Godard (00:00):
The most important thing is picking your co-founders.
(00:00):
VOICEOVER (00:12):
Welcome to Spotlight on a podcast about how companies are built from the people doing the building, one messy, exhilarating decision at a time.
Arun (00:12):
Welcome to Spotlight On, I'm your host, Arun Matthew, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of G two Godad Abel.
Godard (00:18):
Yeah, thanks, Arun. Great to be here with you.
Arun (00:20):
I imagine a lot of the audience has familiarity with G two, but talk about a little bit about G two, who we are, what we represent and what we're trying to do.
Godard (00:29):
Yeah. Well, G two is the trusted place you go for software and AI apps and G two is really built on the idea that real users are the ones that should be validating the value of software and of ai. And so we built G two at the beginning, we called it Yelp for software because I've been in enterprise software 25 years and we thought it was kind of absurd that our industry was still relying on legacy analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and they only publish reports every two years. And I remember as an entrepreneur building my first company, big machines, it took us nine years to get a Gartner report, 12 years to become a leader. And we just thought there had to be a better way to validate solutions and also for buyers to discover solutions. So we wanted to create much more like an Amazon shopping experience for business software. And that really didn't exist when we started G two.
Arun (01:14):
Amazing. At Accel, we love the idea of backing repeat founders. It's a big area of focus for us. You're unique in that realm in that you're a six time founder, and I remember that's one of the things that we had a lot of conversations about as you were starting G two and ramping it. But maybe take us back. What are to your history and what are the companies that you started before G two? And maybe if you could expound on that particularly for some of the audience and some of the entrepreneurs that are on their first venture, what are some of the lessons that you got from some of those earlier experiences?
Godard (01:51):
I started building software companies 25 years ago and my first company, I started way back in 2000 and I just graduated from Stanford Business School, so I was out here in the bay and that was a huge boom, maybe like the AI boom now it was all about coms and we were still early though, bringing software online. At the time it wasn't even called SaaS or Cloud yet. I think it was called On-Demand Software. And we decided to build big machines to help manufacturers sell big machines online. And it was really inspired by my father. He was an entrepreneur in pump manufacturing and he was selling these big heavy industrial pumps and he thought they couldn't be sold online. And that inspired us to build big machines where we wanted to help him sell a big pump. You could sell a Cisco router with online configuration, but that was all the way back in 2000. And probably one of the first things I learned in entrepreneurship was perseverance, because that was an incredible boom in.com. And that first year we raised like 20 million bucks, really just based on a vision and a smart team. But then the market turned way south. There was this massive dot bomb bust in 2001, 2002, 2003. And really it led us to almost failing
(02:59):
And it was really hard. I remember we had to scale the company down from 70 to 20 people just to survive.
Arun (03:04):
And then what was the story after that?
Godard (03:07):
Well, and eventually, luckily big machines did succeed. We did persevere. And that's probably my first big lesson. Oftentimes it can take longer than you expect to find product market fit.
(03:17):
And I think the fact that we persevered and didn't quit and what kept us going was our customers because in those early years we did find about a dozen manufacturers that were actually really getting value from our online software, and they were able to generate quotes and orders 80% faster by doing it online. And so we thought eventually the market would come around. And that did finally happen in 2007. And we partnered with Salesforce with Oracle or the Time Siebel and really became their go-to-market partner for SaaS CPQ software, their number one partner. And eventually that led the company to being a big success. So eventually it was acquired by Oracle, but that was kind of a 12, 13 year struggle until it led to a good outcome,
Arun (03:58):
Overnight success, 12 year overnight success.
