Imagine a little warm fire.
You know, I can almost feel the heat.
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 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.
Well, so I got to say — when we talked and I said that, you were talking about how terrific it was for the milestones we hit, and I'm like, 'You need to meet the actual team.' 'Yes, you did. You said that.' I was like, 'I mean, I've met teams.'
Oh, God. I was recording. The recording's on, right? I want to make sure we got that. You're right. Exactly. That's right. And also, you were right — no, actually, you were right. You know, I just — you were right.
It's not that hard. It's not that I was wrong.
Oh, no, exactly. You weren't wrong in that. I mean, the thing is, everybody understands that a team is important. No one would disagree with that, right? 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 is 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've — I mean, we've got — 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.
We got some really good feedback for you all. Like, you'll see it. Yeah. Right. And you all will see it eventually, but we got 2011. They're kind, they're smart, they're caring, they accepted us right in. Some are shy, some are not — like all the typical things of humans. Yeah. But just very impressive, like, to a one. So I guess the obvious question would be like, how did you do that?
Yeah. And, you know, it's actually not that complicated, which is kind of frustrating that more companies don't do it this way. But we, from the start, 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 — like, we did a podcast, right? And on the one hand, definitely wanted to do a podcast; it was fun to do, but there was a method to the madness, and it was super cheap: a couple of podcasting microphones and getting these pioneers of computing 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.' And so it 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 like, okay, so then how do we down select? Yeah. And that's where, you know, we got lucky by our mistakes at previous stuff. I mean, Steve and I were not, you know, we were not 20-somethings when we started this company, right? You know, we were what? I was 45, you were 41. Where were we? 42. Yeah, but whatever it was.
I think that was one big part of it — 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 like, 'What do you hope to achieve?' And a lot of companies are hoping to achieve like 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 short-term decisions that are actually better for the short term that do not serve a long term that you don't intend to go build towards.
And I think what we wanted to do is we wanted to be doing this for like 40 or 50 years, like the rest of our careers anyway. And when you have that disposition, other people that are attracted by the beacon of a big mission and an idea to go do something, and then can hear honestly and earnestly that we're trying to build a good company first and a long-standing company first — it allows for folks that are deciding whether to leave where they've been for a period of time to 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 — you know, they got here and they're seeing like-minded folks all over the room that want to go build something, 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 the down select — we call it down selecting, the narrowing down of the candidates. Yeah. You have this rigorous written process. Everybody talks about it. The materials.
The RFD. Yeah. Yeah. We've got an RFD that describes the hiring process, and that really came from hiring mistakes at previous spots.
I mean, I made the worst hire of all time.
I made the worst hire of all time.
No, no, no, no. Steve didn't do that. I mean —
Yeah. I mean, it was also like, you know, Steve — 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, right?
Yeah. And it was very helpful to have done that. And you know what, 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.
Yeah, it's bad. And that, um, we took hiring down to the studs after that. Um, 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 aren't — 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 they've never met before. And there's so many terrific technologists that are nervous when they're talking to someone for the first time, that you will interview, and you may be like, 'I don't know,' but you read their written work: 'This person's extraordinary.'
And so we just — 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 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. 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 — I mean, we actually, there's a degree to which, frankly, I'm a little disappointed how little interpersonal conflict we have at Oxide, because I've got like a lot of flights and drama.
Maybe because — no, because of some of the ways we have built things. I mean, so, 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 rewatch themselves, rewatch the person they're arguing with — 'Hey, can you see how — 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 relisten to them or rewatch 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 rewatch 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 morsel —
I'm waiting for my turn. I'm like not — so I'm like waiting for my turn, and I'm keeping my little morsel warm.
It is really hard to listen when you're in that mode.
Yeah. And so what I would do is I would relisten 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 —
Self-awareness really, right? And what forces that kind of self-awareness? There's so many people who are not really that self-aware. Well, it's hard in the moment when you go back to —
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. Um, it's coping, right? I mean, you're teaching basic human skills here — self-awareness, how to cope.
