, it was pretty queer. 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 Sun employees that were not going to be Oracle employees.

• 41:10Ryan Peterman?

  Aqua laid off, like they wouldn't, there wouldn't be a existing company, they're just.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  That's right. So they would, they would lose their job.

• 41:18Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, okay.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  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? Like, lay me off first. This was not me, this was not us, we were, I, I was, I mean, 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. And there were 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. But we, no, I, I was not that. I was, we were at this Fishworks group in San Francisco and I was really optimistic that, I'm really

• 42:00Speaker 00

  optimistic, somewhat optimistic, that we could combine the best of both companies or what I perceived to be the best of both companies. And as turns out, that's not the case. So.

• 42:08Ryan Peterman?

  What'd you see? Cause you left really quick. So.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Oh, it was really clear to me that, that 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, more, 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, 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. Our customers actually were rooting for us at Sun. Our customers wanted us to prevail. Why? Because they, we actually, they trusted

• 42:53Speaker 00

  us. And they, even when it wasn't in our own best interests, like we would, 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 like, we're talking about meaning, that so eroded my own sense of meaning. I 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.

• 43:35Ryan Peterman?

  You mentioned people were eager to get themselves laid off. How do you even, how do you even do that?

• 43:42Speaker 00

  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?

• 44:00Ryan Peterman?

  I thought you have to like really, you know, underperform and like.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  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. Could 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, God damn it.

• 44:19Ryan Peterman?

  So, okay, so I get why you left Oracle and obviously Sun was acquired.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:24Ryan Peterman?

  And so the next place you worked at was Joyant.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:27Ryan Peterman?

  And I understand that this company competed with AWS.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah.

• 44:33Ryan Peterman?

  And I listened to some of the conversation you already had. And yeah, interesting quote, you said Bezos is the apex predator of capitalism. What makes you say that?

• 44:44Speaker 00

  They're just, Amazon was, Amazon at its height was such, so relentless on execution. And what made Bezos really, really good is that, and I would say like, and when I say its height, I mean, they, Amazon hits the mother load and they hit the mother load, not because they're lucky. There's like luck involved, you know, they, they allow S3 to be developed, right? They develop EC2, then they, they realize what they're on to. And they're on cloud computing before anyone has figured it out. And the, the, the, those reinvents in like from 2010 to say 2015.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Were relentless. Every reinvent was a price cut. It was a 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 predator, 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. So it's 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, this is how much Amazon's making. Analysts would ask on the call, they're just like, yeah, we're not talking about that. Which apparently you can get away with as a public company. And so they actually created this idea, especially with the relentless price cuts.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  People were like, oh, the cloud's a terrible business. Like, no one, 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 of this thing are great. Like, this is actually a great business. And Amazon, and Amazon was executing very, very, very, very well. And they did extraordinarily well in, in, in those years. And I mean, they are still, obviously, it's a, it's a, it's a very profitable company, but they have, Amazon has, is not what it was in, 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.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  You don't get the, kind of the new services that you can't live without. So it's, it's a different company.

• 47:00Ryan Peterman?

  AWS was, was early and they already had, I guess, a dominant market share.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:07Ryan Peterman?

  Why would Jeff Bezos continue to just like ruthlessly keep going and keep going? Instead of milking it?

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Because he is not merely a predator. He is an apex predator in capitalism. This is what makes him so good. It's like, I'm not gonna, no, like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna press my advantage. Like I'm, I'm gonna make it so no one can compete with me. And I'm gonna make it so no one wants to get into this business. And I'm gonna do it honestly, like the right way. I'm gonna do it by like giving a great product at a reasonable price. It'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 know, we, we found lanes where we could go compete with Amazon, but it was, uh, it was, it was brutal.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Their, their, uh, execution was extraordinary.

• 48:03Ryan Peterman?

  At this company, I, I saw that you, you start out as a VP and then you transitioned to CTO at some point.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:10Ryan Peterman?

  What's the difference in the roles?

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Was it, that's a great question. I actually gave a talk on this with joint CTO at the time on the contrast between VP of engineering and CTO. And, you know, I'm not sure how much I, how much I buy the difference now. I mean, I think both in both capacities, you're serving as an engineering leader. And I, 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, the pejorative for it. You're on the road talking to customers a lot. You, you are, um, VP of engineering may be more focused on some of the necessary like 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.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  So I mean, like I, again, it's just like the, the grade I was at, uh, at Sun, I didn't particularly care. What I did care about is when the, you know, 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. Uh, so there was kind of like the, the, the empty CTO position. I didn't care. What I did care was that we didn't hire externally for that because I, so that I did care about a lot of it. Like, look, if there's going to be a CTO, I'm happy to be the VP of engineering in perpetuity. But like, I, 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. But, um, yeah, I was later this. CTO.

