From being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems to co-founding Oxide Computer Company to build a new kind of server, Bryan joins the show to chat about being told that he’s on a suicide mission when starting Oxide, the moment he felt “I’m actually living HBO Silicon Valley”, and lessons from Sun. And much more.

Chapters:

(00:02:24 ) The Origin of Bryan's Nom-de-Guerre: "Colonel of Data Corruption"
(00:04:02 ) What Debugging Performance Issues at Twitter in the Early Days Revealed About Silicon Valley
(00:13:37 ) Value of Formal Education and the Experience That Everyone Should Have
(00:16:02 ) Balancing Following One's Passion vs. Having Stability
(00:21:14 ) What Shaped Bryan's Sense of Integrity
(00:25:39 ) The Moments When Values Are Instilled
(00:30:25 ) The Dark Side of Tech
(00:35:12 ) "Economic Opportunities Attract Economic Opportunists"
(00:40:35 ) The Origins of Oxide Computers
(00:50:20 ) Building the A-Team
(00:52:18 ) "Compaq Was the Most Successful Startup"
(00:55:51 ) The Venture Capitalist's Dilemma
(01:03:04 ) Being Told "You're on a Suicide Mission"
(01:07:12 ) The Lifestyle of the "Lifestyle Business"
(01:09:30 ) The Harsh Reality of Raising Venture Capital
(01:13:12 ) The Challenges of Building Hardware
(01:16:36 ) Why You Should Think About Not Only Gross Margin but Net Margin
(01:19:14 ) Hardware and Software Co-Design
(01:22:06 ) The Frustrations of Infrastructure Deployment
(01:26:46 ) Finding the Right VCs
(01:28:16 ) "Oh My God, I'm Actually Living HBO Silicon Valley"
(01:33:12 ) Oxide's Principles and Lessons from Sun Microsystems
(01:39:51 ) Sun's Unspoken Values
(01:45:03 ) Sun's Legacy of Empowering Employees
(01:48:53 ) Sun's Missed Opportunities
(01:53:04 ) The Reason Why Sun Survived the Dot-Com Crash
(01:56:21 ) "God Bless the Early Adopters"
(01:57:39 ) A Tweet from Shopify's CEO
(02:01:24 ) The Hard Thing About Hard Things
(02:12:55 ) The Hardest Moment in Oxide's History

Show Notes:

- Oxide’s principles: https://oxide.computer/principles

- Requests for Discussion (RFDs): https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/

- Toby’s tweet: https://x.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669

- Bryan on twitter: https://x.com/bcantrill

Stay in touch:

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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en