Jonathan Ross, Founder of Groq

Jonathan Ross is the founder of Groq and the inventor of the Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), now a senior executive at NVIDIA following the company's $20 billion partnership with Groq.

Before Groq, Ross built something that didn't exist: a custom AI chip at Google called the TPU, which became the backbone of DeepMind's AlphaGo — the system that defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. After watching the TPU push AlphaGo's ELO score up by hundreds of points overnight, Ross grasped a principle that would define his next decade: faster inference produces more capable models. He left Google to act on it.

Groq's first decade was brutal. Early West Coast VCs passed — and would later watch as NVIDIA announced what Ross describes as the firm's largest deal by nearly 3x. Ross came within weeks of running out of money. Rather than lay off the engineers he needed to hit a critical product milestone, he created "Groq bonds" — war-bond–style instruments that exchanged salary for equity. About 80% of the team participated; nearly half took statutory minimum wage. They saved two months of runway and kept the company alive.

The core bet Ross made — that fast inference would matter — was widely dismissed, inside Groq and out. When the CEO of GitHub called needing chips to run LLMs, Ross's own engineers told him it couldn't be done. He eventually stopped asking and started declaring: "I intend to do this." He describes that shift — from inviting pessimism to announcing direction — as the most important leadership change he made.

Now at NVIDIA, Ross carries what he calls manufactured discontent: a deliberate refusal to rest, convinced that every day without sufficient compute is a day the world waits longer for cures for cancer and aging.

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/jonathan-ross

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Chapters

(00:00:00) The $20 Billion NVIDIA Deal Closed In 3 Weeks

(00:00:25) Why GPUs And LPUs Are Better Together

(00:01:46) When AI Talks To AI, Speed Wins

(00:03:30) Always Start With A Hobby Project

(00:05:55) Ask The Right Questions, Not Answer Them

(00:08:23) There Are Infinite Ways To Be A Leader

(00:13:00) I Was One Of The World's Worst Leaders

(00:14:34) Fewer Constraints, More Room To Surprise You

(00:16:31) At NVIDIA There Is No Politics

(00:19:44) You Have To Learn Confidence

(00:22:23) East Coast VCs Think, West Coast VCs Follow

(00:23:50) The Keynesian Beauty Contest Of Silicon Valley

(00:26:48) The Autonomy That Created The NVIDIA Deal

(00:30:07) Making A Model Smarter By Making It Faster

(00:34:52) Reality Quotient Beats Intelligence Quotient

(00:35:44) Find The Dominant Game And Play It

(00:37:11) A Founder's Job Is Full-Time Change Management

(00:38:34) Return On Luck: Seize It Better Than Anyone

(00:42:54) You Can't Sell Speed, You Have To Let People Try It

(00:46:32) I Intend To: Intentional Leadership

(00:51:07) Groq Bonds: Trading Salary For Survival

(00:54:13) Hire For Negatives, Grow For Positives

(00:58:46) Loss Aversion And Booking The Win Early

(01:00:37) How Michael Jordan Weaponized Humiliation

(01:03:13) Manufactured Discontent Drives Everything

(01:05:02) Every Day Without Compute Has A Real Cost

(01:07:07) Code Was Rationed, Now It's Nearly Free

(01:10:04) Teach Kids To Ask Questions, Not Answer Them

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