Godard (04:00):
And that really did inspire G two as I mentioned. And then in parallel to G two, we did start another company called SteelBrick, which eventually became Salesforce CPQ. And that was an interesting run because they're in two years, we achieved everything that we achieved at big machines in 13 years, so we learned a lot. Plus, by the time we started SteelBrick more 2014, SaaS and cloud were already booming. Two years into that journey, our partner Salesforce came to us and said they wanted to acquire us
(04:30):
And we had great momentum, but we also thought that Salesforce, and I remember meeting Mark Benioff and it was somewhat a surprising meeting because I thought I was just giving him a partner briefing. We just raised our series C and we thought we're going to build a big maybe public scale company. Mark is a very impressive entrepreneur, and I remember I was meeting him at his office, I was giving him my whole partner pitch and about 30 minutes in the meeting right after the demo, he is like, oh, I actually want to acquire your company. That was a big surprise. And then he was very convincing because ultimately he made it clear he wanted to be in our market. And then of course I said, Hey, we'd much rather do it with you started, don't want to compete with you, very aligned with their customers or go to market. And so then I spent about a year and a half integrating SteelBrick into Salesforce, and that was a great experience, really learning how to build a company at global scale. And I think at that time, Salesforce was already doing about 5 billion in revenue and obviously amazing since then. Mark scaled it to 40 billion
(05:26):
And just learning how you applied to V two mom, how he could align thousands and 10 thousands of employees to success and to continued growth. And that also really inspired me. Then when I wound up leaving Salesforce to go back and rejoin my co-founder Tim, and I think as when you invested Tim, who was originally our product, he'd actually taken over while I was building SteelBrick as CEO of G two and did a great job finding product market fit, getting it to scale, and then I decided, wow, it'd be a lot more fun to come back and partner with Tim then to continue working at a giant company
Arun (06:00):
In that second acquisition, the Salesforce one, what sort of puts you over the edge in accepting that outcome versus building a big independent business? I think this is something that a lot of founders go through. You achieve success through a lot of perseverance and grit in your first journey with big machines, and so you don't have to take the exit true, but you decided to sort of go down that path and build G two. We're very grateful for that and excited to be on the journey here, but how did you make the trade off between punching out a little bit early versus building a big independent business?
Godard (06:37):
And I think it's a very personal decision for every entrepreneur. And so after that meeting with Mark, I first sat down with my co-founders, my leadership team. I think it is such a personal decision. And ultimately also our founder there, CTO Max, it was really his first opportunity at a big exit as it was from any of our leadership team. And it was life-changing, and to get there within two years was surprising. And so part of it was
Arun (07:06):
Very different than Steel Brick.
Godard (07:08):
Well, that was
Arun (07:09):
Steel, very different.
Godard (07:10):
And I'd already had the exit, but frankly most of my leadership team. And then I think the other big factor was that Salesforce was a company we admired and all of our customers were joint customers. We were built native on the Salesforce platform. And so that was also I think a good positive motivation. We knew we could really scale our vision, scale our customers, and we had some fear frankly that at Salesforce we had competitors building similar apps. We're like, well, what if Salesforce acquire somebody else? What if they enter our market independently? And so when we weighed all of that, we just thought, wow. And they frankly made us a great offer for two years in and they took great care of us. They have a very positive Ohana culture, and so we just decided it'd be more fun to go build with Salesforce than to keep going independently.
Arun (07:58):
That makes sense. So take us to the launch of G two. What was the opportunity that you saw in the market for something like a G two and what was that premise based around? And tell us about the early years of G two and getting it off the ground
Godard (08:13):
And the idea for G two in some ways to us at that time, we'd already been in business software, enterprise software for 12 years and it seemed kind of obvious it was the kind of thing that just was meant to be built because there was no consumer-like site where you could go discover the best apps for your business. And we saw this pain from our customers with big machines. Eventually we did have success, we sold to big companies like ge. I remember their steam turbines. They make these really big machines like one gigawatt power generation turbines, and eventually discovered big machines became our customer, and they were like, wow, we wish we knew you existed three years ago because we weren't yet in any of the Gartner reports. So they literally didn't know we existed. So it was really hard for buyers to discover the best apps. And when we started G two, that was also around the time Mark Andreeson said, software's eating the world. And I think that was a prion statement in hindsight, but he was saying that there's going to be purpose-built apps built for every vertical, every business function, every geography. And so we thought the world needed a store, if you will, needed an Amazon site where buyers could go easily discover software. And the other big thing that was missing in our industry was the idea of peer reviews.
(09:24):
At that time, you would have to rely on analysts or you would still ask a vendor for three references before you bought their software. And no surprise, those are always positive. It was kind of like employment references before LinkedIn.
