GROQ - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- CLO & VP of Corporate Development
For nearly 20 years, Adam Tachner has provided high-growth semiconductor companies with the cross-functional business leadership they need to thrive in competitive markets. As head of the legal and compliance functions at Atheros Communications (acquired 2011 by Qualcomm for $3.6B), Adam supported the company's rapid growth from a pre-revenue innovator to a market-leading IPO and a $1B annual revenue run rate. Later, he helped integrate Atheros into Qualcomm's global operations. Most recently, Adam held both VP Corporate Development and General Counsel roles at Google's Access division, and earlier at fabless MEMS leader InvenSense, now the sensor division of TDK.
Job Titles:
- IT Industry Executive and General Manager
- President, Government & Public Sector
Aileen Black is a highly respected IT industry executive and general manager with a dynamic record of driving exponential growth results in public sector organizations. Her unique pedigree includes developing industry-changing technology and service businesses from the ground up, with proven experience in running large enterprise-class business units in excess of 600 million. Black has held executive positions at Google, VMware, EMC, and Oracle. With more than 30 years of experience building, managing, and motivating top-notch technology sales and professional services organizations, she has proven success with a deep understanding of the cloud, artificial intelligence, enterprise open source, big data, government contracting, sales, strategic alliances, marketing and the political landscape across the public sector market in addition to extensive media and public speaking across all forms of media including radio and television.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Managing Partner of Skyline Public Works
Andy Rappaport is Managing Partner of Skyline Public Works, Chief Investment Officer of SPW Investments, and Treasurer of the Rappaport Family Foundation. He has spent more than 35 years founding, investing in, and guiding scores of transformative start-up companies. From 1996 until starting his retirement in 2012, Andy was an active partner at August Capital, a leading technology venture capital firm, which he helped grow from $100M to more than $2B under management. Prior to joining August, Andy ran The Technology Research Group, a Boston-based global strategy consulting firm he founded in 1984. Andy is a noted authority on the business and economic implications of changing technologies and has written and spoken extensively on the topic. Technology companies Andy co-founded, led investments in, and/or served as a board member of including Actel, Atheros Communications, Luxtera, MMC Networks, Silicon Architects, Olema Oncology, Silicon Image, and Transmeta. Andy and his wife Deborah are active philanthropists, focusing primarily on causes of equity and social justice. They are the founders of the Minnesota Street Project (www.minnesotastreetproject.com), a 120,000 square foot multi-building arts campus in San Francisco founded to provide an affordable, vibrant hub for the visual arts in an otherwise unaffordable city. Andy is also an active musician, and video and sound artist. He and Deborah split their time between San Francisco and Martha's Vineyard.
Dr. Ford Tamer served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Inphi for nine years until its recent $10B+ merger with Marvell. Under Dr. Tamer's stewardship, Inphi became the trusted market leader for electro-optics solutions for cloud and telecom operators, increasing revenue from these customers more than 20 times during his tenure, to an annual run rate of about $750 million.
Prior to Inphi, Dr. Tamer served as CEO of Telegent Systems. Before this, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Infrastructure Networking Group, which he grew five-fold to $1.2 billion in revenue within five years, making that business the uncontested leader in infrastructure silicon solutions. He also served as co-founder and CEO of Agere Inc., which pioneered Network Processors (now at Intel as the Ixia product line). After Agere was acquired by Lucent Microelectronics, Dr. Tamer became Vice President at Agere Systems, a spin-off from Lucent. Earlier in his career, Dr. Tamer co-founded, operated, and assisted in the growth of system management software, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy businesses. He serves on the Boards of Directors of Marvell, Teradyne, and Sentons. Dr. Tamer holds a MS and Ph.D. from MIT.
Job Titles:
- Chief of Staff to CEO & Head of Strategic Operations
Estelle is a jack-of-all-trades by day, and a National Guardsman by night, bringing more than a decade of leadership experience from the Army and Intel Corporation. Estelle graduated from West Point with an Engineering Management degree and was commissioned as an Engineer Officer. Later, she received her MBA at Cornell University and joined Intel's Accelerated Leadership Program, driving results in business HR, retail analytics, and the memory business. Estelle's passion for driving disruptive technology and working with incredibly smart people aligns nicely in her opportunity to help scale Groq become an iconic company. Outside of work, she likes to snowboard, travel, play guitar, or hang out with her friends in San Francisco.
Igor is an IBM Master Inventor with over 100 patents, 30 IEEE papers and presentations at premier system (AI HW Summit, Linley Conference, ML and AI Dev Com) and circuit (ISSCC, VLSI, CICC, ECTC) conferences, and currently serves on the VLSI Technology Program Committee.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Partner at Social Capital
Jay Zaveri is a partner at Social Capital, a top decile investment firm in Silicon Valley. Jay makes concentrated investments in companies solving forty of the world's hardest problems by 2045. Key investments include Swarm, Aclima, Syapse, UrbanFootprint, DroneSeed, Saildrone, Relativity, Ashvattha, Journal and Datacoral. Prior to joining Social Capital, Jay has been a successful technology entrepreneur. He co-founded three technology companies, the most recent of which was mobile productivity application CloudOn, which had ten million enterprise users and was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. Jay has built companies, products and platforms that have scaled to millions of active users in consumer, mobile and enterprise software. His love for cartoons and work in the new media tech space has won him 18 awards, including a Hollywood Film Festival for Best Animated Short.
