01:27:59 · John Coogan, Josh Lindgren, Jordi Hays, Eric Seufert
[01:27:59] S1: Yeah. [01:27:59] S7: That that audience drives. Right? This is a conversation I have with folks all the time who are at legacy media companies trying to decide what their next steps look like, especially in this really fast changing landscape where some folks are forced out necessarily when they necessarily wanna make that choice right away. Yeah. So it can be a really scary transition. I'm very empathetic for people who are going through it. I don't begrudge anyone who decides that they want to keep working in legacy media. I don't think that it's doom and gloom for legacy media. Right? I think that there's still room for great journalists on television and on radio, print journalists, and so on. But for folks who are entrepreneurial and wanna build their own thing and own their audience, there's incredible upside and opportunity. [01:28:41] S1: Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting times. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat us. [01:28:45] S0: Great to have you on. [01:28:46] S1: Have a great rest. [01:28:46] S7: Godfather. So much for having me. [01:28:48] S0: The godfather of podcasting. Podcasting. [01:28:50] S2: It's true. [01:28:50] S0: It's true. [01:28:52] S1: We will talk to you later. Have a good one. To see you. [01:28:54] S7: Thank you so much.
01:28:54 · Josh Lindgren, John Coogan, Jeffrey Morgan, Sean Frank
[01:28:54] S7: Thank you so much. [01:28:54] S1: Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Up next, we have Jeff Morgan from Ollama. He's the cofounder and CEO. It's his first appearance for the massive series b. Jeff, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. [01:29:13] S3: Thanks for having me. Doing great. So excited to be here. Big fan of the show as well. [01:29:16] S1: Thank you. Please introduce yourself and your music company. I wanna get to the bottom of how the hell you got 80% of Fortune 500 using your product. But first, introduce yourself and the company. [01:29:27] S3: Yeah. I'm Jeff. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Olama. Olama is the largest network for developers to access open models. [01:29:33] S6: K. [01:29:33] S3: You download Olama. Get connected right away to open models like GLM five two, or you can download them locally and run them right on your laptop for more kind of edge low latency use cases. [01:29:42] S1: Okay. Tell us about the round. Jordy's warming up the gong. How much did you raise? Who from? [01:29:49] S3: 65,000,000. The lead was Tamash Tungus, and we had existing investors participate too, like that.
01:29:49 · Jeffrey Morgan, John Coogan
[01:29:49] S3: 65,000,000. The lead was Tamash Tungus, and we had existing investors participate too, like that. [01:29:57] S1: Awesome. Fantastic. So tons of GitHub stars. Why how does this fit into, like, the the value add to, businesses versus just, downloading the model themselves from, from an open platform, getting the the actual, the weights themselves, deploying things, or just going with an API? Like, how are you talking to Fortune 500 customers about, how you will actually improve their experience with something like GLM 5.2?
01:30:31 · Jeffrey Morgan
[01:30:31] S3: You know, the power of open source is how fast it can build trust with developers around the world. And it ends up a large number of developers work at work at companies that work at, you know, a lot of those in the Fortune 500 or Global 10,000. And open source has a special, you know, capability where you can deploy it in your own environment and not have to think about a ton of security and compliance. And what that means is, look, you can take an open model, which already has open weights, that's kind of why open models are perfect for these use cases, and run them without any approval really as a developer and get real successful results all without having to expose your data or even incur big costs. So that's really been the driving force of being able to get into these large businesses. And to your point, look, just the way it's being open isn't enough. You need a way to deploy them, to run them, to make sure it works on your hardware. For the cloud models, you know, you really need to make sure that you're running them in a secure environment where your company can access them. You know, a lot of a lot of businesses we talk to, especially Fortune 500, they need these open models hosted in The US and in Europe. And that's just a requirement, and it's it's a need they have. And so, you know, put put that all together, it's it's so surprising and incredible how fast it can get adopted.
01:31:43 · John Coogan, Jeffrey Morgan, Jordi Hays
[01:31:43] S1: So what does I mean, you say you're you're you're talking to these Fortune 500 companies, but I imagine that the fact that you have so many GitHub stars means that there's a lot of self serve activity. When does a customer cross over to an enterprise relationship with you? [01:31:56] S3: Yeah. Generally, it starts with the individual dev. Right? They bring it they bring it to work. A lot of them use it, you know, for personal productivity. Sure. And they bring it to their team. And once you're using a team, it's not a one one person store anymore. Right? There's there's a team there. Right? And everything from security to technical architects, IT teams. You know? And and these folks, they they need not just a product that's really, you know, easy to use and self serve, but they need a solution that really kind of end to end covers things like safety and monitoring and logging and data storage and protection. These are all components of a successful agent deployment. And so that's when it becomes a multi party environment. And as we know, that's when you need a solution. And on our side, we need a team to be there to help those customers. [01:32:39] S0: What set of models are you most excited about for the back half of this year in the open weights world?
01:32:39 · Jordi Hays, Jeffrey Morgan, John Coogan
[01:32:39] S0: What set of models are you most excited about for the back half of this year in the open weights world? [01:32:47] S3: I mean, I think with DLM five point we just had another massive moment in open models. And, you know, Olana by far, at least from what we know publicly, is the highest token volume of accessing DLM 5.2. And so I'm excited for that. I think there's going be a series of new models that are long horizon. They're focused on these really hard agentic use cases, and there's going to unlock so many use cases in enterprise that the prior generation of open models couldn't. The gap between open models and the frontier models is shrinking, And so, you know, I I think at that point, you we're able to get to these incredible use cases that just weren't there, you know, three or four months ago. [01:33:23] S1: Take me through some of the game theory in the open source community around those rumors that we heard that there might be export controls on open weights models coming out of China soon. If if if we stop getting frontier or or or near frontier open source models from China for free. Is the next step that you would see an American company step up, NVIDIA, or maybe Meta changes their strategy? How are you thinking the open source ecosystem would evolve if China changes their strategy?