He pays every one of his 150 employees the exact same salary. Here's how he built a $6B startup. | Steve Tuck, Co-Founder & CEO of Oxide

Steve Tuck (00:00:00) : We were a good five and a half years in, and it was four and a half years of near-death experiences. Pablo Srugo (00:00:07) : When they say hardware is hard, like, it's those years that they're referring to. Steve Tuck (00:00:10) : You have to have staying power. You've got to be able to have strong stomachs across the company, but importantly, the investor base. You've got to have a cap table that is able to kind of weather through stormy waters, because believe me, you're going to have plenty of them. With the wrong set of investors, you can be forced into short-term decisions that absolutely compromise the long-term success of the business. Investors early on were like, oh, it's going to be such a capital-intensive business. You're going to need to raise so much money to get this thing built. And we were able to actually get the company not only off the ground in the commercial liftoff, but to profitability for $100 million. Pablo Srugo (00:00:48) : It's hilarious. I've interviewed, like, over 300 founders. I've never heard of anything close to that. Pretty unique. Previous Guests (00:00:54) : That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the Product Market Fit question. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. Pablo Srugo (00:01:08) : Do you think the Product Market Fit show has Product Market Fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders, and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Steve, welcome to the show, dude. Steve Tuck (00:01:24) : Oh, thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Pablo Srugo (00:01:27) : And you have a pretty high-fly company, it looks like. Just came off a $445 million raise in August, just last month. And if I had to describe what you do, you kind of, like, bring AWS, you bring the public cloud to on-prem, right? So my kind of framework is imagine you're, you know, a financial institution. Imagine you're a bank. You're going to have a part of your computing you're never going to build to the public cloud, but you want all the advantages of it, and you sell a physical rack, right? If I understand it, then you bring in the customer buys, installs, and it behaves similar to a public cloud. Did I get that right? Kind of at a high level? Steve Tuck (00:02:03) : Yeah, that was pretty good. Pablo Srugo (00:02:04) : There you go. Steve Tuck (00:02:05) : You know, going back maybe prior to Oxide, which, like, yes, by the way, things going well, but very much an overnight success seven years in the making. There were some long, long, gritty years to be able to get through the entirety of building the product. Pablo Srugo (00:02:18) : So, Tommy, like, before we actually get into it, I was going to talk way more in depth about what you do and how it is that you got there. But for you, when was that moment when you felt like this model, this idea was finally working? Like, what was the initial product market fit moment for you? Steve Tuck (00:02:31) : That moment was last summer, and we had some good emergent commercial success. And we kind of hit our first large multi-year contract and were faced with a build schedule that was kind of preposterous. We had a backlog now to go fill. We had to scale manufacturing and supply chain and everything. And that was exciting, but I think that was just yet another data point. And as we were trying to scale up to beat that in, you know, short order, another massive large contract landed. And we were quickly flipped from a position of how do we articulate and make sure that we're getting the message out and getting folks excited about how to think about adoption to we can't build these things fast enough. And not only are we sold out for three months, it's now looking like six months. And I think that was the moment that we knew we had it to go. Pablo Srugo (00:03:34) : I love that as the signal, like the defining feature of what product market fit is, is where your problem is not generating demand, but meeting the existing demand. Like you just said, it's like sold out, right? It happens a lot, obviously, in your case, physical products, right? But many people are selling softwares, there's no like true sold out. Like it doesn't really, but it's, that is really product market fit. Like when you're sold out, because either you don't have the inventory or in a software context, you just can't onboard the customers fast enough. You can't get into success fast enough. To me, that's like the sharpest definition of product market fit. Steve Tuck (00:04:05) : And it's not, I mean, it's not necessarily fun because we are having to delay other customers. Lead times are extending. We're having to say no to some customers while trying to build that production capacity, which you can't just turn on overnight. And this is what, you know, this is the additional challenge of doing hardware as well as software. You've got to scale these things in tandem. But it was very much the combination of doing hardware and software together that led to that moment of commercial takeoff. Pablo Srugo (00:04:35) : And when was this? Steve Tuck (00:04:36) : So we founded Oxide in September of 2019. And this was the summer of 2025. Pablo Srugo (00:04:43) : Wow. Okay. Steve Tuck (00:04:44) : We were a good five and a half years in. And it was four and a half years of near-death experiences. Pablo Srugo (00:04:51) : When they say hardware is hard, like it's those years that they're referring to. Steve Tuck (00:04:55) : And when they say hardware is hard, there's a lot of elements to that. Because yes, like hardware is hard. And you could argue that hardware today is easier than building hardware five, 10 years ago, just given a lot of the open tooling and a lot of the mechanisms that are available. But one of the most difficult aspects was getting the company booted in the first place because of hardware. Venture capitalists in 2019 did not want to invest in hardware. Cloud SaaS was the entirety of the economy. It was where the whole economy was going to go. And apparently, you could just have amnesia to the fact that all that software had to run somewhere. Pablo Srugo (00:05:31) : Before the SaaS apocalypse, it was B2B SaaS only. Like we only operate, by the way. Like we're black and white. It's either the best or the absolute worst. Steve Tuck (00:05:38) : You had to have the apocalypse. You had to have the SaaS super cycle. And it was the only thing. SaaS was the moat. So right in the midst of that era, we were going out to Sand Hill and saying, hey, we need to go raise $20 million to start the first kind of full systems computer company in America in the last 30 years. And got, you know, the treatment you would expect from career finance folks in VC. And would take us dozens and dozens and dozens of meetings to find the hard tech corner of VC. And I'll never forget, you know, the next in a litany of meetings, we go into Eclipse Ventures and sit down and you look around the room. And instead of like career finance person, career finance person, career finance