Doug Camplejohn
(00:01)
Hello everyone, this is Doug Camplejohn, and on this week’s episode of Revenue Renegades, I’m excited to welcome Godard Abel, the CEO and co-founder of G2. Welcome to the show, Godard.
Godard Abel
(00:10)
Great to be here with you, Doug.
Doug Camplejohn
(00:14)
Thank you. You’re a highly successful repeat entrepreneur. You had a $400 million exit of Big Machines to Salesforce. You could have just said, “Great, I’m going to go sit on a beach.” Instead, you started G2. What was the light bulb moment that caused you to jump in the ring again?
Godard Abel
(00:38)
A lot of it was driven by our frustration with the status quo in enterprise software, especially with Gartner and traditional analysts. As entrepreneurs, it took forever to get third-party validation. When we were building Big Machines, it took us nine years to get in the Gartner report and 12 years to become the leader in what they called sales configuration. Ultimately, the company was acquired by Oracle, but it really slowed down our journey. Even more importantly, our customers had a huge discovery problem. At Big Machines, we eventually had success selling to companies like GE Energy, but it took us nine years to sell to GE. When we finally started working with them, they said, “We wish we knew you existed three years ago.” They’d been trying to develop the software in-house. Software buyers had a huge discovery problem.
Around the time we started G2, Marc Andreessen said, “Software is eating the world.” That meant there would be purpose-built apps for every vertical industry, business process, and use case. We thought the world needed an online store for software-a consumer-like shopping experience, maybe more like Amazon. At the beginning, we called G2 a Yelp for software. In software, we felt analysts were like restaurant critics who couldn’t eat the food. They’d stand outside the restaurant, ask for references, but never try the product. We thought, “Why not just ask the users?” When we started G2, peer reviews for enterprise software didn’t exist.
Godard Abel
(02:29)
That was really our founding mission: make it easier for software buyers to discover the best apps based on trusted peer reviews and help sellers quickly validate their solutions to win customer trust. Ultimately, we wanted to be a software marketplace where it’s easy for buyers and sellers to connect.
Doug Camplejohn
(02:48)
You corrected me-I was referring to your first company that exited to Oracle, then your second to Salesforce, and then G2. You’ve had a string of great successes. For people listening who may not know, in the old days, as a software vendor, you spent a ton of money and time courting Gartner, IDC, and Forrester analysts, hoping to get into their waves or quadrants. As you said, much of it was not about real feedback from users, but rather whatever the analyst had been spun into believing.
Godard Abel
(03:51)
For sure. Even the great analysts-it’s just a slow process.
Doug Camplejohn
(03:53)
Yeah.
Godard Abel
(03:55)
You’ve been part of those quadrant processes. Often, it’s two years from when you first get that survey until they actually publish it. Everything in software changes in two years, and then they don’t update it for another two. In the world of CPQ, when we built our second company, Steelbrick, we were quickly acquired by Salesforce within about two years. According to Gartner, we never existed-we never made it into one of the reports. That’s only accelerating in the age of AI. Doug, you’re building Coffee AI, reimagining CRM with AI first. At the Salesforce Ventures Summit, there were probably 100 new AI startups, all already on G2, but probably none yet in an analyst report. In this age of AI, we think a different model is needed.
Doug Camplejohn
(05:07)
When you were building G2 in the early days, one of the challenges is that marketplaces are hard because you have to get both sides of the equation right. How did you think about growing both sides early on while maintaining quality?
Godard Abel
(05:26)
Building any marketplace is hard. Reid Hoffman said it, and you did it very successfully at LinkedIn. I remember the first few years of LinkedIn-it was just an online resume. I probably joined in 2003 or 2004 and would go there maybe once a month when someone sent me an invite. It’s hard. We found the same thing at G2. The idea of Yelp for software sounded great-people would write reviews, we’d have insights, buyers would come-but it took about five years until it really became a business. That’s why I went to build Steelbrick in parallel; it took us so long to get product-market fit and critical mass of reviews and content. I turned it over to my co-founder, Tim.
