Chief Executive Officer · LeadGenius · Berkeley, CA

Mark Godley

CEO · LeadGenius · B2B Data Intelligence

The B2B data market runs on volume promises and underdelivers on precision. Mark Godley built LeadGenius around the opposite bet - that combining AI with a globally distributed network of human researchers would produce data that no crawler alone could replicate. Three billion records later, Google and Microsoft seem to agree.

3B+ Data Records Delivered
400+ Enterprise Clients
42 Countries Served
$31M Total Funding Raised
30+ Years SaaS Experience


Mark Godley's title says CEO. His résumé says something more specific: he's the executive who shows up when a company has a genuinely interesting product and needs someone who knows how to turn interesting into a real business. He calls himself a C-suite startup junkie. His career is the proof.

When Godley joined LeadGenius in July 2017 - initially as President, eventually stepping into the CEO seat - the company was a paradox. Born inside UC Berkeley's computer science department in 2011, it had cracked something difficult: using AI and a decentralized workforce of human researchers to gather the kind of niche B2B data that standard databases simply couldn't deliver. The clients were enthusiastic. The business model was not yet built to scale.

Godley had spent the prior decade in exactly the kind of roles that prepare someone to fix that. As Chief Revenue Officer at HG Data (now HG Insights), he led revenue growth at a technology intelligence platform. Before that, VP of Market Development at ConnectAndSell, a cloud sales productivity company. Before that, partnership and sales channel work at healthcare startup Aventura. Over 25 years in B2B technology, 20 of them specifically in sales and marketing tech. He knew the buyer. He knew the funnel. He knew what breaks at scale.

What he found at LeadGenius was a product that enterprise buyers - the hard-to-impress kind, the Microsoft and Google kind - were calling indispensable. One Microsoft client reported a 190x ROI. An Autodesk executive told the company: "You've made the sellers very happy, which makes me very happy." Godley's job was to build the infrastructure around that kind of result.

Under his leadership, LeadGenius pivoted from a service-heavy, manually-intensive operation to a genuine SaaS platform. The company's Flow product - a cross-functional tool automating manual data tasks for sales, marketing, and customer success teams - was adopted by approximately 900 users within its first year, representing 6x the user base of the prior enterprise application. That kind of adoption inside large organizations doesn't happen by accident.

"Data is the fuel of our economy. Our mission is helping companies gain competitive advantage in sales and marketing data acquisition."
- Mark Godley, CEO, LeadGenius
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Company Origin

LeadGenius started life as MobileWorks, a Y Combinator Summer 2011 startup built inside UC Berkeley's CS department. Ph.D. students combined AI and human computation to aggregate data from the open web. It was a crowdsourcing company before that word became a cliche.

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A First in Crowdsourcing

LeadGenius became the first crowdsourcing company to set a minimum wage for its workers tied to the cost of living in each country where they operate - a detail Godley has championed as a core company value, not an afterthought.


The Scoreboard

400+ Enterprise Clients
42 Countries Served
3B+ Data Records Delivered
$31M Total Funding Raised
190x Reported ROI (Microsoft Client)
6x App User Growth (Flow Launch)
900+ Flow Users - Year One
30+ Countries, Global Workforce

A Startup Junkie's Perfect Problem


Ask salespeople what they want from marketing, Godley often says, and they'll tell you: more leads. Give them more leads, and they'll swear you misheard them - what they actually need is qualified leads. This is not a new observation. What's new is that LeadGenius built infrastructure specifically designed to solve it.

The core proposition is deceptively simple: most B2B databases suffer from the same problems at the same time. They're broad but not deep. They're current on company names, stale on contacts, and completely blind to the kind of specific signals - role changes, buying committee movements, technographic data, niche market indicators - that separate a contact worth calling from one that wastes everyone's morning.

LeadGenius's approach is to not try to be a universal database. Instead, it builds custom datasets tuned to exactly what each client needs, sourced through a combination of AI-driven web crawling and human researchers who can find the signals that automated tools miss. The researchers aren't contractors in the traditional sense - they're part of a decentralized global workforce that LeadGenius has built with deliberate attention to fair wages and labor standards.

For Godley, this ethical dimension isn't separate from the business logic - it's part of it. A workforce that's paid fairly and structured sustainably produces better, more consistent data. The quality argument and the values argument point in the same direction.

From Service to Scale


When Godley arrived, LeadGenius was doing something hard and doing it well, but doing it mostly by hand. Every custom dataset required significant manual effort. The company's clients loved the results; the unit economics of producing them were challenging. Godley's strategic priority became clear: automate the repeatable, keep the human for what automation can't do.

The shift to enterprise-grade SaaS meant migrating target customers from early-stage startups to the organizations with the budgets, complexity, and appetite for precision data that LeadGenius's model could serve best. Amazon. Google. IBM. Microsoft. SAP. These are clients that have tried other data vendors, have been burned by inaccurate contact lists, and are willing to pay for something that works.

The investors who backed LeadGenius along the way include Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, Sierra Ventures, and notable angels including Sam Altman (now OpenAI CEO), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder), and Mitch Kapor. The company raised $31.33 million in total, with the most recent raise in September 2019.

By mid-2024, LeadGenius was reporting $5M in annual revenue with approximately 250 customers. For a company that competes on precision rather than volume, the trajectory reflects a specific kind of discipline - building for depth rather than breadth, and resisting the temptation to oversell what the product can actually deliver.

