Co-founder and CTO of @oxidecomputer. According to @fieldofschemes, "tech exec and Oakland A's fan" -- but more of a Ballers fan now. @bcantrill.bsky.social

Joined August 2010
894 Photos and videos
Bryan Cantrill retweeted
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Update: a remarkable number of folks asking me in DMs to name the partner and firm (which I am gladly doing!) are themselves early stage investors who don't want to point their portcos to a bad firm. Good on you all -- a reminder that there are a bunch of good VCs out there!
Oh, is this what we're doing now? Because we have some tales, including the firm that preempted our Series A, walked away from a signed term sheet (!) -- and then came back four years later asking for a reference (!!)
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There are a few VC firms that we have refused to engage with at all. First among them is a firm that many entrepreneurs AND VCs warned us about -- one that actively harmed companies. So I have heard many horror stories about Khosla Ventures; we can add this one to that list!
Replying to @eastdakota
One more I forgot until just reminded: 3. Khosla Ventures wanted to invest in our Series C. Vinod took me, Michelle, and Lee out to dinner after he’d given us a term sheet. Near the end, Michelle and Lee got up to use the restroom. Vinod leaned over and said: “I’m impressed with you, not so much with them, what if you fire them and I’ll give you all their stock?” I think the charitable read was it was a test of my character. But I was so offended that we never spoke again. Literally blocked his number.
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Oh, is this what we're doing now? Because we have some tales, including the firm that preempted our Series A, walked away from a signed term sheet (!) -- and then came back four years later asking for a reference (!!)
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30 minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital. You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious. It's a dance. And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious. If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird. No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there. It is weird.
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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
In 2015, we started @EclipseVentures to back the boldest engineers building at the intersection of bits and atoms. In 2016, @andrewdfeldman gave us one of the clearest pitches on a long-term vision I have ever heard in my career. "The GPU architecture is fundamentally limited for AI. We are going to build a wafer-scale chip to replace it. It will take a decade." A decade later, here we are. IPO Day. A few lessons I've learned from our decade as investors in Cerebras: The most important company building happens at the earliest stages. The technical bet, the architectural choices, the key manufacturing partnerships, the first 50 people on the team — all locked in before product-market fit, before revenue, before the capital markets care. Taking the time to get these foundational elements right is what lets you move with velocity later. Talent is a compounding asset. From day one, Cerebras was obsessed with hiring the very best people in the world. Watching Andrew and the team obsess over this was a real lesson. Seeing Pierre and Lior work with the founders to build that team taught me a lot about the role a board member should play early in a company's history. One of the most formative things I've witnessed in venture. They treated every hire like it mattered, because it did. Reputations are forged in the hardest moments, not the best ones. The reason Andrew first pitched Eclipse tells you everything: his several decade relationship with Pierre Lamond. Pierre had been on his board at SeaMicro and stood with him through the toughest stretches of building that company. When Andrew started Cerebras, he was adamant Pierre would be involved. The reputation you build in hard moment is what people remember. This is what brings you the next deal, the next hire, the next round. This is how we try to operate at Eclipse: true partners to founders through the hardest stretches of the journey. It doesn't matter how good your technology is if you don't land the deals. No one remembers the company with the best chip and no customers. The last 24 months at Cerebras have been a clinic in commercial execution. Andrew, the GTM team, and the board (Lior, @ericvishria, and @vassallo) have been on a tear. Thousands of hours on planes to all corners of the world. Late nights. Holidays away from families. Hard decisions made under real uncertainty. Never losing sight of the mission. I've never seen anything like it. Great companies need a differentiated mission and world-changing technical execution — but they also need a shit ton of grit and a refusal to quit. Cerebras has all of it. Eclipse is proud to have been there from the seed with @andrewdfeldman and the team. Watching Lior and Pierre steward this company for the last 10 years has been a masterclass. Congratulations to everyone involved on reaching this milestone!
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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
The mic cut out during O Canada at the Sabres game. Buffalo filled every single second of silence. Sang it word for word. This is how you tell your neighbors you see them. We love Canada. Don’t listen to the noise.
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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
Eleven years ago we started @EclipseVentures and bet everything on atoms. Rockets, robots, chips, factories, power systems, defense. The things civilization actually runs on. Today, we're announcing $1.3B in new capital to keep building. The physical world is overdue for transformation. Transportation runs on systems designed decades ago. The energy grid cannot keep up with demand. Healthcare depends on manual procedures that don't scale. Defense development moves at a fraction of the speed threats evolve. These are not software problems. They are full stack engineering and operations problems, and they have been underinvested in for a generation. But there has never been a better moment to solve them. The best engineers are leaving big tech to build in the physical world. AI is compressing timelines from years to quarters. Policy is aligned. And customers are not waiting — the DoD, the hyperscalers, hospitals, and the Fortune 500 are all desperate for technology that makes physical systems smarter, faster, and more resilient. Talent, capital, technology, policy, and demand are all converging at once. This is our moment 🇺🇸 We built Eclipse for this exact moment and in doing so, we launched a movement. Today that movement is 100 companies strong (and growing!). These companies supply each other, share customers, and help solve each other's hardest problems. Propulsion systems powering orbital defense. Modern supply chain infrastructure moving the worlds goods. Autonomous vehicles on three continents. Surgical robots performing procedures that used to require the world's best hands. Cloud hardware powering the AI revolution built on American soil. That's not a fund. That's an economy — an Eclipse Economy. The door is open to rebuild the physical infrastructure of the country. We intend to run through it.
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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
33,000 military veterans are currently homeless.
In the United States military, we leave no American behind.
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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
Our son registered to vote yesterday. He also registered for the draft because he has to. I swear I blinked.
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Something that people on this platform apparently need to hear, even if it makes them feel uncomfortable: if you live in a state that does not believe that transgender rights are human rights, you will never be a true alternative to Silicon Valley -- let alone the next one.
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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
Bryan Cantrill ( @bcantrill ) was a distinguished engineer at the original Sun Microsystems and has now founded Oxide Computer Company ( @oxidecomputer ). We discussed everything he learned through the booms and busts in his career: • Why focusing on promotions is bad • Stories competing with Jeff Bezos • Living through the dot-com crash • Stack ranking and layoff patterns from before • The story behind starting his own company He was gracious in letting me grill him about his past and in sharing interesting perspectives from the experiences he lived through You can watch the full episode here: • YouTube: youtu.be/qhSL-5GtmQM • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7jF… • Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… • Transcript: developing.dev/p/distinguish…
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We’re so lucky we didn’t listen to all the people who told us to be SaaS—almost everyone "smart" btw
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congrats to the @oxidecomputer team on the raise, but more impressive than that, congrats on selling a bunch of racks oxide.computer/blog/our-200m…
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Replying to @bcantrill
@bcantrill makes a good case for why the world needs to eat more software. The layers of emulation and hidden firmware in the innards of our servers is approaching Vernor Vinge levels of archeology!
This was a super fun talk by @bcantrill. The first half in particular has a lot of great hot takes! youtu.be/v0JjG0Qfwi8?si=OSYH…
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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
This was a super fun talk by @bcantrill. The first half in particular has a lot of great hot takes! youtu.be/v0JjG0Qfwi8?si=OSYH…

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Bryan Cantrill retweeted
Pimco's Libby Cantrill says the US dollar is still dominant and serves as the world's reserve currency. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index hit a new session low on Tuesday, falling as much as 1.2%, as the US currency weakened against all of its major counterparts bloom.bg/4sUReVE
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