Tim was my product co-founder. He did a great job bringing it to product-market fit and critical mass. It was very hard. I’ve built a couple of SaaS vendors, and honestly, that’s much easier than building a marketplace. For G2, we picked one category to start, which I think is smart when building a marketplace. We learned from Yelp and their founder, Jeremy Stoppelman. For Yelp, they picked one city-San Francisco-got it to a tipping point, then expanded. For G2, we started with just one category: CRM. Big Machines was a CPQ app, a partner to many CRMs, so we knew Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, and CRM customers. Our day one strategy to get reviews was to put up a booth at Dreamforce in 2013, handing out $5 Starbucks cards for people to write a review of CRM or related software. We had an MVP that could capture reviews.
We just wanted to see if people would leave B2B reviews and if we could algorithmically rate the software. Even that one category took a couple of months. The most depressing part was after Dreamforce-we aimed to hand out 1,000 Starbucks cards, get 1,000 reviews. We went back to the office, looked at Google Analytics, and there were literally two people on the site. One user popped up in Europe-it was from Austria, and I realized it was my dad. Most entrepreneurs have those moments: “Is this a bad idea? Should we quit?”
Or do we keep grinding and figure out a way to get traction? First, we had to get reviews and insights, then buyer traffic, and only then could we monetize. We decided to stay at it, but it was a long grind to get one category spinning. That took about six months. It took five years to get 20 categories spinning. Today we have 2,000, but it took a long time.
Doug Camplejohn
(09:22)
What do you see as best practices for software vendors using G2 well? Where do you see people making obvious mistakes?
Godard Abel
(09:34)
The biggest mindset shift-even for me as an entrepreneur-was learning that a bad review is actually good. Sometimes companies are reluctant to encourage reviews because they’re afraid of bad ones, or they try to filter for only five-star reviews. There’s a lot of research in consumer reviews-on Amazon, for example-showing you get lower conversion if you’re at 5.0 stars. The optimum is between 4.4 and 4.6. If something has 100 reviews, all 5.0, you don’t believe it. Even if the product’s perfect, someone will have a bad day or be a tough customer.
Doug Camplejohn
(10:05)
Interesting.
Godard Abel
(10:30)
Most products don’t work for every type of consumer. In enterprise software, for example, at Steelbrick we might get a review saying, “I hate this, it doesn’t integrate with Microsoft Dynamics.” We’d be fine with that negative review because we focused on Salesforce. That negative review helps buyers see the product’s limitations and attracts the right customers. Another best practice is to respond to negative reviews. Buyers want to see that vendors are responsive to problems and correct them. People read negative reviews much more than positive ones. It’s human psychology: before buying, you want to know what’s wrong with it. If the negative reviews don’t affect you, or the vendor is responsive, you’re more likely to buy. The real best practice is to do what we call in-app reviews.
Doug Camplejohn
(11:50)
Yep.
Godard Abel
(12:16)
You can do this for Coffee AI as soon as you embed any kind of feedback widget. Many mobile apps do this-always asking for feedback and then prompting for an app store review. Having an in-app process where customers are always giving feedback and have the opportunity to share public reviews helps you stand out. People want authentic customer voices, especially in AI, where there’s so much noise. The way to stand out is by having a lot of authentic customer voice, which helps buyers trust you faster.
Doug Camplejohn
(13:02)
Absolutely.
Doug Camplejohn
(13:12)
You mentioned Delighted. Is that a tool that sits in your product and directs users to write a G2 review?
Godard Abel
(13:20)
Yes, Delighted is a feedback widget you can use for NPS, CSAT, or other customer feedback. You get feedback, and you can embed a tool in-app to make it easy to ask for reviews. We recommend doing it continuously and asking everyone, even if they’re upset with you. Some vendors only ask for public reviews if they’re five-star, but best practice is to ask everyone.
Doug Camplejohn
(14:03)
We had Richard White, CEO of Fathom, on the show recently. They’ve hugely benefited from their G2 reviews and talked about the value and importance of monitoring G2 as a critical channel for building credibility in the early days.
Godard Abel
(14:26)
Yes, and investors use it now. We have a data solutions business where we sell G2 data to VCs and private equity investors, as they’re becoming more data-driven. It’s a great way to build brand and show momentum to prospects and investors.