person, it is all operators. It is the president of a semiconductor company. It is Pierre Lamond, the godfather of Silicon Valley. It is Lior. Pablo Srugo (00:06:31) : He was on the show, by the way. Steve Tuck (00:06:33) : Oh, he was? Pablo Srugo (00:06:33) : Smart dude. Very smart dude. Yeah. Steve Tuck (00:06:35) : Ah, he's fantastic. And we start talking through the importance of hardware, software, co-design brought to this industry. And we got stopped and they flashed up a slide that said 23 of the world's 25 most valuable companies do hardware and software together. Pablo Srugo (00:06:53) : You have to find believers. Like that is what just happened. I mean, your initial round is all about finding people who just believe what you believe. And so it changes the complete, the total dynamic of everything that happens afterwards just depends on that piece. Steve Tuck (00:07:08) : One of the aspects of anything being hard, but just in the point you made of hardware being hard, you have to have staying power. You've got to be able to have strong stomachs across the company, but importantly, the investor base. You've got to have a cap table that is able to kind of weather through stormy waters, because believe me, you're going to have plenty of them. You know, when you're standing over your first PCBA and you're hoping that thing comes up and hoping it doesn't smoke when you power it, you are, you know, and then when you need to redesign something and it's not a three day, but a three month setback in timeline, you know, with the wrong set of investors, you can be forced into short term decisions that absolutely compromise the long term success of the business. The engineering and the technical work that you are doing is equally important to having the right foundation for the company culturally from a team perspective and from a capital perspective. The investors that, you know, we just had the very good fortune that at each fork in the road where the right decision for the short term was to go left and the right decision if we happened to live was to go right, our investors every single time encouraged us to take the long path decision. And then when we lived and we started shipping product in 2024, it was like, thank God that we've got this foundation that we can go build a big company on top of. And we didn't have to make these compromises around the integrity of the system, around the integrity of the product, around the integrity of the team to be able to go do that. Because it is, it's hard. Pablo Srugo (00:08:42) : Pain is relative. And I found myself many times when like things are, you know, hard or whatever. And you hear a story about somebody who, you know, grew up really poor, had this trouble, that struggle, and it just puts things in perspective. And so I'll say this, like if you're out there raising for your AI startup and you need like $2 million to turn your half a million in revenue to $5 million in revenue, there are hardware people out there raising $20 million to like build MVP one in, you know, three years from now and then maybe ship it, you know, two years after that. And so it's, pain is very relative. And raising for hardware is tough. Steve Tuck (00:09:14) : If you're raising like, you know, like launching an AI startup right now is hard. It's so noisy. And there's so many difficult nuances to that particular business, whatever that is. And I think the thing that I would say is work to find the right set of investors, even if it looks fraught getting through that first phase or two. It is so important that you find folks that are curious, that have a real long view of what the business could become. And it is worth not lurching at that first offer that comes in from an investor that may not be the right fit. Pablo Srugo (00:09:51) : So we're going to talk at the end of this about two kind of specific things that you did, two tactics, which was building in public, which is not normal for a company like yours that has to build, you know, something for a long time, usually the operating style, you do the exact opposite. And the second thing that you do, which I find insane, which is you pay everyone the same salary. So we're going to go deep on why you do that, how you do that, how that all plays out. But let's start kind of at the beginning. Now that we understand a little bit better what you do, what was your background before you started Oxide in 2019? What were you doing? And what was the kind of idea? Where did the origin kind of come from for this company? Steve Tuck (00:10:25) : Sure. So going all the way back was at Dell, joined Dell in October 1999, right at the absolute height. So Dell was the highest performing stock on any index in the 90s. It was just this insane run. And when we got there, our class came into this auditorium and they dropped like fake stock options from the ceiling while playing. We are Dellionaires to the like, we are Dellionaires. You have people dancing on cubicles. It was a wild time. And then, of course, everyone that was in industry at that time would watch, you know, one of the greatest economic collapses on the back of that technology bubble popping. And then had the real privilege of being at Dell through some really interesting times. The emergence of virtualization with VMware as every enterprise adopted this new technology that would allow much greater efficiency. And through the sort of storage and networking wars where HP and Dell and everyone were kind of competing on acquiring companies, but I was on the sales side through all of this and working with customers starting out from consumer into small business into enterprise. And eventually I started working with this emergent set of companies on the West Coast that at the time, to date myself even further, we would call Web 2.0 companies. And these were folks like, you know, MySpace and Facebook. What today we would call hyperscalers. And what they needed was something a little different than what Dell off the shelf kind of provided. And they would describe, you know, not deploying 100 machines, but 100,000 machines. And to be able to do that, they needed capabilities that the platform didn't have. And they also wanted some things that it came with kind of removed. And this was a difficult contemplation for Dell. And they had viewed this space as not really major server buyers. You know, those are colleges and the federal government and insurance companies and Wall Street. But I had started working closely with some of these companies, including this emergent startup joint that was a pioneer in the cloud computing space. And fortunately, they made quite a pitch. And I came over there early on in that company. And that, you know, six months later, my co-founder at Oxide, Brian Kanfer, would come over there from Sun Microsystems. Pablo Srugo (00:12:56) : This is like what timeline at this point? Steve Tuck (00:12:58) : This is 2009. Okay. So cloud computing is super nascent. If you were running an AWS in 2009, 2010, it was kind of wild that there was this new mechanism where you could hit an API and kind of throw code at it and run applications. And like everything else just kind of