The $20 Billion Sticky Note: How a Nearly Bankrupt AI Chip Startup Outlasted Its Doubters

March 2016. The heat map for the seventh-generation TPU was still spread across his screen, colors bleeding from deep blue to hot orange, like a topographical map with contour lines too close together. That's when DeepMind's email jumped in. He hadn't saved the sender. The body was four lines long, the last line a question mark. He minimized the heat map window, opened the reply box, typed a single line from Ghostbusters, then closed his email and maximized the heat map again. That reply sat in his sent folder for the next ten years. Every time he stumbled across it later, he thought the question mark deserved to be framed.

Thirty days later, Lee Sedol resigned. A screenshot of Move 37 hit his phone at three in the morning. He was awake, but not working. He was halfway through a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. The top-left corner already had three demons assembled. He dimmed his phone to the lowest brightness, kept zooming in on the board, counted the black and white stones, then tore a yellow sticky note from the pad on his desk. He wrote two numbers: 3200, 3900. The adhesive on the bottom-right corner caught a smear from the fingers that had just been holding chips. He left the grease mark there and stuck the note to the lower bezel of his monitor. After pressing it flat, he pressed the top-left corner again because it was lifting slightly.

He told a lot of people about the note over the years, but never what the numbers meant. When someone asked, he said, "That's my pace." At his desk in Google X, the edges of the note curled slowly. The air conditioning made it flutter every few minutes. He reinforced it with a new strip of tape once a year. In 2019, the tape ran out. He switched to clear nail polish, borrowed from the admin desk. When he returned the bottle, he had screwed the cap on too tight. The admin told him he'd stripped the threading.

The entire fall of 2022, he flew somewhere almost every week. Each time he landed, he sent the same text to the same prospective client: "I'm here. Same time as we discussed, if that still works." Sometimes the client replied. Sometimes not. Once the reply read: "Jonathan, I still don't get it. I already read faster than I need to. Why would I need a model faster than my reading speed?" He was sitting at gate C12 at Houston Hobby, read the message twice, locked the phone, unlocked it, locked it again. When the boarding announcement crackled, he flipped the phone face down onto the handle of his carry-on, stood up, and joined the line. The suitcase wheel caught on a seam in the carpet. He yanked it up. The weight of the bag knocked the sticky note out of his head for a few seconds.

That fall he made a lot of demo videos. He cut every single one himself because he thought the editor added too many effects, and effects diluted the physical sensation of speed. In the videos, the left side showed standard inference speed—tokens dripping out one character at a time, like EKG paper. The right side showed the LPU—tokens surging at a density that made you want to lean back. He sent the videos to twelve people. Ten opened them. Two clicked the link but didn't finish the runtime. One who did finish wrote back: "Cool, but the market doesn't need this." He took a screenshot of that message and saved it in a folder called "Receipts." Other screenshots in that folder included: a 2018 internal competitive analysis from a major chip company (under "Threat" they'd written "N/A"), a 2020 investor feedback email after a roadshow ("Strong team, but timing uncertain"), and a food delivery order from Christmas Eve 2021, when he'd been alone in the office. In the notes section of the order he'd typed "extra chili." The restaurant gave him one packet.

In early 2023, he took the team photo off the office wall. Nearly a third of the people in it were gone. The ones who'd left said fast inference would never be worth anything to the ecosystem. He didn't argue. He just turned the framed photo around and leaned it against the wall, backing side out, exposing the date code printed by the photo lab. During those days, he arrived at the office every morning at seven. Before doing anything else, he filled the coffee maker's water tank. The machine was an old model. The latch on the tank lid had one broken clip, so you had to press down hard to close it. Every time, he pressed twice. The first press didn't catch. It popped back up. The second press locked.

The news that cash would run out in three weeks was brought into his office by the VP of Finance on a Thursday afternoon. The VP didn't sit down. He turned his MacBook Air around to show a spreadsheet. The number in the bottom row was bold and red. Ross glanced at it. He moved an empty coffee cup two inches to the side to make space for the laptop, then said, "Get me the compiler team list."

The layoff list was on his desk Friday morning. Two pages, A4, the edges slightly curled. He circled the compiler team names with a red Mitsubishi pen. On the fifth name, the pen ran dry. He pulled another from the holder and kept circling. When he finished, he noticed the two reds didn't match. The first five names were true red. The rest were vermilion, slightly orange. He folded the list, set it back on the desk, then opened Keynote and made a new blank slide.

He searched "WWII war bonds poster," scrolled through maybe a dozen images, and picked the one with the cleanest composition. The original had someone waving a flag. He cropped the person out, kept only the background and border, then typed a single line dead center: "25 million tokens per second." He used Futura Bold because he thought that font wouldn't blur at the edges when projected. Then he added a second slide. It had only one number on it: two months.

