From Startup to IPO: Henry Schuck on Building ZoomInfo and Surfing the AI Wave

Summary

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Liftoff with Keith Newman: From Startup to IPO — Henry Schuck on Building ZoomInfo and Surfing the AI Wave

Episode Date: March 31, 2026
Guest: Henry Schuck, Founder, Chairman and CEO of ZoomInfo
Host: Keith Newman

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Episode Overview

This high-energy conversation explores Henry Schuck’s journey from startup founder to leading ZoomInfo through its IPO and beyond, detailing how his company navigated the SaaS explosion, faced fierce competition, and is now positioning itself at the intersection of data and AI. The discussion seamlessly transitions from the early bootstrap days to current AI-driven strategies, offering actionable wisdom for founders, especially those in B2B SaaS and GTM (go-to-market) tech. The tone is pragmatic, candid, and packed with operator insights, focusing on building enduring companies, evolving leadership, and the power of obsessive learning.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. SaaS to Data Intelligence to AI: ZoomInfo’s Evolution

• SaaS vs. Data Foundations ([01:00]):

  • ZoomInfo’s business splits into a core seat-based SaaS sales intelligence platform and a fast-growing data business (~20% of revenue).
  • Data business is “consumption-based,” integrating ZoomInfo data via APIs into CRM, marketing, and data workflows like Snowflake or Databricks.

• AI’s Impact on Go-to-Market ([03:00]):

  • “If I had just the seat business and no data foundation underneath it, that's a very difficult platform to use to get any uplift from what's changing in AI.” (Henry, [02:36])
  • LLMs and no-code tools unlock new ways for customers to build tailored applications, leveraging ZoomInfo’s extensive B2B data.

• Democratization of Custom Apps ([03:48]):

  • Henry recounts using Claude (AI assistant) to rapidly build a data enrichment app “without writing code,” demonstrating the new ease of building custom solutions atop core data assets.

2. The Future of GTM Platforms and Interfaces

• From One Interface to Many ([05:58]):

  • “Historically, we had one interface for a million users. In the future…there will be millions of interfaces for millions of users and each of those can be really custom built when you have that data foundation at its core.” (Henry, [06:52])

• Stitching Data Context ([07:33]):

  • Companies increasingly want a “robust go-to-market context graph” combining first-party and proprietary third-party data in seamless ways—a non-trivial challenge.

• Battlefront: Interface vs. Data ([11:01]):

  • A competitive scramble exists to become the default GTM interface for reps (see: DayDay, Pocus, etc.), but there’s simultaneous momentum toward interface-less LLM-driven work.

• Lesson from Video Editing ([12:06]):

  • “What we found out was no, that's actually like less is more difficult and more cumbersome than using the standard filtering.… All these things kind of went back to an interface that allowed more control.” (Henry, [12:38])
  • Acknowledgement that UI/UX may cycle back as the preferred path, despite AI hype.

3. Early Decisions and Founder DNA

• Bootstrap Efficiency ([13:44]):

  • ZoomInfo was self-funded to $30M revenue: “From day one, it was $25,000 for me and $25,000 for my co-founder. That was the startup capital.” (Henry, [13:47])

• Efficiency as a Competitive Weapon ([14:17]):

  • “It allowed us to go acquire our competitors with debt…because we had profitability and they didn't.” (Henry, [14:27])

• Go-to-Market as a Founder’s Job ([14:41]):

  • Henry sold ZoomInfo for years, using customer pain points to guide product direction.
  • Notable Habit: Treating every point of friction in the sales or renewal process as product feedback to be addressed.

• On People and Scaling ([17:03]):

  • Key regret: failing to swap out team members who couldn’t scale quickly enough.
  • “There's a thing that Ben Horowitz or Marc Andreessen says…when there's a doubt, there's no doubt.” (Henry, [17:59])

4. Personal Growth and Leadership Evolution

• Constant Learning ([19:06]):

  • “I'm constantly trying to learn and not assume anything I did before is stack or synced.” (Henry, [19:09])
  • Example: Realized skills for new business sales AEs didn’t map well to enterprise account management.

• Founder Traits and the ‘Ownership Tax’ ([21:18]):

  • “Great founders have a really high ownership tax. They're constantly thinking about [the business].” (Henry, [22:44])
  • Obsession, constant learning, and looking for superpowers in other founders.