worked. Also, sometimes things didn't work and you would have an outage that would be like three days long. And so the first era of cloud computing were all of these gaming startups and apps and fintech companies. They were the ones that were willing to go launch in the public cloud and operate there. And it would be a couple of years until the mainstream enterprise was like, wait a minute, we actually could use this, should use this and began to adopt it in scale. And then obviously the last chapter, most recent chapter of cloud computing has been AI. This is where all of the major labs grew up. This is where all of kind of the AI building has occurred is in cloud computing. And the thing that we learned over the 10 years at Joyent was sort of threefold. Number one, the way that Joyent was doing this was writing all the software portion, the cloud control plane and the update engine to be able to deliver cloud services, but buying off the shelf hardware. And short version, it turns out when you take software and try and pack it onto off the shelf PCs and rack form, things don't go well. All the problems around performance, stability, availability, they kind of stem from that hardware software interface. And, you know, like Apple pioneered and learned and like Tesla pioneered and learned the hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google realized we've got to blow this up. We have to redesign the modern computer from the ground up and co-design software in here for the cloud era. And so the machines that power the world's biggest cloud computing hyperscalers look nothing like what you can buy off the shelf from Dell, HP, Lenovo's, micro, you know, storage providers, network providers. And when we were kind of evolving at Joyent, we then got acquired by Samsung. And that's when I moved into kind of an operating role and then eventually would run the entirety of that operation. At the scale we were running, which was powering the Samsung cloud globally, that hardware software disparity just completely broke down. And it was at one of our lowest moments where I was at OCP Summit, which is a place where all the big hyperscalers come to show off their wares, that we would first witness these incredible rack scale machines that Facebook had for themselves that were transformative. They were so much more dense and energy efficient and operable than anything that you could kind of compile off the shelf in hardware. And I was desperate. You know, I had my checkbook out from Samsung, like, how do I buy these? And, you know, how fast can you ship them? And the Facebook team kind of looked at each other and like, sorry, do you work for Facebook? Pablo Srugo (00:15:55) : These are not for sale, right? Steve Tuck (00:15:57) : No, they're not for sale. These amazing machines are not for sale. And it would have truly been the hand of God reaching down in the midst of this five country build out we were doing if we could get a hold of these modern appliances that apparently the best companies in the world have been running on for seven years. And that was where kind of the first deep seeds, we wouldn't know it at the time, but like looking back on it, I think that painful realization coupled with the fact that it's so hard to build high quality, reliable, automated systems when you've got this kind of kit car approach of hardware and software, that we would land on this realization that the same machines that power the cloud need to be available for those that want to operate on-prem, that want to own and control their own infrastructure, that want economics that are massively different than the rental economy of cloud computing, that want, you know, systems and data that no one can access. And yet to do that today for the nearly 60% of IT infrastructure that runs outside the public cloud, you have to go back in time like 20 years and you have to absorb all this overhead in your business to buy these disparate pieces and weave them together. And then, you know, if anything breaks, by the way, you're the only one running that combination of things on the planet. You're the only one responsible for it. And it was in these years that we really realized like cloud computing is the future of computing. Cloud computing is an architectural concept, not a rental concept. And that the machines that power the cloud need to be available in product form to kind of transform the on-prem IT economy, which is huge. $100, $150 billion growing as the economy moves online. Pablo Srugo (00:17:40) : What is, by the way, on the, for the on-prem, like there's a security reason to stay on-prem. There's a cost reason. Like what are the top, you know, two or three reasons why some of the big, big enterprises are going to keep some of that payload for always, you know, on-prem. Steve Tuck (00:17:54) : Security is one. Just, just that governance and understanding that you can verify no one has touched these systems. So you can put subsets of data there and know exactly, you know, how it's being used and who is accessing it. Economics is a big one. Like there's a reason that people lease apartments and buy homes instead of everyone living in a hotel room. You know, when you have a certainty around a subset of usage over years, then owning is not just a little bit more cost effective. It's orders of magnitude. And then there is latency reasons. You know, we have customers that running infrastructure that's collecting data from their own factories and data centers and systems that they need to aggregate locally and make decisions on in real time. And so latency can be a key contributor. And then for software companies, you know, cloud SaaS companies, AI labs, it is the ability to sell the new markets. You know, if you're trying to provide services to a bank and you run explicitly, you run your SaaS platform in the public cloud, you're only going to get a percent of that bank's data. But if you can bring that into a single tenant on-prem model, you now can service the entirety of that bank's data. And so in regulated industries, there's actually an interesting emergent kind of angle that we have heard from customers, which is business growth, is expansion to new markets, being able to grow the top lineup. Pablo Srugo (00:19:24) : But who pays for the rack in that example? Like if Salesforce is selling into a bank, maybe that's a bad example or not. You can tell me, are they buying that on-prem rack and putting it inside? Like how does that work? Where are the economics? Steve Tuck (00:19:36) : It really depends on that software company. You've got some that the end customer is buying it and it's kind of a blueprint, right? It's like a reference architecture where that, you know, database service runs on top of this cloud-like appliance in ways that are familiar to how it was running in AWS. And then in other cases, you'll have cloud SaaS companies that are going to stand up their own owned single tenant environment where they operate the whole thing. And they operate it in a cage adjacent to a large bank or, you know, a federal agency or, you know, an industrial or biotech company. And so those are the use cases that I kind of get most excited about