• 49:34Ryan Peterman?

  And why not hire externally?

• 49:35Speaker 00

  I just didn't want to deal with like having to bring in, I didn't need, that's not what we needed at that time. What we needed at that time especially, well, we had, we got rid of the CEO and we really were, we needed really a terrific CEO, which we later got, so.

• 49:55Ryan Peterman?

  And so then you started Oxide.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Started Oxide in 2019.

• 49:58Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah. And what's the story behind you starting your own company?

• 50:01Speaker 00

  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. I mean, I, Steve was the, when I went to Joinin, I had not talked to Steve prior to going to Joinin. And I was going to Joinin in part because I was running away from Oracle and it was going to allow me to hire folks and so on. But the, I didn't talk to Steve until after I came to Joinin. 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

• 50:42Speaker 00

  this guy. And fortunately, he felt the same. So we both felt like, all right, whatever we do next, we do it together. And so now it's like, all right, well, now what? Now we got to figure out what we want to go do. And we had these long walks in the city, because we're working in San Francisco, and we had so many bad ideas. I mean, it was just, 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, 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, you know what I mean? Like, this is like,

• 51:25Speaker 00

  okay, I could do this, but like, really? I mean, it'd be fun to do it with Steve, but just doesn't feel like, that's not gonna, 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 I'm 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 and I'd known the venture capitalists associated with with joint 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 it's someone I had known since early, early, early in his career.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  And he and I had just gotten lunch periodically through our careers from when he was first in venture and I was in engineering and we it's like, and he had kind of become become pretty famous and I was just wanting to remind myself of 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.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  I think like, wow. And I was like, Steve, you know, you're reminding myself of this email, of this guy's email address. He said, he will fund literally anything we put in front of them. So like, we should just go big. We should do, 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, I, yeah, I, yeah, I think so. And, you know, that was very much in our heart. That was, we had lived that, he had lived that, Steve had been at Dell prior to joint.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  He'd been at Dell for a decade. I'd been obviously at Sun for 14 years. We, and then together at joint for another decade. And this is, we, this was truly in our marrow.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  And we found like, okay, like we can go and we, as we started talking VCs about this, about building, and we again envisioned rack scale design. We wanted to do our, our, our own board design, do our own switch, do our DC bus bar basis line, do all of our own software. Do, build the machine that we ourselves wish we could have had at Samsung. After Samsung acquired joint. 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, they go into the open compute summit and, and looking at like Tioga Pass. And 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

• 54:13Speaker 00

  when I'd been living with DOS and be like, what is this? And you go look at Tioga Pass, you're like, this is like, this is what a computer can be? Like, this is gorgeous. This is amazing. We gotta go build this for the enterprise market. And we, 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, I mean, I don't have to tell you how the story ends, but we went back, we'd 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 Ox. He's like, Brian, Brian, Brian, stop, stop, stop.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  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 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 your emails? Are 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 I, 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. I was like, oh, okay. He's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Cause I'm like, fine, got it. He's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm not going to invest.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  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, that are 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. Optimistic 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've got to 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.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  And so I knew that he was going to be like, and one zero that like looked a lot like, like oxide. And so he's like, look, I'm not going to find it. I'm like, again, I knew that. But I do want to 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 knew how he could help. I had a very concrete idea. It's like, one of those zeros, I want to talk to them. I want to talk to the, I want to talk to the founders. I want to understand everything that went wrong.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  And I did. He 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, Nitro from the Annapurn acquisition at AWS. Does a lot of, 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.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  And they're like, great. And the customer was happy and they wanted to use it in particular on their, 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 gonna 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, there are like a couple of others, but like, or you sell like, you know, two dozen of these things like we've 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 they, that wasn't a zero. They were acquired, but they were acquired in a way

• 58:40Speaker 00

  that left the founder extremely bitter and really felt like, like the VCs had pumped too much capital and it meant 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 whether to do it 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, okay, we're on a suicide mission. That's fun.

• 59:08Ryan Peterman?

  When I think of rack scale compute, especially these days, I think of racks of GPUs more than CPUs. Is that something that you're building?

• 59:19Speaker 00

  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. And of course, along the way, people are like, what about an accelerator? Like, what about an accelerator 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, that have transparency at that hardware software interface. And we want to write that lowest layer of software.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  We are, the company, I mean, ultimately, we're 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, executes 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, have not wanted to do either of those things because certainly 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.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  So like, okay, that's fine. We're gonna be, we're gonna 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 executing, the well-executing company in terms of Nvidia. You've got a lot of competitors around it. It's, it's a little, it's gory, right, over there. And meanwhile, on the general purpose CPU side, it's like HP, Dell, Super Micro, 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.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  So 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 the, certainly the emergent AI workloads, not just AI workloads, but especially 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 chat GPT 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. That is a CPU that's surfing the web. And the CPU is really, really important.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  So for us, we are more focused than ever on the general purpose CPU. And there's, 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.

