steelbrick
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Max Rudman Keeps Fixing the Software Behind the Sale
He built SteelBrick into Salesforce CPQ, then returned to the deployment problem hiding underneath it. The useful lesson is not the exit - it is Rudman's habit of narrowing the problem until an engineer can actually ship the answer.
Godard Abel
Godard Abel is the co-founder and CEO of G2, the software review platform that brought Yelp-style peer reviews to enterprise software buying. A third-generation entrepreneur born in Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, he built and sold two SaaS companies before G2: BigMachines (acquired by Oracle for a reported $400M+) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce). At G2 he has raised more than $260M, weathered a near-bankruptcy earlier in his career, and is now steering the company through the AI wave with its buying agent Monty and the 2026 acquisition of Gartner's Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice.