Inside Oxide

We’ve made it.

We’re here.

Imagine a little warm fire…

I can almost feel the heat.

Yeah, exactly.

Who’s got [unintelligible 00:01:44.04]

That’s right.

This is a moment. I am so proud of you guys. The team you built, where you’re at… I told you on the call, I’m like “We’ve got to milk this.” And here we are.

We’re trying to milk it.

Yeah, we’re trying to milk it.

We’re trying to spend as much time as we can with everyone here, and…

So I’ve got to say – because we talked, and I said… You were talking about how terrific it was with the milestones we had, and I’m like “You need to meet the actual team.”

You did. You said that. I was like “I mean, I’ve met teams before…”

You’ve met teams, I know.

You were right… [laughter]

Oh, God.. The recording’s on, right? I wonder [unintelligible 00:02:21.28]

Exactly, that’s right. And also, you were right with “No, actually you were right.”

No, I just – you know, I just [unintelligible 00:02:28.16]

It turns out you were right. It’s not that hard.

It’s not that I was wrong, it’s that you were right.

No, exactly. You weren’t wrong, in that – I mean, I think everybody understands that a team is important. No one would disagree with that. No one would disagree. Of course a team’s important. But then you look at what companies do, and the way they act. And it’s like, they don’t act consistently with the idea that the team is actually everything. And I mean, that is – I mean, part of what always united Steve and me… We have many shared values, but a real strong belief in teamwork.

Yeah.

And the highlights of my career have always been working on an exceptional team. And we are blessed with a truly exceptional team.

We spent the last day and a half meeting your team…

Yeah.

…talking, hanging out…

Undercover boss style.

Undercover boss… [laughter]

We got some really good feedback for you all. You’ll see it, and – you all will see it eventually, but we got…

But to a one they’re kind, they’re smart, they’re caring, they accepted us right in… Some are shy, some are not… All the typical things of humans. But just very impressive, like, to a one. So I guess the obvious question would be “How did you do that?” How did you do that?

Yeah. And it’s actually not that complicated, which is kind of frustrating that more companies don’t do it this way. But from the start, we believed we could attract an extraordinary team if we built transparently, and really put a beacon out there in terms of what our mission was. One of the things that we believed was that companies were wrong to be deep stealth. Deep stealth made no sense to me, because you’re much better off explaining what you’re building and why… And how do we attract people who are drawn to the same mission? So everything we did, from the beginning… We did a podcast, right? And I definitely wanted to do a podcast, it was fun to do… But there was a method to the madness. It was super-cheap - a couple of podcasting microphones - and getting these pioneers of computing in, into a garage, talking about their experiences, and “Why were we doing that?”, so they could act as a beacon, and people would listen to that podcast being like “Hey, I want to work with people who’ve got that same disposition.” So that was very important, to kind of put that beacon out there… And then once the beacon is out there, then you also have to have a way of “Okay, so then how do we down-select?” Yeah. And that’s where we got lucky, by our previous mistakes, mistakes of previous stuff. And Steve and I were not – we were not 20-somethings when we started this company. I was 45, you were 41… Or were you 42?

Yeah.

Whatever it was, 40s…

I think that was – I mean, one big part of it was we were deep enough in our careers to know what we wanted to do, what we didn’t want to do… And then it makes it easier when you’re talking to prospective employees, and they’re asking “What do you hope to achieve?” And a lot of companies are hoping to achieve a fast start and get acquired. Or they want a quick run, and then – they’re not talking about or planning for a longstanding company that they want to go build. And if it’s the former, there’s a lot of like short-term decisions that are actually better for the short-term…

Sure.

…that do not serve a long-term that you don’t intend to go build towards. And I think – you know, what we wanted to do is we wanted to be doing this for like 40 or 50 years. The rest of our careers anyway. And when you have that disposition, other people that are attracted by the beacon of a big mission, an idea to go do something, can hear honestly and earnestly that we’re trying to build a good company first, and a longstanding company first. It allows for folks that are deciding whether to leave where they’ve been for a period of time and actually jump in and jump in for the long term… And I’m sure you’ve gotten this from some of the stories of folks, they got here and they’re seeing like-minded folks all over the room.

Yeah.

That want to go build something, and build something for a long time. So it was helpful to have a shared disposition towards building for as long as we can, versus a quick short-term company.

That makes a lot of sense. And then to down-select - you call it down-selecting… The narrowing down of the candidates. You have this rigorous written process. Everybody talks about the material…

The RFD.

Yeah, we’ve got an RFD that describes the hiring process… And that really came from hiring mistakes at previous spots.

What do you mean?

I mean, I made the worst hire of all time.

You made the worst hire?

I made the worst hire of all time. Which is –

Steve didn’t do that.

No, no, no. No, Steve didn’t do that. I mean –

[unintelligible 00:07:24.11]

Yeah, I mean, it was also – you know, when someone else in the room has made the worst hire of all time, it doesn’t matter if you made the second-worst hire of all time.

It doesn’t matter. You’re covered over.

Right. And it was very helpful to have done that. You know, in Silicon Valley people are often like “Well, I think I’ve made the worst hire of all time.” And I’m like “Look, I will hand you the crown right now. I’m happy to get rid of this thing. You should know that the guy that I hired presented himself under an assumed name, had served time in state prison for violent felonies, and it’s not what made him a bad employee.”

[laughs] That’s bad.

[00:08:03.08] Yeah, it’s bad. And that – we took hiring down to the studs after that. And again, this is the benefit of having done this at kind of a previous stop, of realizing that interviewing people… You mentioned this, when you were talking to folks and getting different personalities. Some are shy, some are… And so often when we do an oral exam as the way we determine whether someone joins a team, you are selecting for one aspect of a person. You’re selecting for their charisma, you’re selecting for their comfort with someone that they’ve never met before… And there are so many terrific technologists that are nervous when they’re talking to someone for the first time. And that you will interview, and you may be like “I don’t know –” But you read their written work, “This person’s extraordinary.”

So we believe strongly that the best way to evaluate people is them speaking from the heart in writing. And it’s just very revealing in terms of what’s important to people. Because ultimately, what we want is we want a company that we’ve got a shared mission, but bonded by shared values. And there are so many challenges in running a company that kind of go away. If everyone is really high-performing, and kind, and communicative, and collaborative, there’s a bunch of problems – not to say that there aren’t problems to go tackle. But the problems that you do need to go tackle are much easier to go tackle.

One of the things that I’ve been – I mean, there’s a degree to which, frankly, we don’t… I’m a little disappointed how little interpersonal conflict we have at Oxide… Because I’ve got a lot of – [unintelligible 00:09:42.24]

Maybe. Because some of the ways we’ve built things… For example, one of the things that we’ve always talked about is – we record every meeting. If you had something where a meeting went really sideways, and people came out of a meeting really upset, the ability for everybody to go back and re-watch themselves, re-watch the person they’re arguing with, re-watch… “Hey, can you see how – so this person you think drew the wrong inference, and became upset.” But now you can see, watching yourself, how they might have drawn that wrong inference. I mean, speaking for myself - I learned a lot about myself listening to past meetings that I was in… And I would go back to re-listen and re-watch them just because I thought I’d missed some content. And one of the things that I realized about myself, that I guess should seem obvious, but I really had to re-watch myself to appreciate - when you’re in a meeting and you have something that you want to contribute… So now your brain is keeping your little… Like “I’ve got my little –”

Right, right, right. “I’m waiting for my turn.”

I’ve got my little morsel. I’m waiting for my turn. I’m not an asshole, so I’m waiting for my turn, and I’m keeping my little morsel warm. It is really hard to listen when you’re in that mode. And so what I would do is I would re-listen to myself, and someone else would make a really important point, and then I would say something that – it wouldn’t be necessarily obvious to anyone else, but it was obvious to me. Like “No, you dumbass. You just missed something. You thought you were listening.” And I would have been like –

It’s self-awareness, really, right?

[unintelligible 00:11:16.09] that kind of self-awareness.

There’s so many people who are not really that self-aware.

Well, it’s hard in the moment. But when you go back to it –

It’s hard in the moment, but when you go back to it, you’re like “Oh.” And it’s like, when you’ve built a company around that kind of introspection and self-awareness, when you do have these kind of conflicts arise, you have new tools at your disposal to go resolve them.

Yeah. It’s coping, right? I mean, you’re teaching basic human skills here. Self-awareness, how to cope… You know what I mean?

Well, so I think – I mean, are we teaching it, or are we selecting for it?

Selecting for it.

Because I think we’re selecting for it.

Well, I think you’re creating a culture that helps people do that naturally.

Yeah.

The recorded meetings - self-awareness. “How did I respond?” - coping.

Right.

[00:12:00.16] Well, self-awareness starts with the materials, because you’re having to write both examples of your prior work and what you’ve done, and what you’re proud of, and then some open-ended questionnaire questions, which basically are asking “When were you happiest in your career and why? When were you unhappiest in your career and why?” And the answers to that take people to places they didn’t expect. When they were like “Oh, I’m just going to throw my hat in the ring for a particular job.” And they’ll tell us, they get into it and they’re like “Jesus Christ…” I had to put my pencil down and I’m just like sitting here…

Therapy.

…just like – I’m back in that moment where my boss was telling me to let go of this person, so I could promote the other person… And all these things that were just in tension with each other. And what’s really, really helpful is then when we do have conflict, you can take two people that are pitted against each other on a particular issue, and you can say, “Hey, I want each of you to go back and read the materials of the other person when you were like “Holy shit, we have to hire this person.” And you were like “God, that is someone I really want to go work with.” And talk about a way to resolve that tension, and get someone thinking about again “Alright, hold on. Why are we here?”

Well, because you remind yourself, like “We actually agree on a lot.” You may be disagreeing on this issue, but I go back and read your materials, like “Oh, right. We actually are trying to do the same thing. We are actually – we’ve got a lot in common.”

When you all mention materials, what I’ve been thinking about - and correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like you expose a lot, but you also take a lot away that became bias. There’s a removal process by the way that you expose this “Who is it? What do they care about?”, versus their human attributes, how they look, the color of their skin, where they’re from.

For sure.

What is removed from that process that’s usually distractions, that helps you focus on the good stuff that you should focus on.

I think so. I mean, I think so, and it is interesting, because I think that one of the – hiring is always going to be a challenging process. And we are always going to have – and one of the questions people have is “Should I put a review in on someone that I’ve worked with?” Because I’ve worked with them, so I’m biased, because I’ve worked with them. It’s like, you should definitely put a review in on them.

You know them well.

Because you know them well. And we have seen it go all ways. And one of the things that we see, where you’ve worked with someone, you thought they were really great, and then they apply and their materials are not good. And –

That’s the toughest.

That hurts.

It hurts. And it’s happened to us all, and you’re like “Oh, man…”

“I wanted it to work out.”

“I wanted it to work out.” Because we’re so direct about “Here’s what you need to go do.” And like “Read the RFD. Listen to the podcast episode.” We tell people, “Put it all in the materials.” We get people who are like “Well, I’ll tell you more in the interview.” It’s like, “There’s not going to be an interview.”

Yeah, you’ve got to [unintelligible 00:14:52.06] out there.

You’ve got to put it out there. But if people aren’t able to do that, that’s telling you something. And it’s telling you something important, that this is not necessarily the right fit for you. And also, I think the other thing is you don’t want to be too sanctimonious about it. We’re not making absolutist judgments about – like, we’re not hiring the best. We are hiring people that we think are the best fit for the roles that we’re hiring for. And one of the things that we definitely – one of the things that’s been fun about the company is we’ve been around for long enough, we’ve had people apply for the company, and you read their materials, you’re like “I like a lot here, but this is off for this role.” And then two years later there’s a role that opens up that’s a better fit for them. Sometimes we’ve communicated to those folks that like “Hey, I loved your materials, but here’s why it wasn’t a fit.” Sometimes we haven’t. And then they come in [unintelligible 00:15:46.06] like “Now the time is right.”

So I think that you want to be careful about kind of – this is not kind of ordering. This is finding people that we think are the most likely to succeed at Oxide. And honestly, one of the things that’s been really challenging is we’ve got a lot of people that apply for the company, that desperately want to work for the company. And it’s really hard to turn someone like that away. They pour their heart and soul.

[00:16:20.14] It could be good.

It could be good. It could work out. It could work out. And the problem is we don’t have an infinite amount of resources, and we do have to make decisions. Those decisions are really hard.

What you described is something I would call a velvet rope, right? When you go to a certain club or a certain place, there’s a line that says “If you pass this bar or if you meet these guidelines, or you are a fit, come on in. But if you don’t - politely, not now.”

Not now.

Right? That velvet rope is a very powerful thing in your business.

Yeah, and I don’t like the exclusivity of it, but that’s just the reality of what we need to go do.

You have a responsibility…

That’s right.

…to these folks here.

100%.

To do your jobs, and be selective.

That’s right.

I think we have the good fortune of now being very, very oversubscribed in almost every role… So it is tough, because there will be a great candidate, and then an even better candidate, that is just a better fit. And we’re obviously growing, we’re expanding, we’ve got more racks out there than we’ve ever had by a factor of two, so that helps… But we’re still massively oversubscribed.

