Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:44:29 · Jeffrey Morgan, Aaron Epstein, Harj Taggar
[00:44:29] S0: I think security stuff. We're... We have this Ollama thing now. [00:44:32] S1: I think you were catching up with Jared, then I bumped into you on the stairs, and I think you had your t shirt or some swag or something. And I was like, oh, I like it. You guys are Ollama. I was like, know, I... Meeting a rock star or something. [00:44:43] S0: It would have been really hard to time this, but I wish we had taken that leap much sooner. I mean, the best time to do it was during y c. But it was impossible. Didn't exist. Exactly. [00:44:52] S4: Llama Llama didn't launch yet. I guess you were also one of the first GitHub projects that very quickly got to a 100,000 GitHub stars. Right? Do you remember how long it... It was, like, very quick. [00:45:03] S0: Yeah. I can't remember exactly how fast, but it was much faster than Docker and Kubernetes. To your point, things kind of just started working and started taking off. And you're really as a founder just beside yourself because you can't totally explain why. I think it's the best way to explain product market fit. And there are different levels of product market fit. We only started monetizing earlier this year with Ollama Cloud. But just to see people fall in love with the product, it's such a zero to one moment that I wish we had done it during YC, but in some ways it wasn't possible.
00:45:03 · Jeffrey Morgan, Aaron Epstein, Garry Tan
[00:45:03] S0: Yeah. I can't remember exactly how fast, but it was much faster than Docker and Kubernetes. To your point, things kind of just started working and started taking off. And you're really as a founder just beside yourself because you can't totally explain why. I think it's the best way to explain product market fit. And there are different levels of product market fit. We only started monetizing earlier this year with Ollama Cloud. But just to see people fall in love with the product, it's such a zero to one moment that I wish we had done it during YC, but in some ways it wasn't possible. [00:45:36] S1: I also think it's just kind of wild to put into perspective. Like, you sort of went from being in sort of like the cranks on Reddit, like, interested in running their own, like, rigs at home to, like, 85% of the Fortune five hundred in, like, two years or something like that. That's like that's like a pretty [00:45:53] S2: That's the Homebrew Computer Club to broad computer adoption and, like, speed run that took ten years for the PC. Yeah. It took, like, eighteen months, twelve months.
00:45:53 · Garry Tan, Jeffrey Morgan
[00:45:53] S2: That's the Homebrew Computer Club to broad computer adoption and, like, speed run that took ten years for the PC. Yeah. It took, like, eighteen months, twelve months. [00:46:02] S0: Yeah. And that's one of the things that surprised us the most. Because I think, look, I think open models, the original users, very much hobbyists just tinkering, oh my god. This is even possible. But very quickly because, you know, two things. One is they're free to get started with and you could run them anywhere. That is incredibly helpful to a Fortune 500 IT developer team. They don't have to ask for permission to use it. And so it just happened what was really good for a hobbyist user translated very quickly to a developer within a business. It just happened to be a case where that was it. For example, databases, we saw some of this too where databases started for devs like MongoDB very quickly also moved to enterprise. But because LLMs are stateless, it made for such an easy transition. Now moving to the cloud, there's a lot more in play. There's an economic question if you're a customer. There's obviously security, where's the model running? But what's beautiful about open models that both hobbyists and IT developers loved is you could just get started, you didn't need permission.