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

Takeaways

• Product-market fit looks like being sold out. Tuck dates Oxide's product-market-fit moment to summer 2025, when a first large multi-year contract forced it to fill a backlog and scale manufacturing and supply chain ⁵⁸. Demand then outran supply.
• Hardware investors were scarce in 2019. It took dozens of meetings to find the hard-tech corner of venture capital. At Eclipse Ventures, Tuck found a room of operators including Pierre Lamond ⁹. The first round is about finding people who believe what you believe ¹⁰.
• Most IT still runs outside public cloud. Nearly 60% of IT infrastructure runs outside the public cloud, an on-premises economy Tuck sizes at $100-150bn and growing ¹. Economics and latency keep workloads there, since owning is orders of magnitude cheaper than renting when usage is certain over years ⁶⁷.
• Oxide reached liftoff on $100m. Tuck says Oxide reached commercial liftoff and profitability having raised $100m, far less than investors expected for a capital-intensive hardware business ⁴. It later raised $445m in August ¹¹.
• Equal pay makes every role equally important. Oxide pays every employee the same salary, which Tuck says signals every role matters and removes salary and title as measures of personal value ¹²¹³. It lets Oxide hire senior support people and keeps total pay competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic ¹⁴¹⁵.

Oxide's build-in-public playbook

• During fundraising, Tuck and his co-founders spent about $500 on podcasting gear and recorded daily updates to share with their families ¹⁶.
• They launched On the Metal with Jeff Rothschild as first guest, a conversation that ran about three hours ¹⁷¹⁸.
• Prospective customers listened, and Oxide and Friends later covered hardware bring-up from EBT through PVT ¹⁹²⁰.
• A photo of Oxide's first rack being wrapped in its crate, with engineer Robert Keith stepping over the crate door, went viral on Twitter ²¹.

Tuck's advice for founders

• Tuck says the most common startup failure is pushing into go-to-market spending before product-market fit ²².
• He advises founders to have as many as 300 conversations a month, including with people adjacent to the space ²³.
• Always ask who else they should talk to, which expands the network beyond the first circle ²³.
• For AI founders, he says the market is noisy, so find investors with a long view rather than lurching at the first offer ²⁴.