How Henry Schuck Built a Billion-Dollar Company from His Law School Bedroom

Thank you for having me.

Great. My name is Henry Schuck. I'm the founder and CEO of ZoomInfo. It's a publicly traded software and data business that helps sellers and marketers identify and then engage with their next best clients. I founded it in 2007 when I was 23 years old, almost 19 years in now, and have been running it ever since. I'm married. I have a 9-year-old daughter. I live here in Boston. And that's kind of me.

I am. I'm the assistant to assistant coach of my daughter's 9-year-old soccer team that won the championship this year.

Yeah. No, I actually thought business was kind of like an ugly term and I thought it didn't have enough honor to being in business. So, I went to law school because I thought lawyers had a certain level of respect out in the world. I could tell someone I was a lawyer and they would be like, 'Oh, that's really a respectable career path.' But I never really appreciated business for that. I started when I was in college, I started a nightclub promotions business.

It's a good business. You know, the nightclubs knew that if you got someone in the door, they were worth $50, and so they would pay you $10 for each person you could bring in to the door. And at one point I had 35 employees working for me. And I remember one of the employees was like, 'Henry, why don't you just run this business? Why are you going to law school?' And I told him this whole thing about like honor and respect and this whole thing. And he was like, 'Henry, you are business. You like bleed business. Everything you do is business.' And I remember like brushing it off. And then two years later, I started ZoomInfo.

I took the bar. I'm a licensed attorney in Nevada and Washington. Washington is where we kind of established the business where it's headquartered. And so I went through law school, but when I was in college, I worked for a similar company to ZoomInfo. It was called IProfile. The company was growing. There was a tremendous amount of demand for its products and services, but the CEO and the founder didn't want to really build a business around it.

Wow. From '01 to '05, we sold a SaaS solution. And if you think about like software as a service, Salesforce invented that in 1999. And I was lucky enough to find a job on the UNLV job board at this software as a service business that paid me I don't know, 12 bucks an hour to go start. I started by doing administrative work, then I was doing marketing work, then I was doing data privacy and data collection work. But I got into that company and I learned a ton about just how you run a small business. I understood the demand there but the owner didn't want to build a business around it. It was largely a lifestyle business despite the fact that I got there in '01. It was a $300,000 business. I left in '05. It was a $5 million topline business. And it was a $5 million topline business doing like $4.7 million of profit because it was just me and like a couple other college kids doing the work. And I was like, well, I don't have like a career path here. I can't like go anywhere, right? So then I went to law school and then knew that there was this tremendous amount of demand and my co-founder called me at the end of my first year in law school and was like, 'Hey, I want to start a business like this, but I don't know anything about it and you understood that business. Would you start it with me?'

No, I knew that companies needed data to sell and market their services just because of what I had seen. What I was like surprised to learn was when you don't have context for business, usually people come out of college and they start like I don't know something for other college students or when I came out I had all this context about business-to-business sales and marketing because of that company that I worked for. And the thing that I knew was companies just didn't have an organic database of who they should be selling to and who worked at companies and how to get a hold of them. And so I knew there was that hole in the market. And then my job was to just go build a data asset that they could use to prospect and sell their services.

Great question. Originally, we were focused on providing data on the information technology decision makers at mid-market companies. And so, what we went out and did was like, look, there's some information on Fortune 1000 companies, but everything outside of the Fortune 1000, nobody knows who the IT decision makers are, how to get a hold of them, what the organizational chart at that company looks like, what technologies they use. And so it was a really important niche because everybody's selling into the IT department of a company, but they didn't know who to call. But it was an incredibly fragmented industry of people selling to that buyer. Like if you go across most companies, the budget in IT or engineering is the largest budget in the business. And it certainly was like that in '05 and in '01 through '05 when I was working at IProfile. And so we knew oh there's this huge opportunity because every software company, every hardware company, every networking company, every consulting company was trying to sell to those IT decision makers and nobody knew who they were to call. It wasn't there wasn't LinkedIn like LinkedIn was just kind of getting started. There weren't databases of information and so we could sort of bring that data asset together and then sell it to a broad assortment of customers trying to sell to those people.

We were selling to anybody who would sell to mid-sized companies.

Which is kind of everybody. So our first customer was a publicly traded IT staffing firm that sold to everybody but they didn't have any information on this sort of mid-market segment of data that we were collecting.

