Gartner ($IT) podcast mentions
Ed Elson, our fastest growing property is Prophecy Markets. Ed has become central to that. Raging Moderates gets the most video views of any of our property, and that's Jess Tarlov. So the only way to ensure they're gonna stick around is to give them equity and a vision for how we add enterprise value. I'm constantly thinking about how we diversify away from yours truly. Now, what probably happens if we are ever to sell ProfG to a larger agency or a larger entity is that I will have to sign up, as will some of the other employees, for what is a fairly onerous employment agreement that says, say they buy us for, I call it, you know, $100, that some money upfront, but the rest is on not an earnout based on EBITDA, but an earnout based on tenure. And that is you're not going anywhere. When Gartner bought L2 for $100 and I think they bought it for $158 million, we got, I think, 40 or 50% of it upfront. And then the other 50% over 3 years.
Scott Galloway · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · The $40 Trillion National Debt, and the Trade-Offs of Living With Your Parents · 2026-09-16You know, G2 was founded around the idea of creating the highest form of intelligence for buyers of software. G2 stands for the highest form of military intelligence, for example. The original name of the company was G2 crowd. The belief was the crowd, those people writing reviews, the community, the peers, are the best way to generate the highest form of intelligence. At the time, our founders were struck by the, if you will, pay-to-play model of analyst firms like Gartner and how difficult it was for a software company to establish trust with the buyer and actually become successful as they added more and more capabilities. So that was the driving motivation. And today, when you look at how the agents at Frontier Labs like ChatGPT, so OpenAI ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini, when you think about their logic today, um, they absolutely love human natural language as expressed in reviews. They love the idea that a company like G2 has reviews to scale, and as a result, we become the dominant player, um, in driving AI search results when you're trying to buy software. We're often going to be the most cited third third party when recommending the answer, which just illustrates over more than a decade of work how far G2's come. I would say though, Craig, that, you know, we had the founding mission to provide this, this highest level of intelligence for the buyer. And let me tell you where we are today. I hear a lot about this in our meetings. G2's new mission is to become the trust layer for the age of artificial intelligence. And that's where we are right now. We want to help buyers and owners and users establish trust in artificial intelligence, especially as agents and autonomous computing come online and offer people a breakthrough in business results. Not 30%, not 40%, but what we're hearing now, 2x, 5x, 10x in certain situations. Only if they trust it though. And trust is a hard thing.
Tim Sanders · Eye On A.I. · The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 2026-09-14That's right. We've added a little bit with the acquisition of Gartner Digital Markets, which involved the brands Capterra, Software Advice, and GitApp.
Tim Sanders · Eye On A.I. · The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 2026-09-14Yeah, what are those three and what is your relationship with Gartner? I mean, do they use your reviews? Do they refer to your reviews?
Craig Smith · Eye On A.I. · The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 2026-09-14Nope. We just made an acquisition of three of their properties, which were rolled up in a property called Gartner Digital Markets, and we completed the acquisition February of 2026. Gartner continues to be an analyst firm. They still own the review site Peer Insights, which their analysts use. But we bought the other elements of that business. Capterra's leading software review site, probably top 3 or top 4 prior to the acquisition, depending on how you want to count it. SoftwareAdvice, fascinating service. If you're buying software, you can call a 1-800 number and have a conversation with an expert that will help configure for you the exact solution you're looking for. We think that's a great layer of intelligence to feed trust. And then GetApp really focuses on startups, very small businesses in terms of how they buy software to fuel their companies. And it also promotes startups and small businesses that are just coming online trying to compete with the incumbents.
Tim Sanders · Eye On A.I. · The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 2026-09-14yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. So it's a huge AEO, answer engine optimization, huge industry. But I want to make a distinction here. The purchase recommendation use case is the only use case G2 is concerned with because we sell marketing services to help software companies drive purchase, right? There's many use cases on ChatGPT. You could do fact lookup, You could do document summary, you could be tool use, but purchase recommendation represents a unique risk to the user. OpenAI researchers call this your money, your life. So when it comes to things like medical advice or purchase recommendations, OpenAI, and for that matter, Google Gemini, they don't just rely on pattern recognition, matching the natural language in the prompt to natural language on a website. That's what many companies are retooling to do is to have all that language on their website to win the pattern match. You may win in a variety of use cases, but when it comes to the purchase recommendation, both of the models I mentioned, ChatGPT and Gemini, enter into a process called validation layer work at inference. What does that mean? They are validating that the entity that they're about to recommend is not going to lead to a regrettable purchase. How do they do that? They look for trust signals from high authority sources, usually with strong underlying data. One thing I would share is there's a fantastic study out there by a company called First Page Sage. And First Page Sage, they broke down that algorithm for how the agent at ChatGPT is thinking at inference time about validation. And so as you can see here, 41% of the weights that drive a software company being recommended is their appearance and quite frankly, their ranking on authoritative lists. Lists. Another 18% is driven by awards, accreditation, 16% by online reviews. Um, all of those are third party. They can't be generated by a vendor. They must be acquired. Now, what are the authoritative lists? They could be review site lists like G2's Best of Software Awards. Last year, uh, we had an— we did an audit for where our citations came from. 60% of our citations came from the Best of Software Awards and all the best of category pages across G2. Okay. Other sources could be authoritative lists published by analyst firms, Gartner, Forrester, right?