I think actually one important things on the job descriptions – we put a lot of effort into the job descriptions. We want to make sure the job descriptions –

To describe the job?

To describe the job.

Good job.

[unintelligible 00:17:53.23] something radical. We’re gonna describe the job, not make up a bunch of bullshit requirements…

No AI slop…

No AI slop…

This is human-generated thoughtfulness…

Hasn’t AI submitted materials yet?

Oh, yeah.

[laughs]

Well, so you also have people that you just want to give them the feedback, “Next time let an AI write this. This would have been much better with–”

Grammar check, and stuff.

Oh, we’ve gotten some real stinkers in that regard.

Right.

And actually, I was talking to an old friend of mine, and she was like “Those processes won’t work in the post AI age.” I’m like “Well, let me describe the questions we’re asking.” It’s like “When have you been happiest, and why?” Hard to AI-slop that one into existence.

That’s so true. It’s such a personal question.

It’s a personal question.

It requires introspection, journey…

Yeah.

Hard to generate that one.

It is hard to generate that one. And I would say one modification we made to the materials is we asked – the last question we asked is “Why do you want to work for Oxide?” And it’s an unfortunate kind of indictment of the age we live in, where people are like “I want to work for Oxide because it’s a principled company. Honesty, and integrity, and decency.” And that’s great. We view that as a constraint on like operation. We think that any company should have that. I think that that is great that that resonates with you. That is nowhere near enough. That is nowhere near enough. I need to know, we need to know that the mission speaks to you, that the role speaks to you. And one of the things we’ve done is we’ve put more and more in our job descriptions, and given people more opportunities to explore the degree that they’re a fit. We’re very transparent. We want you listening to podcast episodes, in the RFDs, in the repos. And the more you can do that… Because you need to try it on, to see “This is actually earnestly going to be a fit for me.” So one of these we’ve added is not just “Why do you want to work for Oxide?”, but “Why this role at Oxide?” And that’s been really, really important.

[00:20:00.18] So I described some of the characters that we met here, Adam described some of their lifestyles, all around the world… One thing that I think it seems to be missing is youngsters.

Yeah.

Everybody’s generally thirties, forties…

First of all – I mean, we made a MASH reference that literally half the company didn’t get.

I saw the hands. It was a lot of hands.

Half of us got it.

I would say 70%, it seemed… Wasn’t it around 70%?

No, no, no…

I saw a lot of hands.

No, no, no [unintelligible 00:20:31.04] Less than 50%.

So you’re overly subscribed, you’ve got tons of people that want to work here…

You’re right.

You have a gluttony of riches and choice, right? And at a certain point, there’s a demographic that seems to be missing. It’s like someone who’s fresh out of college, fresh out of high school, maybe has a different perspective… [unintelligible 00:20:45.07]

That’s a challenge. It’s because we – I mean, I obviously had a job straight out of college, straight out of school I went to Sun… It is important that we are in an environment – I want us to be able to be in an environment for that, and we do have people apply straight out of school, and whenever I look at someone straight out of school, I am like “Okay, this is unlikely, but let’s see.” And I always go into the materials with an open mind. The materials are weak. I mean, the materials are weak. And I think that – and look, [unintelligible 00:21:21.23] exclusivity, which may make me a hypocrite from what I’m about to say, but this is an elite team. And like, “Hey, I want to play Major League Baseball. I’m a good high school baseball player.” It’s like “Alright, do you want to go play Major League Baseball? That’s great. You’re going to go play D1, and then you’re going to go play maybe Indie ball, you’re going to be on the bus, you’re going to be in the minors… And you’ll be playing Major League Baseball when you’re 25. Maybe, if you’re Bryce Harper.” And if the Bryce Harper of software engineering or the Bryce Harper of sales applies, I think that –

The materials will show it.

The materials will show it. But it’s like, we are not going to be – so I think that in the abstract I’ve wanted to be able to be someone’s first stop… But as a practical matter, when you’re building an elite team, is it really practical? I mean, we need like a minor league Oxide.

Oh, hey… Come on now…

[unintelligible 00:22:11.25]

Exactly. Hey, now… [laughter]

You know, a farm team is a decent metaphor, because don’t you guys want that eventually? I know you’re in a different phase now, but maybe eventually.

We will, eventually. And I think the – and we have folks that, you know, just several years out of school, that weren’t here… And I think it is just easier to know yourself and know what you want to do, and be able to express that in your materials with just a few miles on the tires.

Yeah, this is a very important point.

A few miles on the what?

A few miles on the tires. There’s a big difference.

Having some lived experience that allows you to understand a little bit more of what you want. So that this is not like trying on work, but this is like where you want to go really apply yourself. And I think part of it is – you know, we have fewer submissions from folks that are earlier in their career than later in their career. And I think it’s – you get into the materials and you’re like “This is not a trivial –”

[unintelligible 00:23:08.01] He’s shaking his head.

It’s not true… Because –

Fewer materials that [unintelligible 00:23:13.07]

He’s the primary filter, right? You said that earlier. Well, at least off camera.

Yeah, they just don’t make it through the first round.

That’s right.

Okay, there are many fewer quality materials, even like moderate quality materials, of folks that are very, very, very, very early in their career. Because it is hard to describe robust experiences if you haven’t had them.

Right. There’s also - just as Steve said, there’s a really big difference between a 22-year-old and a 25-year-old. And a 25-year-old and a 28-year-old. That prefrontal cortex is still developing.

It’s true, yeah.

So we get – we do have actually plenty of people… There are people here that are younger than you might think.

Okay.

I mean, certainly we’ve got plenty of people here that are much closer to our kids’ age than they are to our age.

Definitely.

[00:24:08.17] But they didn’t come straight out of school. They had two years experience, three years experience, four years experience. And you look at those folks, that are exceptional - the experience they had was exceptional. They were in a real [unintelligible 00:24:19.11] where they learned a lot in a very short period of time… They’re wise beyond their years.

One of the things that a lot of people have said when we asked why you work for Oxide, why you like Oxide, and this reflects in your management style, which you say is trust, your management style is trust… Is they say “Well, they treat us like grown-ups. They treat me like a grown-up.” And I think that’s an awesome way of describing it. That being said, everyone here is a grown-up.

Well, people were saying that we treat them like a grown-up. But they are grown-ups, though.

Well, exactly. I mean, it’s just nice to be recognized, I guess… [laughter]

It’s like, that’s the bar? That’s the bar? A bunch of grown-ups getting treated like grown-ups?

I know.

I know. I’m sorry.

Well, I mean, it just speaks to the experience level of people, right? They’re self-starters, they’re motivated… And of course, this goes now to where I always end up, which is like “How long can you keep doing that?” In terms of –

He’s already told you that.

As you scale.