Well, so I think — are we teaching it or are we selecting for it? Because I think you're creating a culture that helps people do that naturally.
The recorded meetings, self-awareness. How did I respond? Coping. Right.
Right. Well, the self-awareness starts with the materials, because you're having to write both examples of your prior work and what you've done, what you're proud of, and then some open-ended questionnaire questions which basically are asking like, 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 get into it, and they're like, 'Jesus Christ, I had to put my pencil down,' and I'm just like sitting here —
Just like, God, I'm back in that moment where I was — 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 — 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, like, 'All right, hold on. Why are we here?' Well, because you remind yourself that we actually agree on a lot. You maybe disagree on this issue, but I go back and read your materials like, 'Oh, right. Right. We actually are trying to do the same thing. We've got a lot in common.'
When you all mention materials, um, 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, maybe even where they're from.
You know, 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 hiring is always going to be a challenging process, right? And one of the questions people have is like, 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 —
Because you know them well. And we have seen it go all ways. And one of the things that we see is where you've worked with someone, you thought they were really great, and they apply and their materials are not good. And that's the tough — that hurts. It hurts, and it's happened to us all, and you're like, 'Oh man, I —'
'I wanted it to work out.' But people — I know that because we're so direct about here's what you need to go do: like, read the RFD, listen to the podcast episode where we tell people like, don't put it all in the materials. We get people who are like, 'Well, I'll tell you more in the interview.' It's like, not going to be an interview.
Yeah. You got to throw it out, man.
And you got to put it out there. But 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. Uh, and I think the other thing is like, 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 have — and it's been 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 and you're like, 'This is — 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, 'Hey, I loved your materials, but here's why it wasn't a fit.' Sometimes they come in on a role like, 'Oh, now the time is right.' So I think you want to be careful — this is not an 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. And they could be good.
They could be good because it could work out. It could work out.
And it's like, the problem is we don't have an infinite amount of resources, and we do have to make decisions. Those decisions are very hard.
What you described is something I would call a velvet rope, right? When you go into 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 —
That velvet rope is a very powerful thing in your business.
Yeah. And I don't like that. 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.
Right. To these folks here.
To do your jobs. And be selective.
That's right. I think we have the good fortune of now being very, very oversubscribed, right, 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, uh, I think, you know, we're obviously growing. We're expanding. We got more racks out there than we've ever had by a factor of two. Um, so that helps, but we're still massively oversubscribed.
Well, I think actually one of the important things on the job descriptions that we have out — one, we put a lot of effort into the job descriptions. We want to make sure the job descriptions describe the job.
Describe the job. Yeah, good job.
We're going to do something radical. We're going to describe the job, not make up a bunch of requirements.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, so you also have people you just want to give them the feedback: 'Next time, let an AI write this. Like, this would have been much better with, like, grammar check and stuff.' Oh, we've gotten some real stinkers in that regard. Um, but actually I was talking to an old friend of mine and we talked process — 'won't work in the post-AI age' — and 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. And so true.
It's such a personal question. It requires introspection, a journey.
Yeah. Hard to just generate that one. Yeah, it is hard to generate that one. I would say one modification we made to the materials is the last question we ask is, why do you want to work for Oxide? And unfortunately — I mean, 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 that, like, you hold honesty and integrity and decency.' And that's great — we view that as a constraint on operation. We think that any company should have that. I think that is great that that resonates with you. That is nowhere near enough. That is nowhere near enough. 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 want you — we're very transparent — listening to the podcast episodes and the RFDs and the repos, and the more you can do that, because you need to try it on to see if this is actually earnestly going to be a fit for me. And so one of the things 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.
So I described some of the character of the characters that we met here. Adam described some of their lifestyles all around the world. Um, one thing that I think seems to be missing is youngsters. Yeah. Everybody's generally 30s.