From Aventura to LeadGenius


2008 - 2012
Alliance, partnership, and sales channel management at healthcare startup Aventura. First deep exposure to the challenge of growing revenue inside specialized enterprise markets.
2012 - 2014
VP of Market Development at ConnectAndSell, a cloud-based sales productivity platform. Built market presence and go-to-market strategy for a company in the sales acceleration space.
2014 - 2017
Chief Revenue Officer at HG Data (now HG Insights), a technology intelligence platform. Led revenue growth, established enterprise sales motion, and sharpened expertise in data-driven GTM strategy.
2015 - 2017
Advisor at ZoomInfo, then an emerging contact intelligence platform. Parallel advisory roles at Omniquo, The Big Willow, and ZenIQ kept Godley close to the martech and salestech ecosystem.
July 2017
Appointed President of LeadGenius following the company's Series B round. Brings 25+ years of B2B technology leadership to a company that had cracked a hard technical problem but needed enterprise-grade scale.
2017 - Present
Steps into the CEO role at LeadGenius. Drives pivot to SaaS, launches Flow product (900+ users in year one), signs enterprise clients including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Box, and Autodesk. Reaches 400+ enterprise customers across 42 countries.
2024
LeadGenius reports $5M in revenue with 250+ customers. The company delivers 3 billion+ data records and operates a global researcher network spanning 30+ countries with GDPR and CCPA-compliant data practices.

What He Actually Says

Data is the fuel of our economy. Our mission is helping companies gain competitive advantage in sales and marketing data acquisition.
- Mark Godley, LeadGenius CEO
I'm excited to join LeadGenius for many reasons, from its unique data-based solution based on its community of researchers, to its customers that are rabid fans.
- On joining LeadGenius, GlobeNewswire (2017)
Ask a salesperson what they want from marketing and they will say more leads. Give them more leads and they will swear you misheard them - they need qualified leads.
- Sales Pipeline Radio
It's a blessing and a curse. Vendors previously offered single solutions, but the ability to get granular has now allowed specialty vendors to augment traditional data with more qualitative information.
- On the B2B data market, DemandGen Radio

What He's Built


01 Enterprise Scale: Grew LeadGenius to 400+ enterprise customers across 42 countries, with clients including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Box, Square, eBay, and Autodesk.
02 SaaS Transformation: Led multi-year automation initiative converting a service-heavy operation into a scalable SaaS platform with genuine enterprise infrastructure.
03 Flow Product Launch: Launched the Flow product, which reached 900+ users in its first year - a 6x increase over the prior enterprise application's user base.
04 Ethical Data Pioneer: Championed LeadGenius as the first crowdsourcing company to set worker minimum wages tied to cost of living by country - a model that improves data quality and labor standards simultaneously.
05 3 Billion Records: Oversaw the delivery of more than 3 billion custom data records, sourced through an AI and human-intelligence hybrid model built for precision over volume.
06 USC Guest Lecturer: Award-winning guest lecturer in undergraduate business at USC - bringing practitioner-level perspective on sales, marketing, and SaaS growth to students.

Where He Studied

Villanova University
B.A. in Marketing - the foundation for a career spent understanding how buyers think and where revenue comes from.
Undergraduate
UC Berkeley - Haas School of Business
Executive Graduate Program: Increasing Sales Force Productivity. Practical application of organizational theory to enterprise sales challenges.
Executive Education
University of Chicago - Booth School of Business
Executive Business Series in Sales & Marketing. Rigorous frameworks for commercial strategy at enterprise scale.
Executive Education

The Ecosystem He Shapes

Beyond LeadGenius, Godley has been an active advisor and board member across the salestech and martech ecosystem - bringing the same pattern-recognition he developed across 25+ years of B2B technology to companies building adjacent to the space.

Omniquo ZenIQ The Big Willow ZoomInfo (Advisor) HIMSS Analytics (Board) Matchbox.io (Board) Vervoe

Worth Knowing

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LeadGenius started as MobileWorks in 2011, built inside UC Berkeley's CS department by Ph.D. students who were trying to solve global data aggregation. Y Combinator funded it that summer.
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Early LeadGenius investors include Sam Altman (now OpenAI CEO), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder), Mitch Kapor, and Andreessen Horowitz. Not a bad cap table for a Berkeley CS experiment.
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Godley is an award-winning guest lecturer in undergraduate business at USC. His students get practitioner-level curriculum on enterprise sales and SaaS growth that most business courses don't cover.
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LeadGenius is the first crowdsourcing company to tie its worker minimum wage to the cost of living in each country where researchers work - not a flat global rate, but a locally-calibrated floor per market.
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A single Microsoft client reported a 190x ROI from LeadGenius - with new business logos closing within 14 days of receiving the contact data. That number travels well in enterprise sales conversations.
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Godley calls himself a C-suite startup junkie. His career arc - Aventura, ConnectAndSell, HG Data, LeadGenius - reads like a deliberate education in every phase of the B2B revenue machine.

The Landscape He Works In

B2B Data Intelligence Sales Intelligence Lead Generation GDPR Compliance CCPA Compliance Account-Based Marketing Data Enrichment Demand Generation Human-in-the-Loop AI SaaS Enterprise Software Crowdsourcing Go-to-Market Strategy Sales Automation Data Quality Privacy-First Data Contact Intelligence Machine Learning Ethical Data Sourcing Technographics Buying Committee Identification CRM Integration Information Technology Decision-Maker Data Sales Pipeline Growth Global B2B Contact Data Personalized Outreach Data Compliance Role Change Signals Market Segmentation

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