For as long as you can.

As you scale.

Look, if people are coming in – people are coming in drawn to the mission, and especially excited about working with this exceptional team, there’s a responsibility to the team around you. We see this all the time, where folks are trying to do their best work, because they feel an onus to these people around them that are doing their best work. You can’t take your foot off the gas, and you don’t want to, because you want to show up and help your peers, and help your customers. And that’s infectious. So I think as you have that in the collective, it’s very hard for the next five people to come in and disrupt that. You come in and you are trying to live up to that, and so that ends up being this gravitational pull to where you can keep growing, with everyone with that same disposition. And I don’t know, it’s hard to imagine – like, the bigger that gets, the harder it is for the next group to tear away at that.

I mean, I will say this… If you talk to founders where companies have lost their way - and indeed, like the Brian Chesky piece that inspired Paul Graham’s Founders Mode - they will say that culturally we lost our way. I didn’t spend enough time on the culture. And I think we would say “Well, you didn’t write the culture down early enough, and you didn’t use the culture as a lens for hiring. So the company lost its foundation.”

You asked a good question, how far it can scale. No company has ever been at our size with what we have in terms of the strength of culture that we’ve got. I mean, there are very few other companies –

And consistency from when we started.

…period, that use written materials as the primary rubric for hiring.

But… They’re not you.

So that has been so important to us, to scale out… It’s like, it would be foolish for us to say what we can or can’t do, because we just don’t know.

Pretty concretely, when we started hiring sales, a bunch of people outside the company were like “You’ve got to stop the materials process. You cannot hire salespeople this way. Salespeople move very quickly, there’s recruiters involved… If you take that long, they’ll be gone. They’ll be off the market.” And we’re like “Well, no. It’s a hard constraint.” We actually are going to require someone to spend several hours writing down their thoughts, if we’re going to consider them to be one of the foundational members of the sales team, or the next five, or the next five. And it turned out exceptional salespeople loved the process. They loved describing themselves –

I would love the process…

[00:27:54.18] … like, the curious attributes of their character, and how they do research on a company before they show up to the first meeting… Which is a sign of respect, and it allows you to get into a deeper conversation more quickly, rather than “How can I hook them on some quick little “Why this company does this”? So they really enjoyed the process. And now they bring that into the sales culture for the next round of sales hiring.

You guys ask them different questions than you ask engineers?

We do.

Yeah. So what we’ve done is we’ve changed the portfolio questions. So the questionnaire is the same, because we’ve found that the questionnaire, happiest and why, unhappiest and why, is universal. The portfolio questions change. And one of the things that we do is we – especially if we’re hiring for a new role we’ve never hired before, we want to go find the person that we would love to hire, that’s working in that role, unhirable, because they’re happy… “Help us figure out what the materials should look like for this person.”

What are the questions we should ask if we’re trying to get at curiosity and responsibility in a sales context? And lo and behold, as they start being like “Okay, here’s how I would put the materials together.” And then like six months later, they’re like “Hey, do you have an opening over there?”

“I might be interested.”

It’s like “I thought you were happy.” Like, “Well, I just might be interested…”

“Things change… You know, things change.”

Exactly. So we do change that. But it’s interesting to look at, because I think that those changes are really important.

So we are asking – especially for roles that are customer-facing, we want to see evidence of real customer curiosity and depth. Because when we – it’s great, and we obviously wanted to build a company that employees would be proud to work for. It’s great. We also want to build a company - and that is equally, if not more important - that customers love to buy from. It was very important to us, from the outset, that we build a company that – because we’re talking about trust as a management philosophy… Trust is also a customer and market engagement philosophy.

I was at Sun during some very, very dark years, and we had a non-competitive microprocessor. And one customer told me, he’s like “I’ve got to tell you, the products you make are not competitive right now. There are a bunch of things about Sun that are really difficult for me to deal with… But I really want you guys to make it. And the reason I keep you in here is because you guys never lied to me. You’re the only ones that never lied to me. You come in here… If your products are not the right products – like, you’ll help me find something better. You always want me to succeed. And I’ve got to tell you.”

That also seems like a low bar. Like “Look, you guys don’t lie to me… Everybody else lies.”

You’d be surprised.

I think you would be surprised.

But that’s simply because it’s typically transactional. And what you want is you want – I mean, yes sales is about transactions. But it cannot be transactional where someone is thinking about their quarterly number. I mean, yes, you absolutely want them hitting their goals, but thinking the long game with these customer relationships. And you find that those that have played that long game, and have built trust with customers, have these longstanding relationships with customers. Even if they went to two companies, three companies…

Yeah.

So how do you understand how they think about being not just the representative, but the steward of the company with those relationships? And the materials are a great place for that to take shape. Then we’ve gotten great feedback from candidates on the materials. They’re like “Hey, you know what else would be great to talk about in here?” And just, again, we feel very fortunate that the founding sales team here are big believers in the process, and want to carry that forward.

[00:31:42.23] I’ve gotta say, when we were first trying to hire for sales, my own conviction was kind of wavering. I’m “Steve, is the materials process the right process for sales?” Steve’s like “Emphatically, yes. We just haven’t found the right people yet”, and we just needed…

To be patient [unintelligible 00:31:57.16]

And also, you’ve got to be doing more than that… Because for some roles, yes, we are very oversubscribed. For other roles - like, we’ve got to go out and really shake the tree. And you’ve got to be willing to go find the people and have the pre-conversations with them. I mean, Steve and I have had many conversations with candidates, like “I don’t know about Oxide.” Like, “Look, let me hop on the phone with you, and what I want to close you on is digging further into the company to get you to the point where you’re submitting materials.” So we are happy to get engaged in –

But I will say, when we got early in the process with sales candidates, one of the things we kept seeing was these materials that were not great, because it was salespeople just pounding their chest. And if you think about what they are predisposed or conditioned to be able to talk about, it is “How I crushed my number. How I was the first person to close this size deal.” And like, great. I mean, a lot of people are involved in closing big deals. What we want is story time. We want to hear about like when things didn’t go great, did you run towards it or run away from it? How did you deal with – how do you treat your peers when you’re working on a large, complex customer engagement? And it’s funny, because we’ve had candidates that have submitted materials that were just all about the headlines of success metrics, which is how folks have been trained, and we had to get better at “How do we ask the right questions to get them to… Just stories you tell around a campfire, about the scar tissue that you have with – tell us those stories.”

So where did that conviction come from? He was wavering… Why did you believe so much that that was still the right path for sales, when it was a struggle at first to find the right people?

