Groq Founder Jonathan Ross: Jensen Huang Never Holds One-on-One Talks to Reduce Company Politics
Jonathan Ross stated on the David Senra podcast that the biggest management lesson learned from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is that there are no one-on-one conversations where Huang speaks to just one person. To reduce politics, stop one-on-ones and gather everyone in the same meeting to address all at once, with everyone copied on emails; if someone says "so-and-so messed up," then include that person and bring them in.
Ross described NVIDIA as the large company with the least politics he has seen. At Groq, he tried a half-measure: after separate conversations, the two people heard different versions, and when they relayed to each other, small circles formed; speaking to a room full of people ensures everyone hears the same message. Huang himself mentioned in 2025 at Stanford that he does not hold one-on-ones with about 55 direct reports and does not write their performance reviews, with the principle being "no information is communicated to just one person." His direct reports number around 60.
Ross, who founded Groq after leaving the Google TPU team, develops inference chips (LPU) and reached a collaboration worth about $20 billion with NVIDIA in 2026. He described that it took about three weeks from presenting to Huang to securing funding. In the podcast, he equated "eliminating secret one-on-ones" with "first asking customers what they really want" as part of Huang's method, admitting that he did not push this to the extreme at Groq.
Boundaries are also within the same narrative: performance and family changes cannot be discussed publicly; if a boss cannot be contradicted in public, copying everyone will turn into a performance for all. Information asymmetry is the raw material for office politics, and one-on-ones are the production workshop—this mechanism's premise is that the leader can withstand public conflict.
In market mechanisms, what is sold is decision speed and unified messaging, while what is bought is the middle management losing the opportunity to "first talk to the boss". NVIDIA uses meetings and copying everyone to reduce internal transaction costs, allowing cycles to be compressed into chip routes. The beneficiaries are the execution layers that can confront each other in the same room, while the pressured parties are departments that rely on private complaints to secure budgets. Funds do not flow directly due to the meeting format, but consistent messaging allows capital expenditures and customer commitments to follow the same timeline.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Jensen Huang treats information as the bus of the company's operating system, not allowing a second private bus to exist. Ross validated the opposite at Groq: one-on-ones create two versions of strategy, and differing versions lead to factions. NVIDIA can do this because Huang is willing to be challenged in front of 60 people and does not rely on one-on-one reviews to maintain authority. If a different boss relies on private promises to manage people, the same copying will turn into public denunciation.
The capital path does not allow for two sets of messaging in the chip cycle. The CUDA ecosystem, TSMC capacity, and customer delivery windows are all scheduled according to public commitments; privately assuring A of supply while telling B to yield will explode in the next quarter. Groq framed LPU and GPU as complementary rather than substitutes, securing a large deal in three weeks, predicated on both sides hearing the same architectural story, rather than each hearing their own.
Similar experiments can be seen in Bridgewater's extreme transparency, Bezos's six-page memos, and military operational meetings: minimizing information asymmetry and replacing post-alignment with shared knowledge at the same moment. Most large companies are still in the phase of producing politics through one-on-ones and then digesting politics through meetings; NVIDIA has dismantled the production end.
Structural judgment belongs to the transfer of pricing power. Internal influence shifts from "who sees the boss first" to "who can present the facts in a public setting." The mechanism is: once complaints must be copied to the parties involved, the expected benefits of complaining decrease; once meetings become the only messaging, small circles lose their information rents. Politics decreases not because people become better, but because information asymmetry is no longer valuable.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- One-on-ones are the production workshop of information asymmetry.
- Complaints must be copied to the parties involved, making complaints more costly.
- Less politics is due to private versions having no market.