(09:35):
And I think what we do today, we still probably ask for official references, but we always back channel right now at G two, we're looking for a new chief product officer, and first thing I do is go on LinkedIn, see who knows the candidate, and I ask 'em like, Hey, what was really like to work with them? And we really want to create the same thing for software. Now on G two, there's 3 million reviews contributed by over a million real users oftentimes with their LinkedIn profile. And so now you can do the same thing for software with G two. You can find someone that use the apps, ping them on LinkedIn, ping them on G two, and obviously read the review, but also get the real color and software. There's always learnings from other users, how was it actually, what are the best practices in deploying it? What works well, what? And so I think the world was hungry for peer insights and now like I said, we're really happy to have G two where over a hundred million software buyers come every year both to discover apps because they want to find out, build their shortlist when they're considering buying some software, and then also have those trusted peer reviews to allow them to figure out which app will work best for them and to have that confidence. For a lot of people, it's a big decision
(10:40):
Because it impact your career an enterprise. If you're going to deploy, let's say a CRM system, if that works, it's a big win for you. You might get promoted if the project fails. I mean there's a real risk you could get fired. And so these are big decisions for businesses on which enterprise software or now, which enterprise AI they should deploy. And so having that trusted peer advice is essential and it is exciting now and it took over a decade to really see come to life, but it's exciting now on G two, on almost any app, any AI software. You can find those trusted peer insights and make better faster buying decisions.
Arun (11:13):
Now we're going to spend some time in just a little bit talking about G Two's place in sort of the AI age, but in the early days of G two, take us through some of the experiences and maybe even the challenges that you faced. You were a repeat founder, you knew how to build and scale a business. And so I imagine some things were really easy, but some things were probably really challenging. Take us through a couple of those struggles or early challenges that you had to navigate your way through.
Godard (11:39):
And we did face a lot of challenges building G two, and I think one of the things that was different, the other businesses I've built are SaaS businesses, and in some ways there's a known playbook. G two is really more of a marketplace. And it was my first time building a marketplace and the marketplace is
Arun (11:52):
Different with a real brand
Godard (11:54):
And it's more like building a consumer site. And at the beginning was really hard. Like any marketplace, how do you get software buyers to come to G two? And first of all, they had to leave reviews because that was a unique content. The unique insights were all from reviews. And then we realized at the beginning, wow, most people love reading reviews, but they don't write them. And also the Jeremy Stoppelman, the Yelp founder, he'd written some good blogs about his experience with Yelp. I think 99% of consumers online read reviews, but only 1% write them. And frankly, I have to admit, when I was starting G two, I'd never written online reviews, but of course then I started writing reviews on hotels and TripAdvisor, Yelp. I want to learn the experience. And also what Yelp learned, they have kind of an elite they call it where it's like 1% of people that for some reason do love to share.
(12:42):
And we found those same people in software. Some people do really want to share their CM expertise inherently. If you're an expert in something, oftentimes you like to share. And secondly, it could also be good for your career because if you have the top review of let's say Salesforce on G two, it might also lead to people reaching out. You're a Salesforce administrator, they might offer you a new job, they might ask you for consulting. And so we had to find that subgroup of experts that do love to share, but it was really hard to get that flywheel going to get enough review content. And then once we had enough review content, we had to rank on Google. And I remember one of the scariest things we first decided to launch G two I a Dreamforce, this was way back in 2012, and I think we had the idea, we got together my basement July that year and we're like, great, let's build Yelp for software.
(13:28):
It's needed. And most startup founders, we were euphoric at the beginning. We were like, we're going to change the world. We're going to launch this site and it's going to be incredible. And then we did learn, of course, we said, Hey, we got to figure out how we're going to get reviews because this thing doesn't work. So we said, I remember we got a booth at Dreamforce, like a small booth in the back, and we said, Hey, by then we have to launch our functioning site. I think the first site we actually called G two Alpha because it was like our alpha version and we're like, Hey, we're going to test it at Dreamforce to see how many reviews we can gather. And so we put up a booth at Dreamforce, we were handing out $5 Starbucks, and I think we collected over a thousand reviews just to test a concept of CRM apps from Salesforce and others.
(14:05):
At the end of the week, we felt pretty good. We're like, wow, we got well over a thousand reviews and we validated that people would leave reviews and it would actually give us high quality insights. But then the next big challenge, I remember that next week we were looking at our Google analytics and I only saw, we saw they have real time analytics. There were only two people on our website from around the world. And then I remember a third one popped up out of Austria and we're like, wow, somebody from Europe. And then I'm like, oh, my dad lives in Vienna. And he was checking out. So then we kind of got depressed. We're like, wow, it's so hard to get reviews and then it's so hard to get buyer traffic. And frankly, we also didn't even know how we're going to monetize it. And so then we kind of went through that trough of despair, which I think is often common with founders as well. You have from this euphoric vision, you launch your alpha, you're like, it's going to change the world. And then we had a like, Ooh, nobody's coming
Arun (14:53):
Yet. This is going to be hard.