Oh, because it’s not about sales. I mean, it is nothing to do with a particular goal, whether it’s solutions engineering, support, sales, finance… Again, back to folks that have shared passion, shared values, and a shared disposition about building something meaningfully with people they love working with, for a long time, and doing it the right way. That’s what you’re looking for. And then when you find that, it doesn’t matter what particular team, or role, or anything. I mean, I think you all have started to feel that across the company, and that’s where the flywheel starts to take shape. It’s not about these siloed organizations where you have to do things differently, because that’s a certain type of animal… And then thankfully, we’ve started to see “Holy shit, that’s an incredible salesperson, that loved the process.” And like, just go read the materials.

Yeah. Whenever you’re doing something that kind of takes conviction that’s contrary, you need those early omens that like “Okay, I’m not totally on the wrong path here.”

Right. To reinforce it.

To reinforce it. And when I say my conviction was wavering - I mean, I don’t think I needed much in the way of convincing, but it was – and actually, it was extremely helpful that Steve was so emphatic, because I think that we’ve all… I mean, for us the proxy, especially in sales - how much of your sales is like understanding what a customer needs, and then sculpting what you’ve got for that customer. It’s like, “Well, we’re being very explicit with you about what we need”, and it’s like, this is a very good proxy for a customer relationship. If you’re not reading the RFP thoroughly, and you’re kind of shooting your mouth off, it’s like “Well, you’re not going to work.”

Then how rigorous are you going to be on the thing that you’re submitting to that CIO? And you’re going to be like “Oh, well, I brushed through it because I was on a plane.” It’s like, “No. What?” So it gives you –

[00:35:43.00] And I will say, the other thing about this company is that – and this is where you get to that trust. This company sticks it. We know that if someone is out there representing Oxide, in any capacity - sales, finance, operations, engineering - we know that they themselves are going to hold themselves to a high standard of execution.

But I would say the reason that it’s reasonable to ask “How could this scale?”, it is easy to see how these things don’t scale… Meaning - like, there was real investor pressure early, especially around sales hiring, where it’s like “I want you hiring faster. Why aren’t you hiring faster? It’s probably this materials process.” You know? And so you can totally imagine scenarios in which you’re like “Okay, there’s just like too much external pressures”, and you’ve got to relax these constraints. And that’s not to say that you don’t need to adjust and modify things as the company gets bigger… But the foundation is so, so, so important. And sticking it out just a little longer, you get these omens, and you’re like “Okay, alright [unintelligible 00:36:47.26] Stay the course, and then down the road it’s like “Oh man, what a great model.”

And this happens exactly – I mean, I end up reviewing a lot of materials, and you just get numb as you’re reviewing materials… And then you can have a candidate that’s just a bit better than the others, and you’re like “Oh, this person’s great.” But you’re like “No, no, no. I’m just numb from these others.” And then you begin to, like, “God, maybe this is unreasonable.” Especially when it’s a new role. And then you get that superlative candidate, and you’re just like “Oh, thank God. Thank God. Alright, yes.”

It still works.

Yeah, it still works.

There’s still hope.

There’s still hope.

So on that vein, and fast-forward 20 years… You guys are retiring from Oxide…

20? You forget that – like, we’re youngsters still.

Okay. Ish.

Fast forward 30 years.

40 years. Okay, fine.

You’ve built a generation of computer companies. The next generation is running it, you guys are ready to hang them up. Does Oxide still do uniform compensation? Predict it.

Oh, boy… Hard to know. I genuinely hand on heart don’t know, because… I just don’t know. I can easily go either way. I can easily be like “No, no, of course not, because that generational company has to have 10,000 employees.” I’m like “No, God. That would never work.” And then I can go the other side of like “Yeah, that generational company only had 500 employees. Only had 600 employees.” And I just don’t know.

What do you think, Steve? Bryan doesn’t know.

I don’t know.

I think the foundation behind uniform compensation still remains.

Which is what?

Transparency, for sure.

Transparency is absolutely important.

Could there be tiers, maybe? Still uniform, but like tiered uniformity? Does that make it non-uniform?

Well, look, I’ll give you an example. So we do not have uniform construction of compensation at Oxide.

Right.

We have salespeople that are putting something in the middle, where if they do not achieve their target, they make less than everyone else at the company. And if they overachieve their target, they make more than everyone else at the company. And we have definitely had open conversations about whether others are interested in putting something in the middle. And it gets a little interesting when you’re like “Okay, well then, what’s my [unintelligible 00:39:16.11]

Right. [unintelligible 00:39:19.21]

Right, right. But again, if we’re thinking about everyone having an equally important role in the company, I think that’s foundational as well. Where a lot of people are just like “Oh, you can’t possibly pay the same for a support engineer.” Right?

Always support engineer.

[unintelligible 00:39:41.19]

They always get kicked. They’re the first example. It’s like, “I’ve got to kick one of these – support, get over here. You know the drill, I’m going to kick you.” [laughter]

So… Look, I mean, is there a future where we want to be building folks that are earlier in their career, and –

That’s what I was thinking about, yeah. The farm team.

[00:40:04.02] Look, I don’t know. But I think the things that start that eventually you’re asking questions around are – I mean, we already hit this first “Is it rigid in all regards? Or is it the foundation of transparency, and an equal weighting of value of job, which is kind of like the first two important pieces?” And then sales was the first time that we broke it being completely rigid and uniform across everything. But landed on transparency, and kind of equal weighting.

So yeah, the things that will open the question is “How will we address folks that are earlier in their career as we get further along?” And international – I mean, I don’t know, I would like to believe that we’re going to be able to hold true to the foundation of this thing, regardless of international, and some of the other things that will [unintelligible 00:40:59.17]

And I think the other thing that – we’ve been told so frequently, like “Oh, this doesn’t scale, this doesn’t scale.” It’s just kind of a waste of time to think about it… Because actually –

You’re not there yet.

The only thing I care about is “Does it scale to the next ten hires?” And the answer to that is yes. So we’ve kind of figured out – and the other thing that… The esprit de corps that we have here is so sacred that we – and it’s not unrelated, because people don’t… Whenever you tie compensation to people’s individual actions, then people will adjust their individual actions accordingly. It’s like “Well, has this been my OKR? My MBO? Is it yes or no?” And we want people to make the right decision. And we want them to do that, and we trust them to do that in the moment. And so we don’t want to lose any of that.

So anything we would do – we want to be very careful about in anything we would do, because we don’t want to lose any of what we’ve got, because what we’ve got is lightning in a bottle. I mean, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a team this large, with this kind of breadth and this kind of depth, that has this kind of esprit de corps.

And by the way, throughout we’ve been wide open to the questions – we would never do anything where it was “You are unable to serve your customers appropriately without X. You are going to hurt the company, or put a limiter in front of where the company can go because of Y.” And we’ve had the good fortune of – when it comes to this topic, we have never had to compromise or make sacrifices around our customers, and the growth of the business around that. And I hope that’ll be the case for a long time to come.