The all-hands was set for four p.m. Before walking on stage, he went into the break room, opened the bottom shelf of the fridge, and fished out a can of Diet Coke from the very back. He placed the can on the floor next to his left foot at the lectern. He didn't open it. Condensation gathered slowly on the aluminum and bled a small dark circle into the charcoal-gray carpet. Once all four hundred and fifty people had settled, he said, "I intend to do this." Then he flipped to the second slide. "We need two months. We currently have three weeks."

No one asked, "What if it doesn't work?" He didn't say it either.

The first person to sign afterward was an engineer from the compiler team who'd joined fourteen months earlier. He used his own pen, a blue LAMY. The cap made a crisp click when he posted it on the back of the barrel. The second was a hardware architect who'd been at Groq for six years. He wrinkled the paper while flipping through the document, tried to flatten it with his palm twice, gave up, and just signed. By Friday of that week, eighty percent of the employees had signed the paperwork trading salary for equity. Some took their monthly pay down to the legal minimum—just over five thousand dollars before tax, enough to cover rent in San Jose if you didn't eat out much. When HR was filing the documents, they found one signature with a tiny smiley face drawn next to it. The circle wasn't very round. One corner of the mouth was higher than the other.

Two things were happening at the same time: the compiler team was racing to finish the last lines of code that would let the system auto-schedule hardware instructions without engineers handwriting kernel commands, and the finance team was waiting on the next receivable to clear. The company's only margin was those two months of operating runway and the bodies of everyone who'd signed the Groq Bonds, still showing up at their desks every morning. On the night the compiler passed testing, someone printed a single sheet of A4 from the office printer. It said only "BUILD SUCCESSFUL" and was taped above the coffee maker with Scotch tape. The next morning, Ross filled the water tank, looked up, saw the paper, pressed the lid twice—first press popped open, second press caught—then poured a cup. No sugar.

The client meeting in Norway was in June. The conference room was on the ninth floor of a gray building in Oslo. The windows faced west. The afternoon sun landed directly on his laptop screen, so he couldn't read the real-time token output graph. He yanked the blinds down a few inches. The plastic toggle at the end of the cord swung and hit the window frame with a single knock. Seven minutes into the demo, the system response suddenly slowed. The curve that had been a steep waterfall turned into a gentle slope. Without changing his expression, he switched the demo to a different screen and glanced at his phone out of the corner of his eye.

A colleague in California had sent him a link to a post on X. An anonymous account had uploaded a phone recording of someone running an open-source LLM on Groq. The footage was shaky, but the speed at which tokens flooded the screen was visibly faster than any known public service at the time. Views had already passed 120,000. Retweets broke 4,000. The top comment read, "Is this sped up or actually that fast?"—nobody believed there was no post-production acceleration. It started raining in Oslo. Drops hit the ninth-floor windows at a slant. He dialed the infrastructure team. In the background, the keyboard clatter was dense. He said four words: "Don't throttle it." After hanging up, he marked every congratulatory text on his phone as unread. One was from his mother. He marked that unread too.

On the flight back to California, he couldn't sleep. He opened the duty-free catalog in the seatback pocket and mentally converted every price. By the third item, he realized he'd used the wrong exchange rate and started over. When the flight attendant came by with the cart and asked if he needed anything, he said no. After she moved past, he pulled out the old phone with the sticky note on it—the monitor hadn't fit in his carry-on, so he'd peeled the note off and stuck it to the back of his phone case. He pressed a fingernail along the edges of the note, flattening the parts that had lifted, reseating it firmly.

The day COO Sunny Madra physically connected an LPU to a GPU was a Thursday afternoon. Sunny dragged two machines out of the server room and linked them with a single bright orange fiber-optic cable. The cable had been bought that morning from Fry's Electronics. The packaging was still in the trash can nearby; the label on the box said "3m." The moment the connection was made, the cooling fans on both machines spun up instantly. The noise rose by fourteen decibels. Ross was walking past. He stopped at the server room door. He stood there without saying anything for roughly two minutes, then turned and walked away. The next morning, a cup of coffee was sitting on Sunny's desk. The sleeve was blank, no writing. Only the receipt from the coffee shop was still stuck to the side. The time stamp read 8:47.

The $20 billion deal took less than three weeks from the first formal call to the signatures. The legal team barely slept the last forty-eight hours. Someone brought a sleeping bag from home. It was a kid's dinosaur sleeping bag, because that was the only clean one the house had. On signing day, everyone was waiting for the dual confirmation of fax and digital signature. Ross sat in his office with a physical contract in front of him. He flipped to the signature page, pulled the cap off his pen. There was nowhere to put the cap, so he held it pinched between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand while he signed. Only after he finished did he notice the cap had left a shallow red indentation in the web of his hand. He closed the contract, stood up, walked out of his office, and kept walking until he reached that old monitor. The sticky note was still there. On the front, the ELO numbers had been faded by sunlight until the original pen strokes were nearly invisible, but they were still recessed. They could be felt. Back when he'd written them, his hand had pressed too hard. He peeled the note off, flipped it over, wrote down a date on the back, and re-stuck it to the monitor. The top-left corner lifted again. This time he didn't press it down.