Godard Abel

Godard Abel is a serial entrepreneur and investor in the technology industry. He is the current co-founder and chairman of G2 Crowd.

Abel was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany to Goerdt and Maria Abel. His paternal grandfather, Wilhelm Abel, ran Dusseldorf Waterworks during World War II before starting his own company, Abel Pumps. At the age of nine, Abel’s family relocated to Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where his father had plans to set up a subsidiary of Abel Pumps. Abel attended Sewickley Academy where he served as the business manager for the school newspaper, and spent his childhood summers in Germany.

Abel went on to receive his B.S. and master’s in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also joined the rowing team and was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. After graduation, Abel worked for McKinsey & Co. as a business analyst before attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business

While at Stanford, Abel joined Alyanza, a startup specializing in time and expense software. Alyanza was eventually acquired by the Niku Corp., a professional service automation software company, in 1998. Abel stayed as a general manager at Niku Corp. before selling his shares after the company went public in February 2000.

In 2000, Abel co-founded the software company BigMachines in Chicago with his fraternity brother Christopher Shutts. BigMachines is a cloud-based configure, price, quote software designed to help manufacturing and technology companies pick the correct combination of features for customers and price products correctly, merging all elements to generate one final proposal. Abel ran the company for over 11 years before selling a majority stake to Vista Equity Partners and JMI Equity in 2011, who eventually sold BigMachines to Oracle Corporation for over $400 million.

Following a short retirement, Abel returned to the quote-to-cash space after meeting Max Rudman, founder of SteelBrick, in late 2013. Abel first became interested in SteelBrick after it popped up on the radar of his venture, G2 Crowd, eventually investing $5 million into Rudman’s company. Abel would go on to become SteelBrick’s primary backer and CEO, helping grow the global team from five to 200 employees. During Abel’s time with SteelBrick, the company raised $78 million in venture capital before being acquired by Salesforce in 2016 for $360 million.

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