So we did all of our sort of demand gen work through email. So, we created a couple of like samples of the data that you would get, put them in a PDF, and then we sent an email out to sales and marketing directors and VPs at a list of companies that were great fits for us, and we said, 'Hey, take a look at this organizational chart of Starbucks or take a look at this organizational chart of Vail Resorts.' Those were sort of our first two. And if you think that it would be valuable for your sales team to have exactly this on 1,000 companies, to have all of their contacts, their IT org chart, the technologies they use, if you had this on a thousand companies, could you sell better? And the IT staffing firm that we sold to was like, 'Yes.' And they but the first thing they told us was, 'Okay, great. We love this, but we also have this other list of a thousand companies that you don't have that we want access to as well.' So the first contract was a mix of software recurring and then a custom build component like a services component. So it's like hey the product is not all the way there for you. We understand that but if you pay us we'll go build custom profiles for you. You give us a list of the companies you want to sell to. We'll go build the same thing you see on those thousand companies for the next set of 500 companies that you care about. We'll give it to you exclusive access. None of our other customers are going to have access to it even though you're the only customer and we'll sell it to you for custom access for the first six months. You'll have an exclusive access to that and then they'll realize how much they need it and then we'll just continue to build.

Awesome. And thank you by the way.

And so now you want to get to the decision maker when they're thinking about products and services like yours, right? And so we started with that contact and company data. And then what we really evolved to was signal data that tells you like, hey, this is a company that's likely in market for your products and services. They're doing research on your competitors. They're researching your product and services categories. They just hired a new executive in the types of roles that buy your products and services. What are all these signals that we can bring together that would tell you this company's in market for your products and service?

Yeah, so signal data is let's say there's all this digital footprint that a company has on the web. So one of the examples we show all the time or there's two big examples. One is like a cyber security breach. Company has a cyber security breach. They don't announce their cyber security breaches right away. Sometimes there's a month or maybe even two months in between the realization of the breach and then the public acknowledgement of that breach. In that period of time, the company's doing a bunch of research online about cyber security breach, data breach, data breach protocols, what do I do in a cyber security breach? Which vendors do I call on a cyber security breach? We have a product that looks at what a company is researching on the public web and it looks for spikes on research on those topics.

If everybody searches for cyber security or Coca-Cola or whatever it is some baseline amount of times. But if they spike like two standard deviations above that for some extended period of time, you know, 3 days or whatever, we tell you, hey, this company right now is doing an abundance of research on a topic that's relevant to you. Call them now. This is the hot time that they're thinking about this more than they have historically.

Manufacturing.

So we make the shelving for Walmart, Home Depot, grocery chains like that.

So let's say that what we would do is we would go look at like what are the topics that you would be researching before you go buy shelving for you're the buyer at Walmart or Home Depot or wherever you're going to buy shelving. What are the things that you're researching ahead of that? Maybe you're researching like a competitor of yours or you're researching like in-store manufacturing shelving. We'd go like, 'Okay.'

Yes.

That's exactly right. Or your website, someone comes to your website. 98 to 99% of the people who come to your website never fill out a form or call you. They just come look around and then they leave, right? 1% of people or one to two percent of people will fill out the form on your website and then hopefully if you're good, you have a salesperson call them right away, right? But the other 98 just come and they're ghosts. And across that group of 98 people, we can identify the company in about 45% of the instances. We can tell you it's this company.

And then we can tell you in a smaller percentage of that, not 45% but less than, we can tell you the exact person at the company who's on your website looking at your website.

So those are like signals. It's like now look, everybody needs a total addressable market that they're going to go after. Your total addressable market is like, you know, Home Depot, Walmart, every large box, all of these different star market. But then you've got that whole addressable market. You should be constantly calling and emailing and trying to build relationships with those companies. But if one of those shows up to your website, one of those starts researching your competitors, one of those hires a new head of in-store displays, you want to call that person right away before someone else does.

And so the world shifted from like I just give you the information on the companies and contacts to I help you architect a sales motion to maximize your website and your rep's productivity. If you call a 100 people tomorrow, your rep calls 100 people that are just cold, that's very different than making sure that 20 of those people visited your website are researching your products and services, right?

Yeah.

First, I've used it in that use case numerous times. I think the trick there that I've learned is there are a lot of things at ZoomInfo that I could fix for you as a customer by getting you to the right person at ZoomInfo so that it could get fixed quickly, right? And so when I have these issues, I had an issue with UPS. I needed something delivered one day. Some stuff happened. So I emailed the like case number and the stuff to like five people who were senior executives at UPS. And I was like, 'Hey, can you just get this to someone who could help me?' And like four of them just got it to the person who could help me and as easy as connecting the dots.

So you know we founded the company in '07 and for the next seven years we were just like heads down building building building. In 2014 we brought on our first institutional capital. So, we had bootstrapped the business for the first seven years. For the first seven years, I put $25,000 on my credit card. My co-founder put $25,000 in his credit card. That was our seed funding.