• Memorable Moment:

  • Henry reflecting on “jury duty” as almost the only time he wasn't thinking about ZoomInfo.
    • “During jury duty, it was the first time in years where my mind was completely free of ZoomInfo.…But in almost every other moment…am I looking for value to extract and ZoomInfo?” (Henry, [22:36])

5. Pragmatic Advice for Today’s Founders

• Cash-Flow-Positive First ([23:53]):
  • “If you want to control your destiny, get to cash-flow positive as fast as possible.”
• Do One Thing Exceptionally ([24:04]):
  • “Do something really, really great, better than anybody else in the world…and then start doing another thing.”
  • Warns against early horizontal sprawl: “Nobody [will] buy a thing that does 15 things kind of crappy.”

6. Quickfire Round and Reflections

• Coach vs. Quarterback ([25:20]):

  • “I am more the coach. I'm calling the play. Looking at how the play got run…I have a good team now that does most of the quarterbacking better than I could.” (Henry, [25:35])

• Key Metrics That Matter Now ([26:24]):

  • Consumption of data in more places, top-of-funnel lead gen, product pipeline (e.g. GTM Studio uptake).

• ZoomInfo’s Growth Truth ([27:24]):

  • Underdog story: Bootstrapped vs. heavily funded competitor (“Ranking”). Breakthrough was innovating with “intent data.”
  • “When you get a very innovative product that lands product-market fit…that allowed you to take off.” (Henry, [27:45])

• Book & Habit Recommendations ([28:40]):

  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
  • Team Intelligence by John Levy
  • “Exercise every day…30 to 45 minutes where you're just pushing yourself really hard.” (Henry, [29:10])

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Notable Quotes

• “If I had just the seat business and no data foundation underneath it, that's a very difficult platform to use to get any uplift from what's changing in AI.” — Henry Schuck ([02:36])

• “Historically, we had one interface for a million users.…In the future, there will be millions of interfaces for millions of users.” — Henry Schuck ([06:52])

• “I always viewed my job, from a go-to-market perspective, to take out as much friction in the sales process as possible.” — Henry Schuck ([15:25])

• “When there’s a doubt, there’s no doubt.” — Henry Schuck (quoting Andreessen/Horowitz, [17:59])

• “Great founders have a really high ownership tax. They're constantly thinking about it.” — Henry Schuck ([22:44])

• “Nobody buys a thing that does 15 things kind of crappy.” — Henry Schuck ([24:08])

• “I am more the coach. I’m calling the play…But I have a good team now that does most of the quarterbacking better than I could.” — Henry Schuck ([25:35])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:00] – Data businesses vs. SaaS seat model
• [03:48] – Building an AI enrichment app with Claude
• [05:58] – Evolution from single interface to platform
• [11:01] – Competing on interface vs. data asset
• [13:44] – The early bootstrap journey
• [17:03] – People decisions; when to change for scale
• [19:06] – Personal learning and evolution
• [21:18] – What makes a great founder? Ownership tax
• [23:53] – Cash-flow positive & focus for modern founders
• [27:24] – Growth story: beating the Goliath competitor
• [28:40] – Books, exercise, and habits
• [29:25] – What’s next for ZoomInfo and Henry

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Memorable Moments

• Henry’s “Claude code" story showing even a non-coder founder can now build custom GTM tooling thanks to AI ([03:48])
• The “intent data” innovation that shifted ZoomInfo’s fortunes versus their deep-pocketed rival ([27:24])
• The “ownership tax” and how even jury duty was the only time business wasn’t top of mind ([22:36])
• ZoomInfo’s guiding North Star obituary exercise ([29:46])

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Actionable Advice & Takeaways

• Focus on building a unique, high-value capability before expanding breadth.
• Scrutinize and remove friction in every sales touchpoint—listen and iterate.
• Leadership is about evolving, questioning what got you here, and staying obsessed.
• The future is about omnipresent, embedded data, not just SaaS seats—find ways to power customer workflows everywhere.
• Be “a coach”: build a great team, call the right plays, and empower your people.

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This episode is a must-listen for founders wanting a mix of operational wisdom, candid lessons learned, and a realistic lens on building durable companies in AI’s new era.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. We are live. I have the founder, chairman and CEO of Zoom Info. Welcome to liftoff.

