Godard Abel, G2

Summary

Godard Abel, co-founder of G2, walks through the origin story of building the "Yelp for enterprise software" — from self-funding the marketplace after failed VC pitches, to temporarily leaving to build SteelBrick, to eventually scaling G2 past $300M in revenue. The conversation covers the original 2013 pitch deck, lessons on founder-market fit and perseverance through slow early growth, and how G2 is now reinventing itself for the AI era around answer engine optimization.

Key takeaways

• Founder-market fit comes before product-market fit. Godard's team had lived the pain of enterprise software discovery firsthand at BigMachines, and that personal credibility is what got Chicago Ventures to bet on an unproven model when Silicon Valley VCs wouldn't.
• Marketplaces take longer than you think. G2 missed its 2017 revenue forecast by 10x ($54M projected, ~$5M actual) — the three-sided flywheel (reviewers → buyers → vendors) took years to spin up, and the right move was staying lean and patient rather than forcing it.
• The SEO game is over; AEO is the new battleground. Over half of modern B2B buyers now start their research in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude rather than Google — and G2 is rebuilding its entire go-to-market around winning answers in AI engines rather than rankings on search results pages.