Godard (14:54):
Yes. But then I think we did double down because we just had conviction, the idea, and we're like, Hey, we got to keep going.
(15:03):
We got to get more reviews. And we realized for our first category, we had to get a critical mass of all the leading apps. At the beginning we had a lot of Salesforce. We're like, that's not that interesting. And we had to get dynamic CRM HubSpot competitors, so we'd have a full perspective on the CRM market and that would be interesting to buyers. And also we learned how to optimize it for Google. And then eventually we figured out how we get a critical mass of traffic and Google was key to that. Then all of a sudden we started ranking for CRM software, best CRM Salesforce versus Microsoft. And all of a sudden we started bringing all these buyers and finally then we figured out, oh, we can monetize it from the sellers, the sellers of software. And our first customer was a little CRM vendor called Workbooks.
(15:44):
And frankly, they weren't yet in Gartner Reports, so they were desperate for validation. And they actually gave us the idea. They're like, Hey, we'll pay you if we can republish your G two grid ratings on our own website. And we're like, great, we'll do that. And then actually not too long after, even Salesforce signed up, which we were surprised by like they're the market leader, but the one that has the demand was like, I need more demand now. You have a lot of CRM buyers coming, so can we upgrade our profile? Can we put some CTAs in there? And so that all led to us developing our marketing solutions. And so we realized once we have buyer traffic, buyer influence with G two, then the sellers, their marketers would want to target our audience, use our content to drive their demand. But all of that to really start generating revenue really took about a year, and then it really took I think four or so years to get to millions of revenue. So it was a long time to get the flywheel spinning for G two,
Arun (16:39):
Which with marketplace businesses, that's pretty common that it takes a little while. Was there a moment, an aha moment where you felt like you hit product market fit where you felt confident this thing could really scale?
Godard (16:54):
Yeah. Well, I remember there was, I think in our Highland Park office, our first office in the suburbs of Chicago, we had this wall where we started putting up customer logos and it was really slow going for the first year, there were maybe 20 logos on the wall. And then I remember talking to Tim, we decided to run an experiment. Partly we were frankly, let's lower the price, let's lower the price for a marketer to get to a paid profile on G two. Let's lower to a thousand bucks and then we'll charge 'em incrementally for more leads. We deliver to them. And then all of a sudden one month it went from 20 to a hundred logos. And then we'd also hired these, it was kind of young smart BDRs sales reps. And in our Highland Park office, we actually rented because the beginning it was one room and it was 20 or 30 people, mainly product and building the site. And then we rented out a room next door. It was a former nail salon in Highland Park, Illinois, and we stuffed four very junior sellers in there, and they just started calling the vendors on our site, but then they started buying. And so I think in one quarter going from 20 to a hundred customers, all of a sudden we're like, wow, this is real.
(18:02):
The marketers are starting to value the G two brand and validation and we can monetize this
Arun (18:06):
Thing. You just mentioned it, but the unique thing about G two is that it is a brand and it's also clearly very strong business. And so can you just talk about managing the dynamics of building a brand, building a business where those two come in conflict and where they sort of help each other?
Godard (18:26):
And G two has built a brand now, and I'm very proud on most websites you go to, they're proud to show off their G two leader badges or their G two customers love us badges because we have become a brand. And I think the one challenge in that we've also had a freemium model because we also want all software products listed on the G two marketplace. And frankly we love entrepreneurs. I've always been a software entrepreneur, so we didn't want to be like Gartner where you have to pay to influence the analyst and get in the report. We're like, Hey, intentionally you can start for free and you can encourage your customers to leave some reviews. And once you have 10 reviews from real customers, you start showing up in our grid ratings. And obviously if you have the most high quality reviews, you can be a leader and you get this great validation. And most of that frankly is for free. And that has always been a challenge in our business model. Then we offer paid marketing solutions, but where's the right line between free and paid and how do we keep all these insights for free for software buyers but still build a good business monetizing the marketing solutions? And I think that's still something we're continuously optimizing, what are the right additions and price points
(19:35):
Between free, and we're just offering actually new launchpad, which might be interesting for a lot of the startups here. We also realized that for years our starting point was more at least 10,000 a year, let's say for paid solution. And that actually doesn't work for a lot of startups. So now we're launching a launchpad, which is more like a couple hundred a month, and then you pay us more as we drive more demand more leads for you. And so we think that's a more flexible model. We're still even today, 13 years in optimizing what's the value balance between our paid marketing solutions and our free validation.
