Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:55:07 · Garry Tan
[00:55:07] S2: I mean, you're probably actually doing an incredible service to like, both sides of the ecosystem, and that, like, the end users get this, like, very clean thing that just works, especially, like, the tokens just come out, and they're very clean, and the API makes sense, and it's rational and logical. And then on the flip side, like, I mean, if you don't have a layer like Ollama, I've directly experienced this, where it's like, oh, yeah, the underlying inference provider has a weird error for, you know, if you put this parameter in this way, or it expects JSON, and, you know, it's not documented. It's just like this insane minefield. Like, the agents can kinda figure it out, but you're gonna bang your head into the wall for a couple hours before the agent figures it out. And in the meantime, you're like, this is a terrible experience, you know? And so you're in there probably helping the inference providers fix all these fundamental bugs too.
00:55:57 · Jeffrey Morgan, Garry Tan
[00:55:57] S0: Yeah. And it's part of the the job we do. And I think one of the big opportunities in the open model landscape is curation and taking a fragmented universe of models and inference technology and cloud services and harnesses and making that actually just work is a really valuable problem. Because the end developer, to your point, they just wanna build their software, They just wanna build stuff, they wanna build their next company, their next application. And I think that's where we come in, but it's where a ton of great services also come in. And we saw OpenRouter obviously is a good example of that from a wide model selection, so developer doesn't have to sign up for 100 different providers, they can just go to one, they can pay in one place. I think we've seen with open code, you can have one harness that integrates with any model. It's a really powerful experience for developers just looking to try the next model to see if it solves their use case better. So this curation and when there's an abundance of models and providers, now there's a scarcity in bringing that together into something that works. [00:56:58] S2: Thank you so much for joining us. That's all we have time for. [00:57:01] S0: Thank you guys for having me.