We were Yeah, that was it. I mean, I had $130,000 in law school and undergrad debt, you just had to make it work. And there was no more money coming into the business. You either you had to fund the rest of the business with the revenue of the business. And then in 2014, we brought in our first outside capital was a firm called TA Associates. They came in in '14 when the business was about $30 million of revenue.

From there, and that's 2014. That's 2014. Then they helped us bring in a CFO, recruit some new leaders, and then go out and do some M&A. And so we acquired that company I worked at in college. IProfile was our first acquisition in 2015. We acquired a competitor of ours called Rain King in 2017. And then this is like a fun tangent. The company I founded was called DiscoverOrg. Then in 2019 we acquired ZoomInfo and we changed the name to ZoomInfo.

DiscoverOrg is a terrible name. You know, I think we came up with it when I was in law school. It was like we made org charts. So it was like DiscoverOrg charts. Terrible name.

That was the biggest acquisition that we made. And when we made that acquisition, we were like two businesses selling to very similar markets. We were good at one thing, they were good at another thing. And we were really able to make 1 plus 1 equal 3 in that acquisition. And that's when things really started taking off.

Um mainly at that point their data. And then the benefit of the ZoomInfo acquisition and any of the acquisitions that you also inherited some really talented people. Yeah. And so, you know, my job in those acquisitions was there's a bunch of people who are going to be doing the same job. I got to cut that because I can't have just from a cost perspective, we can't have two people doing the same thing. But then there are a whole bunch of people who are not doing the same jobs and are additive and I need to find the best person for the roles. And so like when DiscoverOrg acquired ZoomInfo, I had a bunch of people come to me at DiscoverOrg go, 'Well, we made the acquisition. Why does it feel like we're the ones being acquired?' And it's like, 'Yeah, well, because the CTO at ZoomInfo is more talented than the CTO at DiscoverOrg. So, I'm making him the CTO of the combined organization.'

You just make the best decision for the company. Yeah. Like you're always just on the hunt for what's the best decision for the company. Okay. And in those situations, it was like I took time, not like a lot of time. I didn't have a lot of time, but during diligence, I'm starting to figure out like, okay, are they better? Show me proof points that they're better. Is the marketing person here better? Is the revenue officer with us better? And then when the companies come together, I make a bunch of calls like this person, the CRO at DiscoverOrg is going to be the chief revenue officer of the combined organization. And the CTO at ZoomInfo is going to be the CTO of the combined organization. And so you're kind of putting that together.

So I had a funny realization over this last week. I was just on jury duty for two and a half days. Okay. And I did everything I could to get out of jury duty. Like they I deferred it three times. You're allowed to defer. So I deferred it. Then I got on the jury duty. And I went to the judge and I did the whole like, hey, I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company. I'm regulated by the SEC. I have a board meeting coming up. And he was like, uh, yeah, okay. When's the board meeting? And it's like, you know, it's February 5th. And he was like, yeah, well, this trial is only going to be like a day, right? So like, is that really going to cause an issue? And the answer is no. And I was like, 'Hey, I'll do everything I can. I'm not gonna lie.' Yeah. Yeah. And then Exactly. So, I was like, 'Okay, CEO of a publicly traded company is not going to get me out of it.' Like, I'm a lawyer. I'm a lawyer. Do you really want a lawyer on this jury? And they're like, 'Take your seat. Jury number seven. Juror number seven.' And at first my first I went home that night, my wife was like, 'Oh, that sucks.' And I really wanted to also be like, 'Yeah, it sucks that I have to do this.' But I had this realization where it was the first time I think honestly in 19 years of running this business where I didn't have to think about whether the thing I was doing was beneficial for ZoomInfo. I was a slave to the state. There was nothing that I could do to get out of jury duty. So in that moment I didn't have any thoughts that went through my mind about like is this the best use of my time? What ROI am I getting from ZoomInfo during this? But every other decision with how I spend my time, I'm constantly thinking about is this the right way to spend my time that drives the best return for ZoomInfo. Like I sit on two boards. Every time I go to a board meeting, I'm like, 'Okay, I made a commitment to this board. I told myself that the reason why I'm joining this board is because I can learn things for ZoomInfo that I could take back and I can make ZoomInfo a better place.' So, while I'm in that board meeting, I'm like, 'Okay, what is the thing, you know, like where is the learning that I'm going to get? What's the thing that I can take back to ZoomInfo to make ZoomInfo better?' When I'm on vacation, I'm like, 'Okay, I know that vacation is theoretically good for executives to turn off and you refresh yourself. You come back a better person. But I've never had a vacation where I'm not thinking like am I actually getting that benefit? Like am I going to come back to ZoomInfo a better person? Like was this the right decision to go on vacation this week? Is this the right thing?' So everything that you do because you get to choose where you spend your time. I think this is probably like a founder CEO thing. I constantly have head thrash of like is this the right way for me to spend my time that gives the most ROI back to ZoomInfo. There are a few things that are required, right? I have to go to board meetings. I have to meet with investors. I have to do earnings call. Everything else is to my discretion. I could say yes or no to everything else. And so every decision I make with my time, I'm constantly questioning like, is this the right decision for ZoomInfo?

