 | TL;DR: Jeffrey Morgan, Ollama's CEO, lost two years after selling his last company, and says one decision ended it.
The decision was a deadline. Two weeks to ship a first version, and by his own count it pulled in more users than anything they had shipped before. That much is checkable, and it is good advice.
But Jeffrey could throw everything out because the company was his. An employee who tries that with the roadmap gets a performance plan.
Picture the engineer instead. It's 8:47 on a Wednesday and he's still at his desk with no deadline. His manager's latest Slack message says the team is "leveraging AI to streamline our infrastructure workflows." Nobody is firing him. What he knows is worth a little less every month while the salary stays flat, and a two-week deadline can't fix that when the thing he'd ship sits on someone else's roadmap.
Nothing requires an employer to turn a skill that's being commoditized into anything the engineer owns. Nothing requires a model provider to keep the terms a workflow was built on, either. Even a gateway to any model rests on providers who choose to keep access open, on terms the gateway doesn't set. I think that gap is widening as more of the stack gets easy to swap out from under the person depending on it.
I'd like the open-model story to be true for him too. Not yet.
It's playing out this week. AI Weekly, relaying The Information, reports a growing number of developers pointing Claude Code at OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek backends right after Anthropic tightened its paid weekly limits. OpenRouter and home-built gateways turn the switch into a base-URL change, the same one-line-install treatment his own specialty keeps getting, and the limits were still Anthropic's to set.
I don’t know why, but the story of the Prophet Elijah just surfaced into my mind like a bubble. You know the story, right? Elijah was just fresh out of a glorious victory on Mount Carmel. He took down hundreds of false prophets, and brought people back to the Lord. He outran King Ahab’s chariot, back to the Palace in Jezreel. Then the valley after the peak hits him like a freight train. Queen Jezebel threatened to kill him. This caught him by surprise. Fear flooded his mind. He ran for his life. Depression followed him after. He stopped by a tree. And in his own pity-party, he moans to God wanting to die. The angel has to wake him up, fed him, and push him to continue on the journey up the mount of God. At the top of the mountain, God didn’t directly rebuke his moaning and groaning, about being “no better than my fathers”. After a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire, God’s still small whisper sort of “reconsecrate” Elijah, by giving him more missions. Elijah was to go anoint 3 more guys – 2 to be king, and 1 to be his successor. Then God mentioned that there’re 7000 others that haven’t bow down to Baal. Elijah isn’t alone. The Lord strengthened Elijiah. And Elijah’s spirt was renewed. If you wanna read more about it, it’s in 1 Kings 18-19. Kind of like Jeffrey and His co-founder picking themselves up and reevaluated themselves through their strength. _________________________________ It's odd how often the way out of a comfortable ceiling turns out to be small. Somebody stops renting a skill, sets a deadline on owning something built from it, and wishes it had been sooner.
Another founder came to mind while I was writing this. Starcloud's CEO Philip Johnston said one of the primes quoted $75 million to $100 million for Starcloud-1, and his team built and launched it for $2 million. A quote like that is a plan with a price on it, and most of us have redrawn the architecture diagram of a side project once too often.
Drop your take: does a two-week deadline still work when what you'd ship belongs to your employer? 💬
Clip credit: Y Combinator — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.
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Predictive technology: computational social science