[B]

Awesome. I'm glad to be here. Thanks.

[A]

Keith Henry, it's great to have you here. I've been waiting to chat with you for a little bit. I mean you're just such a fantastic story from the SaaS world. From a great startup story all the way to ipo, which is sort of every founder and entrepreneur's dream. So that on top of category leader and now the transition to AI. I hope you don't mind me not starting in chronological order, just jumping into this crazy world. We go from SaaS and that whole amazing rise in companies and that birth of a new generation of software companies and that transition into this thing that we're hearing about called the SAS apocalypse. And you transition into the AI tidal wave. How are you doing in all of the ups and downs of all this? A lot of it may be media attention, but certainly some of it's real. How do you see things today?

[B]

Yeah, look, I think a couple of different ways. Lots of places to start here. But let's start with the difference between a data company and a traditional SaaS. Seat based company. So ZoomInfo has two businesses, effectively. One is our core sales intelligence platform where a customer buys a seat and they get access to Zoom Info and their sellers, their SDRs, their AES account managers get access to Zoom Info or they could go look up information on their customers. They could use AI to build them an account plan to summarize the interactions they've had with the customer, to find out who the CEO or CFO or CRO is and get their phone number and email address. It's kind of like a traditional SaaS application, but it's built on top of our data foundation which is the world's best go to market B2B data. It's 500 million contacts, 100 million companies, billions of signals that we see every month worldwide data asset. And so the other side of our business, which is about a fifth of our revenue, we're about 1.25 billion in revenue. A fifth of our revenue growing 20 plus percent a year, is our data business. That data business is I want to take your APIs and I want to enrich data in my CRM. I want to enrich data in my marketing automation system. I want to enrich data in Snowflake or Databricks or Bigquery, wherever I am that I have a go to market workflow. I want Zoom Info's data plugged in there so that I have a clean look at the universe. That business is not seats, it's consumption based, it's using our data to build and cleanse your own data or your own apps. And so when you think about where the world is going from an AI perspective, if I had just the seat business and no data foundation underneath it, that's a very difficult platform to use to get any uplift from what's changing in AI. If I had just seats, I was like, I don't know any of these sort of collaboration platforms that are like undifferentiated. The difficulty with those platforms is what benefit do I get from AI outside of the fact that I can just outside of the fact that I have a built in customer base and I built them products with the data. The big advantage we see today is it's very extensible and people are building new applications internally, they're building new go to market workflows internally. And so yesterday I went to Claude and I built an enrichment application. I was just like, I've never coded, I don't know how to code. I mean I didn't know how to code. I guess like in today's world that you do know how to code, if you could just chat back and forth with Claude. And I said, okay, I want to build an app where I drop in a CSV. You then go to Zooming APIs. By the way, I've never coded to an API. You then go to Zoom info's APIs, you enrich it with company information and then you find my buying committee, CROs, VPs of sales, chief marketing officers, demand gen people bring that back, give me their funding information, give me any signals that might be interesting to me as well. I pointed Claude to the API documents and then we went back and forth a couple of times and ran into a couple of issues with authentication that we resolved by going back and forth. And then I had an Apple application that did enrichment and that is a very different, that's a very different world than existed a year ago where now companies are going to be able to build purpose built applications for go to market for their customer base to understand their customer base to understand a campaign they're going to go after. But every time they do that they should be calling Zoom Info data to deliver that data that they need for any go to market workflow. That data piece is very extensible in the world of AI. So where historically I had the seat business and you access Zoom Info data through a seat that had a SaaS interface, today we're seeing many, many more surface areas where go to market work is being done. It's being done in the LLMs, it's being done internally in applications that they're building. They're vibe coding a bunch of different stuff. It's being done in databricks and Snowflake and BigQuery and their CRM and their marketing automation tool. And so the opportunity for us is to free our data from this like very diff, like historically difficult SaaS interface and make it available anywhere. Go to market work gets done and that's our opportunity. And it doesn't exist for a standard SaaS vendor, but it's really unique for ZoomInfo. And so, you know, when I look out to the next two and three years, our job is to execute on what is a much bigger opportunity than ever existed at Zoom Info. Now can I, can I dig into

[A]

that for a second?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And give you just a sec to take a sip? I feel like you started off as an application and then went into this whole platform of B2B intelligence. You became the brand name that everyone knew. And in terms of my B2B lead gen activity, it was we need to deal with Zoom Info. And then there were a whole bunch of new players that arrived on the scene and did you know bits and pieces of what you were doing? But you were the, you were the database of source and you didn't see that as your business. But now you do. Now you are a data intelligence repository. It's not necessarily a flattering word, but I mean to say it's like a data vault in a way that you're now opening up and giving people access. And what does that look like now? Are you a marketplace, are you a app, are you a platform? How do you start to in your executive level conversations? How are you building this company for the next two or three years?

