Because the speaker did not expect Google to add Marimo support to Colab soon, the Marimo team decided to build a similar service themselves.

“like I guess the sixth or seventh most upvoted issue support Marimo in Google Collab and I don't think Google was ever going to do that anytime soon so we decided to kind of just do something like that on our own so that's sort of the origin where Marimo came from yeah it's a funny the issue was open in June of last year it was one of our users who we've communicated with over at GitHub for for some time yeah”