Job Titles:
- Vice President of Hardware Engineering
Jim Miller is the Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Groq, responsible for leading the silicon and systems engineering teams. He has spent his career delivering some of the most complex and impactful semiconductors and platforms. He began his career at Intel with early engineering and management roles on the i486 and Pentium, and led all of the Pentium II engineering. After Intel, he served as VP of Engineering at VOIP pioneer, Silicon Spice, led all of Cadence's EDA product development, drove methodology convergence at AMD, led the engineering efforts for Broadcom's, and then Qualcomm's, ARM server SOCs, platforms, and software. Most recently, he was at Amazon responsible for the hardware development, delivery, and support for AWS' compute platforms. Jim graduated from Stanford University with both a BSEE and MSEE, and Santa Clara University with an MBA.
Job Titles:
- CEO
- Founder
- Member of the Board
Jonathan Ross is the CEO and founder of Groq. Groq is the innovator of the novel Tensor Streaming Processor compute architecture, accelerating workloads in AI, ML, and HPC through their product portfolio ranging from GroqCard™ to GroqRack™.
Prior to founding Groq, Jonathan began what became Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first generation TPU chip. Jonathan next joined Google X's Rapid Eval Team, the initial stage of the famed "Moonshots factory", where he devised and incubated new Bets (Units) for Google's parent company, Alphabet. Jonathan studied under Yann LeCun of the New York University Courant Institute.
Mark Heaps brings over 20 years of creative experience and passion to Groq. He snapped his first picture at the age of four and years afterward he picked up a guitar, a skateboard, and a can of spray paint, then kick-flipped his way to becoming a professional creative. He has led projects and teams for some of the top Fortune500 brands including Apple, Google, Adobe, Dell, Capital One and E&J Gallo. He is a published author, award winning speaker, featured at events like Adobe MAX, SXSW, CreativePro Week and others. His passion is igniting the soul of a company, driving synergy on projects, recognizing the heart of a brand are the people it serves. Today he resides in Austin, Texas, with his wife, two rad kids, a Goldendoodle, and another dog that lied about not being part chihuahua.
Michelle is a results-oriented executive with 20+ years of experience leading and operating distribution and go-to-market functions in hyper-growth environments.
Known to be customer-obsessed and a "growth hacker," Michelle joins Groq from Salesforce where she led Retail and Consumer Goods sales organizations focused on cloud strategy, strategic partnerships, ecosystem development, and revenue growth. Under her leadership, her teams shaped customer demand, scaled for rapid growth, and exceeded revenue targets year-over-year.
When Michelle is not working, she is hanging out in San Francisco with her husband, her teenage daughter, and her pandemic puppy. Michelle has traveled the world and is rumored to have hung out with gorillas in the Congo, trekked the Himalayan mountain ranges, and studied yoga in India during the monsoon.
Before joining Groq's Board, Raju was part of the core leadership team at Amazon that built and scaled Amazon web Services (AWS), the market leading cloud computing platform. He most recently served as Vice President of the AWS Database and Analytics business at Amazon. At AWS, Raju took the database and analytics business from a tiny startup to the biggest player in the cloud database space and delivered services like Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift, and OpenSearch, used by over 1.5M active customers. He also co-founded the AWS Machine Learning business with services like Amazon SageMaker, DeepLens, DeepRacer, and Transcribe. Before Amazon, Raju was Director of Product Management at Google and started Google Workspace, used by millions today. Earlier in his career, Raju was at Microsoft where he partnered with Intel to deliver fixed function server appliances. Raju holds an Executive MBA, MS in Computer Science, and BS in Electrical Engineering.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Senior Member of the ACM
Satnam Singh has worked at the intersection of programming languages and hardware design with a focus on improving developer productivity and expressive power as well as formal correctness. He has applied functional programming languages to the development of domain specific languages, both for the design and implementation of special purpose hardware accelerators and for the programs that run on these accelerators.
Satnam started his career as an academic at the University of Glasgow researching software tools and applications for FPGA-based accelerators. At Xilinx Satnam developed the Haskell-based functional domain specific language Lava for layout aware high performance circuits, as well as techniques for the formal verification of hardware. At Microsoft Satnam widened the scope of high level hardware synthesis tools to include .NET languages like C# and F# as well as improving tooling for the parallel execution of functional programs. At Google Satnam worked on various aspects of devops including Kubernetes as well as on a chip for machine learning developed using functional programming language technology. At Facebook Satnam worked on the bytecode optimization of Android applications.
Satnam is a Senior Member of the ACM and the IEEE; serves on IFIP working groups WG2.8 and WG2.11; and was previously an elected executive committee member of ACM SIGPLAN.
Job Titles:
- General Counsel
- General Council
- Women 's General Counsel Network
Sheryl joined Groq with the intention to transform how customers interact with in-house legal departments. With over 17 years of legal experience, she has worked in a wide range of fields, from Fortune 100 technology companies to newly acquired renewable energy firms. While her training and experience was influenced by larger, traditional in-house legal departments, Sheryl believes the legal team should be everything but traditional. Instead of approaching the law as slow-moving, immutable and resistant to change, Sheryl embraces technology and innovation so Groq can do what it does best - defy gravity.
Outside of the office, Sheryl is a member of the Women's General Counsel Network, a mentor and advocate for women lawyers, novice rock climber, avid cyclist, and hiker.
Tobi Crabtree brings over 15 years of human resource and leadership experience in diverse companies spanning Fortune 500s to non-profits. Prior to joining Groq, Tobi was the Director of Global Employee Services at Intel where she was responsible for leading a global organization that provided exceptional support to over 100K employees, leveraging data to drive program and culture change and leadership development. Tobi's passion for people and culture shows through her track record of improving the employee experience, making data-driven decisions, and steering organizational evolution. Tobi earned an EMBA from the University of Washington and received a bachelor's degree in political science and history from UCLA.