Doug Camplejohn
(14:48)
You’ve talked about AI being a bigger shift than the advent of the internet, a view echoed by many. What do you think is the most overhyped promise of AI in B2B today, and what’s one of the most underappreciated?
Godard Abel
(15:06)
What’s overrated is full driverless automation-like Elon Musk saying the car will drive itself next year, but it’s always next year. The idea of full automation of BDR outreach, for example, hasn’t happened yet. AI is the most amazing assistant.
Doug Camplejohn
(15:12)
Right.
Godard Abel
(15:33)
AI can make SDR outreach much better, but it’s not fully driverless yet. It’s a great assistant, and that’s true in most applications. We say in our all-hands meetings: AI won’t replace human employees, but it will replace employees who don’t use AI. We’re encouraging everyone to use the tools to automate workflows and assist themselves, but I don’t think it’s going to fully automate most jobs.
Doug Camplejohn
(16:08)
How does AI fit into your plans at G2? Tell me about the G2 AI roadmap.
Godard Abel
(16:22)
We’re excited about our AI Monty agent, which we see as the ultimate advisor to the software buyer. It’s like your smartest analyst or consultant in AI form. We’re building it on top of ChatGPT, in partnership with OpenAI, and training it on our unique G2 data-over 3 million reviews, our category taxonomy-to be a professional software buying advisor. Most software buyers are looking to solve a business problem, not for a category. With Monty, we can ask more questions about your industry, sales cycle, and make nuanced recommendations. Monty is a virtual software buying advisor and expert. On the seller side, we’re also training Monty to be an inbound SDR. It can answer questions about your product, pricing, integrations, and even book demos or start trials. We see it as a great assistant for both software buyers and sellers, enabling faster buying and selling.
Doug Camplejohn
(18:41)
Is the mode of interaction text-only, or can you do voice and video as well?
Godard Abel
(18:45)
Right now it’s all AI-based text chat, but we’re soon launching voice. We’re also reimagining reviews, moving away from painful online survey forms to more free-form AI chat-text, voice, or even video. We’ll parse out structured data from these conversations and get richer unstructured data. The AI conversation can become a dynamic interview, possibly even multi-party, gathering perspectives from different personas at the customer. This will provide much richer information for software buyers. We’re excited to use AI to totally reimagine reviews.
Doug Camplejohn
(21:20)
Part of our vision for Coffee is to minimize manual data entry-never throw away data, give people ChatGPT-style interfaces. More broadly, enterprise software is moving toward conversational configuration. Instead of a multi-week or year-long configuration exercise, onboarding will be a conversation, and at the end, you’ll have software configured for your business.
Godard Abel
(22:25)
Exactly. Imagine your Coffee agent could ask, “How do you want to do your forecasting? How do you want to track your opportunities?” and just have a conversation with the CRO. At the end, your system uses AI to reconfigure itself based on that CRO’s preferences. That’s really cool.
Doug Camplejohn
(22:44)
By the time this episode comes out, we’ve launched tools like CRM Grader to evaluate CRM data quality, and ICP Builder, where you describe your ideal customer profile in natural language, and we show you matching companies. We’re focused on getting high-quality data into the system in a scalable, actionable format. You can’t have good AI with bad data.
Godard Abel
(23:40)
That’s the big problem. When I was at Salesforce a decade ago, every customer would say, “I’d love to implement your CPQ, but my data in my CRM is so bad, I can’t do it.” Almost any CRM system, whether HubSpot or Salesforce, has a lot of bad data, and AI is bad if the data is bad.
Doug Camplejohn
(24:08)
A simple thing we use AI for is summarizing company descriptions from data vendors. We use AI to create smart summaries so you can quickly see what a company does. There’s a lot of data hygiene work that AI helps with throughout the product.
Godard Abel
(24:43)
You get that snippet.
Doug Camplejohn
(25:04)
As more capabilities come through LLMs, how do you see the line between people going directly to ChatGPT for reviews versus coming to G2?