I would define youngsters. First of all, we made a M*A*S*H reference that literally half the company didn't get.
I saw the hands. It was a lot of 'got it'. I have gotten it. I would say 70%, it seemed.
Got it. Was around 70%. Was it not 70%?
No, no, no. There were a lot of hands — less than 50%.
A lot of hands to go.
So, you're oversubscribed. You got tons of people that want to work here, right? And so you have a gluttony of riches and choice, right? Yeah. At a certain point, there's a demographic that seems to be missing — someone who's fresh out of college, fresh out of high school, maybe has a different perspective, maybe is wondering —
That's a challenge. And I think it's because — I mean, I obviously had a job straight out of college. Straight out of school, I went to Sun. Um, 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'm 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 look, I kind of, you know, I say I hate the exclusivity, which may make me a hypocrite from what I'm about to say, but like, 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, all right, 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 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 the material will show it.
The materials will show it. But we are not going to be — so, in the abstract, I've wanted to be able to be someone's first stop, right? But as a practical matter, when you're building an elite team, it isn't really practical. I mean, it's like we need like a minor league Oxide, you know, we need like a —
I know. Exactly. Hey, now that's —
I think 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 we have folks that are just several years out of school, right? And that work 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, yeah. This is a very important point — a few miles on the tires, a few miles of experience — that allows you to understand a little bit more of what you want. So this is not like trying on work; this is 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 materials and you're like, this is not trivial.
He reviews them all. He's going to say it's true because fewer materials get through. There we go. He's the first round and he's the second round. Yeah. He's the primary filter, right? You said that earlier. Well, at least off camera.
Don't make it through the first round. That's right.
Um, okay. There are many fewer quality materials — even like moderate quality materials — of folks that are very, very early in their career. Because it is hard to describe robust experiences that haven't happened. 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, right? And so we actually do have plenty of people — there are people here that are younger than you might think. Okay. And certainly we got plenty of people here that are much closer to our kids' age than they are to our age. 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 — and they learned a lot in a very short period of time. Wise beyond their years.
One of the things that a lot of people have said, when we ask 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. They say, 'Well, they treat us like grown-ups. They can treat me like a grown-up.' And I think that's an awesome way of describing it. That's like saying, here's a grown-up.
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.
Well, another bar is the bar that a bunch of grown-ups get to. I mean —
I know. Sorry.
Well, I mean, it just speaks to the experience level of people, right? They're self-starters. They're motivated, right? 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 as you scale?
He's already told you that.
Well, look — if 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. And so, 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 — 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, 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 say, like, how far can it scale? It's a good question, like, 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, period, that use written materials as the primary rubric for hiring. But they're not you. And so, like, we don't know — that has been so important to us to scale out. It would be foolish for us to say what we can or can't do, because we just don't know.
Very 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.' Even salespeople — they move very quickly, there's recruiters involved. 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.' Like, 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 after that.
And it turned out exceptional salespeople loved the process. They love describing themselves — 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 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 enjoy the process, and now they bring that into the sales culture for the next round of sales hiring.
You also have 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 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, 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 — to 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, 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, you have an opening over there. I might be interested.' It's like, 'I thought you weren't interested. I thought you were happy.' 'Well, you know, I just might be interested.'
That's it. And I think that we do change that up. And it's interesting to look at because I think 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, 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 that is equally, if not more important, that customers love to buy from. It was very important to us from the outset — because you talk about trust as a management philosophy, it's true. Trust is also a customer and market engagement philosophy.
Because, you know, 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, 'You know, I got to tell you, the products you make are not competitive right now. There are a bunch of things about Sun that have been 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 lie to me. The only ones that never lie to me. You come in here — if your products are not the right products, you'll help me find something better. You always want me to succeed.'
And I got to tell you, that also seems like a low bar. Like, look, you guys don't lie to me.
