“We were going to run out of money.” Groq was 3 weeks away from death and @JonathanRoss321’s leadership team put together a list of layoffs …

“We were going to run out of money.” Groq was 3 weeks away from death and @JonathanRoss321’s leadership team put together a list of layoffs that also would have killed the company. He realized that the only way to survive was to convince their employees to take a salary cut. The wild story of Groq Bonds: “We had an all-hands and put up World War II-looking pictures of war bonds. We called it ‘Groq Bonds.’” 80% of Groq’s employees participated in exchanging their salary for equity. Half of them went to the statutory minimum salary by law. “Engineers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. These folks cut their salary down to 50,000 to 60,000.” “By doing this, we put everyone's hand on the steering wheel. They were participating in saving our runway and we had less than 10% attrition. It might've been closer to 5%, which was probably better than our attrition rate before then.” Media A conversation with @JonathanRoss321, founder of @GroqInc. This is the first podcast that Jonathan talks about his $20 billion partnership with NVIDIA. In this conversation, we talk about his decade building Groq: why West Coast VCs kept passing on the company, how fast Jensen wo…

Source: Emad Mostaque (X) | 2026-07-06