Key insights
- Growing up as a single mother with three jobs, Henry Schuck realized early on that tough work was essential.
- He founded DiscoverOrg with a co-founder while in law school, spent a maximum of about $50,000 on bank cards, worked at the corporate from 7 a.m. to three p.m., and attended lectures until 10 p.m
- DiscoverOrg became ZoomInfo through an acquisition in 2019, and the corporate went public in 2020.
Henry Schuck grew up timing double shifts and bus transfers. He grew up in Southern California with a single mother who worked three jobs and disappeared before dawn and didn’t return until long after dark. “My mom was a nurse. She had three jobs, so she would often work the morning shift and then the night shift,” he recalls in a brand new interview with . “I always knew that you have to work hard to achieve something.”
In a small household consisting of Schuck, his sister and his mother, there was just one non-negotiable rule: “Get good grades in school.”
Schuck began working at age 12, selling newspapers door-to-door in Southern California. The job wasn’t particularly glamorous, however it reinforced his belief that tough work was essential to getting ahead.
When he went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), his mother gave him every thing she could scrape together: $5,000 from a life insurance payout. “That was my college fund. It got me through my freshman year,” he says.
A job that modified his life
At school, Schuck thought he would grow to be a hotel manager in Las Vegas [after graduating? it seems like an intense job to have in school, but he then says he was planning to become a lawyer]but a job posting on the UNLV job board quietly modified his life. The post was for a small business-to-business data company called iProfile, which sold worker contact information from firms like Ford and General Motors to sales teams at other firms.
At first the work was almost bureaucratic. “Originally my job was almost like an administrator, so I researched companies we would send marketing materials to,” he says. He labeled and mailed CDs containing the corporate’s research, including organizational charts and get in touch with information in Fortune 1000 IT departments, to sales teams in need of urgent leads.
Schuck took over the marketing channel and brought the corporate into early email outreach when most were still in junk mail. “We were early adopters of email for sales and marketing use cases,” says Schuck. “We went from sending direct mail to 16 people a week to sending emails to hundreds or thousands of sales managers across the country.”
As a result, iProfile’s revenue grew from about $300,000 to $5 million in 4 years while Schuck was still in college.
Nevertheless, Schuck saw no possible way forward there. “I didn’t think I had a future at iProfile,” he says. There weren’t many growth opportunities in the corporate.
At the time, law, not economics, gave the impression to be the respectable, stable path. “I felt like being a lawyer was a noble profession, and I didn’t feel the same way about the business at the time,” Schuck admits. So, in 2006, he enrolled in law school at Ohio State University.
Start a business while studying law
Law school did not appease his entrepreneurial instincts; it sharpened it. In 2007, after his first 12 months, an in depth friend [and former coworker? seems a little random if they didn’t both work at iProfile]Kirk Brown, called with a suggestion: Replicate the iProfile model, but for a neglected a part of the market, the mid-sized firms, who’re ignored by traditional providers. Brown was “super optimistic” and willing to “give up everything,” quit his job and even move to Columbus, Ohio, if Schuck would work with him. They would split the corporate 50:50. Schuck agreed and Brown made the move.
They called the corporate DiscoverOrg. It began as an internet subscription database geared toward mid-sized business decision makers, particularly IT executives. The work reflected the success Schuck had seen with iProfile, but for a unique market segment.
The model was initially brutally manual. “We researched online and then called the companies to validate the information we found,” he says. Loads of the work was just confirming, “Are these people still working at the company?”
To get the corporate off the bottom, Schuck invested a maximum of $50,000 in bank cards. In the primary three years, each founders paid themselves $24,000 per 12 months. Every latest customer became a promotional event. “We used the revenue we generated from new customers to fund company growth,” he says.
According to Schuck, in 2007 there was no real strategy to find enterprise capital in Columbus, Ohio. [Was he still in law school this whole time? I think we need that noted here] That left two options: construct a highly efficient business or run out of cash. They selected the primary option.
“We were very disciplined when it came to spending money,” says Schuck. “We were very disciplined about thinking about the return on every dollar that went into the business.”
This discipline brought the founders to $30 million in revenue before making their first outside investment in 2014.
Bootstrapping also shaped the best way Schuck built the team. Without VC money, he would not find a way to draw high-profile executives with lavish salaries or gleaming offices. So he searched for something else in latest employees: hunger. He hired individuals who were very young of their careers, perhaps of their first jobs. One of the primary employees was a former skilled poker player who desired to work in sales – but didn’t know what Microsoft Outlook email inboxes were. “We started from a very rough starting point,” says Schuck. With this attitude, Schuck was eventually named the primary Chief Revenue Officer.
Leading a double life
All the while, Schuck led a double life. In DiscoverOrg’s early years, he worked at the corporate from 7 a.m. to three p.m., then went straight to law school until 10 p.m. He selected his law school curriculum based solely on what fit the corporate. When it got here time to take the bar exam in 2009, he retreated for 2 and a half months to check, checking in just mornings and evenings along with his co-founder and a small team of six. He passed the bar – and continued constructing.
This legal background has proven to be a strategic advantage, he claims. As privacy laws became more stringent, Schuck’s training helped DiscoverOrg navigate an increasingly complex landscape. Having a lawyer as CEO made investors, customers and regulators feel more comfortable. “With my legal background, I am able to understand it, understand the regulations… know how to navigate it and know what we need to do to manage the risk,” he says.
Until 2019, DiscoverOrg was a highly profitable area of interest company that sold extensively verified data from IT decision makers primarily to software firms. But customers wanted more: HR, finance, supply chain, procurement, marketing. ZoomInfo, then a standalone company, had just that: a broad but less precise data set that spanned the organizational chart. Schuck acquired ZoomInfo in 2019, combining the standard of DiscoverOrg with the amount of ZoomInfo. “We ended up having the best of both worlds, so to speak,” he says.
The combined company adopted the name ZoomInfo, expanded its reach beyond IT to each area of the corporate, and went public in June 2020. Today ZoomInfo is a $1.8 billion Platform utilized by over 35,000 customers to search out the best buyers and reach them across email, phone and digital channels, far beyond the boundaries of a single network. The company counts Airbnb, Snowflake, Adobe and Capital One amongst its largest customers.
When asked if he has any advice for other aspiring business owners, Schuck emphasizes that financial discipline is significant, especially within the early stages. “It gives you control over your destiny,” he says.
Schuck also says that it can be crucial to develop people. He had conversations along with his leaders telling them that their job was to “create champions.”
“Don’t come and complain to me because the person you hired three weeks ago isn’t a good fit for you,” he says. “Coach them. Help them, put them on the path to being successful here.”
Key insights
- Growing up as a single mother with three jobs, Henry Schuck realized early on that tough work was essential.
- He founded DiscoverOrg with a co-founder while in law school, spent a maximum of about $50,000 on bank cards, worked at the corporate from 7 a.m. to three p.m., and attended lectures until 10 p.m
- DiscoverOrg became ZoomInfo through an acquisition in 2019, and the corporate went public in 2020.
Henry Schuck grew up timing double shifts and bus transfers. He grew up in Southern California with a single mother who worked three jobs and disappeared before dawn and didn’t return until long after dark. “My mom was a nurse. She had three jobs, so she would often work the morning shift and then the night shift,” he recalls in a brand new interview with . “I always knew that you have to work hard to achieve something.”
In a small household consisting of Schuck, his sister and his mother, there was just one non-negotiable rule: “Get good grades in school.”
