The right place at the right time

Recently, the New Stack had a piece excerpting some of my conversation with Gergely Orosz. In introducing me in the piece, Joab Jackson writes "Cantrill has had a knack at being at the right place at the right time." While this is objectively true at some level, it also gave me a double take: it rarely felt true at the time.

When I entered university in 1992, it didn’t feel like the right time: the economy for new grads was very grim — and I knew plenty of folks who had done at well at top schools who were struggling to find work (and accepting part time jobs that didn’t need a college degree at all while they searched for something better). I never doubted going to school, but I also have never taken a job for granted.

When I fell in love with computer science as an undergraduate and realized that I wanted to become a software engineer, it didn’t feel like the right time: Ed Yourdon had just written The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, which boldly told any young computer science student that they were wasting their time — that all programming jobs would be done by cheap labor abroad. This argument felt wrong, but I was too in love with computer science to be talked out of it anyway.

When I decided that I was specifically interested in operating systems kernel development, it definitely didn’t feel like the right time: the conventional wisdom in the mid-1990s was that operating systems were done — that Unix was in decline and that the future clearly belonged to Microsoft. I ardently disagreed with this, and my conviction brought me in 1996 to the one company that unequivocally shared it: Sun Microsystems.

When the internet exploded in the late-1990s, I was — at last — at the right place at the right time. But it was short-lived: when the Dot Com Boom turned to a Dot Com Bust, we were fighting conventional wisdom yet again. Didn’t the bust mean that there was no future to this stuff?

When we started Oxide in 2019, it was almost comforting when it didn’t feel like the right time: Sand Hill investors told us that "we only fund SaaS companies", that our $20M seed round was "too big", that "there is no market." (And most absurdly: "if this is such a good idea, why are you the only ones doing it?") Six years later — with VMware customers wanting to get away from Broadcom and with frontier AI companies realizing that there is (in fact!) a lot of general purpose CPU involved in their workloads — our timing looks perfect, but in fact we are just resilient.

So, my advice: have the courage to follow your heart — and disregard what others say about your timing. This is not an assurance of an easy path (to the contrary, going your own way will assuredly be a struggle!), but you will have the solace of knowing that you were true to yourself — that you did your best work. And who knows: maybe years down the stretch, someone will observe that you have the knack for the very thing that you disregarded…​

Note: Also published as a LinkedIn post.