Oh, everybody else — I mean, I think — but that's it. So it's typically transactional, and what you want is — 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 long-standing relationships with customers, even if they went to two companies, three companies. And 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. And we've gotten great feedback from candidates — they've done the materials, they're like, 'Hey, you know what else would be great to talk about in here?' And again, we feel very fortunate that the founding sales team here are big believers in the process and want to carry that forward.
I got to say, when we were first trying to hire for sales, my own conviction was kind of wavering. I'm like, 'Steve, is the materials process the right process for sales?' And so, yes — Steve's like, emphatically yes. We just haven't found the right people yet, and we just need to be patient.
And, well, also, you got to do more than that. Because for some roles, yes, we are very oversubscribed; for other roles, we got to go out and really shake the tree, and you 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 that.
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 — a lot of people are involved in closing big deals. What we want is story time. We want to hear about, 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. We had to get better at how do we ask the right questions to get them just like the stories you tell around a campfire — right — about the scar tissue that you have. 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 has nothing to do with a particular role, whether it's solutions —
Engineering support sales finance. We're, you know, I think again back to like 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 or team or role or anything. I think you all have started to feel that across the company, and that's where the flywheel starts to take shape. You just got like, you know, it's not about these siloed organizations where you have to do things differently because that's a certain type of animal. And then, you know, thankfully we started to see like, holy, that's an incredible salesperson that love the process and just go read the materials.
Yeah. And that is like 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.
Reinforce it. And to reinforce it. And it's like, I mean when I say like my conviction was ravering, I mean I don't think I needed much in the way of convincing, but 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. And if like yeah, if you're not reading the RFP thoroughly and you're kind of shooting your mouth off, it's like well then you're not going to work. Then how rigorous are you going to be on that thing that you're submitting to that CIO? And you're going to be like oh well I rushed through it because you know I was on a plane. It's like no what? So it gives you
and I will say that the other thing about this company is that like we, and this is where you get to that trust, like we, this company sticks it. Like we know that if someone is out there representing Oxide in any capacity, sales, finance, operations, engineering, we know that that they themselves are going to hold themselves to a high standard of execution.
But I would say like the reason that it's reasonable to ask like how do you, 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 why I want, 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 many ex like too much external pressure.
You've got to like relax these constraints, right?
And that's not to say that you don't need to adjust and modify things as the company gets bigger and you are, but the foundation is so so so important. And you know, sticking it out just a little longer, you get these good omens and you're like okay all right actually no like stay the course. And then you get the like down the road it's like oh man what a great model and
this happens because I do, I mean I end up reviewing a lot of materials and you just get like numb as you're reviewing materials because you're and then you can have a like a candidate that's just like a bit better than the others. Like, oh, this person's great. No, no, no. This, I'm just like I'm numb from these others. And then you begin to like, God, maybe this is unreasonable. Like, especially when it's a new role, like, God, is this a like? And then you get that superlative candidate and you're just like, oh, thank God. Thank God. All right. Yes. Yeah. It still works. There's still hope. There's still hope.
So, on that vein, fast forward 20 years, you guys are retiring from Oxide, right? So,
you forget to like we're youngsters still.
40 years. Okay, fine. 40 years from you've built a generational computer company, right? Next generation is running it. You guys are ready to hang them up.
Are you still, does Oxide still do unicorn compensation?
hard to know. I genuinely hand on heart don't know because I just don't know. I think that we, it's easy to I can easily go either way. I can easily be like, 'No, no, of course not because that generational company has to have like 10,000 employees and 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. I mean,
you think, Steve? Brian doesn't know.
I don't know. I think the kind of like the foundation behind uniform compensation still remains and
transparency is there. Be tiers maybe still uniform but like tiered uniform, like uniformity is that, does that make it nonuniform?
Well look, I'll give you an example. So like we do not have uniform construction of compensation at Oxide.
that are putting something in the middle where if they do not achieve their target, they make less than everyone else at the company.
