Apr 29, 2022 · 33m · top-founders
This Founder Built 3 SaaS Companies, hit $40m ARR 3 times. Here's how
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
At a live SaaS founder conference hosted by Nathan Latka, serial entrepreneur and G2 CEO Godard Abel outlines the tactical playbooks, ecosystem partnerships, and conscious leadership strategies that enabled him to scale three software companies to multi-million dollar exits and unicorn status.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 6.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 0.6 Guest teaching 0.4 Guest disagreement 0.4 Nathan pushing back 0.5
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 6:25 Godard's rejection of traditional industry analysts
Godard jokingly tells audience members who love Gartner to leave the room and compares analysts to food critics who cannot actually eat the food.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 4:43 Nathan demands hard metricsNathan cuts into Godard's opening presentation to insist on revealing his exact equity share and G2's current ARR before allowing the storytelling to continue.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 22:45 Godard explains the danger of broad product scopeGodard educates the audience on why multi-feature startup pitches fail, sharing his own costly mistakes trying to launch fifty features simultaneously.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 4:43 Nathan anchors the presentation to revenue and ownershipNathan exerts host control by extracting specific operational benchmarks ($80M ARR and equity ownership) from Godard.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome and In-Person Founder Event Announcement | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | Nathan introduces the live event and interrupts Godard's opening remarks to demand exact equity ownership and ARR figures. Godard responds candidly and banters playfully about Nathan's direct interviewing style. | |
| Founding G2: Modernizing B2B Software Evaluation | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | Godard delivers a stage keynote detailing his critique of Gartner's analyst model and his early struggles scaling Big Machines through the dot-com crash. Nathan interjects briefly with a humorous comment about sponsors. | |
| Hypergrowth at SteelBrick: Scaling to $60M ARR | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | This is a solo keynote segment where Godard recounts how SteelBrick achieved hypergrowth from $1M to $60M ARR and was acquired by Salesforce. There is no host interaction. | |
| Founderpath SaaS Valuation Tool Advertisement | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Nathan delivers a mid-roll advertisement for Founderpath valuation tools before Godard resumes his stage talk explaining the cold-start problem of review platforms. | |
| Lesson 2: Hyper-Focus, Sales Enablement, and Strategic M&A | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Godard presents on sales enablement, avoiding overly broad product scope, and using strategic partnerships to drive M&A. Monologue format with no host interaction. | |
| Lesson 3: Developing Talent and Global Teams | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Godard shares his philosophy on building an entrepreneurial family, hiring young talent, and cultivating intentional company culture. Monologue presentation. | |
| Lesson 5: Scaling Leadership and the Office of the CEO | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Godard explains scaling leadership past 500 employees, replacing co-founders when necessary, and adopting Salesforce's V2MOM alignment framework. Monologue presentation. | |
| Lesson 7: Conscious Leadership and Founder Wellbeing | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Godard discusses mental health, conscious leadership coaching, and applying Netflix's keeper test to manage high-performing teams before concluding his talk. |
Statements from this episode (21)
BigMachines took 12 years to become a Gartner category leader.
“But they're just slow, because I remember my first company, Big Machines, it took me nine years to get into Gartner Report, and 12 years to become the leader.”
Abel: Legacy software analysts don't use the software they evaluate
“You know, I said it's like a restaurant critic that literally can't eat the food, right? The analyst can't use the software, and they just stand outside the restaurant asking other people, how is your meal? And I'd rather ask the people eating the meal, right?…”
BigMachines raised $20 million in year one based purely on internet hype.
“We were able to raise twenty million dollars the first year, just based on hype and the internet, and back then, VCs were not so critical. Like, there were no metrics, there was nothing. You just kind of had hype and a vision.”
BigMachines burned $19 million to generate just $1 million in revenue.
“In 2003, we kind of had our come to Jesus moment, because my co-founder and I, Chris, we sat down, we're like we have a million dollars left, we burned through 19. We only had a million dollars in revenue”
Godard Abel scaled SteelBrick from $1M to $60M ARR in two years.
“But then, and at the time Max's original product had about a million ARR.
And then in two years we scaled it.
Actually we beat that plan.
That was a plan, but we scaled it to sixty million in two years and got acquired by Salesforce.”
Abel: SteelBrick Hit Sales Plan for 17 Consecutive Quarters
“Steelbrick we never missed.
It was while I was running it, I think it was 17 quarters in a row.
First as a startup and then inside the Salesforce.”
G2 bootstrapped its first 1,000 reviews by handing out $5 Starbucks cards.
“And I think our first, we launched it at Dreamforce, we just put out a booth, because we decided to start with Salesforce and partner apps, but, and then we were just handing out five dollar startups, Starbucks cards, like, hey, please write a review, and we d…”
Abel: Slack ranked number one on G2 without paying a penny
“Like Slack has been number one on G-II for many years. They've never paid us a penny, to my frustration.”
Godard Abel predicts the software market will 10x over 30 years.
“And the good news for us, I think it's going to continue another 30 years. And this is, I think, some battery ventures data. But it's, you know, the market's going to 10 X again.”
G2 reviews power AWS, Azure, and IBM Red Hat cloud marketplaces.
“But I think partnering also with Giants, we partner with AWS Marketplace. We partner with Microsoft Azure. We partner with IBM Red Hat. So three of the four largest cloud marketplaces in the world are now powered by G-II reviews.”
Abel: The best acquisition strategy is partnering before buying
“I also think the best way to make acquisitions happen is to partner first, and certainly that's what Salesforce does, you get to know each other, you actually make sure your products work together, do customers love them together, and then it can lead to very …”
Half of SteelBrick's 200 employees were Godard Abel's former BigMachines staff.
“I think of the 200 people we had when Salesforce acquired us, over a hundred were with us at Big Machines, and they were totally dialed in.”
Abel: Hiring Young Generalists Beats Using Recruiters
“You just hire young, smart people, and then see who grows with you, and that's a much better way than using recruiters”
Godard Abel internally positioned SteelBrick rival Apttus as 'the bad guys.'
“In high level, we just said, we're the good guys, and we had a competitor. Well, I didn't use their name anymore, Aptus. They were the bad guys.”
Godard Abel replaced G2's entire executive team upon reaching 500 employees.
“I brought in a whole new leadership team the last year, new chief product officer, Sarah, new chief revenue officer, Mike, new CMO, Amanda, new chief people officer, and I'm looking for a CFO, so I've kind of found, wow, once we hit five, 600 people, it just,
…”
Marc Benioff maintains a 30-person Office of the Chairman at Salesforce.
“And he's got a whole office of the chairman, like, 30 people, chief of staff, that just helped him drive his initiatives and his impact.”
Abel: Every employee and leader in a startup is ultimately replaceable
“And I've always found, you know, everyone is replaceable ultimately.”