ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck: Sales Cycle Elongation; Gratitude Journaling; Sales Layoffs | E964

Henry, I am excited for this. You don't know this, but I'm like the biggest fan boy of ZoomInfo's journey.

(laughs)

I've been looking forward to this for a while. So, thank you so much for joining me today.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Not at all. Now, this direction of conversation is gonna go in a couple of different ways. But I wanna start on the founding story. How did you come to found the incredible brand that is ZoomInfo today?

Yeah, so I actually ... This- this started when I was in college. I was a fr- I went to college in Las Vegas, um. When I went to college, I grew up in a pretty, um, sort of middle class family. My mom was a nurse. Uh, I was raised by my mom. She was a nurse, she worked three jobs. When I graduated high school, she gave me $5,000, which was the, like, remnants of a old life insurance policy, and she said, "Here's your college fund." Like, "Good luck." So, I went to college, I ran out of that money my first year, and I went searching for a new job. Uh, so I applied everywhere around Las Vegas and I ended up landing at this small SaaS, early stage SaaS company. It was the founder and one other person, he was looking for someone to do administrative work. This is like 2002. Um, and he sold an annual subscription service to a database, uh, of basically reports on the information technology departments of large companies. Uh, and then he would send out a CD that had all the reports too, to these companies. And so, I got this front row seat at a super early entrance in SaaS. It was 300,000 in revenue between '02 and, uh, '06. We grew it from 300,000 in revenue to just under 5 million in revenue.

Wow.

The business was 5 million in revenue and doing like 4.7 million in EBITDA. And so, there wasn't much of a business. It was this incredibly high margin company without much of a business infrastructure. And so, I left the company and I went off to law school. And in my, after my first year of law school, a friend of mine and I said, "Hey, why don't we start something that's like that, doesn't directly compete, and actually build a business around it?" And we knew there was a market there. We understood how the business operated. Uh, we knew there was a large total addressable market. We knew what the product market fit looked like. And so we said, you know, "Won't be that hard to be better at the business side than, uh, than the company we worked at in college." And so we did, we went out and we started building what was at the time, Harry, called DiscoverOrg, which is probably like maybe the worst name in business history. Um, because people would call it Discover, and Discover.org, and Discovery, and Discovery.org. So, we started off in '07. I put $25,000 on my credit card, he put $25,000 on his credit card. This is 2006, Columbus, Ohio. Um, and so there's no like, uh, VC funding or, you know, VC appetite for these types of companies. So, that was all the funding we had. Uh, we grew the business without any outside investor through 2014 where we were about $30 million of ARR, profitable, and brought in, uh, TA Associates as a private equity investor in 2014. And l- that's where I'll pause the story, 'cause I think the rest of the question is on.