because they're not about just like saving dollars. Like, sure, I mean, everyone likes to improve the cogs of their business and the op-ex of their business, but where you can find opportunities that where businesses can go faster, can grow faster, can go enter into new markets without being a hundred percent constrained by a service provider that you depend on. Another anecdote for you was talking to an AI lab last night and they can't get capacity on the public cloud right now. They're not big enough to fight with the heavyweights. They literally cannot get capacity. And they had this moment of like, we don't control our destiny. If we take off and we go grow another 10X, like we actually can't guarantee that we can serve our customers. And so they are contemplating not for everything they're doing or even a majority of their doing, but having a subset of what they are doing under their own control, guaranteed capacity that they know they can always make available to their customers. And then, you know, have that either as insurance or as primary and use the cloud to burst. So yeah, I mean, the use cases vary. Another is energy efficiency. We've got these designs that the hyperscalers run on are vastly more energy efficient than the rack and stack approach of on-prem IT. And so you end up with some customers that are out of power. They can't deploy another rack that they wanted to of any variety because they are completely out of power. Well, what if you could take 60 racks, these diesel engine racks you've been running for two years and consolidate them into 30 high efficiency Oxide racks and free up a whole bunch of real estate, both in power and in physical space to go deploy new capacity. So I hate to tell you it varies by customer, but it does. Pablo Srugo (00:22:04) : You get a sense of kind of the main thing. So just the eclipse round, when did that happen? Steve Tuck (00:22:08) : We closed December 31st, 2019. Pablo Srugo (00:22:11) : Okay. Because what I was getting to is, I mean, when you're doing something like this, you kind of need funding. I mean, you need real funding. You can't just kind of like hack your way to something, right? So that's a huge milestone. And then I want to get a sense of if you were to think about those first, call it five years, six years until you hit what you refer to as a primary for the moment, how would you split them? Like, how would you bucket them? What were some of the main milestones, let's say, that happened in that time span? Yeah. Steve Tuck (00:22:36) : I do want to mention, you know, because everyone thinks, and investors early on were like, oh, it's going to be such capital intensive business. You're going to need to raise so much money to get this thing built. And we were able to actually get the company not only off the ground and the commercial liftoff, but to profitability for $100 million. And that might sound like a lot to some. Pablo Srugo (00:22:59) : Today he doesn't. Today he's like, what, $100 million? Steve Tuck (00:23:01) : I would say it was far, far, far less than we thought it might take. And very germane to this conversation, I think where a very high percentage of companies capsize is that they push into go-to-market expenses before they have product market fit. It is the most common failure mode of startups. And VCs don't help because they want to gas it. They want you to like push as hard and fast as possible to see like where the winners are going to be and where the winners are not going to be. And it's tough to navigate because, you know, you're trying to do a service to your investors. But I loved, I think it was maybe Peter Levine that had said, you know, when you're hiring for sales, you do not want to hire the next salesperson until you can see the whites of the customer's eyes. Like they are on you. They're all over you. You want to hire a little too late rather than too early. And there's this notion, of course, of like, well, I've got to hire the salespeople to be able to go generate the sales. And really going out and testing assumptions and having as many prospective customer conversations as possible and asking them to suspend disbelief to say, yeah, but what if, then how would you use the product? And then what would be that next stage to expand and use it more broadly across the company? And like, just steep yourself in that before you are, I've got to go, got to go hire that VP sales. My investors really want me to do it. And then, of course, that person's like, well, I got to build the team. And like, where's the VP of marketing? Like, you don't have a VP of marketing. Like, let's get that person in here. And that person has to bring in the team. And before you know it, you've got $2 million a year of expenses. And you don't even have a repeatable sales process. You may not have even built the thing that customers want. And that is a trapping that is endemic to, like, startups writ large. And is why I very much appreciate that you run the show and do such a good job of helping folks understand, you know, what are these points and these milestones and how to gauge what success looks like. Back to your question, I think for us, there was a pretty easy and obvious first milestone, which was getting the core team hired. And getting folks that were going to be able to build across the hardware and software domain. And, you know, one of the advantages to building in the open, which is, you know, so many companies want to do this build in stealth. Like, build, build, build. Like, don't show anyone your underbelly. And then, you know, like… Pablo Srugo (00:25:36) : Huge launch event. Yeah, exactly. Steve Tuck (00:25:38) : Yeah, yeah, big launch event. And the problem with that is that now everyone has to come up to speed on what this thing is. Why do I want it? How does it work? And what was the thought process? And who's behind it? And can I trust it? I mean, I trust is probably the most important element that you are trying to establish as you are getting a company off the ground and you are getting closer to market. And so we took the opposite approach. We were like, we're going to share everything about this journey along the way, which, by the way, was a multi-year journey. So, you know, on the one hand, you could argue like, oof, you're going to keep talking about stuff while you're building for three years. Surely folks are going to get tired and are going to move on. Pablo Srugo (00:26:19) : I'm going to ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact, it's not even now that I think about it, it's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. If you do, just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. This is one of the kind of tactical deep dives that we're going to do. So let's do it now, actually, because it fits in the storyline. When you say build in public, like what specifically did you do? Like a PR, you know, once a quarter? Was it, you know, newsletter to customer? Like what are some of the things that you put in motion as part of this kind of build in public idea? Steve Tuck (00:27:00) : So the first thing was kind of cataloging and documenting everything we did before thinking