Former CEO of AI Chipmaker Says He ‘Was a Terrible Leader’

Jonathan Ross, the founder and former CEO of AI chipmaker Groq, helmed the company for seven years before leaving in December to join Nvidia full-time as a chief software architect. In a recent interview, Ross acknowledged that he made management mistakes earlier in his career that cost Groq years of progress.

“I was a terrible leader. I was one of the world’s worst leaders when I started,” Ross said on an episode of the Founders podcast released earlier this week. “The first thing that you have to do as a founder is you have to go from the technical thing that you know how to do and that you can add value with, to learning how to manage people. For me, that probably cost Groq three to four years.”

As CEO of Groq, Ross said he made the mistake of hiring people who needed to be told what to do and then giving them too much 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.

Ross solved the problem by becoming more selective about hiring. Instead of looking for positive attributes or reasons to hire a person, he switched to looking for negatives or reasons not to hire them. He shifted from “trying to grow talent” to “trying to select talent.”

Groq signed a $20 billion deal with Nvidia

Ross founded Groq a decade ago with the intent of building AI chips called language processing units. The custom chips are in direct competition with Nvidia’s graphics processing units. 

In December, Nvidia signed a $20 billion licensing and talent agreement with Groq that allowed Ross and other key engineers to join Nvidia full-time while allowing Groq to maintain its status as an independent company. Groq’s new CEO is Adam Winter, a former vice president at the firm. 

Other leaders have made mistakes too

Ross isn’t the only leader to own up to management mistakes. On the First Time Founders podcast in December, Dylan Field, cofounder and CEO of design software company Figma, said that it took time for him to learn how to manage people effectively. 

“Management and leadership are different,” Field said on the podcast. “You can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa.”

Field said that leadership came naturally to him, so he thought he would be a good manager. Instead, he found that there was a “whole new skill set around management” that he “definitely didn’t know” and had to learn the hard way, through trial and error. 

Field’s experience is similar to that of Facebook and Asana cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. In an interview in October, Moskovitz said that the CEO role was “exhausting” and didn’t suit his introverted personality. He led Asana for 15 years as CEO before stepping down in July 2025.