One of the things that you said in our conversation initially, Bryan, with even doing this, even being here, was you wanted to capture this special thing you have - papers, materials, the whole process - and expose it. You want to kind of – I think you said the word “infect”, or something like that, to other companies out there. That you hope that you can be a leader on that front.

Yes.

“We’re going to put something out. We’re going to share the inside of something.”

That’s right.

You’ll prove it, of course. But it’s to be a version that you can showcase what’s happened here. What do you hope happens? What do you hope people do that changes maybe the Goliaths, the Googles, the whomevers? You’d think they’ll – they probably won’t change, but maybe the next version of…

The FAANGs will be reformed one funeral at a time.

Sure.

[laughs]

[00:43:37.20] To paraphrase Thomas Kuhn. There’s no salvation, I think, for those companies. You know, Jared Diamond’s collapse is very instructive in this regard. Companies – when the culture is wrong, fixing a culture is such a gargantuan amount of work that you would have to – and so thankless in so many regards. And there are so few people that are capable of true cultural change. You’d have to ask yourself, why would someone do that? Why would someone sign up for that job? And this is like – look no further than Intel. Intel has had an acute –

Go deep.

…cultural problem for decades. I mean, they’ve got their first outside CEO in their history in Lip-Bu Tan, and not coincidentally, it’s the first person who’s trying to fix the culture problem. It is far too late. Far too late for that company. I mean, good luck to them, but the kinds of things you need to do…

Get a big, new investor.

That’s what that is… [laughter] Oh, God. Yeah, you and me. Yeah, when’s the board meeting? Do we get to go?

I didn’t get a choice on this one… I guess I invested.

I guess we invested, yeah.

Anyways… I sidetracked you there.

So that I think you kind of have to give up on. I think you can have – what I think is possible is around new company formation, and inspiring a rising generation. And one of the things that – I’ve got a lot more… I’ve got a lot of faith in the rising generation. I think that the – maybe just from my own kids, and their friends, and kind of the approach that they take, I think that young people have… Yes, they got flooded with a lot of dis and misinformation, but they’ve also got the ability to go find information that is a real source of truth for them, in a positive way. And I think that we can be an inspiration for that new company formation. I think we can tell people there’s a different way to do things. And I think people, to a fault, have mimicked some of the bad behavior in Silicon Valley. And that bad behavior has kind of reinforced itself.

The TV show? [laughs]

Silicon Valley, the place… You’ve seen that the behavior around here has degraded.

Well, and I think people are just by nature moving fast, looking to copy things that are around them, pick up stuff that probably worked, or sort of is the way you do things…

Right. Works for them, works for us.

Part of getting it out there is giving another little blueprint that one could follow. And even if they’re not rigorously evaluating it, they’re like “That seems plausible.” Also the ecosystem around new company formation. So a recruiter that we used was one of the parties that was just like “This materials thing is bonkers. I can’t work with this. I can’t work with this. I’m working with 50, 60 companies, I’m talking to hundreds and hundreds of candidates across these companies…”

You will never hire someone this way.

You’ll never hire someone this way. This is not how it works. And it took some time to get them around the bend to agree to work with us on this, and kind of work together to help them with how we operate through this process. And they had some good feedback for us just in terms of – let’s say we landed on a good process.

There we go.

And by the end of it, we had a candidate come aboard that they had worked with…

One, I would say very key moment in that path - they would have a candidate that they’re very hot on. We would talk to them. It seems possible. The candidate is good. We have a good conversation. They submitted materials. Materials are poo-poo.

Terrible.

[00:47:46.08] Terrible materials. I mean, it would be interesting to talk to these folks, but we would send the recruiter the materials, and the recruiter is a smart person. So on the one hand, yes, had the conviction of their own beliefs, but is an intelligent individual. And they would read the materials and be like “Ooh. Those are bad.” Well, and I think it also – like, maybe challenging some of your priors. Actually, maybe, I thought that guy was really good. And you guys talked to the guy, and you guys also thought he was really good. And now all of us can agree that, based on the materials, it’s terrible. Maybe I’m not deejaying this correctly.

Is that like talking versus walking, though? Because papers, the materials – I keep saying papers accidentally; the materials are kind of like walking.

Show me your papers.

Yeah. Show me your papers. You know, you can talk a lot. But can you walk? The materials is like the walk.

Yes, but in the case of this recruiter, by the end of the process they said – and we’ve seen this across investors, recruiters, where they are now taking that process and beginning to implement it. So this particular recruiter is like “If you don’t mind, I want to start kind of like educating some of our clients on this process, because I’m now seeing value in being able to get higher quality candidates further along with these engagements.” So there’s an example of, like, we’d love that. It’d be amazing. And anywhere we can help, where this helps others begin to to do hiring, add elements to their hiring process that helps them get better people on board.

I almost wonder too if it’s not a byproduct of how we force hiring… Like, I know people looking for jobs like “I submitted everywhere.”

Oh, yeah. [unintelligible 00:49:43.20]

You kind of have to gunshot your opportunity, because one, you’re between things, you’re desperate… Maybe it could be that situation where you got laid off, and your position is not of your own doing, necessarily. You may have been upset about where you were at, maybe you would have changed, and you love Oxide, or whatever, but… It’s almost like the hiring scenario is forced to go gunshot. “Let me put who I am everywhere, versus go super-deep on where I truly can apply.” It’s got to be both sides, though. The company has to do what you all do, and the candidate has to be willing to do what you ask them to do.

Yeah.

In particular, what you have is a lot of companies - and I think it’s a mistake… Companies are thinking “Well, this is a lot of tedious resume review. This is a great task for LLMs. Let’s put LLMs in charge of this, and let’s relieve the human of having–” Because they only do resume review. They don’t have any other materials to look at. So the cynicism that you see from [unintelligible 00:50:38.17] It’s like “Look, these guys just use the AI anyway. So what you need to do is –”

Play the game.

Play the game. And it’s basically random, whether you get a – because the conviction from the candidate is “It’s random whether you get a call or not.” And I don’t know that they’re wrong for a lot of companies. So if it’s random, AI-slop your resume up such that an LLM can actually identify… At some point, the LLMs are going to start writing… It’s going to be like, “My resume –” This is like in alien rooms… It’s like, “Yeah, but the other LLM can read it”, and for whatever reason it’s selecting it…

It’s more efficient that way.