[B]

Yep. So there's two things here. One, the data foundation has always been the most important foundation. So the one thing that's different is we actually started as a data company giving you data on the people and the companies that you should be engaging with. That's where we started. And then we sort of added on additional data attributes, first party data, we merged it in, we added an intent data and then project data, job posting data, earnings call data. And so the data has always been the foundation. But the place where we became an app company or a software company is how do you take advantage of that data in the pre AI world? You take advantage of it through an interface that we build for you, we're opinionated about that interface. There's filters. We try to think through what the sales rep wants to see, what a marketing person wants to see, the activities that they would want to do. And so we built a very opinionated front end for our customers to take advantage of that data. Inevitably when you do that, you don't cover every use case perfectly. There are a bunch of edge cases. There's a different way that a customer wants to see data that you know, we didn't think of. Oh, I'm a media company, I want to see your ad spend data front and center in the interface. Well, it's not flexible like that. And so but when you have that data foundation then you can kind of build whatever you want on top of it. And so the way that I think about it is historically we had one interface for a million users. And in the future what is actually happening is that there will be millions of interfaces for millions of users and each of those can be really custom built when you have that data foundation at its core. The other thing that is real in the age of AI, particularly in go to market is I don't just want zoom info data, I want a whole bunch of other data. I want my CRM data, I want my call data, I want my email data, I want my product data and then I want that all stitched together so that when I go write an account plan for an account that I'm working, I don't just get my CRM data, but I get all this interesting zoom info data married to and I get all the call data married to it as well. So that when I build the account plan I have that full context and you know where the GTM universe is going is a robust go to market context graph that then you build on top of that requires zoom info data and that requires your first party data. And those two things have to be stitched together in a seamless way that you could take advantage of it. That's actually is much less trivial than it sounds because like oh yeah, just bring my first and third party data, stitch it together. Well, open up any company of scale CRM system and you'll probably find 20 different Cisco records and which one is the real record? And there's Cisco, there's Cisco WebEx, there's Cisco App Dynamics. And what you really need to do is take 20 Cisco records, understand that those are all one, consolidate that and then marry it to the third party Cisco data and then you can start building on top of that and get an Account plan or a prospecting email or, you know, whatever it is you want to try to automate or build agents on top of.

[A]

Is this still a GTM platform with intelligent layer? And then now we're going to be adding agents to the platform or how does this continue to get realized as you build this business?

[B]

Yeah, exactly. So I think there are a couple of things. One, we built interfaces for our customers to take advantage of that data foundation inside of Zoom Info. You can take advantage of it in our GTM Workspace application, you can take advantage of it in our GTM Studio application. You can build audiences, push them to your sellers and you could do it inside of Zoom Info. And so there are a lot of companies are like, listen, I'm not going to go build my own interface on top of Zoom Info data. It's cool that you did it in two hours. With cloud, we're not doing it. And so we want an out of the box solution that we can put in front of our sellers. That's actually the vast majority of the market. I was talking to my chief product officer yesterday, I was like, I built this enrichment app with cloud code, with Zoom Infos APIs. What percentage of our target audience our customers have done that? And if you're on my X feed and you're on my LinkedIn feed, you would think the answer is like 60% of the marketplace has already done that. But if you take a step back, it's actually not 60%, it's less than 1%. And so we have to also appreciate that it's very, very early for these solutions and most professionals are not leveraging them yet. And they're not going to build their own interfaces, they're not going to interact with the API. The way that a top 1% go to market practitioner is. But look, it's our job to build for the future. And so we're building the flexibility for that, while also understanding that even five years from now, many of our customers are not going to be building their own solutions in cloud code. They're going to want a simple, easy to use interface to take advantage of, but we also want to make that interface really flexible. And so in Zoom Info, like where we're going is the ability to vibe code that interface. We'll give you a standard interface, but if you want it changed so it doesn't look like that or brings in a different data point or does something else for you, you should be able to vibe code the interf, the front end.