I think I've always felt like that.

I do think that constantly making sure that I'm spending my time on things that nobody else at the business could spend their time on that are the most strategic to the business that solve the biggest problems in the business is definitely a key very important aspect of the way that I'm wired. Maybe there are CEOs and founders who figured out a way to manage that in a more healthy way. I have never been able to do that.

I think the other thing that I've done is you I have a nine-year-old daughter. So and I have a family and that's a very important part of who I am and I've made a real commitment there. And so there are a bunch of like guard rails I put around my time at ZoomInfo to make sure that I'm also giving the right amount of time to my family and my daughter. I think when I do that if I ever get off balance there I actually am a worse CEO. So if I haven't seen my daughter in the morning or seen her at night before she goes to bed I feel off the next day. It's actually like exercise. I exercise every day and on days that I don't exercise, I'm not the best version of myself. And so somewhere along the way, I sold myself on that. I sold myself on, hey, see the way you feel today. You worked out today. See how you feel. You feel different. You're more productive. You're getting more things done.

You're moving differently. You're a better version of yourself.

Yep. Every day I wake up around like somewhere between 5 and 6.

I have coffee with my wife. We play like a Wordle or a Connections on New York Times. I wake up my daughter. We hang out with her for a little bit and then I go to the gym and I'm not like it's not like I'm spending two hours at the gym. I have a gym at home. I spend like 30 to 40 minutes doing something hard. And then I take my daughter to school and then I go to work. I'm usually at work till between 6:30 and 7. I come home and have dinner with my family.

Yeah.

Yeah. You're up early. Even on those days, I have a little bit of an abridged workout, but I get a workout in. I get it done every day.

I feel way better. Yeah. On days that I exercise. I also feel like I respect people more when they walk into a room and they like take care of themselves than if they show up like a slob. You know what I mean? Like your first impression does not lie.

Right.

Definitely the person across from me from the table. I think resumes have a way to trick you. You go like and investors love pedigree and so they love it if you go get somebody from Salesforce or ServiceNow or somewhere and there are great people at those companies too but it can't be the thing that you rely on. Every interview, every time I sit down with anybody on my own team, but definitely with interviews, I need to learn something from that interview. If I sit down with you and I'm an hour in and I haven't learned something. You haven't taught me something because you're an expert in your thing. I'm, you know, not or I'm a

That's why I'm hiring you. So, like, what are you teaching me that I'm like, ah, that's super interesting. Oh, I never thought of it that way. Oh, you're way ahead of us in that way. Like, teach me something. Have a point of view. A lot of times people show up, they say a bunch of generic stuff.

Right. Right.

Yeah.

First. Luckily, I don't manage all of them. I communicate with a lot of them. You know, I manage today, right? Like I manage my direct team. Which is like 12 people. Yeah. And then I communicate very often with the team one level below that. We call that our senior management team. So the people who report to my direct team. So I spent a lot of time with them. In the early days obviously like up until the company was about a thousand employees I think I knew everybody and then after a thousand it got a little bit tricky. Also we grew a lot during COVID so we went from like two offices that housed everybody to like I think 1,500 of our staff or something like that are remote, right? And so if you're remote I don't really see you that often. You're not in the same building as me. And so then I'm

Communicating with you through our all-hands meetings, through meetings that we might both be at, but primarily through my executive team. My executive team has to take the context from our interactions and then filter that down to their teams. Two years ago, what I started doing was I used to have a one-hour standup with my executive team every week.

We'd get together, we'd have an kind of an agenda. Sometimes that meeting might be 30 minutes and like the agenda didn't get filled and we didn't get through everything or we didn't have anything else to talk about. Two years ago, I switched that to I'm having an hour-long standup with my direct reports every single day. And this really interesting thing happened when we switched to that. One, I told my team, 'No more one-on-ones together. Like, if you have standing one-on-ones with other people on the executive team, I want them canceled. Come to this meeting if you have something that's cross-functional and bring it to this meeting. We'll discuss it together.' What was happening was they would go like talk to each other before the meeting. 'Hey, do I have your support on this? Hey, I'm going to present this thing.' Just come to the meeting and present it. If you have something to talk about, bring it.

Yeah. And so now we have an hour-long meeting every single day and that agenda is full. Every day we go to the full hour every single day.