Yeah. It’s like, the white space has– and then you scatter-shot your way out there, and then you get that call, because it’s random. And [unintelligible 00:51:25.22] that is the wrong way to get a job. And look - yes, we’re X-ers, okay? We’ve seen shitty job markets. We’ve seen job markets way shittier than this one. Way shittier than this one. And what do you need to do to find a job in a shitty job market? It’s hard. I mean, I’ve got total sympathy, especially with people that are suddenly laid off, and are scrambling… But you need to figure out what you need to do next. “Well, I need to just get a job, okay?” Okay, take half a step back, because you’ve got to find what is going to be – if you truly need to pay the bills, you should get literally any job that you can use while you’re actually formulating your proper job search. I used to listen to Bruce Williams as a kid…

[00:52:18.21] Was it Bruce?

Bruce Williams was on TalkNet.

This is like AM talk radio.

Okay…

I’m dating myself. Even Steve is like “You are on your own, pal.”

[unintelligible 00:52:25.25]

No. So this is like Sally Jessie Raphael [unintelligible 00:52:29.26] So before she had a daytime talk show… This is taking a very weird turn. Before she had a daytime talk show, she was an AM radio call-in kind of advice show. And I used to listen to this as a kid. And Bruce Williams gave this really good advice. These people would call in with their financial problems, and he’s like “Look, if you need to find a job, what you need to go do is work the overnight shift at a convenience store, and get a paycheck. And then use your days to go interview, and find the right job.” And this was in like 1982. The recession of 1982 was super, super-deep. And what you need to go do if you’re job searching - it’s like, you actually need to figure out what you need to go do, what you want to go do, and you’ve got to then find the company, whatever it is, that is like “I want to work there.” And then you’ve got to be like “Okay, I’m going to focus my efforts on wanting to work there.” And it’s like, yeah, maybe that’s Oxide, we can’t take you… But hopefully that process has sharpened you in terms of – and you should not be “spray and pray”. Spray and pray –

That is what everybody’s doing.

That’s what everyone’s doing.

I know because we’ve talked to people recently… People literally, who are listeners of our show, that we’ve recently met… We had a live show in Denver, by the way. I don’t know if you knew that, but we did a live show on stage, kind of like this… And we invited people out. They bought tickets, they’re fans, they listen to the show… It was cool. And a few of those folks did not have employment at the time. And they shared how challenging it is to be so skilled, to have such intention, to be great people, and have this challenge.

Yeah. I mean, again, heart goes out to them, because it’s really hard. You’ve got your own self-worth being chipped away at. And it’s really hard when you’ve got someone who’s then – that person has set their whole being on being an Oxide… And then I’m the one who’s got to be like “No.” But spray and pray is not going to – that’s not the right way.

I would love to keep going deep on this subject, and I’m sure we can, because y’all are passionate about it… It’s one of the many defining factors about your business. But we haven’t mentioned at all where you’re at. This is a scale moment. I know there’s some things we can say and can’t say; you can share what you want. But can you speak to your personal feelings to being at the moment where you have to do a heck of a lot more in a month than you’ve done previously?

I mean, it’s definitely exciting to be in the situation that we had been building for and hoped for, which was struggling to catch up to fulfill demand, figuring out how we can stay in front of customer opportunities, that are going to push us really, really hard… Being able to not prepare ourselves to scale, but actually to go scale, and supply chain, and manufacturing, and delivery, and logistics, and field service, and all that stuff… Different kinds of fears and stressors… But yeah, I mean, it’s exciting. It’s exciting.

Last year we were excited to get the product, first year, fully in commercial market, into customers’ hands, and be able to prove out that we could ship reliably, build reliably, ship software updates every eight weeks…

[00:56:01.14] And last year, a year ago, we had to raise. We were very upfront about that with the team. I mean, we’re not trying to get anyone to throw up in their mouth, but “Hey, folks, we run out of cash in May, June, or July, depending on which model you look at. So… Just FYI. And so we have to hit the milestones that we need to go raise.” And that’s not where we are this year.

Right.

Whole different ballgame.

Whole different ballgame.

It just shifts from “What are the milestones to raise?” to “What are the milestones to stay ahead of these large customers that are growing?”

To deliver, to delight our customers, and to not lose track of who we are.

Right. And you guys are a hardware company, you know that.

Systems company. Hardware and software.

I like that. Systems company.

Yeah, sure. [laughter] [unintelligible 00:56:53.17] I’ll just say that as a contrast to a pure software company, because you are not in control of every aspect of your business. Supply chain I’m thinking of specifically. As a pure software company, you can just write the software and deliver it. But there are so many more moving parts, [unintelligible 00:57:13.22] around the world…

Yeah, undoubtedly.

How much is your ability to deliver on the demand that you’ve found outside of your control?

I think it’s –

Put it on a percentage scale.

There are things that are outside of our control, for sure. And things that happen. One thing that this team gives us the confidence in - we’ve had so many of those things already happen. And Steve and I were talking about the things that are our biggest single sources of stress in the history of the company… And for Steve, rightfully, it was the SVB failure. SVB failure… We had to wire payroll on Tuesday morning. It’s Thursday and there’s a run on the bank.

Oh, the crisis moment.

It’s Friday and the bank has failed. It’s like, we had to wire payroll on Tuesday morning. My view was “You know what? It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine, because Janet Yellen cares about this problem.” We were not the only ones that had the SVB problem. Everybody had the SVB problem. And it’s like, it will be disruptive in the short – versus some of these other issues… You can die alone.

So my biggest sources of strain were stress, were in the development especially of our first product, where it’s like - yeah, this CPU will come out and reset and we don’t know why. Janet Yellen does not give a shit about that problem. Nobody cares about that problem. You are out here, in the wilderness, and you can die.

And no supply team really, because you’re inventing it.

100%. So on the one hand, that is scary. On the other hand, we have now hit so many of those, and we have found our way around them, that – of course, I’m tempting the gods…

You are. [unintelligible 00:58:53.07]

I think that there are things that are out of your control… But when you have those things, you’re like “Okay, who do we know at this [unintelligible 00:59:03.11]

But also, by the way, when you say a hardware company, then most hardware companies would have a bunch of third-party hardware in their system that they are reliant upon… So they would be like “What if we have an issue with our third-party switch? Or software? What if we have a firmware issue in this component? How do we go solve for that?” So you end up having 10x the surface area of supply chain problems… And because of the way that we’ve designed the system and taken a lot more of it first-party, we’ve shrunk that surface area.

And then, with the key suppliers, being able to go deep with them and demonstrate to them that we’re not treating them as a vendor, that we’re just one of four that we’re going to partner with… There has been so much time that we’ve been able to punch above our weight where - yes, there was a shock to the system, and yet, they were like “Oxide, we got you.”

So I think we’ve done this in manufacturing, manufacturing software, taking control of the build process… A bunch of the stuff that we now - which took years - making sure we had control over… Yes, you’re down to inventory tariffs, stuff like that, but those are problems that can be solved by banking relationships, and capital, and manufacturing partners. So it is good to be in the place of –

[01:00:23.05] We have spent a lot of time building those relationships.

