“I think the first rule of tax optimization is don't waste money trying to optimize your taxes, right? Don't make bad decisions because you're scared of paying the government a little bit, right?”
Oxide and Friends · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
After the server company announced its Series D, Hacker News commenters asked why a profitable startup would end up paying taxes. The company's finance chief says it is already investing heavily in its technology and team, and the profit is what's left over after that.
Transcript
got to be.
Fully wicked. Okay. So, Scott, what gives? Why, how, how dare, how dare we pay taxes? What kind of rubes? What kind of morons are actually paying taxes? Yeah.
Well, before we get into it, I want to give a shout out to my Kellogg professor, Mitchell Peterson. My favorite class at Kellogg was tax strategy. So believe me, I've thought a lot about this. But Steve has, we were talking before, and Steve had a good idea, which is the table stakes here is that we are investing super heavily in our technology and our team. Like we are pouring money into that. And so the profit of. That we're seeing here in 2026 is in excess of all that. And I think the first rule of tax optimization is don't waste money trying to optimize your taxes, right? Don't make bad decisions because you're scared of paying the government a little bit, right? So that's that's rule number one here.
That's actually, sorry, just to not to fix it. That's a that's a pretty wise statement there. Golden rule. Yeah, is that from is um is that a Mitchell Petersonism? I mean, yeah, that's a
Scott Orn Scott Orn, Brian. That's
a Scott Orn. Excuse me. Excuse me. No,
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