Arun (20:09):
Over your career and six startups, you've worked with a lot of leaders and teams. If you put on your hat as sort of like a mentor to a lot of people, you're a mentor to a lot of people in the community, what sort of advice do you have in terms of team development and growth?
Godard (20:27):
And I do think the most important thing is picking your co-founders. I've been lucky in that, and I think
Arun (20:34):
You've had a consistent group across many of these companies.
Godard (20:37):
And I recruited actually four co-founders for G two. Once we had the idea, we all got together in my basement and probably my first startup. The mistake I made was honestly to add sales too soon. And I think this is better known now, but I do think at the beginning I think the more you just invest in product and platform. And at the beginning I also had to learn to do founder led selling, and I think that's well known in the startup community today. But if you're going to build something B2B business is only going to bet on your early days if they know you as the founder, they got to feel your vision and your passion. So I would actually, and we did this, I'd go later in bringing in kind of an outside sales leader and even outside marketing because at the beginning I would put all your dollars in product and platform. And today it's probably in AI
Speaker 3 (21:21):
And
Godard (21:21):
In
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Data
Godard (21:22):
And the beginning, just do founder led selling. You'd probably want a growth marketer, a growth hacker, run experiments, figure out your product market fit, figure out what sells before you go and hire professional sales leaders
Arun (21:36):
And really scale it.
Godard (21:37):
Yes, and it's also hard at the beginning. I mean even I remember our first sales leader at G two Oli, he was actually very good, but I'd learned that at big machines because big machines, I tried to hire a couple proven VPs of sales way too early,
(21:48):
And they came from big companies like Oracle and frankly they just couldn't scale down. And so I think your first sales leader is really hard because I think you still want player or coach and Olivier was that he'd get on calls with people, close deals, really just teach 'em how to close more deals. And later, I think it's only later, once you're scaling to multiple teams, when you really want a more mature sales leader that can also drive process and systems. Because at the beginning I think it's more passion and rapid iteration and let's just hop on calls and close deals. I think that's kind of the first sales leader you want, but not until you've figured out yourself as a founding team how to sell the product.
Arun (22:27):
Right. G two is interesting because a lot of your customer base is here in Silicon Valley software companies, but the companies actually headquartered in Chicago. Can you talk about, and a lot of the team now is distributed with a base in Chicago. Can you talk through the evolution of building in Chicago, selling everywhere, how the team is organized and just how you think about geographic concentration in today's world
Godard (22:52):
And over half our customers, G two R in the Silicon Valley. And so we're doing customer dinner here in San Francisco tonight, so we love that. But gt, we started in Chicago mainly because we were there and it was an interesting story. 2003, I'd started big machines in the valley, but three years in when we were almost bankrupt, my co-founder Chris, who I'd recruited from Chicago to come out here, he actually decided to go back to Chicago because I had promised him, Hey, we're going to do an IPO and you have a mansion in Atherton instead. Three years in, he's living in a crappy rental town home in Foster City, and he and his wife had two daughters and they're like, we want to go back to Chicago, buy a house, have a better lifestyle. And frankly, we also realized we had to go to Bootstrap. It was interesting. We raised venture burned through it with nothing to show for it. So then we had to go bootstrap, so we decided to go to Chicago to do that. At the time, that was very contrarian, but it actually really worked. We were able to hire all these smart young people from University of Illinois or Northwestern, and frankly in Chicago, there's no Silicon Valley.