That’s right.

So one of the things that we – a very strong disposition that we had… So we were at Samsung together. Samsung bought Joyent. And we thought, “Oh, this would be great. We were little, tiny Joyent, and we’ve got these relationships with these various folks… But Samsung must have these great relationships.” What we learned is everyone kind of hates Samsung’s guts, because Samsung wants to dual-source absolutely everything, and cares about one metric: price. That’s it.

Gotcha.

And what we discovered is – and folks confide in us, like “Look, we really like you guys, so we’re going to continue talking to you. You should know that my boss doesn’t want me to spend any time with you, because we always put Samsung at the back of the line.” That’s kind of eye-opening… Because you would think, “Oh, dual-sourcing… That makes sense for everything.” And it’s like, when you do that, you’re sending a message that “I actually don’t value our relationship at all.”

And there are things where we have a true vendor relationship. It is not a partnership relationship at all. And you know, FedEx versus UPS. And FedEx reminds us of this whenever they toss one of our packages in the bushes… There’s no partnership with FedEx.

“We don’t care about them.”

Yeah, exactly. But for the component choices we’ve made, we really sought true partnerships. How do we find – instead of trying to dual-source lowest common denominator everything, how do we pick the right partner, and then go deep with that partner? And we were talking to our fan provider, Sanyo Denki, and they’re like – Sanyo Denki, we had to make a very important modification to our fans, to lower at 0% PWM, lower the RPM from 5,000 RPM to 2,000 RPM because it would consume much less power. Which they did. And they did in part because they’re like “We’ve never encountered someone for whom – like, this relationship…” I’m used to just getting beat up on price, that’s it. And then when you’ve built that relationship, by the way, when you need to have a pricing conversation, it’s a much easier pricing conversation.

They want to help you.

They want to help you, and they’re like “Look, hey, let me be transparent with you.” And we want to make sure that folks have the margin that they need, but we need to have the margin that we need, we need our customers to meet the price that they need… You can have those conversations, that are easier to have those conversations when you actually have a solid foundation of real partnership.

Yeah.

And these are risks – I mean, yesterday was the sixth anniversary of Oxide, so we got to celebrate with the team…

Happy birthday.

Thank you. And it was fun, because we got to go back and think about what was going on six years ago when we had a couple slides, Google slides - I don’t think it was PowerPoint slides - and we were trying to raise money for the company, and we had been in that mode, just to answer your question of “How does it feel now at this point, looking forward?” We’ve been in the mode of thinking about the four big risks that investors are always thinking about for companies, and like their evolution. And there’s team risk, and I think we feel pretty good that we’ve knocked down team risk…

Check.

There’s technology risk, and that was ever-present over the last, certainly – I mean, there are still elements that are present…

[unintelligible 01:03:18.11]

But we have de-risked a whole bunch of the technology risk. There is then market risk… And we now have kind of crossed into where we are getting pulled by the market, versus where you are trying to push yourself into the market…

So much better to get pulled than push.

And then the fourth is capital risk. And this latest fundraise was to make sure we secured our capital future, combined with things that we will do with lines of credit and everything else for a hardware company that you have that balance… Which does leave you in the privileged position – there’s still plenty of risk, but it’s execution risk. And so now, we get to go focus on doing the thing in front of us that is dead-ass clear, and I think that’s what’s exciting for the team, and why we are entering this kind of next chapter for the next six years.

[01:04:10.01] Can you do that with the size of the team you have now? I guess it kind of comes back to the hiring process…

We’re growing.

So you are growing.

We are growing.

Are you actively non-AI generating new job roles?

You know, you should have seen the show of hands of people that weren’t at the last one of these, people that joined in the last three months, that we’ve got a bunch of folks that are in conversation, that we weren’t quite there that would join us here… So yeah, we’re adding folks as fast as we can find terrific folks.

So yeah, we’ve got, whatever, 13 open roles right now… Multiple hires [unintelligible 01:04:43.09]

Where do you go to get that? Is there a URL? Is it Oxide.com/careers?

Yeah.

The obvious URL.

Yeah. And again, we write those job descriptions carefully… One of the things where we’ve got a lot of vigilance is like we are not hiring recklessly. We are not just selecting carefully, but we’re also very careful – one of the things we’ve just already learned… When we open a new job description, there are so many people that just want to work for Oxide. If we don’t write that job description carefully, we can get a flood of folks, and it can be really hard to actually – so we want to be very crisp about what we’re hiring for. And we want to make sure – because you feel like “Oh, I really wanna work for Oxide.” And they kind of look at the roles and they’re like “Oh, okay… Do you have anything else?” This stuff all seems really hard. It’s like “Well, yeah.” It’s really hard stuff for me to go do.

So, yes… And we need to be very, very careful about how we expand the team… But a part of that also is when we open up a job description, we would like to hire someone there. If we can’t find someone that is worthy of this team, we will not hire someone there. It’s not like we’re going “Well, we’ve got to find the best of whoever applied by Wednesday.” It’s like “Nope. If we don’t find someone that –” Conversely, if we find two, three people…

It’s probably better that way. I mean, honestly… Right?

But then we’ll hire more than one person if we find –

And boy, one thing that we’ve done right… I mean, not that we were ever really second-guessing ourselves, but I remember a couple of times we would have a JD open, and we’d get two really superlative people. Like, “God, how do we decide between these two?” Like, “Let’s hire both of them.” And we would hire both of them.

They’re that good…

Absolutely.

And those were some of the best decisions.

Well, my favorite is “Why not both?”

Yeah, why not both.

Let’s close here, because I know we’re getting close on our time. We’ve got food to eat…

I think the Computer History Museum buses are taking off…

Yeah. Let’s do it in one second then. Give me one minute of this… We’re here, you’ve got this next phase… We’ve been privy to some information… I’m not sharing it, you all share it. Give us a glimpse. What version of a glimpse can you give our audience? It’s going out - what, not this Friday, next Friday? So not this week, next week. What glimpse can you give?

In terms of where we’re going?

Yeah, the horizon. The unknown horizons you all know, [unintelligible 01:07:13.00]

I would say that for a long time, as Steve mentioned, certainly prospective investors thought there was a lot of market risk. We believed in our heart that there was not that market risk, because of what we knew… But ultimately, you only de-risk that market risk when you have signed [unintelligible 01:07:33.28] That’s when you de-risk that market risk. And what I would say where we are now, we can say with absolute confidence that that market risk has been de-risked… And it is interesting to watch the doubters become believers. And we now absolutely know that market risk is off the table. It is just execution.