about how we would share it. And, you know, very, very early on, like going actually back to when we were fundraising, we knew we weren't going to see our families for the better part of three or four weeks. So we went out, which seems a little reckless maybe at the time, but we spent this like a huge amount of money, like 500 bucks on like podcasting equipment. And it was in Jess's garage, actual garage, and set this stuff up. And we would go down to Sand Hill and do meetings all day and then drive back. And at 7 p.m., we would sit there and record the day's events for our families. This is just so we could share with our... Pablo Srugo (00:27:42) : It's hilarious. I've interviewed like over 300 founders. I've never heard of anything close to that. Pretty unique. Steve Tuck (00:27:47) : Highly recommended because you will forget so much. And importantly, when you get home, you don't have to recap everything, which by the way, your spouse, partner, friends, family, they don't want to hear the full recap anyway. But you get it. You get it in a form in which, you know, your parents and your family can kind of keep up on how things are going. So that was sort of the genesis of like why we had the equipment. Then when we had the equipment, all three of us were students of computer history and just fascinated by what we were building and why in the 60s and 70s. And, you know, what transitioned when all of a sudden we, you know, stopped building systems, these like hardware, software, co-designed, mainframe systems. And you had hardware companies go to the left and software go to the right. You know, you had Dells and Compaqs over here. And you've got, you know, Microsoft in kind of the 80s running to the software side. And you wouldn't have those two really important domains come back together again into real systems until it would happen in the data centers of the hyperscalers. That was this arc of like finally going back to systems-based design. And along the way, like dozens and dozens and dozens of dead computer companies. Why? What happened? And so we had reached out to a couple of terrific technologists and asked if they'd be willing to sit down and just tell stories. And tell stories of the past of, you know, Honeywell and Intel. And I mean, just kind of like running the gamut of history. Because it turns out like not a lot of this stuff was documented. It's really hard to find real firsthand accounts of the computer industry evolution of the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and 2010s. And so we, you know, we got Jeff Rothschild. And we called this On the Metal, Tales from the Hardware Software Interface. Pablo Srugo (00:29:37) : He launched a podcast around this. Steve Tuck (00:29:39) : It was a podcast, but it had nothing to do with Oxide. Right. It was truly just like stories of the computer industry. And we would just listen to these amazing technologists tell stories that hadn't been told before. And, you know, if anyone wants a taste of it, the very first episode with Jeff Rothschild, who founded Veritas, co-founder of Veritas, was, you know, one of the earliest kind of like senior engineering leaders at Facebook, was at Intel, was, I mean, just very, very, very interesting past in technology that kind of elucidates a lot of the transitions that have happened over the last couple of decades. We just sat there and listened. It was like three hours. It was amazing. Pablo Srugo (00:30:18) : And what did this, I'm curious, like the podcast, like what did that lead to from a business perspective? Steve Tuck (00:30:22) : Well, so we put it out there. And one of the things that we had hoped would come of it is other similarly curious folks would listen to this and be like, oh my God, these are my people and would apply. So back to like that first milestone on that Jeff Rothschild interview, there was an engineer at Meta who listened to that and reached out like less than a week later. And that person would go on to become foundational to building a critical aspect of the system. I mean, it was front and center designing our switch, which is a huge effort. And, you know, we had more folks that were coming in. We had, eventually, we wouldn't know it at the time, but prospective customers that started listening to this thing. And we had these cheesy little Oxide commercials that we would run. And we just recorded like two of them and we would loop them. And people would send in like, hey, can I send you all a new commercial so I can stop listening to that one? Because again, this is 2020. We haven't built anything yet. Pablo Srugo (00:31:22) : Well, I'm curious on that note, like you're doing this podcast, which is content related to Oxide, but it's not building in public in the sense of you talking about, you know, these days you have people sharing like MRR charts and all these crazy things on LinkedIn. What else were you doing around that? Like sharing with the world what you were building and why? Steve Tuck (00:31:39) : So that we ripped off while we were fundraising. We like kind of like just like ran through all those episodes while we were fundraising. Then we raised and now we had to go build. And in the build process, we took a break and then we came back and launched a podcast called Oxide and Friends. And Oxide and Friends now was very central to what we were building. And so on the hardware side, you have these steps in the evolution of a new hardware platform that no one talks about. Your first board bring up is usually a tire fire. It is not an event to be celebrated. And we basically had like the step-by-step as we are seeing if this thing is going to light on fire and we're dead or if this thing's going to work. And like going through what it means to do bring up an EBT and then, you know, getting to DBT. And furthermore, then once you've got a product that you think is going to get to PBT and production validation test and get to commercialization, you have to go through compliance testing. The FCC requires that you go through this chamber test to ensure your emissions are within the allowable amounts. This is extremely grimy because inevitably people are just skirting by and they're doing like all sorts of things, sanding down paint, you know, all these things to then go back into the chamber to test. No one talks about this. Everyone's like, this is not going to give customers comfort. We talked about all of it. We talked about the development of the storage service, the development of hardware, the highs, the lows. And, you know, the thing that came out of it, came out of that transparency, was our future customers that we wouldn't know it at the time were listening along. And they began to get real trust behind the team and the thought process and the rigor and the transparency. And by the time we were bringing a product to market, they already felt like they were on the team. Like they already knew us. They'd kind of been through the journey, the highs, the lows. They were just as excited as we were that we were now shipping our first rack. Pablo Srugo (00:33:40) : Did you feel it? I'm curious in the conversations, like obviously before selling something, you probably