(23:50):
So we had a unique employee value prop. And then when we started G two, we just rolled with that. We took the best talent. I think even today still G two, I dunno, there's maybe five or 10 unicorns in Chicago. And so we do have I think a more differentiated employee value prop. And that has worked great for us. And I think over half our US team is in and around Chicago and we've been able to continue to attract great talent there,
Arun (24:14):
Spread a lot of loyalty, which I think is reflected
Godard (24:16):
True. People do stick longer and obviously you've seen this with Accel where now startups are being built everywhere. It's also what's cool about G two, obviously companies, FreshWorks, I know you're an early investor with Garish, but I think they were started in Chennai,
Arun (24:28):
In Chennai
Godard (24:28):
In India, and we have now an office in Bangalore. And so we see so many amazing startups now being built, obviously in India. We also have an office in London. We were talking about Synthesia, another Accel company, and they started in London. So I think today it's well known, you can build anywhere, but obviously Silicon Valley is still the hub. And so it's important I think to have a presence here. And I think especially on the go-to-market side, if you're selling to tech as we are, then I think you do want some feet on the street. And obviously we come out here, we do events, go to Dreamforce, so you still have to be part of the community, but I don't think you necessarily have to be based here anymore.
Arun (25:00):
Maybe a reason to have Silicon Valley investors too
Godard (25:03):
True
Arun (25:03):
To give you some connectivity.
Godard (25:04):
True. And I do think that's still very true. I mean, most of the capital is here in the valley because even I look at Chicago, I mean I think there's probably a hundred times the capital here in the investors here. And if you want to go global, I do think having a global investor like Accel is wonderful because I know we're actually going to one of your events in Bangalore, our Bangalore office leader now, he's going to be there. And so you also have a global community, same thing in London. And as part of how I got hooked up with Synthesia and they made me an avatar, but also being part of the Accel family globally I think is a big advantage. Most of those global investors also, like Salesforce Ventures for example, they've invested in all our companies, including G two, they're out here. So I do think as a founder at a minimum, you're going to have to spend some time here,
Arun (25:47):
Right? That's right. Well, let's look forward a little bit. It feels like we're on the precipice of a real platform shift with ai, and that's exciting. You've been through a few of these transitions.com to cloud and SaaS mobile, now it's ai. Walk us through a little bit of the where G two fits in this new world order and how you are integrating AI into your own core business today.
Godard (26:15):
And I do think AI is the most exciting shift. I remember the first Netscape browser launched in 1995, I think as my first job as a consultant. And I remember for a couple of years it actually made me seem smart because a lot of people didn't know the browser existed. Just having the power of online information, that was amazing. But I do think AI is probably even bigger. And of course it builds on the foundation of the internet, and I think we all know it's been trained on all the knowledge, all the information that's available online. And now you can in a middle second synthesize all that information, apply it to get smarter, and now obviously apply it in agents to drive workflows. So we're just so excited about this massive opportunity at G two. And of course also all our customers are innovating. We do work closely, obviously with big companies like Salesforce that's now all about Agent Force or ServiceNow.
(27:03):
That's all about powering agentic workflows for the enterprise. And many startups like Synesthesia that are creating these amazing avatars. And so G two has a massive opportunity to validate that ai. And I think where businesses outside the valley are still skeptical, they're like, Hey, is this hype or is it real? Can I trust the ai? Is it going to hallucinate? Can I put business critical processes on ai? Is AI ready? And obviously there's a huge opportunity for GI G two to validate that. And we have a new thought leader, Tim Sanders, who's really the master AI evangelist, and he looks at all the data we're getting on G two and now we're asking reviewers questions like, what business outcomes are you actually driving with ai? What results are you getting? And for example, with customer support and service, that's probably one of the best use cases we're seeing on G two. And obviously companies also like Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud, tons of startups, all automating service processes. But we're also asking reviewers now, what percent case deflection are you actually achieving? And what's exciting, I mean, some people are reporting now up to 90% ai automated case resolution, and obviously we're able to put the trusted G two brand on that
(28:14):
And really validate these AI use cases and help buyers make more confident buying decisions. So there's that really natural opportunity for us. We've spun up, I think, close to 50 AI categories now, and we've also, in all of our legacy categories, every vendor is adding AI as core features. So we're also asking every reviewer, now, are you using those AI features? What use cases are you automating with ai? What results are you seeing? What challenges are you seeing? So we really want to be trusted, place, trusted data on AI adoption in the enterprise, and that's creating a natural massive opportunity. And then there's also a threat with G two because we did build our business on Google,
Speaker 3 (28:54):
And
Godard (28:55):
I mentioned this early on, figuring out SEO was so critical because that was for the first few years, that was our primary channel of user acquisitions. And now we have over a million people signed up with G two. And the good news is now half our audience is actually owned, so repeat visitors coming to G two because they know our brand or we're bringing them back with digest software trends, hottest new AI tools. But we also see the threat because as less people go to Google search, and maybe they're starting in chat GPT, maybe they're starting in perplexity, they're doing LLM or AI based search. And so now we're also re-imagining G two, so how can we be even more relevant in the AI era
Arun (29:36):
Rather than a selection of ideas? Users just want the answer.
