The Evolution of B2B Software Reviews - with Godard Abel, G2 Founder and CEO

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed and benchmark-validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Godard Abel, co-founder and CEO at G2. We'll be covering four main topics with Godard today. First, the benefit of being a multiple time B2B SaaS founder and CEO.
Second, how a Salesforce acquisition in the follow on experience impacts perspective. Third, the vision behind G2 in B2B Software Reviews, yesterday, today and tomorrow. And lastly, it's 2024, so how AI will change the B2B SaaS industry. So with that, Godard, would you take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest here in the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Godard Abel** (1:22)
Yeah, Ray, thanks for having me first of all. Excited to be here for Metrics That Matter. And I've been a SaaS Enterprise Software Entrepreneur now for about 25 years. And that also, and I'll talk about it more, but my first company was Big Machines, which was acquired by Oracle. Now it became the Oracle CPQ Cloud. Then we built another one of those, Steelbrick, that became the Salesforce CPQ, Salesforce Building, Salesforce Revenue Cloud.
And after that, came back to G2, which my co-founder Tim had already been building and now excited to be scaling that to really be the trusted place you go for software.

**Ray Rike** (1:58)
Well, one of the great joys of what I do now for a living is getting to talk to successful entrepreneurs, founders like you, but you're a five-time kind of entrepreneur and you've got some great exits. So here's the question I have for you.
As you think about all that experience at other successful SaaS companies, exits, did that inform or change your approach to G2?

**Godard Abel** (2:26)
Definitely. And that's what I love about being an entrepreneur, Ray. I keep learning, and today I'm very much still learning, trying to become a better CEO every day. And frankly, my first company, Big Machines, probably like a lot of first-time entrepreneurs. I think I started that when I was about 28 And so frankly, it was a lot of hard lessons. And especially I remember I started Big Machines right at the beginning of 2000 And you and I remember it. A lot of people don't, but that was a dot-com boom.
And I remember I incorporated on January 1, 2000 And I was probably full of a bit of hubris. I was young and maybe cocky, but I was like, we incorporated on January 1, 2000 because we're like, hey, we're building the company for the new millennium.
And for a year, it was pretty exciting. It raised like 20 million bucks. I created a bunch of hype. But then I remember three years in, we were almost bankrupt because you also remember.com boom turned to.com bust.
And we almost died in that bust. But I do think all those things I learned and especially, I think the only way we got out of that honestly was focusing 100% on customers and sales.
And you're kind of winning one customer at a time, winning a customer, making a customer happy. Just kind of went back to basics. And we had to do that for a few years until the cloud and CPQ took off. But so it was a lot of good hard lessons learned. And but every company and every day ever since then, you know, I do try to keep learning.

**Ray Rike** (3:56)
Well, let's talk G2. A lot of companies or a lot of people listening is like, oh, yeah, we know G2, but they may not know that you're almost 12 years old. I think you're getting ready to celebrate them with 12 year anniversary. Is that right? That you've been there?

**Godard Abel** (4:09)
Yes, I think July 1, it'll be a dozen years.

**Ray Rike** (4:14)
So what has surprised you the most about this 12 year journey? Did something just jump out at you? It's like, wow, I learned something new during this 12 year period.

**Godard Abel** (4:25)
For sure. And I think in our vision, at the beginning, we called it a Yelp for software because we wanted to bring what was already very common 12 years ago in our consumer lives, on Yelp, if you want to borrow a restaurant, you go look at reviews. Amazon, when you buy anything, you look at reviews. And we were a little bit shocked that this idea of review based insights, peer reviews, it didn't exist for B2B SaaS.