• 1:02:38Ryan Peterman?

  I think coming to the end, I want to ask you some career reflections.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, you bet.

• 1:02:42Ryan Peterman?

  And kind of just all over the place type of questions. You, you wrote a tweet a while ago, I thought was really interesting idea, which was you, 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, her thinking has evolved since. And I polled 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.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:03:14Ryan Peterman?

  So first one, which is actually really famous, I was, when I saw, I kind of did a double take. So in, in 1996, as a new grad, there's this, this, I don't even know what you used, used net was. I had to do research, actually.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Ryan Peterman?

  But there's a guy who, he writes this long technical response.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  David S. Miller.

• 1:03:34Ryan Peterman?

  Yes. And a part of it too, it's, it's not nice either. This, I saw this line in there. It says, Linux is lightweight, Solaris is a pig, which Solaris is what I guess the sun was.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:03:46Ryan Peterman?

  And then he writes this long thing and you reply with just a few words. You say, have you ever kissed a girl?

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, first of all, I want to know the context behind it. And then also knowing what you know now.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Oh, definitely in the regret department, if that's what that's asking. Like, yeah, I've got very few regrets in my career, but like, you can put that one like pretty firmly in the regret column. Uh, yeah, no, that, that was, 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 96, it was 96, 97, certainly like, I'm like 22, 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? Why the way, like, no, no, trust me. It's like, the world gets weird. You're going to be asked about this. Um, I, the, uh, so it was actually a, okay, this is, I'm not

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  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 is like, you can't even find the video, but they have, uh, so the, um,

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  They 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 of this episode, you know, what, what was the combination on the safe? He's like, what? I don't know that. I don't, I don't, I don't know that. Why, why would I know that? Like, I don't, 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, the kind of the canon of Star Trek. And then he's like, hey, can I just say something? Get a life, people. You, you, have you ever kissed a girl? That was the, that was where they, you know, going to a 30, going to John Lovitz, when like Vulcan ears, John Lovitz, do you know?

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, no. Yeah, I've done that. That's 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, that doesn't make it any better. Um, the, uh, yeah, I was, that was, that's definitely in the, in the regret department. What did he say back to that? Oh, he had a whole lot to say about, back to 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. And so like, really going through kind of point by point. I think, you know, I've actually never, I've never met him, never talked about, that's a very talented guy.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  I think he actually, I actually did read, I think it was in, um, the, with the Rebel book, um, 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 in, 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. Um, but yeah, that was definitely, uh, that was a life lesson. I would say that history forgot about that, though.

• 1:06:58Ryan Peterman?

  So on another tweet.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, sorry. Yeah, here we go. This is great. We're, this is like the cleanse. Yeah.

• 1:07:05Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, this is in 2022. You wrote a tweet. You 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.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  I wrote that. That's a good one. That's a good one. I don't remember writing that. I agree with that guy. He's on to something.

• 1:07:24Ryan Peterman?

  Well, I guess the question.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  What was I responding to? I wonder. I missed something. Something that day on the internet. There's some weather on the internet that I'm subtweeting Paul Graham there somewhere. I think that must have been it.

• 1:07:33Ryan Peterman?

  But I'm curious, do you think that's true?

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Ryan Peterman?

  For, for Sun, because Sun ultimately failed.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  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, 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, their parents were able to work for Sun and you got, you know, so I don't views, 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, but Sun to me is not a failure. Sun is a success.

• 1:08:19Ryan Peterman?

  Was its collapse at the end, I guess, changeable in hindsight with different leadership?

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  I think so. I think that there are, I mean, this is a classic power game of like, why did Sun ultimately not, not survive as an independent entity? And why is that? I think there were 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. 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, where we were developing a storage appliance, I felt that we could have been an example of, an exemplar of what the kinds of products

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  I felt Sun could develop, an independent Sun could develop. But it was gonna 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, like, that's not what we had. And in hindsight, it was probably time for a change. It was, you know, it's like, it, it, it, kind of the way a, a forest fire, in a, in a normal, healthy forest fires, is kind of a part of the life cycle of a forest. And you need that to have, to have, to have rebirth. And I think that that, it's, I mean, ultimately, I think that, that Sun had succeeded, but had also run its course. And it was, it was time for-

• 1:09:52Ryan Peterman?

  Had its time.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  It had its time. Absolutely had its time.