met them at events, talked to them, whether Zoom calls, whatever it is that you did, but you kind of had these engagements with them. Was this something that many of them would bring up? Like, oh yeah, I listened to the episode, but whatever, right? And just kind of deepened that conversation. Steve Tuck (00:33:56) : Well, even better, it wasn't a podcast. It was a show. So we started on Twitter Spaces and that then, you know, like had a good run there. And then as that dematerialized, we moved over to Discord, but they would show up. We'd have in the audience folks that were chiming in in chat and occasionally listeners would join the stage for a particular topic. Pablo Srugo (00:34:19) : So it's like the more, it's like a better version of a webinar almost at that point. Yeah. Because you're not like demoing a completed product, clearly salesy. It's kind of just like behind the scenes, but you can join and ask questions and whatever. Steve Tuck (00:34:31) : That's right. And it allowed others to see other people's questions. And it was definitely a catalyst. We would then package it up and ship it as a podcast, but you'd have folks showing up to the show, excited about what Oxide was building and just kind of growing group of support, some of which would never be customers because they were an individual, but like they'd be the first ones to jump in and hacker news comments when we'd be the first story on hacker news, you know, at a particular milestone. Pablo Srugo (00:35:00) : You're creating fans. I mean, the simplest way to put it. Steve Tuck (00:35:03) : That's right. Pablo Srugo (00:35:04) : Were you also posting on Twitter or on LinkedIn or blogging, all these sort of things? Steve Tuck (00:35:08) : Yeah, for sure. And making sure that we were showing up, talking about the journey of getting the company off the ground, what it took to fundraise, what it took to, to hit these milestones in the business from getting our first system passing compliance to the all-important first customer shipment, always have been extremely careful about customer information. And we are, you know, you see a lot of companies out there that like will leak stuff about their customers and, you know, on background and we just don't do that. And you'll see sort of these like articles written in publications and, and we're very, very private about customer information, but we have had the good fortune of working with some phenomenal customers. And, and as we got our first rack shift, being able to take a picture in our factory of that thing getting wrapped up and going in the crate, I mean, that went viral on Twitter. In fact, it was funny because like all the different parties came out. It was a picture of one of our double E's, Robert Keith, who's, he had the anti-static wrap. It's this pink wrap that you run around electronics and he's stepping over the, the, the crate door. A bunch of people came in like, oh my God, did he break his ankle? It looks like he's going to step on the corner. So like, you know, medical Twitter showed up. You had, you know, anti-static Twitter show up. They're like, is that going to create a static charge? It's like, no, it's anti-static. But it was fun to celebrate that with what we would learn was a much bigger supporting community than we knew. And with every commercial customer there in, there was someone in that company that learned of Oxide years ago that had begun championing it inside the building. Pablo Srugo (00:36:47) : What would be your number one piece of advice around building in public in terms of getting into cadence? Because what I see is a lot of founders that want to do this, very few founders do it consistently. Maybe they'll post here or there. They start a podcast at stocks. Like, how did you force yourself to keep putting things out regularly? And the only way this works is if you do it consistently over a good amount of time. Steve Tuck (00:37:08) : I would say what worked for us is involving the team. Like, bring your team forward. You're going to have plenty of people that do not want to be front and center describing what they're working on and why. But you will find that, you know, folks are proud of their work and what they're doing is a super important part of the overall thing that you are building. And giving them a platform to highlight that a little bit. A, it gives you an excuse for the cadence. It kind of like forces the action. You know, you're sort of thinking about what team members to slot in as co-hosts or participating. Gives you kind of an idea of what the theme or the reason that you're having that episode could be. And then what's happening is, you know, your potential future customers are getting to know the people behind the product. And again, it builds that trust. It builds that sense of relationship. And I think, you know, it also lowers the burden of one person being responsible for the content every single week or every two weeks. But I think I would love to take credit for it. But, you know, Brian Cantrell and Adam Leventhal have borne the brunt of that religious kind of weekly show. And it does take, takes grit and there's never enough time in the day. But you're right on. Like, you have to get into that cadence and that consistency for it to show up. The only thing I would caution is there's a lot of podcasts out there that are created to try to get to people. Like, are created for the sake of having a podcast. And there's not a lot of great signal, like a lot of great interesting information out there. And that is where allowing the experts to come to the front and talk about what they're doing and why and where they came from and why they're passionate about, you know, signal integrity. You're going to be surprised by the folks that also similarly care about that stuff that become champions of the product. Pablo Srugo (00:39:03) : The second thing I want to talk to you about because it's so, like, different is you have about 150 people. My understanding is you're paying everyone the same salary. Tell me as much as you can about why you would do that, how that works, you know, the benefits, et cetera, because I, I mean, I have so many questions about it. Steve Tuck (00:39:22) : Yeah, most people do. Let me talk about where it started. So we founded the company. Brian and I both had three kids and we were going to make sure that we did not start the company off where we were, like, already in financial distress. We couldn't pay our bills. So we wanted to make sure that at least we had a, like, a way to be financially stable, pay ourselves, like, a decent salary so that we could pay the bills. And then when we started hiring the first couple of engineers, like, we certainly are not going to pay them less. And they were coming in and they were going to have an opportunity to participate in our early equity in the company. And so we want to make sure that, like, we had a good competitive compensation structure early on and it made sense to kind of, to kind of keep things even as we went. Then it kind of became an interesting experiment because once you've hired a handful of folks and you kind of are incrementing in that wage to make sure it's