Groq Founder Says 'Terrible' Leadership Cost Chipmaker Years

Jonathan Ross, the former CEO of chip startup Groq, said his management failures in the company's early years set it back by three to four years.

"I was a terrible leader. I was one of the world's worst leaders," Ross said in an interview. He described a steep learning curve that slowed Groq's progress as he figured out how to run a company while building its AI inference chip.

Groq has raised more than $1 billion from investors including BlackRock and D1 Capital Partners. The startup competes with Nvidia in the market for chips that run AI models, a space where execution speed and talent retention matter as much as the underlying technology.

Ross stepped down as CEO in 2022, handing the role to former Google executive Jonathan D. Ross (no relation). The company has since shifted its strategy toward selling cloud access to its chips rather than just the hardware itself, a model that mirrors Nvidia's own push into cloud services.

Ross's candor about his early missteps is unusual for a founder who has raised that much capital. Most startup leaders frame their tenure as a series of smart pivots. Ross instead described a period where poor management decisions compounded, costing the company time it could have spent winning customers.

Groq now faces a market where Nvidia dominates AI chip sales and competitors like AMD and Cerebras are also chasing the same inference workloads. The three-to-four-year gap Ross described is roughly the length of one full chip development cycle. Closing that distance will require Groq to execute on its cloud strategy faster than its hardware competitors iterate on theirs.

Ross remains at Groq as chief scientist, focused on chip architecture rather than company operations.