[A]

That creates some really interesting balancing acts for you right, keep pushing totally the front end, the wild frontier. Even at 1% or 2%, you want to maintain leadership but at the same time taking care of that enormous installed base that always has its own set of needs and inquiries, both from a marketing sales product standpoint. Right.

[B]

There is definitely a battlefront in two places today. There is a battlefront for an interface for AES, AMS and SDRs. And you see a lot of companies getting funding to go try to build that. You can see like a day day.com or a rocks or a Monaco or a Com room or a Pocus or on and on Hockey stack and unify. And it goes on and on and on. There is a, there is a battle field around an interface for a sales rep to do work. And I think that's largely driven from the expectation that that's not going to be CRM anymore or it's not going to be Salesforce, it's not going to be HubSpot anymore, that the place where GTM teams do work is going to be somewhere different. And a lot of people are fighting to have that interface, us included. And then there's this other kind of train of thought that says, well, interfaces are all going to go away. Everything's going to be interacted with through an LLM or through a vive coded application that somebody built themselves. And so the thing that you want to make sure that you have in that universe is proprietary data that makes itself available in all of those different places. And if all you have is the interface and you're licensing data from a bunch of people and trying to like cobble together a data asset, it's a very difficult place to be. If you have the data asset, then you can kind of fight the battle in both places. Look, I'm not, I'm not smart enough or Nostradamus enough to tell you that five years from now, one of these places, one of these ways is going to win. You know, one example that I think about is video editing applications. You know, at the beginning of the release of the LLMs there was this big push where people said, look, video editing is going to go away. It's all just going to be edited through a back and forth chat with an LLM that edits your videos, that edits your, that edits those videos. But then what we found out was no, that's actually like less is more difficult and more cumbersome than using the standard filtering and, and, and aspects of a video editing software. Video editors don't want to just chat with ChatGPT. They want control of like the vision in their mind coming out on the screen and they don't want an intermediary doing that. And so all of these things kind of went back to an interface that allowed more control. And so, like, I don't know if that's what's going to happen in Go to Market land, but for now we are largely fighting the battle in both places.

[A]

And we're going to hit pause on the future frontier models and go back to the early days because as I mentioned, I have a lot of early founders and doing some crazy things here that want to hear about the early days of Zoom Info and when, if you start to think about like reverse engineering the success here, what were the one or two decisions that you made or that you faced and, and you know, that were pivotal, what were those and how did that turn out? Would you do anything different?

[B]

Yeah, so a couple of different things here. One, you know, we bootstrapped this business to 30 million in revenue before we took any outside funding. And so the business had to be we just, from day one, it was $25,000 for me and $25,000 for my co founder. That was the startup capital. And so you had to be really efficient. And that DNA still exists as Zoom info. Zoom info, it does $450 million of free cash flow. It's 38% margin business, it's run really efficiently. What that gave us the ability to do is because we were far more efficient than our competitors at running the business, it allowed us to go acquire our competitors and acquire our competitors with debt instead of diluting the shareholder base because we had profitability and they didn't have profitability or they had a little bit of profitability. And so we had a number of acquisitions where because we were running a really efficient business and winning, it gave us an opportunity to consolidate the marketplace a bit. Then, you know, every business kind of has two sides. It has a go to market and then it has a product side. Like someone is building the thing or some group of people are building the thing and some group of people are selling the thing. And a lot of times early founders, it's actually changed a bit today. But historically, early founders spent all of their time on the product and engineering side and very little of their time on the go to market side. And we spent like, I was the first seller of Zoom Info. I sold it for six years. I was on the front lines, I was talking to customers, I was in the lead queue. And so I really understood the pain that a seller would have on a call and like, what questions the customer would ask, oh, do you do this? Do you do that? Do our, you know, our competitor is saying that they do this, do you do that? And so then all of the like product build was coming from my frontline experience with the customer. And the way I think about it today is there is a bunch of friction in a sales process. How? Whatever. Even if you're plg, right, there's friction. Something happens. If it was like you log in with your Gmail, okay, that's friction. If you could just not log in and everybody could click it and get in, that's a piece of friction you could take away in the sales process. And in the PLG process, there are a whole bunch of points of friction. And I always viewed my job from a go to market perspective to take out as much friction in the sales process as possible. Do you integrate with Microsoft Dynamics? The answer is no. That's friction. And I need to start thinking about should we, when should we, how many customers are saying that? Do you have data in Europe? Okay, we don't. That's friction. So how do I start solving for that friction? Your competitor does this, do you do that? Okay, that's friction. Either I'm going to build that thing or I'm going to have a really great talk track around why that thing doesn't really work or that you could actually get at it this other way inside of Zoom info. And so I think one of the reasons why we were able to run such an efficient business is that we were really focused on taking all the friction out of the sales process. And then that really drives win rates. It gives you happier account executives. And then a lot of that is because you're feeding that back into the product. And then you're getting a better product out that customers want and the customers are asking for. And then that takes friction away from both the renewal side and the, and the new business sales side.

