Groq

“When I hire people, I hire very autonomous people who often go off and execute on their own, and they would be terrible in most corporate environments.”

“And so GPUs and LPUs combined ended up giving better performance across the performance curves.”

“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. And for me, that probably cost Grok three to four years.”

“The call where the idea was first floated was about three weeks before money was in the bank.”

“We had implemented it and we had gone to Jensen asking, could we buy about a 100,000 GPUs because we were going to deploy them ourselves.”

“There was a lot of pushback on, like, we had a lot of turnover at this point. A lot of people were leaving. This was probably three or four years ago. And so a lot of people were leaving, saying there was no point to fast inference. It wasn't going to add any …”

“About 450, but it was more difficult to manage than a typical group of 450.”

“When LLMs first started to become a thing, I remember getting a phone call from the CEO of GitHub basically saying, I need a bunch of GPUs. We've now gotten LLMs to be able to do code completion, even though, you know, we're part of Microsoft and everything yo…”

“The biggest flip in my hiring was when I went from looking for positives, which is what you do when you're trying to grow talent, to looking for negatives, which is what you do when you're trying to select talent.”

“80% of the employees participated. And I think about half went to the statutory minimum salary by law. And remember, engineers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. These folks like cut their salary down to like 50, 60,000 dollars, whatever the statutory …”

“So everyone at Grok had a challenge coin that said, twenty-five million tokens per second and had a little graph of it going up, and everyone knew that was the thing to do.”