The “In Their Own Words” series is a collection of short columns from some of Chicago’s most influential tech leaders. After a tumultuous 2020—with a global pandemic, civil unrest and a turbulent economy—Inno wanted to give Chicago's tech community an opportunity to reflect on the highs and lows of the last 12 months, and share how they're working smarter and better in the next 12. Each columnist was asked to answer the question: How are you and your company preparing for 2021?
For more columns like this, scroll to the end of the story.
I’ve been an entrepreneur building cloud software businesses since 1998, and I’ve never experienced anything like the roller coaster ride of 2020.
I recall the dot com crash of 2000 and the subsequent 9/11-induced recession almost putting our first company, BigMachines, out of business in the early 2000s, as well as the 2008 financial crisis creating extreme uncertainty and angst for our customers.
But I’ve never seen such a sudden shift in how we work as we all went to remote almost overnight, and such whiplash in the technology financing markets, with both VC and public market investors panicking and valuations plummeting in March and April, only to rebound to record highs in December.
Like many, we made difficult changes at G2 to adapt, including letting go of valued team members early in the year and shifting to an efficient “smart growth” strategy to ensure we could survive the economic storm. Our team and customers went through much anxiety as it was very uncertain how our business and world would come through the pandemic, social inequality and a contentious election.
I now feel so much gratitude for the stellar progress we were able to make together as a G2 team and community in 2020 in spite of these severe challenges and difficult changes. We adapted incredibly well as a team by focusing on living our PEAK values, and taking care of each other and our G2 customers.
We were fortunate that the growth of our industry of cloud software was even accelerated as businesses needed digital tools more than ever. After a tough Q1, we were able to grow our traffic and revenue faster than planned in the second half of the year. As a result we reached positive cash flow for the first time ever and are now back to hiring talent around the world.
We’re hopeful the whole world and economy will return to good health in 2021. We’re optimistic as we plan for accelerating our revenue growth in 2021. We’re planning to invest and hire over 100 people around the world to help us scale our product and customer success teams.
In 2021, we plan to accelerate our innovations to deliver more value and software-buying insights to our G2 users. We plan to also help our G2 vendor customers grow faster by amplifying their customers’ success stories and connecting vendors with more software buyers. We’re bringing together our G2 Track and G2 Marketplace solutions to help businesses optimize their software stacks and discover the best apps for their employees.
We’re adding to our global leadership team to help us scale towards becoming a meaningful, public-scale company, and realize our vision of truly becoming “the place you go for software."
