Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:37:18 · Jeffrey Morgan, Jared Friedman, Aaron Epstein, Garry Tan
[00:37:18] S0: I think it wasn't well defined. I think we realized, let's go back to building a really great desktop experience for containers and Kubernetes. [00:37:28] S3: I remember what I wrote down on the on the application. It was a Kitematic for Kubernetes or a Docker desktop for Kubernetes. [00:37:36] S0: Which was effectively Docker desktop. They had a [00:37:39] S1: great Kubernetes. I [00:37:40] S0: think, you know, it's one of the challenges as a second time founder that, you know, Michael and I have told ourselves. We we tried to overengineer the idea in many ways. And I think even the two to three years after, like Ollama, we did YC in 2021 and Ollama wasn't launched until July 2023. After we raised our series A, after obviously after we had done YC, that journey was one of really in search for a customer problem that could delight a developer. And in some ways it was also a good thing that we tried different ideas and pivoted until 2023 because that's when Llama came out and started the open model wave. [00:38:19] S3: Which is why it's called Ollama. Not necessarily. Okay. [00:38:23] S0: No. Oh, really? Llama means generally from our experience, whether you think of local llama, the subreddit, a llama really just stands for open models. As we were looking through the name, it wasn't necessarily from an existing model. [00:38:37] S2: It's more LLM. Exactly. It's like the animal plus LLM. [00:38:42] S0: Yeah. I think having that character was important. So we're like, what's a good name for a character, a face you can put to the name? Because You need
00:38:42 · Jeffrey Morgan, Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, Aaron Epstein
[00:38:42] S0: Yeah. I think having that character was important. So we're like, what's a good name for a character, a face you can put to the name? Because You need [00:38:48] S2: go to animal mascot sometimes. [00:38:50] S0: Had one. Yeah. GitHub. [00:38:52] S3: Yeah. He still hasn't taken my advice to have llamas come to actual Ollama events. [00:38:55] S2: Oh my god. [00:38:59] S1: I'm curious what your series a pitch was because you raised from Benchmark, like, fantastic investor, but all of this, the future we're in now hadn't quite taken off in 2023. So what was, like, the pitch and the vision back then? [00:39:10] S0: Yeah. And we partnered with Benchmark in 2022. So it was Dolly days, but pre ChatGPT. When it came down to the pitch, I think we weighed so much on like, hey, we're trying to build this great developer experience. We're solving this security problem. And we had known Peter, a partner at Benchmark from our previous lives building a Docker because he was the series A investor in Docker. And so a lot of it was weighted on the people and also why we exist. I think the what, I mean, solving SSO for Kubernetes, which is a real problem, wasn't really our passion. I think we were really lucky to find a partner that could see us for what we stood for and what we were trying to do versus the point in time problem we were solving at [00:39:54] S1: I that see. So you were as the ace or pre pivot, didn't [00:39:57] S0: you? Correct. [00:39:57] S1: Okay. I didn't realize that, actually.
00:39:57 · Aaron Epstein, Jared Friedman
[00:39:57] S1: Okay. I didn't realize that, actually. [00:39:59] S3: I was just looking at this Cloud Tokens by Model Family Graph, and like, basically, if you just look at this graph, it looks like the story begins on... In February 2026, and it, like, explodes thereafter, which is, like, so funny because, like, of course, it actually goes back to, like, 2021. What was it like to be, like, sort of lost in the wilderness for, like, many years working on stuff that was, like, kind of working, but like not really taking off. And then all of a sudden to have things like just like explode. Like how did how did it affect you and your co founder psychology and the team and the employees? What what was the experience like?
00:40:36 · Jeffrey Morgan
[00:40:36] S0: It was definitely scary. And for a few reasons. One is like when you're trying to solve a problem for devs or for a customer and you're just getting on the phone with them over and over again and it's not totally clicking, that's, you know, it's less about the, are we in the headlines or is the project taking off the product we're building? It was just, are we truly actually solving a problem for somebody? And I think being lost in the wilderness, like what's your North Star? Customers are generally a great North Star. But not seeing the North Star is even scarier, right? Because often you know what problem you wanna solve, you just haven't figured out what problem. And I think Michael, my co friend and I, we started this company because we built a company in the past and we ended up being acquired by Docker very early. It was just the founding team. And Arnar Starr was saying, we wanna go solve a great experience for developers with something they find really hard. But man, in the two years where we're just finding that problem, it's really scary. We had a team of more than 10 people, which made that really hard. And I'm so thankful to that team for staying by our side as we went through different ideas. And what's not really obvious is we went from this security for Kubernetes to then security for developers on the desktop, which is the pivot that we've never spoken about. And then we took that form factor when models came out. Said, well, it was a leap. But it was we knew the kind of problem and the feeling a developer wanted to have. But LMS finally made it realize. It was crystal clear at the point when we tried running the llama model, and it was really hard. And we're like, okay. This is a problem. And it's really impressive when you get it working. And it's kind of just a zero to one moment.
00:42:15 · Jared Friedman, Jeffrey Morgan, Garry Tan
[00:42:15] S3: I'm curious for the story of that pivot. Is there... There are actually, like, many pivots in the Ollama story, but probably, like, the most critical one was, like, the pivot to Ollama to doing, like, hopefully hosted LLMs. Like, how did that come about? Were you just, like, tinkering with ideas on the side? And when you found the idea, was it really obvious to everyone in the company that that was the thing to do, or was there, like like a big debate? And it wasn't until it took off that it became clear. [00:42:39] S0: We sat in a room together. I remember we were in Toronto because we had a team split across Toronto and Palo Alto. And now we're predominantly in Palo Alto. And we were saying, throw everything out. Like if we had to start from scratch. If we were just joined YC right now, what would we do? And we had seen two big problems. Because we had talked to some users in Ollms. We tried using open source Ollms ourselves or just Ollms in general. One problem was, could you build a gateway to access any model and host that and make that really seamless? Back then, we were thinking of it as like the segment for LLMs. [00:43:09] S2: That's a good way to think about it. [00:43:11] S0: Which I think has become really this big router idea, which is only at the beginning. It's a massive opportunity. The other problem was we were a bunch of ex VMware, ex Docker folks. Like, we know how to make things run. And so like, let's help make things run with open models. And then we kind [00:43:24] S2: of Systems.
00:43:24 · Garry Tan, Jeffrey Morgan, Aaron Epstein, Harj Taggar
[00:43:24] S2: of Systems. [00:43:25] S0: Yeah. Systems. And so we kind of tried to really introspect our team, which I wish we had done sooner because security is a very different team and sale than developer tools. And just by doing that, we gravitated towards saying, let's just try this thing. Let's give ourselves two weeks to launch the first version of Ollama. And then Ollama two came out and we said, that was right at the end of the two weeks. We said, okay, we're launching it. And we just had a bias to action. If you think back like in two weeks, all of that happened going from idea to shipping it, to getting to more users than we had ever had with our previous stuff. And before that was two years of just frankly overthinking the customer, the product, and just not getting something out there. [00:44:02] S1: The first time I actually heard about Ollama was on Reddit. I didn't realize it was you guys. I was on like their logo. I just was interested in like running local models and it was on like the... Think the local LLM subreddit or whatever. Everyone was just raving about Ollama and how great it was. [00:44:16] S4: I was like, it's a Y Combinator. [00:44:17] S1: Yeah. I found out later actually because you you were called a different company. You were in our internal system at Ollama. [00:44:24] S0: Yeah. I remember catching up with Jared and saying, oh, hey, by the way, [00:44:28] S1: there's Yeah. No. [00:44:29] S0: I think security stuff. We're... We have this Ollama thing now.