• 1:09:55Ryan Peterman?

  Okay. And that next past take of yours, you, you wrote in 2022, 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 I actually don't even know what's going on on Twitter, because it's private at this point.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Excuse me, I will thank you to not refer to SpaceX that way.

• 1:10:15Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, right.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10:23Ryan Peterman?

  So I, I guess, do, do you still agree that it's run poorly?

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  Oh, God, yes. Yes. Yeah, I definitely agree that. I mean, because, yeah, definitely. It's so, I mean, the, yeah, yes. Yes. I mean, yes. 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.

• 1:10:55Ryan Peterman?

  What's your number one thing that is tire fire?

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  The number one thing of tire fire is that they, they, they, oh, 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.

• 1:11:11Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, you see, okay.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  It's like the level of racism, bluntly. I mean, crazy racism, crazy, crazy racism, crazy antisemitism, crazy and crazy, anti-Islam, 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. I'm just not gonna do that.

• 1:11:57Ryan Peterman?

  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 bust right now. I mean, AI is going crazy and there's all these layoffs.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Crazy. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah.

• 1:12:10Ryan Peterman?

  But what advice would you give, given your experience through the booms and busts, for people who are in today's market?

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  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 gonna be built and then shut down, or pipelines that were rebuilt and then shut down, like everything tracking the price of oil, right? Oil, 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 and busts. 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.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  And what I would say is like, you gotta be really careful about listening to other people. People will tell you that this is gonna be the future, or that thing is dead. And you gotta 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. When people tell us you can't start a computer company in 2019. I'm really glad we didn't listen to them. That you VC firms, so we only fund SaaS. Those VC firms are like, well, it'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,

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  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 these SaaS companies. And I think of like, there's definitely truth to that. But if one's heart is in that, you should ignore the, ignore the pessimism or, or treat the pessimism and the optimism with a grain of salt. Be your own judge and be, 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 a good reason. I mean, these things are amazing. I mean, the, the, where we are with respect to these LMs is just bonkers.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  And you could 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, this is, this is, to quote Steve Jobs, this is the dent I want to kick in the universe.

• 1:14:42Ryan Peterman?

  I noticed your career, almost everything's driven from fulfillment and intrinsic motivation.

• 1:14:49Ryan Peterman?

  Is there a time in your career that you look at and you say, that's the happiest time of my career?

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question. We asked this at Oxide, we ask you, when have you been happiest and why? For exactly that reason. And I would say that like, there, it's not the, it's not necessarily an era. 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. I say that, right? And the, we have, the moments for me, and this is an important kind of question for me to reflect on as we're starting Oxide, and this is actually due to a friend of mine who had been in 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, what is drawing you to start a company?

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  And because it wasn't financial return for me and people should not serve a company for financial return. That's just not a good, that's not good life advice. But what was drawing me, 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. Like 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 Giant a couple of times with LX, with Triton.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  Those times have been like, oh, that, 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. And 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? Like heist movies are great because of that. And like, because it's the, 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.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  And, and Steve loves, I mean, that's, that's part of like our shared bond is he and I are both very, very team oriented and we built a company around that. And it's extraordinary. It is, it 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.

• 1:17:22Ryan Peterman?

  And when you look back on your whole career, is there a particular top regret that you have?

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  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, 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, I think you've made the worst hire of all time. Mike, thank you. Thank you very much. Um, that was a bad experience. It was also very eye opening because everything I was doing about hiring was wrong. And we, after we rectified that situation and got him out,

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  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,

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  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. I needed that guy.

• 1:18:38Ryan Peterman?

  So you don't regret it?

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  I don't regret it. I don't, 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 think, 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, and, and you don't want to take those away. I mean, if I go to the time machine, maybe I would take away the, the Usenet posts and maybe that way, I know maybe that wouldn't have any long lasting consequences, but boy, that's about it.

• 1:19:21Ryan Peterman?

  Awesome. And then last question is, uh, if you can go back to the beginning of your career, knowing everything you know now, what advice would you give yourself?

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  Jesus, don't fuck it up.

• 1:19:31Ryan Peterman?

  Don't fuck.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  I would just think, because like, I feel like 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 controversial 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, I've been able to do so much with so many extraordinary people. I've been blessed with so many incredible colleagues.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  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 of, 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, I wouldn't want to not make those mistakes. Those mistakes were really important.

• 1:20:41Ryan Peterman?

  Well, doesn't get better than that. And thank you for your time today. I really appreciate it.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:20:53Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:20:57Ryan Peterman?

  Thank you for listening to the podcast. It's a passion project of mine that I've 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. 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 Gregorik 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

• 1:21:42Ryan Peterman?

  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.