While visiting Silicon Slopes this year (2019) I had the opportunity to hear from and meet many accomplished entrepreneurs. Of course many of which were Silicon Valley successes as well as some of the more local entrepreneurs that presented in the main room and the smaller breakout sessions.

One of the breakout sessions that stuck with me was one featuring Godard Abel describing his success story and his current venture, G2. He also gave a lot of great advice for others following the pursuit of entrepreneurship.

Godard Abel’s Story and Current Venture

Godard briefly told us about Steel Brick and BigMachines which are two companies Godard has built and grown through the acquisition process. Steel Brick being acquired by Salesforce for about 360 million dollars and BigMachines being acquired by Oracle for about 400 million dollars. More details about the acquisitions can be found here here from Business Insider and here from Venture Beat.

His newest venture G2, is a service platform to provide a standardized review and metrics of B2B software and services.

G2’s attractive interface is much like Gartner’s reviews but with live data and a nicer interface. I have been enjoying exploring what the platform has to offer and seeing where others rank some of the products we use for our businesses. Give it a whirl here and see what you think.

The G2 team has already received over 100 million in funding and am looking forward to see how the platform can get any better. Given Godard’s track record, we expect a future acquisition on the horizon. I’ll be sure to get my G2’s before deciding to use any business software.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

Commit to the Sale

Committing to the sale means to me that you are already sold and now you are just sharing with the world what you are dying to get out. Reflecting back from the good old days of door to door sales, you have to get used to endless door slams and people saying no over and over again. Once you get over that part, the fear of failure and rejection, you can start to have fun with it.

The way I see it, the world is one big science project, so following the scientific method for me has always been key: Observe, question, measure, and research. Then you can start to form your hypothesis, then the fun part.. the experiment, after which you should analyze and realize your findings, refine, and repeat.

Sell with Passion

Passion comes from spending a lot of time with something, failing a lot and that’s when you start to form a skill. Your new skill gives you new found momentum and excitement that you want to share with others. For me that’s hard to fake and thus it is typically easy to detect when others are lacking true passion.

Build a Winning Team

As many of you that have been involved in start-ups, I don’t have to tell you about all the hard work and dedication it takes to get your business off the ground. There comes a point when there is only so much you can do in a day/week and you find the need to start finding specialists to trust with the delegation of certain sectors of the business. One quote comes to mind, though I am not sure where it originates.. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Take Care of Yourself

Obviously this is a big one. It’s easy to get lost in the vision of something and other neglect areas of your life. Sometimes that’s necessary to get traction and switch to a new routine. But there is a balance to all things and when you start to get off kilter, there is a point of diminishing returns.

I like to think of managing my day/week/month to fulfill my needs within the social, physical, work, and fun aspects of life. This is an important topic and there is much to discuss and so I may dive a little deeper into this in a later post if I see the need or have requests in the future.

Godard gave many great insights in his break-out session, which I will include and expand on in a later post.

Dan Newbold II