Jonathan Ross

Jonathan Ross is the founder of Groq, which designs chips built for AI inference. He started what became Google's Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, before founding Groq in 2016.

Starting the TPU as a 20% Project

At Google, "there wasn't enough compute," Ross said on the Modern CTO podcast. Teams had trained models they could not deploy because they cost too much to run. "So as a 20% project, I started building an FPGA acceleration of that," he said. The work led to the TPU, and the team realized the rest of the world still had the same problem. He later joined Google X's Rapid Eval Team.

He took the name Groq from the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, where it means to understand something deeply. "I'm a little bit of a domain name hoarder," he said, and Groq was first on a list of about 100.

Trading Salary for Equity to Survive

Groq came within weeks of running out of money, according to David Senra's podcast. Ross created "Groq bonds," which exchanged salary for equity, and about 80% of the team took part, saving two months of runway.

Licensing Groq's Technology to Nvidia

Under a non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia, Ross and Groq president Sunny Madra joined Nvidia to help scale the inference technology, while Groq stayed independent with finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO, Humanity Redefined wrote. CNBC reported the deal at about $20 billion.