Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:35:07 · Jared Friedman, Garry Tan, Jeffrey Morgan
[00:35:07] S3: For for like critical tasks like that, how do you ensure that a Chinese model, even if it's hosted in The US, isn't basically, like, booby trapped to, like, cause problems? [00:35:19] S2: Yeah. The Manchurian candidate problem. Exactly. Have there any been any like known cases of the Manchurian Candidate yet? [00:35:26] S0: I think not that I can think of off the [00:35:28] S2: top of haven't my head. Heard. I feel like I would have heard about it, but... [00:35:31] S0: You know, what you don't see a lot on some of the press articles is how robust some of the the IT and security teams are at the businesses that we know of, the top Fortune 500 businesses. They're really used to this already because open source software, if you think the average application, has thousands of dependencies. This isn't a new problem. And all it takes is one dependency for there to be a major security issue in the entire application. [00:35:55] S2: The blockchain poisoning is insane. [00:35:57] S0: It's a thing. Been a thing for decades. And it's not new in that sense. It's a little more opaque because you can't, like, dig into the model. It's [00:36:06] S3: It it is deterministic. [00:36:07] S0: But it's deterministic. And if you screen the model properly with safety checks, by and large, at least what we're hearing is from customers is that can be solved.
00:36:07 · Jeffrey Morgan, Garry Tan, Aaron Epstein, Jared Friedman
[00:36:07] S0: But it's deterministic. And if you screen the model properly with safety checks, by and large, at least what we're hearing is from customers is that can be solved. [00:36:14] S2: Do you wanna talk about the origins of Ollama? You you know, you guys came up through the Docker ecosystem, and a lot of people watching, you know, would love to be in the position you're in where you have this sort of enduring brand moat that looks like it will extend for, you know, really till the end of time. No. I just... It's it's a very powerful situation to be in. You basically found yourself on top of a giant oil well. Right? For those out there wildcatting, can you tell us that story? You you were actually working with Jared in 2021. [00:36:51] S0: Yeah. You know, my my cofounder and I previously built Docker Desktop while at Docker. So we really got an understanding of what makes a great developer experience. But I have to say the first few years of Ollama as a company was really in search for what's the right problem to solve with this muscle we've built of trying to design a great experience for developers. [00:37:11] S1: You applied to YC with a very different idea, right? [00:37:14] S3: For sure. Do you remember what the tagline was when you guys applied to YC in Winter twenty one? [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.
00:37:18 · 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.