[A]

Anything on that early journey, Henry, that stands out as like a sore spot for you, like the transition you missed or the opportunity. There's so much success you can point to. But I mean, there's always a couple things, right?

[B]

Yeah, I mean this usually, almost always this question is about people and whether they scale with you. If your company is growing fast, you're either, you're either like, you've either done a really great job, you're super well funded, so you bought people like you were able to get people who were like ahead on the scale arc so that when you met the scale that they were used to, they were able to sort of accelerate past it. I would tell you there were points of time building Zoom Info where I just had the wrong people. Like, I think at one point in time where I had the wrong product and engineering folks and, and I didn't realize it fast enough. They were really great for the period of scale right before. They were really bad for the next period of scale. And like, the period of scale that they were really great in really drove the business and they were incredibly valuable.

[A]

I'm thinking of the saying, hire slow fire fast kind of a thing.

[B]

Yeah, that's definitely, that's definitely true for any founder's journey. And I think, like, what ends up happening again, it's kind of exactly that they're really, really important and valuable to you for one stage of scaling the business and you feel super indebted to them for that. And then all of a sudden they're just not there anymore. And you know when there's a thing that Ben Horowitz or Mark Andreessen says is that when there's a doubt, there's no doubt. And that's right. Like as soon as you have a doubt, there's probably no doubt that you're right about that.

[A]

Could be a little harsh, but that's prerogative. As a founder, you gotta make those tough decisions. We see it in sports, we see it in life, we see it in sports.

[B]

Definitely see it in sports. Yeah, sports does an incredible job of that. Better than, you know, any other industry or type of company.

[A]

It's in your face all the time, probably. Hey, what about you personally? How did you evolve when you were startup founder out of law school all the way to, oh, we're a public company now. Oh, wait, we're a billion dollar unicorn. Oh, wait, we're now taking on the next frontier. And I'm 13 years into this, 14 years into it. You know, how do you personally evolve in that process?

[B]

Look, I'm constantly trying to learn and learn new things and not assume that anything that I did before is Stacker synced. Like, I think, like, when I think about the business, there are probably a lot of things that, that were really important to the way we operated the business a year ago that are just not very important to the way we're going to operate the business next year. And so I'm constantly trying to learn, like, what the next frontier is and then take apart the things that we're doing at Zoom Info today and modernize them for what the Next leg of growth is your one interesting example. Here is the way our the talent profile for a great new business account executive is very different than the talent profile for an enterprise sales account manager. And I didn't appreciate that. I thought like, if you're great at new business sales, you're going to be great at enterprise account management. So I started moving my great new business sellers into the enterprise account management role. I was like, you know, I don't think these account managers in enterprise are any good. You guys are amazing. You're selling all of these deals. I'm going to move you into the enterprise account management role and you guys are going to crush it because you're technical and you understand customers and you know our product really well. Turns out that in the enterprise, your job is so much more than just understanding the problem, the product. Like that's very important. But it is not what gets large enterprise expansions done. It's building relationships and trust with your customer. It's solving problems for them in real time. It's navigating the organization when they have a problem, it's getting them collateral that they could use to talk to their organization about zooming. There's all these other elements of being great at account management that don't map really well back to new business account executives. And so I had to go through that learning process where I was like, there's no way that person can be good. They don't look at all like my new business account executives. And then, you know, you sort of like learn through that. But so it is questioning your assumptions and your, your, your not your, your experience constantly.

