From Near Death to a $20B NVIDIA Deal | Jonathan Ross, 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 Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra David Senra X: https://x.com/davidsenra Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsenra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsenra Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senrashow Threads: https://www.threads.com/@davidsenra Spotify: https://spti.fi/TVrr557 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4msoZtb Website: https://www.davidsenra.com Jonathan Ross X: https://x.com/JonathanRoss321 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ross-jonathan 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 #davidsenra #groq #nvidia

David SenrahostJonathan Rossguest

Jul 5, 20261h 11mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: July 5, 2026
Duration: 1h 11m
Channel: David Senra
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

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 Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra David Senra X: https://x.com/davidsenra Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidsenra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsenra Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senrashow Threads: https://www.threads.com/@davidsenra Spotify: https://spti.fi/TVrr557 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4msoZtb Website: https://www.davidsenra.com Jonathan Ross X: https://x.com/JonathanRoss321 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ross-jonathan 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 #davidsenra #groq #nvidia

SPEAKERS

David Senra
host
Host of the podcast Founders with David Senra, known for interviewing entrepreneurs and discussing business biographies.
Jonathan Ross
guest
Founder and CEO of Groq, focused on LPU-based AI inference hardware and related compute systems.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of David Senra, featuring David Senra and Jonathan Ross, From Near Death to a $20B NVIDIA Deal | Jonathan Ross, Groq explores groq’s Jonathan Ross on speed, leadership, and seizing luck fast Ross says Groq’s LPU and NVIDIA GPUs are complementary because different LLM operations are compute-bound versus memory-throughput-bound, and splitting work across both defeats bottlenecks across the decode path.

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