Godard Abel
(25:24)
The trend in online shopping is that more buyers are starting with LLMs, no matter what they’re shopping for. On Google, the AI summary at the top is very useful. We see more software buyers starting in LLMs and relying on summaries. We’re working on proving G2’s influence. Our new strategy is G2 Everywhere. Originally, we wanted everyone to come to g2.com, but in the age of AI, that’s unlikely. Now, our goal is to provide the most trusted data on software, wherever buyers are. G2 is a top influencer of AI answers around enterprise software topics. We’re partnering with Profound, a startup measuring AI LLM influence for brands. For enterprise software, G2 is the number one influencer of AI answers. We’re building awareness that the magical answer from ChatGPT is trained on some site-often G2. We’re also seeing more people going to marketplaces.
Doug Camplejohn
(35:17)
Let’s talk about leadership. You’ve talked about the importance of sharing weakness or vulnerability as a leader. Can you share a moment where vulnerability made a difference for your company or team?
Godard Abel
(35:40)
As an entrepreneur for 25 years, I’ve been through a lot of hard times. Entrepreneurship is sometimes glamorous, but often extremely humbling. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had a Business Insider hit piece on me. We had just built a beautiful new Chicago office, but then had to do a layoff. The headline was something like, “Godard’s walking people up this new million-dollar staircase to lay them off,” with a picture of me and money bags. The criticism was understandable-I had over-invested and hadn’t anticipated the downturn, so I had to adapt quickly. Being authentic with our team, owning my mistakes, and saying “I’m sorry” when I put the team in a bad position helped us get through it. If you’re vulnerable and own your mistakes as a leader, you build trust and get better together.
Doug Camplejohn
(38:27)
I remember my first startup-I was a brand new CEO and assumed I had to have all the answers and show no weakness. Clearly not the way to do it. I just did a post on LinkedIn about a phrase from Tomer Cohen: “I may be wrong, but I’m not confused.” It’s about being confident in your direction, but open to being challenged and admitting mistakes.
Godard Abel
(39:11)
I like that quote. As a leader, you have to be confident and make decisions, but also realize when you’re wrong, admit it, and course correct. That builds trust and helps the team improve faster.
Doug Camplejohn
(39:40)
G2 isn’t your only startup. You have 3DKit, and you’re an investor and advisor in others. How do you avoid burnout? What do you do to protect your mental health and model that for your team?
Godard Abel
(39:59)
It took me a long time to learn that. Building my first company, Big Machines, took about 12 years, and by the end, I was burned out. I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but it was a grind-years of feeling like I was failing, with fear and anxiety. Before starting G2, I took a few months off. My wife noticed I was depressed-I just needed rest. After a while, I realized I missed building and having a team. Many entrepreneurs feel that way: building is a thrill, but you need breaks.
What changed for me was getting a conscious leadership coach, Jim Dethmer, at the end of my Big Machines journey. He wrote a book on conscious leadership and has a community at conscious.is. I still have a conscious leadership coach, Heather Frick, and do coaching at least monthly. A lot of it is about presence. I started meditating, aiming for better self-care, working out, and doing something outdoors every day. Taking a couple of hours for yourself each day is a worthwhile investment. In my first startup, I hustled all the time and burned out. There’s no way I could still be building 25 years later if I hadn’t started taking better care of myself. I try to bring conscious leadership to my team-being authentic, sharing vulnerabilities, not trying to be perfect, showing up more consciously at work and at home. I still feel stress and anxiety, but I deal with it much better through continual self-care and consciousness.
Doug Camplejohn
(42:37)
That’s a common theme on the podcast-being outdoors, working out, and nature as a balancing force. I had to force myself to go outside and see the sunshine in the morning before sitting down at my laptop. Even that simple act was a struggle at first, but it makes a huge difference. Just taking a 15-minute walk in nature balances me. Maybe it’s wisdom from years of doing this.
Godard Abel
(43:09)
You feel guilty not going right to your email, right?
Doug Camplejohn
(43:34)
But I feel much more efficient now than in my earlier startups.
Godard Abel
(43:39)
Andrew Huberman talks about the importance of sunlight in your first 90 minutes. In my first company, I’d grab coffee and go to email. Now, it’s better to go outside, get sunshine, meditate, drink water-connect with nature before starting the digital grind. It’s harder when you’re younger and ambitious, but I wish I’d done it in my 20s. Hopefully, younger entrepreneurs start earlier than I did.