[A]

So let me play off of that then and ask if you're the difference between a good and a great founder. Is it something that's more a skill, a habit, a mindset, a personality trait? When you start to identify that from a leadership perspective, a founder perspective, what do you think you would lean on the most?

[B]

So I ended up, I have a group of founders that gets together two times a year from large publicly traded companies, fast growing private companies. There are a couple of things that make it so that we all get along and have successful businesses. I would say the first one is these guys. You're all in. I don't know if there's a second of their day that goes by where they're not thinking about their business, they're not thinking about how to improve their business, they're just obsessed with their businesses. And then each of them has a superpower. Like one is really great at product, one is really great at go to market. One is really great at inspiring and recruiting a team. One is really great at analytics. And so when we get together, the coolest thing to watch is that everybody's trying to steal a little bit of the other person's superpower in the moment. So that goes back to like, you're a really great learner and you're always looking for opportunity in any situation you are to apply it back to your business. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. I called it the ownership tax. And the ownership tax is like this constant voice in your mind that's like, is this the best use of your time? How is this going to add value to zoom info? Should you go do that? If you do it, are you going to find something valuable for zoom info? And I think, like, great founders have a really high ownership tax. They're constantly thinking about it. But when I wrote about this, it dawned on me because I went, I got jury duty. And so I tried to get out of it. I was like, oh, I'm a very important man. They were like, yeah, good story. It's a one day trial. Is it really going to cause an issue for you to go to this one day jury trial? And I was like, no, it's not. And I was like, oh, I'm a lawyer too. Maybe that can get me out of it. And he's like, yeah, no, you're still going to jury duty. The judge, they're okay, fine. And then I realized, like, during jury duty, it was the first time in years where my mind was completely free of zoom info. There was nothing that I was going to do. I was a slave to the state for two days. There was no value I was going to be able to extract from that jury trial that I was able to bring back to zoom info. But in almost every other moment of my day, I am looking for value to extract and zoom info. So it's a combination of obsession and constantly learning, constantly looking for opportunity for your business.

[A]

I like that. Be curious, not judgmental, as Ted Lasso would say.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

Let's say you're talking to a seed founder and I'm sure you do this on quite a regular basis. But what's the one thing you would share with them today in this environment that's so unique? I feel that's, you know, getting started in an industry like ours. What is the piece of advice you'd give them? And you go, shit, nobody told me this, but I'm going to share this with you.

[B]

Look, in today's environment, I would tell you get the cash flow positive because you don't really know like how. Like the way that software companies particularly are getting funded today is very different than it was two years ago or three years ago. And so if you want to control your destiny, get to cash flow positive as fast as possible, then the other thing I would tell you is that I learned the hard way is do something really, really great, better than anybody else in the world and then, and that thing should be sellable, monetizable, and then start doing another thing and then do that thing really, really well, better than anybody else in the world and then do another thing. What I think a lot of companies get stuck doing is that the, the field is so big, it's like, oh, I need a large TM so I need to do 15 things. And then you end up not doing 15 things very well. You end up doing 15 things kind of crappy. And then nobody buy a thing that does 15 things kind of crappy. And so like you figure out a niche or a thing that you do really, really well and then expand out from there and only expand out once you nailed something that you do better than anybody else in the world that's monetizable.

[A]

Love that answer. Hey, we're going to go to our quick fire round out of respect to your crazy busy day. But listening to this conversation gives me a new question I want to fire at you, right? Are you the coach or the quarterback?

[B]

I am more the coach. I am more the. I'm the coach. I'm the coach, not the quarterback.

[A]

You sound just so hands on, right? With the way you're leading the business. I know you get together with clients, with customers, with prospects, your events all the time, right?

[B]

Yeah. But I'm not like I was trying to think through that question because I went back and forth in my mind and my coach, there are some things where I'm the quarterback, but mostly I'm the coach. And when I'm the coach, it's like I'm calling the, I am calling the play. So I am like the offensive coordinator. And then I'm calling the play and then I'm looking at how the play got run and then I'm showing up and going like, okay, I wouldn't run it this way. I would do this. I'm running a new play, so. But more coach than quarterback. And largely because I have a good team now that does most of the quarterbacking better than I could.

