Biggest Tech IPO in 2020, ZoomInfo's CEO Shares their $13B Growth Journey

Currently valued at around $13 Billion, ZoomInfo, made its Initial Public Offering on NASDAQ in early June. It was the technology sector’s largest IPO of 2020, and in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews ZoomInfo’s, CEO Henry Shuck. We discover how using data, technology, and insights, Henry and his team have built a platform that today is used by more than 200,000 sales and marketing professionals at 16,000 companies to help them find their next best customers.

Henry explains that the journey began when he was a law school student. Having worked for a company in the same space that ZoomInfo would eventually occupy, he saw an opportunity to help an underserved area of the market and launched Discover.org (5:00). The business took off, but it was learnings from a webinar a few years later that helped him see how sales and marketing automation could be transformational for the business. Using these emerging technologies to power meaningful interactions with customers, the company--which was bootstrapped through 2014--rapidly expanded and positioned itself for growth through acquisition (12:40).

Discover.org eventually bought the original company Henry had worked at while he was in college, and in 2017 they completed the purchase of ZoomInfo. Merging Discover.org’s powerful tools with ZoomInfo’s tremendous industry breadth proved fruitful, and today the combined company has more than 1300 employees. While the large organization is built to support and drive a sales-driven model, Henry explains that an always-experimenting mindset, using data at every step in the customer journey, is actually the foundation of ZoomInfo’s breakout growth (34:00).

We discussed: 

• The story of how Discover.org came into existence to fill a market need, and how that eventually led to the acquisition of ZoomInfo, and the recent IPO (5:00)


• How sales and marketing automation transformed the business and became the company’s competitive edge (12:40)


• Key challenges that have threatened the company’s success, but also helped the company thrive (23:52)


• How experimentation powers growth within ZoomInfo’s sales-driven model (24:00)


• The intricate organizational structure, that relies on specialization to acquire and retain an enthusiastic user base (28:30)

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