competitive, as you hire more people, quickly things flipped to where we wanted to hold that as a constraint. What that resulted in is that when we were going to go hire, you know, roles that people typically think like, oh, you can go find someone in that role at a much lower cost, be it support or, like, finance support or other, we had to flip it around. And we're like, if we were going to pay this amount for a support person, like, what does that support person need to look like? That might be like an L3 senior support person that, you know, may have been the most valuable person in the company they're coming from. And that is going to be the only support people we hire. And it then kind of turned out that we would have these meetings with Fortune 50 entertainment companies that would have the same person that was at the whiteboard kind of architecting stuff pre-sales responding to their ticket six months later. And they're like, I've never experienced this before. Like, how did I get to this person already? And it's like, sorry, that's like the only people we have. And so across every role, you end up with this just like highest caliber of talent, but there's a much, much, much more powerful thing that came out of that. And, you know, what you're doing is you're saying every role in the company is equally important. And that just like breaks people's brains. It's like, ah, it can't possibly be the case. Pablo Srugo (00:41:46) : It goes against everything. Yeah, I mean, it's very, it's almost non-market. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, really? Steve Tuck (00:41:51) : It breaks people's brains. And, you know, we've been conditioned as a society that like the way that people are valued and then judged is we put these labels on them, which is their salary, their compensation. Like, you're worth more. That's why you have this higher salary and you're not worth as much and that's why you have a lower salary or title. You're a VP. That is a way of describing your value. And what's reality? Reality is everyone's worked in companies where you have so much resentment because this idiot over here definitely must know someone because they are definitely not deserving of the salary or the title they have. And in many cases, you have these fear-based cultures where folks are incentivized to take credit, certainly to make sure they get full credit for their work, but also like, you know, maybe take credit for that work that's sitting in between a few folks because I want to get ahead. I want to get paid more. I want to get that title. And then the flip side of that is that you have folks that are afraid to divulge mistakes. They want to bury their mistakes. And that is destructive for the company. Now, the company's not learning from things that need to be improved. And so, you know, we've kind of lucked our way into a condition where we have this really high trust team. Everybody is equal. You don't have people competing with each other, feeling like they are in competition for each other for praise or a raise. And it, you know, an engineer that came over from Google had talked about it being the first time in his career that he was able to put all his mental energy towards the thing that he loves, his passion, his work. Not have to worry about, you know, the upcoming performance review and how to position themselves with the manager to make sure this person gets knocked down so they can get moved up. Pablo Srugo (00:43:32) : It does take politics completely out of the table and it refocuses. I could see how from a mindset perspective and culture building perspective, it can be exceptionally powerful if you get it right. Steve Tuck (00:43:43) : Yeah, if you're not competing with your peers, now all of a sudden you're interested in doing things for them. So we see team members that are doing work for their peers without being asked and you get this virtuous cycle that ends up becoming a flywheel of sorts where, you know, folks are building for each other. It's easy for those, for everyone to come together in support of building for the customer and it is hard to describe the power of a high trust environment. It's why we can do so much with a team that is, relatively speaking, not that big. And so it's paid a lot of dividends for sure. Pablo Srugo (00:44:17) : Let me ask two kind of tactical questions on this, practical questions I should say. The first one is when you talked about the sort of people that take that support example and you hire someone really high up because you can at that salary level, how do you get them to still do the minutia? Maybe that's changed with AI, but part of the whole thing was certainly before AI, like there's all these little things that are so easy to do. I don't want to do them and I shouldn't have to do them. So put this person who makes like way less than me and get them to do that stuff. How did you kind of manage that when you're hiring so high because your salary kind of allows you to? Steve Tuck (00:44:49) : Yeah, I think, you know, man, such important stuff happens in the minutia. So like it turns out if you, through your hiring process, make sure that you're finding folks that love the grit, that love the detail, oftentimes that like quote unquote menial work is the difference between a high quality customer experience and a low quality customer experience. Because by the way, like someone has to do that dirty work and if you don't do it, you put the burden on the customer. And so I think, you know, we've got folks that lurch at the opportunity to get into the weeds, to get into the data, to get into the detail and yes, are also like, hey, let's figure out how we can automate something that should be just sort of an automatable, repeatable kind of a thing. Pablo Srugo (00:45:34) : I think that's the other thing that you got kind of for free through this, which is the 10x type people are more than happy to automate what they should automate to kind of lift them up and especially if they're not going to lose their job, like they're not worried about, oh, AI is going to replace me so I've got to shield it, so I've got to, it's just like, I'm going to be here, I'm going to make what I'm going to make because we all make the same thing. So I might as well just 10x myself and 100x myself and you're hiring those sort of people. It's kind of this, this extra, you know, tailwind that you get, it feels like at least from the system. Steve Tuck (00:46:01) : Yeah, and by the way, it's not like we're not only hiring people 25 years into their career that are like, you know, at the top end of their field. We have tons of folks that are these like deeply curious and highly driven kind of emerging folks in their particular domain or discipline that they come in and, you know, they want to earn their stripes because they are at the same level as everybody else Pablo Srugo (00:46:24) : and I like that because it's like, here's, if you're working here, here's the bar. Like, you got to meet it. It's simple. Steve Tuck (00:46:29) : And team members hold each other accountable. Like, that's the flip side of this is like, they demand that folks are, you know, as hardworking