[A]

I got it. I'll take that Modest response. What about the metric you look at today that you weren't so focused on five, 10 years ago, but maybe you wish you had been? Is it, is it ebitda, as we touched on earlier? Is it, you know, what is that? Or is it customer churn? What are the, what's that factor you're looking at now?

[B]

So it depends on the moment that you're in with the company. And so at different moments I'm focused on a different metric because we're trying to drive something different. I would say today I'm focused on consumption. Are customers consuming more of our data in more places? I'm constantly focused on top of the funnel. What are we driving from a lead generation perspective into the top of the funnel. And then how does that filter down? Like, what are our win rates? Are they increasing or decreasing? What are they tied to? They tied to price, pricing? Do they try to product, you know, how are we thinking about pricing and packaging if, like our win rates are lower and how do we offset volume? So I'm looking at the all of the funnel metrics and then I'm looking at new business, new product pipeline. So we're, we released two big new products this year and I'm ultra focused on what is our upstate uptake in GTM Studio and GTM Workspace and our MCP servers. So those are the ones right now.

[A]

Okay, what about zoominfos Growth Truth? That's you still look back on and you go, how did we do this? Or I still can't believe that that period was there something that jumps out.

[B]

I think my favorite One is for 10 years we were in a deadlock battle with a company called ranking and it was us and ranking. And like when we started, my co founder And I put 25 grand on our credit cards. They started with $8 million in venture financing. My co founder, I never started a business before. They came in with a bunch of tenured information services executives. We should have died then. And we were like ultra competitive and we ended up winning. But there was a moment where we innovated on the product. We added intent data into the sales product. And then from that moment forward, like the win rates were the wind was at our back. And so when you get a very innovative product that lands product market fit, there are moments where the business takes off and that's not going to last forever. You actually have to innovate the next thing. But there are moments where you landed product market fit with a really innovative product that allowed you to take off. And when we added intent to our product in 2015. Three years later, we acquired Rankin.

[A]

That's great. Hey, is there a book or a habit that you recommend to people that either join the company or starting their own company or something that you just find super useful, inspiring. And again, if it's not a book or a habit of practice.

[B]

Yeah, look, I just. From a book perspective, I love the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. That's almost like a trope at this point in startup land, but it's a great book. There's a great book called Team Intelligence by John Levy. If you're like at a little bit of scale and you need your teams to operate at the highest levels, that's a great one. I would tell you, like, I exercise every day and so I think finding time to exercise or do something active every day, if you're a founder and there's a lot of pressure on you having doesn't have to be a long time, 30 to 45 minutes where you're just pushing yourself really hard I think is a really important habit that to keep.

[A]

Great answers and I wholeheartedly support all of it. Last question. Easy one. What's the next chapter look like?

[B]

I think the next chapter is Zoom Info. Winning in the age of AI and moving to a much bigger consumption business that plays in all of the areas where people are doing go to market work, not just in our one SaaS application.

[A]

That's Zoom Info. How about you personally? Is there a person, Is there another step in your. In your own personal evolution?

[B]

Look, I wrote, I actually wrote an obituary four years ago. I had an executive coach tell me, like, go write your obituary. Which is super interesting because we spent so much time writing the like, mission statement for our businesses and our values and very little time doing that for ourselves. Personally, I wrote it. I actually put it on LinkedIn too, so if anybody wants to read it. Something sad, but it gave me a North Star for what I care about. And like, you know, what I care about is that I operated with integrity in my business, that I saw things in people that they didn't see in themselves. And I helped them, coach them to see those things out in the real world. That I was a great husband and a great father and a great friend and I was incredibly loyal. I gave back to causes that I cared about. And I think as long as I'm doing those things in the obituary, I'm living up to the North Star.

[A]

You are following a great path. This has been super fun, informative, insightful, inspirational. You're a great follow on LinkedIn, which is why I reached out to you, including my friend Bobby Knapp, who says hello.

[B]

Amazing. Tell Bob guy said hi too.

[A]

But I mean, this, this is, this is just fantastic for old school, for new school, and I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much, Henry, and best of luck with everything, zoom, info and more.

[B]

Thank you. Keith. Really great to see you.

[A]

Great to see you again. Thanks.