Managing the journey from start-up to IPO and beyond - with Henry Schuck, Founder and CEO ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck, Founder and CEO has been leading ZoomInfo since he first founded the company in his law school dorm room through multiple funding rounds leading to an IPO in 2020. Henry shares his journey and his leadership evolution which continues today as he maneuvers the industry's choppy waters of 2023 and 2024!

• The journey from founding DiscoverOrg to the ZoomInfo IPO…and beyond
• Data-driven processes and decisions - how they are used at ZoomInfo
• Lessons learned from leading a public company during an industry correction

Henry founded ZoomInfo 17 years ago in his law school dorm when he was 23 years old.  The goal was and continues to be to provide Sales and Marketing professionals with the most up-to-date data to inform them who their prospects are who their buyers are and if they are in the market for their category of solutions.

The journey started as a boot-strapped business with two first-time founders including $50,000 of personal credit card funding! TA Associates was the first outside capital brought into the company when the company hit $30M Run Rate revenue, which allowed for investing into the business including acquisitions and scaling Go-to-Market.

In 2017 they acquired RainKing and then acquired ZoomInfo in 2019 and that was when the original company - DiscoverOrg became ZoomInfo. The primary market had traditionally been the B2B Technology industry, and the ZoomInfo acquisition enabled a more horizontal focus across additional industries focused on B2B Selling.

On June 4, 2020 ZoomInfo went public - how did that change Henry's role as the CEO? The first statement was you do not want being in a public company to change you as a leader much, but at the same time, there are new responsibilities including a new set of investors. Moreover, as a public company, you are constantly fundraising as you need to meet the institutional investors regularly and the public stakeholders are more transient, and building trust with them is critical.

Staying focused on what is most important in running the business and executing is still an important role of the CEO, which does not change dramatically as a CEO. One of the things that does change materially as a company scales is to hire people who can take on the majority of day-to-day execution of the strategy. At the same time, the CEO focuses more on setting the strategy and hiring great executive leaders. The acquisition of RainKing required Henry to build the skills of integrating a competitive company and its employees into the company, and then the acquisition of ZoomInfo made the company much larger which requires an additional skill set of leading a larger workforce.

Henry shared how does a CEO know if an executive can scale to the next level of the company's growth.  One, they need to learn quickly and simultaneously they need to build a great team underneath them to help scale their function. A great team allows the department head to take additional time to learn the skills required at that stage of the company's evolution. Without a great team, that learning process is compressed and may not afford the department executive the time to grow on the job without negatively impacting the business.

One of the most important parts of the executive leadership team's role is to be very aligned with the CEO to intimately understand the vision and then to ensure you are executing the priorities that align with the vision.

How does the role of the CEO of a public company change during a period of economic uncertainty (post ZIRP) and decreasing growth? The difference in leadership when growth decelerates is you can not spend as much, so the need to build the muscle to determine the best way to prioritize investments increases.  Another key change is the need for "transparency" increases as growth decelerates, including providing the narrative so it is not developed out of thin air.  Things like here is where we are succeeding, here is where we are struggling, and then monthly updates on how the company is performing as measured against the priorities, the strengths, and the threats.

Henry says that in 2024 they have their best people ever, and the best level of engagement which he credits to having a higher level of transparency.

Henry shared the importance data plays in their decision-making. Henry highlighted one area is if there is a data source that identifies prospects that will convert into customers at a higher rate and with an increased velocity. One example was to identify prospects that did not show up to a scheduled meeting and then take a systemic, data-driven approach to follow up with those no-shows and get them back into an active sales cycle. This "play" became a material source of new customer ARR every month!

If you are a founder, a CEO, or a Go-to-Market executive this conversation with Henry is full of great insights and ideas on how to scale a company and increase GTM efficacy in today's changing purchasing environment.

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