as they are and, but it really, it is hard to describe the value of everyone on the same team. Pablo Srugo (00:46:43) : Because you do get that in other companies and it's like, well, this person doesn't perform that well. Yeah, but they only make like 50K, so like whatever, right? It just, so that no longer kind of bleeds in. The second question by the way I wanted to ask just before we move on is, what about at the high end? Like, the person who has to do, you know, half their salary or maybe they can make three times as much somewhere else. And you're kind of like, well, you're great. I want you to work here. We have the perfect role for you. But like this, you know, I'm kind of capped like this because I have a salary cap. This is all I can pay. How do you still get them? I get that there's the story and all these other things, but at some point if they're like, I'm going to make it up. I make a million here, 250K here, you know. Steve Tuck (00:47:18) : No, you're right. You're right. Look, mortgages are at seven and three quarters. Like, oil is through the roof. There's, back to where we started, we wanted to make sure that everyone had a really comfortable financial situation. And so, a couple ways we approached that. One is, as the company became more successful, we've raised that level from 175K to 200 to 225 to 250 to 275. We will be at 300. Second of all, we invest a lot into benefits. So, you know, whether it's an individual or a family, we cover everything. And yes, that doesn't show up, you know, in the bank account, but it is a way of investing into employees, whether it's retirement and health and others that it's so rewarding to hear from spouses or others, like, oh my God, this is like night and day from what we've been before. And then the third piece is, as we've been able to grow the value of the company, having ownership in the company has become really valuable. And it didn't occur to me until one of our engineers who's got a bunch of friends over at Meadow was like, hey, by the way, you know, as folks are going into the market, it turns out from a salary plus benefits plus equity perspective, like, we are 100% competitive with, like, OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, all, some of the leading companies out there with some of the biggest offers. And so, I feel like we can stand there kind of chest out with, like, from a compensation perspective, we're competitive. Pablo Srugo (00:48:51) : And that part, to be clear, the equity piece, you do kind of drive more or less. It's not like everybody has the exact same equity. Steve Tuck (00:48:56) : The way we view equity is that you have, it's an offset for risk. So, if you came to the company before we had anything, you were taking on a hell of a lot of risk. Over time, as we have de-risked the company, you're not going to have as much equity as someone that showed up four years ago. And so, we have been relatively consistent in the rubric around equity, which has also helped. There are cases where you have someone that is taking responsibility for a broader team and a broader effort. And as they are taking on more responsibility, they may have a slightly different profile from an equity perspective. But, I think what's important is that there's no one that is not getting equity that if we go take this business where it should go, it's not going to be life-changing. And that is, you know, something that we want to keep consistent as we go forward and grow. From a compensation perspective, we do not want people to have to feel like they have to invest in Oxide to be able to get the fulfillment of the other side of it, which is be part of something special, be working against a mission that is going after, totally transforming a massive space that, you know, I think we're in the very, very early days of on-prem having its cloud moment. And if that happens, and then on-prem IT transforms from this sort of kit car approach to a cloud-ready systems-based approach, over the next 10 years, you have a trillion dollars of infrastructure that's going to turn over. And to be part of being able to build, you know, kind of part of nine products in one, and then most importantly, work closely with customers to make them successful and work with a bunch of brilliant folks that are in this sort of high-trust environment, it ends up being pretty compelling. Pablo Srugo (00:50:35) : Steve, we're at the top of the hour, which we had another hour because I think there's a bunch of other things we could cover. But I'll ask just the last question, which is, if you had one piece of advice for an early-stage founder and still kind of hunting for product market fit or just getting the beginnings of it, what would that be? Steve Tuck (00:50:50) : Just as many conversations as you possibly can have with as many people as you can. I mean, you should be having, you know, 300 conversations a month if you can. And it doesn't mean that each one of those is a prospective customer. It can be folks that work in a company that's sort of adjacent to the space, but asking for time with people to get feedback on what you're building. Yes, of course, in your prospective customer set. But then when you finish that conversation, asking them if there is anyone they think you should talk to. And that's how you get this kind of spider effect of conversations that you would not have been able to get to first party. And it turns out, like, people love to help. They're drawn in to why you decided to kind of throw everything in on this company idea and kind of make the sacrifices you're making to go build this company. And usually, you're able to get folks that are willing to give you feedback. And a lot of these are not going to be prospective customer conversations, but a bunch of them, you know, you're going to be able to ask questions around the edges of, like, ultimately what you want to get down to, which is, what are the top business level problems that they have? And how does the thing that you're building meaningfully impact one of those top three? Because if it's not in that top three, it doesn't matter how good your marketing and sales and timing is. Unless your sales cycle is less than 30 A's, something is going to broadside that effort. That company, that team, that person is going to be distracted and off to the next thing. And, you know, product market fit gets used as this sort of abstract term like cloud computing or AI. And you really got to dig into understanding how you can fundamentally help companies make money, save money, grow customers, and there's going to be top level priorities inside these businesses if you don't have something that can negatively impact that. It's going to be a rocky road. So I would just say as many conversations as you can have. There's no conversations, the bad conversation, and always finish by asking them who they think you should talk to and you'll be pleasantly surprised at that network effect. Pablo Srugo (00:53:02) : Steve, thanks for your time and appreciate having you on the show. Steve Tuck (00:53:06) : Pablo, thank you. It was fun. Pablo Srugo (00:53:08) : Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.