Nvidia made a $20 billion licensing and talent agreement deal with AI chip startup Groq last year. Now, Groq’s founder and former CEO, Jonathan Ross, says his own management mistakes delayed the company’s progress by as much as four years. Speaking on a recently released episode of the Founders podcast, Ross said the setbacks were caused not by technical challenges but by leadership decisions he made while learning to manage people.“I was a terrible leader. I was one of the world’s worst leaders when I started. The first thing you have to do as a founder is go from the technical things you know how to do and can add value with to learning how to manage people. For me, that probably cost Groq three to four years,” Ross said.
Groq founder Jonathan Ross says his hiring strategy held the company back
Ross, who led Groq for seven years before leaving in December 2025 to join Nvidia full-time as chief software architect, said one of his biggest mistakes was hiring employees who expected detailed instructions while giving them broad responsibility.“What ended up happening was things would just grind to a halt because they wouldn’t know what to do, and I wasn’t telling them what to do, and they were used to being told what to do,” Ross said on the podcast.He said he later changed his hiring approach by focusing on identifying reasons not to hire candidates rather than reasons to hire them. Ross described the shift as moving from “trying to grow talent” to “trying to select talent.”
The deal allowed Groq to remain independent
Ross founded Groq about a decade ago to develop AI chips known as language processing units, which compete with Nvidia’s graphics processing units for AI workloads.The $20 billion agreement signed in December allowed Ross and several key engineers to join Nvidia full-time, while Groq continued to operate as an independent company. Adam Winter, previously a vice president at Groq, became the company’s CEO.
Other founders have shared similar experiences
Ross is not the only technology executive to reflect on the challenges of managing people after starting a company. On the First Time Founders podcast in December, Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field said that leadership and management require different skills.“Management and leadership are different. You can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa,” Field said on the podcast.Field said he initially believed leadership abilities would naturally translate into management, but later realised there was a “whole new skill set around management” that he “definitely didn’t know” and had to learn through experience.Facebook and Asana cofounder Dustin Moskovitz also spoke about the role in an interview last year, saying being CEO was “exhausting” and did not suit his introverted personality before stepping down from the position at Asana in July 2025.