A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:27:00 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
[00:27:00] S0: 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... [00:27:42] S1: It's hilarious. I've interviewed like over 300 founders. I've never heard of anything close to that. Pretty unique.
00:27:47 · Steve Tuck
[00:27:47] S0: 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.
00:29:37 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[00:29:37] S1: He launched a podcast around this. [00:29:39] S0: 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. [00:30:18] S1: And what did this, I'm curious, like the podcast, like what did that lead to from a business perspective?
00:30:18 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[00:30:18] S1: And what did this, I'm curious, like the podcast, like what did that lead to from a business perspective? [00:30:22] S0: 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. [00:31:22] S1: 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?
00:31:39 · Steve Tuck
[00:31:39] S0: 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.
00:33:40 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[00:33:40] S1: 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. [00:33:56] S0: 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. [00:34:19] S1: 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. [00:34:31] S0: 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.