Tim Sanders · Eye On A.I. · The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 2026-09-14Yeah. Why? Yeah. Anybody that can influence your success is going to be seen as a gatekeeper. So yeah, I mean, I can't imagine that some wouldn't think of that if high authority lists were the biggest weight at test time, you know, to win the answer. And we know Gartner blocks AI. We know some of their winners post them at JQs. You know that a lot of publishers like tier 1 publishers, AP, Bloomberg, they block AI. We don't. Then, then, then yeah, we would be one of the ones that are going to influence your your success. That being said, we're not charging you for a review to be put on your website. We're charging you for services that make it easier for you to scale the, the volume and the recency of your reviews. Yeah, and it's a fine distinction. It's a fine distinction. But I would understand a vendor that would see us not as the G2 from, from years ago that you just wrote a bunch of reviews, but now a G2 that has a lot of marketing services that can help good go great.
Tim Sanders · Eye On A.I. · The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 2026-09-14It uses ring fencing to limit what approved applications can access, what processes they can launch, how they communicate. It uses web content control to manage access to public AI platforms and other online services. Privileged access management lets you prevent AI applications and their users from receiving unnecessary administrative privileges. Oh, ThreatLock has always been great at endpoint zero trust. Now they do zero trust network access and zero trust cloud access. And these policies are so helpful to restrict resources to just those people allowed to use them, the ones you explicitly authorize, to devices you explicitly approve, to applications you explicitly approve. Permit. You're in charge. And it works everywhere you do Windows, Macs, Linux. They've got great US-based support, 24/7 engineers who understand what's going on and can help you. And that's why ThreatLocker is trusted by the best, the biggest, the companies that can't afford to be attacked, can't afford to go down. Companies like JetBlue, they use ThreatLocker. Heathrow Airport uses ThreatLocker. The Indianapolis Colts the Port of Vancouver. Ask Jack Thompson. He's Director of Information Security, Risk and Compliance for the Indianapolis Colts. He said, quote, with ThreatLocker, we have the ability to centralize disparate elements in the security stack. They're all together. Centralization makes them visible. Visibility means we can defend. ThreatLocker has also recently received the following industry recognition. It's recognized as strong performer in the January 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for endpoint protection platforms, ranked number 1 in application control by PeerSpot, winner of the best zero-trust security solutions at the 2025 TICE Awards. AI governance is— it needs more than just, you know, an acceptable use policy. ThreatLocker gives security teams the technical controls to define which AI tools are approved, who and what can access them, and how those tools are allowed to interact with business systems. You need ThreatLocker. Visit threatlocker.com/twit to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com/twit. We thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. So, Oh, folding phone. Sexy, dead sexy, but dead expensive. $2,000 to start, over $3,000 if you load it up. I don't know who would put 2 terabytes of storage in there, but you could.
Leo Laporte · This Week in Tech (Audio) · Adversarial Clothing - The Dramatic Calls to Regulate Artificial Intelligence · 2026-09-14Actually, maybe one question for you, Ben, on just like how the industry has formed before intelligence came through. Like we're now measuring something that's very fluid versus before, like when we're talking about enterprise software, there's Gartner rating on like 70 different metrics. Like you can sort of stack rank on the quadrant to say this company has these features covered, these features not. But now it's like very jagged frontier. That's very hard to measure given industries. What do you see? One is the analogy to the past, that lessons we can borrow, and what do you see that's really going to be the challenge and missing pieces going forward?
Jennifer Lee · The a16z Show · Who Grades the AI Models? | Ben Horowitz & Rayan Krishnan · 2026-09-09