Risks, Rewards & Building the Unicorn Chip Company Taking on Nvidia | Inside Groq with Jonathan Ross

The story of Groq, a semiconductor startup that makes chips for AI inference and was recently valued at $2.8 billion, is a classic “overnight success that was years in the making” tale. On this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I talk with founder and CEO Jonathan Ross.

He began the work that eventually led to Groq as an engineer at Google, where he was a member of the rapid eval team – “the team that comes up with all the crazy ideas at Google X.” For him, the risk involved in leaving to launch Groq in 2016 was far less than the risk of staying in-house and watching the project die. It’s just one of his many counterintuitive beliefs that have paid off.

Groq has had many “near-death” experiences in its eight years of existence, all of which Jonathan believes have ultimately put it in a much stronger position to achieve its mission: preserving human agency in the age of AI. In order to do that, he told me, “[Groq] needs to be in the conversation. The best way to do that is to produce most of the world's AI compute. We want to make sure that there's a lot of voices, and that there isn't control [by] a small number of entities.”

Groq is committed to giving everyone access to relatively low-cost generative AI compute, driving the price down even as they continue to increase speed. We talked about how the company culture supports that mission, what it feels like to now be on the same playing field as companies like Nvidia, and Jonathan’s belief that true disruption isn’t just doing things other people can’t do or don’t want to do, but doing things other people don’t believe can be done – even when you show them evidence to the contrary.

Other topics we touched on include:
• Why the ability to customize on demand makes generative AI different
• Managing your own and other people’s fear as a founder
• The problems of corporate innovation
• The role of luck in business
• The error of insisting on founder control
• How he thinks about long-term goals and growth
• The importance of empathy
• Maintaining trustworthiness

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Where to find Jonathan Ross:
• X: https://x.com/JonathanRoss321
• LinkedIn:   / ross-jonathan  

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• Newsletter: https://ericries.carrd.co/
• Podcast: https://ericriesshow.com/
• X:   / ericries  
• LinkedIn:   / eries  
• YouTube:    / @theericriesshow  

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In This Episode We Cover:
(00:00) Welcome to the Eric Ries Show / Introduction to Jonathan and Groq
(04:24) Jonathan’s involvement with the DeepMind Challenge Match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol
(06:06) How Jonathan’s work Google and how it led him to that moment
(08:46) Why generative AI isn’t just the next internet or mobile
(10:12) The divine move in the DeepMind Challenge Match
(11:56) How Jonathan ended up designing chips without the usual background
(13:11) GPUs vs. TPUs
(14:33) What risk really is
(15:11) Groq’s mind-blowing AI demo.
(16:23) How Jonathan decided to leave Google and start Groq
(17:30) The differences between doing an innovation project at a company and starting a new company
(19:03) Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan theory
(21:02) Groq’s founding story
(24:12) The difference in attitude towards AI now compared to 2016 and how it affected Groq
(25:46) The moment the tide turned with LLMs
(28:28) The week-over-week jump from 8,000 users to 400,000 users
(30:32) How Groq used HBM and what is it (the memory used by GPUs)
(32:33) Jonathan’s approach to disruption
(35:38) Groq’s initial raise and focus on software
(36:13) How struggling to survive made Groq stronger
(37:13) Hiring for return on luck
(40:07) How Jonathan and Groq think about the long-term
(42:25) Founder control issues
(45:31) How Groq thinks about maintaining its mission and trustworthiness
(49:51) Jonathan’s vision for a capital market that would support companies like Groq
(52:13) Incentives and outcomes
(52:58) How Groq manages internal cultural alignment
(55:59) Groq’s mission and to preserve human agency in the age of AI how it approaches achieving it
(59:48) Lightning round, including hiring engineers with empathy and Jonathan’s ideas about sentience and civilization.

You can see the transcript and references at https://www.ericriesshow.com/

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Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.