G2 Crowd, a leading B2B review platform, announced that three of the company’s original founders are stepping into new leadership roles to advance the company to its next level of growth and market leadership.
Co-founder Godard Abel will return to the role of chief executive officer of G2 Crowd. This will be the third tech venture he has built and led as CEO, having previously created cloud market leaders BigMachines, which was acquired by Oracle in 2013, and Steelbrick which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Abel remained with Salesforce as SVP & GM of CPQ and led SteelBrick’s integration to make it one of Salesforce most successful acquisitions, before returning to G2 Crowd last summer as executive chairman.
“We’re thrilled to see the world embracing the transparency G2 Crowd is bringing to B2B technology buying,” said Abel. “Every month millions of buyers are coming to G2 Crowd to inform their business purchasing decisions with authentic peer reviews. Matt and I are pumped to come back together and work closely with our co-founders Tim, Mark, and Mike to lead the company to hyper-growth and market leadership.”
Co-founder, TIm Handorf, who successfully led G2 Crowd to market leadership over the past four years as CEO, will now become the company’s president and lead the product, engineering, design, research, as well as people and culture functions.
“I am excited to continue the journey we began more than five years ago and create a new buying process for the B2B marketplace,” said Handorf. “As we enter this new phase of growth at G2 Crowd, our founding team has a terrific opportunity to come back together to lead to our rapidly accelerating venture to the next level.”
Co-founder Matt Gorniak is returning to G2 Crowd as the chief revenue officer. For the past two years, he served as SVP of Global Quote-to-Cash Sales at Salesforce and turned SteelBrick into one of Salesforce’s fastest growing acquisitions ever. Gorniak touts a long history of experience and accomplishment as Abel’s business partner on building and driving the ultimate success of their prior ventures SteelBrick and BigMachines.
“The way businesses are selecting and buying technology has fundamentally changed and G2 Crowd is the platform where it is happening,” said Gorniak. “I am extremely excited to return to G2 Crowd and help businesses around the world reach their full potential.”
This new leadership structure is designed to play to the natural strengths of G2 Crowd’s executive team, as well as help to scale the company more rapidly. In the first quarter of 2018, G2 Crowd’s revenue grew by more than 100 percent over the prior year, while dramatically accelerating organic traffic from tech buyers.
“We’re thrilled to see the original leadership team re-convene to amplify the company’s growth and momentum,” said Arun Mathew, partner at Accel and G2 Crowd board member. “Since we invested last year, we have seen the company’s growth and potential expand, and now we’re confident that we have the proven leadership in place to really go to the next level.”
