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Bryan Cantrill

Co-founder & CTO, Oxide Computer

Search every verified Bryan Cantrill interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Bryan Cantrill, co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, appeared on two programs in late September and mid-October 2026. On the September 27 episode of MTS, he discussed his company's focus on rack-scale hardware and software co-design, explaining that Oxide was founded in 2019 to avoid pivoting to software and to address the breakdowns he observed in cloud computing at scale. He also criticized AI extinction fears, stating that doomsday predictions stem from a lack of familiarity with industrial reality, and suggested that people would benefit from experiencing factory or mining work to better understand automation's actual risks. On the October 15 episode of TVPN, Cantrill discussed Oxide's engineering approach, noting that the company does not resell catalog items but engineers systems, and he acknowledged the risk of failure, saying some companies that attempted similar efforts have become "zeros." He also reflected on his past predictions, including a 2003 forecast about the iPhone, which he correctly anticipated as a new gadget but initially thought would be a flop.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“Don't screw it up. I don't want to phrase this too bluntly, but sometimes I think when you've got a very very good thing going, and maybe in a marriage, you've got a very good thing going, you lose track of what a great thing you've got. Rust has lightning in a bottle. What we have is extraordinary as a community, as a language, and it's very important that we not screw it up. How could we screw it up? Well one of th”

“I just think that this is where people just don't they people would benefit from like going working in a factory, going to a mine, looking at a mine, go into like the actual industrial economy that people are talking about. It doesn't work the way you think it does. Just doesn't. And we've got an entire generation that like doesn't have callous hands. I mean, I hate to put it so pjoratively, but people that that are ”

“The reason that Samsung bought Joy is Samsung's cloud bill was let's just say it was extremely March, they were spending an enormous amount of money every year on the public cloud and they realized that in order to secure their fate economically, they had to be running on their own infrastructure. Just did not make sense and there was not really a product that Samsung could go buy that would give them that on-prem cl”

“The true folly here though is this idea that software and hardware are totally disjoint. And that essay I think over and over and over again kind of implicitly denigrates hardware. Hardware is something that is low margin. It is commodity. There's a bunch of kind of ways that hardware is actually denigrated unless it's changing your life with the phone in which case software ate it apparently. But there's this kind o”

“The problem is that it is extremely reductive. And it's reductive for understandable reasons. It's like I get it. Like you're a VC. It's like bacteria. You kind of do what VCs do. And in particular, you conflate innovation with new company formation. This kind of drives me nuts. If you work for an established company, you know, there is a lot of innovation that happens at established companies. News flash. And yes, t”

“We knew that one, cloud computing is the future of all computing. Not a deep thought that elastic infrastructure, API-driven infrastructure, that is modernity. Two, you shouldn't be able to only rent that; you should be able to buy that, own it, run it in your own data center. Why would you want to do that? Well, you might want to do that for risk management, for security, or for economics, because if you're at a cer”

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