Can we pause for a second and appreciate...!?

A friend of mine in the technology space once told me that “marketing in semiconductors is an oxymoron.”

Honestly, I didn’t know whether to laugh or be offended. I decided to laugh. In the last 20 years, I have worked and consulted for Philips/NXP, Atmel, Marvell, Maxim, SiFive, Syntiant, SiTime, Arduino, Intrinsic ID, Mythic, Lumileds, DuPont, Intermolecular, and a few other tech companies like Groq. I’ve learned a lot… and am still learning a lot. I continue to be humbled by the smartness of the people I get to work with. 

I learned that marketing in this space is hard. That organizations are hard to navigate and that they are hard to change. I learned that ‘our’ target audience doesn’t like to be marketed to (who does, these days?), and I learned kicking off new projects isn’t easy, especially when these projects are a little out of the box. Some of these businesses tell me they need “branding.” Some want more new customers and long-tail business creation. Some… are undecided :-). 

Now, I have done some “new stuff” in my career, so I know gaining traction for new projects is hard. These days, I get to meet new people and love learning from the fresh perspectives and ideas they bring. The other day I was reflecting on Groq, their go-to-market, and their marketing. Groq is an integrated compute systems accelerator and one of the leading startups in the AI space. 

The CEO and founder, Jonathan Ross (inventor of the Google TPU), has put together an incredible team. This includes a great group of marketeers under the leadership of a gentleman named Mark Heaps. Mark is a rocker, biker, public speaker, and a creative genius. He has built an amazing team and has a unique perspective on how to market in the AI space.

A little while ago, Mark and the team came up with GroqDay…. Yes, GroqDay. A day with Groq. A day where Groq connects directly with its audience of engineers, developers, decision makers, and curious investors. No media briefings; no “one, two punch” via press releases; just Groq talking (and quite openly) to its audience and the world. 

I love it. 

And here’s why I would like us all to pause and appreciate what is going on. 

First off, how does one target and find customers? After all, this market is a market that was nonexistent a while ago. It is also a market that did not necessarily have solutions in the form of sellable products. Many people will argue that marketing should be geared towards “decision makers” - executives. There is also a theory that developers will embrace something and then create a groundswell that will create demand as well. It will influence. In the book  I co-authored a few years ago, we mention the various strategies to target customers and create new ones. It is always hard to explain, hard to defend, and difficult to measure (maybe I should have stayed in school longer and become a sales executive, or become a chief legal officer?). Anyway… I still love this profession, and I can appreciate something really awesome when I see people build it. 

Last year at the first GroqDay, Groq had almost 500 people attend the two and a half hours of presentations and panel discussions. At the last GroqDay on March 31st, there were, again, hundreds of participants from over 250 companies and institutions. There is an ever increasing amount of people rallying around the company, and an ever increasing amount of traction being gained by Groq technology solutions. 

After last GroqDay, I have a few observations and conclusions that I want to categorize under “Can we pause for a second and appreciate…?” Here we go:

Can we pause for a second and appreciate that this GroqDay hosted speakers from the AI accelerator startup class, i.e. direct competitors? Mythic CEO and Co-founder, Mike Henry, was one of the speakers and he talked about high performance, deterministic computing at the edge and hardware being at the center of value for AI. 

Can we pause for a second and appreciate that this GroqDay had a majority of female speakers and panelists? It was Women’s History Month after all. We were educated on technology and trends by thought leaders like Dr. Cara LaPointe, Sarah Hooker, and Samantha Greenberg - to name just a few who shared their insights. Also, one of my favorite people, Niamh Gavin, was on one of the panels. She is a brilliant and accomplished woman with a very diverse set of skills and experiences. Always a great pleasure to listen to and interact with.

Can we also pause for a second and appreciate that Groq is reaching out directly to the compute community and curating a space to learn and share? In just four months Groq has gathered almost 1,000 AI, ML, and HPC enthusiasts who are hungry for things like insights, new tools, and breakthrough technologies.

Can we pause and appreciate that Groq engineers demonstrated how anyone can pull down a publicly available (natural language processing or transformer) models such as BERT, BERT-large or GPT, easily compile on Groq compiler, and gain near linear performance increases across 1, 2, 4, and 8 GroqChip? processors!

Can we pause and appreciate that Groq demoed real-time industrial applications with people detection and a trained playing card detector by using a publicly available YOLO Image Detection Model run on GroqChip in a simple Linux box and Groq compiler to produce 30 frames per second using a basic webcam.

I could go on and on, because I love it when technology meets the market with practical, commercial applications. I admire companies that build a ‘fan base’. A fan base turns into customers, and, at Groq, that has already happened. A fan base also wants to work for the company they admire. I see that with all the Groq employees I get to interact with. They love what they do; they love the company, and they love the problem that they are solving with the people that they get to work with.

Overall, GroqDay gave great insights that were worthwhile watching and I hope you will tune into the next one! 

I would love to hear your insights, opinions, and comments.