Mark Granovsky

Founder & CEO G2Planet

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Mark Granovsky is the founder and chief executive of G2Planet, a Minneapolis company that builds software for running large corporate event programmes. He started it in May 2000 — during the NASDAQ crash, and a year before the September 11 attacks upended the events business — on the strength of a frustration he had experienced directly. Working in enterprise software sales and marketing, he had both attended and helped launch corporate conferences, and understood that companies spending enormous sums on events had almost no systematic way to plan or measure them. His answer was the ‘Data Driven Enterprise Event Planning’ methodology, or DEEP, which remains the framework the company sells on: treating an event portfolio as a managed programme with data attached rather than as a series of one-off productions. G2Planet was bootstrapped on friends-and-family money, grew organically, and is now employee-owned, with clients including Microsoft, FedEx, Oracle, Toyota, HP, Intel, IBM and Nissan.

Career Highlights

• Founded G2Planet in May 2000 and has led it as chief executive since, through the dot-com crash, the post-9/11 collapse in corporate travel, and the shift to virtual and hybrid events.
• Originated the Data Driven Enterprise Event Planning (DEEP) methodology, the company’s central intellectual property.
• Built the company on friends-and-family seed funding and organic growth rather than venture capital; it is now employee-owned.
• Built long-term enterprise relationships with Microsoft, FedEx, Oracle, Toyota, HP, Intel, IBM and Nissan.
• Shipped mobile event applications as far back as the Palm Pilot, and now offers EventCENTRAL for portfolio management, EventMAX for large conference execution and Velocity for virtual and hybrid delivery.
• Previously led new business development at NAVTEQ, working on map data applications, and served as VP of Sales and Marketing at the startup Athletic Technologies.

Professional Journey

Granovsky’s route into event technology came through enterprise software rather than through events. He spent his earlier career in sales and marketing roles in that sector — including new business development at NAVTEQ, where he worked on applications built on map data, and as VP of Sales and Marketing at Athletic Technologies — and in those roles both ran corporate conferences and attended a great many of them. That gave him an unusual vantage point: he could see what events were worth commercially and, at the same time, how chaotically they were managed.

He founded G2Planet in May 2000 on that observation. The timing was close to the worst imaginable. The NASDAQ was collapsing as he launched, taking with it the enterprise technology customers most likely to buy event software, and within eighteen months the September 11 attacks had shut down corporate travel across the industry he was selling into. The company survived because of how it was financed: seed capital from friends and family, no venture obligations, and growth paid for out of revenue. That constraint became a structural choice, and G2Planet is today employee-owned.

The product line has tracked three decades of change in how companies convene people. Early versions were mobile event apps for the Palm Pilot, at a time when handing a delegate a schedule on a device was novel. The current portfolio separates the problem into three: EventCENTRAL for managing an entire event portfolio as a programme, EventMAX for executing individual large conferences, and Velocity for virtual and hybrid delivery — the last of which became the whole industry’s problem in 2020 and has remained a permanent part of it.

Underneath all of it is the DEEP methodology Granovsky originated. Its argument is that enterprise events should be instrumented like any other line of business spend — attendance, engagement, pipeline and cost tracked against a portfolio strategy — rather than judged impressionistically after the fact. That is why the company’s customer list skews toward organisations that run many events a year at scale: Microsoft, FedEx, Oracle, Toyota, HP, Intel, IBM and Nissan, relationships he has held over long periods. After 26 years in the Bay Area, Granovsky moved the centre of gravity to Minneapolis, relocating with his wife and four children.

Education

No education record for Mark Granovsky could be established from any source this corpus accepts. A targeted search was run; the only educational information that surfaced came from a professional-networking profile that is not usable as a citation here, and it stated attendance dates without naming a degree. The field is therefore left empty rather than filled with an unverifiable claim.