As a global AI hardware company building high-performance processors for machine learning workloads, Tenstorrent operates at the frontier of one of today’s most demanding industries. Yet one of its strategic pillars is Serbia — a choice that speaks volumes about the region’s engineering potential.
Ahead of unlockit, we spoke with Ivan Hamer (Co-founder, Fellow) and Radomir Jakovljević (VP, Product Software) from Tenstorrent about scaling globally from Serbia, leadership during hypergrowth, and the mindset shifts required to turn prototypes into products trusted by customers worldwide.
u: Ivan, many founders here see the border as a barrier. As someone who scaled Tenstorrent globally, how does an event like unlockit serve as the ‘key’ to shifting a local engineering mindset into a global leadership one?
Ivan: We want to prove that world-class innovation can happen locally. We know Serbia has excellent engineers and the potential for building great things. We want to give people the opportunity to attack the hardest of technical problems and demonstrate that it can be done in our country, and hopefully boost confidence and spark growth of the industry locally. unlockit is an excellent channel to share our vision with an audience densely packed with tremendous talent. Through the success of Tenstorrent, we aim to add fuel to the entrepreneurship fire already ignited in the region.
u: Scaling a multi-billion dollar hardware company isn’t just about code; it’s about resilience. What is the one leadership ‘unlock’—that specific shift in your management style—that allowed you to survive Tenstorrent’s most aggressive growth phases?
Ivan: Just like David Marquet famously wrote in Turn the Ship Around! — “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to information” — we tend to give our engineers the reins to take ownership and find the best path forward. The leadership unlock for me was learning to trust the people closest to the problem. When you empower engineers to own decisions rather than wait for approvals, you don’t just move faster — you build a culture where people grow into leaders themselves. That’s what allowed us to scale through the most intense growth phases without breaking.
u: You chose Serbia as a strategic pillar for Tenstorrent. From a global perspective, what is the ‘hidden’ competitive advantage of this ecosystem that the rest of the world hasn’t fully unlocked yet?
Radomir: Tenstorrent found smart, educated, and experienced engineers and leaders in Serbia, who are ready to work hard, learn a lot, and who are focused to achieve great results. There are experienced people who built their expertise working on world-class products in some of the best Serbian and International companies. There are also young people, new university graduates, who are highly motivated to continue learning and succeed in solving difficult technical challenges. That enabled us to quickly build high performing teams and centers of excellence.
u: One of our themes is the moment when inspiration meets growth. For many, the ‘inspiration’ is the easy part, but ‘growth’ is where the grit is tested. In the journey of building Tenstorrent, can you share a moment where a technical vision seemed impossible to scale, and how you ‘unlocked’ that specific constraint?
Radomir: As a startup, you start by working to validate your main idea and iterate based on your learnings. At Tenstorrent, we used to have a number of experienced experts solving very challenging technical problems that nobody solved before. Everybody was going fast to make iteration loops as quick as possible. To go fast in the prototyping phase, we had to take some shortcuts. The knowledge and all the design decisions were in the heads of the experts and not properly documented. The code, as an artifact of the prototyping phase, was not optimal as well.
After validating the idea, we focused on creating products that we can proudly give to our customers to rely on. It required meeting a completely different set of criteria. The products needed to be: 1) functional and performant in all edge cases besides the common ones, 2) implemented as high quality code, well tested, and easily maintainable. That is to both enable great customer experience and enable us to provide great support during the products’ lifecycle.
The gap between the prototype and the product phases required a non-trivial mindset transition and team growth. At Tenstorrent, we succeeded in the transition by hiring whole teams for each area, extracting the experts’ knowledge and documenting it for easier onboarding of new team members, refactoring a lot of the code in parallel with implementing new improvements.