Doug Camplejohn
(44:22)
Hopefully they do. It pays dividends for sure. I know we’re running up on time, but let me ask a few wrap-up questions. First, talk about giving back. That’s a big part of G2’s culture. How do you think about that in building out G2?
Godard Abel
(44:47)
We have a G2Gives initiative and have done Pledge 1%. I was inspired by Marc Benioff at Salesforce. We’ve committed 1% of our equity to tech education. One part is philanthropy; another is volunteering. We have ERGs at G2 that organize local volunteering events, including our team in Bangalore. It could be with organizations like Girls Who Code or whatever our teams are passionate about. Ideally, we also apply our product to help nonprofit software grow for free with G2. We’ve built it into our model. Marc Benioff was a pioneer here, and Pledge 1% has tools and templates to make it easier. It helps our teams feel more inspired and connected to our vision.
Doug Camplejohn
(45:54)
We’re members of Pledge 1% as well, and I recommend any startup founder do it in the beginning. It’s hard to set aside 1% later, but at the start, it’s easy. I wish it was part of the standard term sheet for every startup.
Godard Abel
(46:22)
Absolutely. I was executive chairman of Logic, which ServiceNow just acquired. Chris, the founder, did Pledge 1% on day one, and now it’s a significant philanthropic win. Day one is easy; once you have VCs, it’s harder. The sooner you build it in, the better.
Doug Camplejohn
(46:55)
Let’s broaden the aperture on AI. If you could automate any one thing in your life with AI, what would it be?
Godard Abel
(47:03)
Meeting follow-up. I often have back-to-back meetings and don’t follow up as well or as quickly as I’d like. Follow-up is probably half the value of a meeting.
Doug Camplejohn
(47:08)
Great one.
Godard Abel
(47:20)
I don’t do it as well or as quickly as I should. Tools like Zoom have features, but I’d love to take it a step further-finish a meeting, and have an email draft ready to send, personalized. That would have huge value and save time. I’d love that to be fully automated with AI.
Doug Camplejohn
(47:48)
We’ll go offline-I’ll show you Coffee. I’m the same-terrible at follow-up, things fall through the cracks. In many ways, what we’re building is to help with that. What’s something you’re passionate about that might surprise people?
Godard Abel
(48:14)
I love Strava and posting a daily workout. It’s the one social network I binge on. I love sharing pictures of my dogs on hikes, and there’s a Strava dogs group I enjoy.
Doug Camplejohn
(48:35)
That’s amazing. I love Strava’s story-Mark Gainey built it for himself to track runs with friends. That’s my version of retirement-building little hacky things. What is one thing you can’t live without in your daily routine?
Godard Abel
(49:04)
Cold plunging. I’m sad when I travel and can’t do it, but I have one in my yard and love doing it every day. It’s an intense meditation and gives me energy all day.
Doug Camplejohn
(49:20)
I’m building a deck with a cold plunge and outdoor shower. What’s your routine-how much time, what temperature?
Godard Abel
(49:31)
I aim for five minutes daily, between 45 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Doug Camplejohn
(49:38)
Do you do just the cold plunge or alternate with sauna?
Godard Abel
(49:45)
I have a hot tub next to it-one side hot, one side cold. I usually do a little hot first, then the cold.
Doug Camplejohn
(49:56)
It is bracing! I’m looking forward to it. I’m at a place called the Portal in Mill Valley, set up by VC Tim Chang-they have cold plunge and sauna. It’s a great part of the workday. Finally, how can listeners stay in touch with you and help with G2’s mission?
Godard Abel
(50:16)
I love LinkedIn-I’m Godard Abel on LinkedIn, and my email is godard@g2.com. Let’s connect there. If you haven’t already, list your product on G2-it’s freemium, and you get validation for free. If you have feedback or ideas to make G2 better, I’d love to hear from you. LinkedIn is a great way to connect.
Doug Camplejohn
(50:40)
Awesome. Godard, thank you for taking the time. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Godard Abel
(50:44)
Great to be with you, Doug.