Godard (29:41):
And now if you ask, let's say Gemini best CRM software, it'll give you an AI summary
(29:46):
Right on top of the Google search. And that is having somewhat of an adverse effect I think on all websites where I think overall click-through rates are down about 25%. And so we are seeing that on some of our organic and SEO at G two. Of course, on the flip side, there's a massive opportunity, especially on sites like perplexity, they do provide attribution where you can see which websites are they getting the content from, or Google is sometimes doing this in their AI search results where they're showing you what are the top three websites, content sources they're referencing. And so we are now retiming all the G two content to also show up at the top of the AI LLMs with attribution. And we're also experimenting with new tools like Profound where we can really prove the AI influence. And I think there's new tools being created where you can say, let's say that query CRM software that G two is well ideally the top influencer of the results in that query. So we're having to also reeducate marketers on how G two can be actually even more important in the age of ai.
Arun (30:51):
It sounds like we've spent the last 12 years building an incredible brand and this data asset of qualitative data that's just impossible to get anywhere else. And now we're going to leverage AI to both fuel additional review creation and feedback creation, but also find ways to disseminate that across the web through a lot of different modalities, whether that's on our site, whether that's through perplexity or some other tool, whether that's through agents, and that's just going to propagate all this information that's valuable information everywhere. So we're going to be where the buyer needs us or wants us to be, which is really exciting. I mean,
Godard (31:35):
That's a whole new opportunity.
Arun (31:36):
It's a whole new opportunity,
Godard (31:37):
But any of the shift, it's also a threat. I was like, if you're a company in the late nineties and you didn't launch a.com website eventually you probably got Amazon and went out of business. And I think AI is a moment like that. I think we seize today. We can't provide much better software buying experiences, seller experiences, much better insights. But of course if we don't innovate and this is true for everyone now
Arun (31:57):
Execute and innovate
Godard (31:58):
Exactly, then we would fall behind. But I'm really excited to reimagine G two in the age of ai, and I think also back to the agents, but I think these agents can inherently talk to each other. And so it'll be just as easy if it's an agent in the future that's working on behalf of the buyer, that agent will just be able to talk to our agent. And that's where people are talking about ENT workflows. Maybe the G two agent is referenced two or three times in a large buying workflow, and then the buyer just gets synthesized automated information. They probably just have to approve it, yes, by this software. And that decision's going to be based on all this trusted data G two and our agent is also feeding back to the buying agent.
Arun (32:39):
Super exciting. Yeah. Goda, anything else that you think is worth sharing with the audience entrepreneurs that are on earlier in their career in ARC than you were? Any other lessons you think worth sharing?
Godard (32:51):
Yeah, now since you and I are talking everyone, I think also choosing your investors wisely, obviously if you can. And sometimes as a first time entrepreneur and I had this, you kind of just take whatever money you can get. But I also feel fortunate at G two, I have a great board, and Arun, you were actually our first real Silicon Valley institutional investor at G two, and you've been a great guide now for the past eight years. And I think that's something for entrepreneurs to keep in mind. Oftentimes they say it's like a marriage and already eight years. I think the average marriage in the US apparently is only seven years.
Arun (33:21):
It's harder to get out of this relationship
Godard (33:22):
Than marriage. Exactly. And so I think you really want to have investors that can one, be a good guide. There's always a lot of ups and downs and challenges in entrepreneurship. So I think you want investors that'll have empathy, and I truly have a long-term perspective. They're not expecting you to exit in a year because also good exits I think come when they come. So I think you want patient advisors that can be committed to advising you for many years. And then I do also really like with Accel, also having a global partner, and obviously the marketplace for building a G two for software and AI is inherently global. And so if you can also find investors that can give you scale globally, ideally, and also your portfolio is amazing, but sometimes they'll ask for CMO intros and also at the beginning, but really having investors that will roll their sleeves up with you, help you build a business. I think that is critical for any entrepreneur if you're going to build for the long term, you really need partners that can guide you and help you along the way.
Arun (34:18):
Well, we're grateful for the partnership cutter.
Godard (34:21):
Yeah, thank you Arun.
