Henry Schuck CEO of ZoomInfo - Taking Care of Business | T-Mobile

if you were to summarize a couple of the nuggets of things for other entrepreneurs to do a version of what you've done you know what what are some of the top things that you point to taking time to self-reflect about what you're great at and what you need to improve as a leader is really valuable i tell our team all all the time two years from now if i'm the same ceo as i am today i will not be the right ceo for this business two years from now hey everyone welcome back to taking care of business i'm mike katz evp of the t-mobile business group and today i'll be chatting with henry schuck founder and ceo of zoom info in 2007 henry co-founded discoverorg which built the industry's highest quality data sets through a mix of automated tech and human in the loop ai in 2019 discoverorg acquired zoom info a go to market solution for over 20 000 companies worldwide which by the way facilitated the largest ipo of 2020. well henry thank you so much for joining us it's great to have you here thanks for having me mike i'm excited to be here with you well first let me jump right into it is it true that you founded discover.org while you were only 23 years old and actually still in law school that is true i was 23 years old when we founded the business i was in law school i founded it in my law school dorm um put 25 000 on my credit card and my co-founder's credit card and we started building the company so i i mean i wanna i gotta dig into that one a little bit more how how did you one possibly find the time to do that and what was the inspiration for because this this seems like what you do now seems like a a far departure potentially from a from pursuing a law career yeah totally first of all much more enjoyable than law school starting the business even though it added a whole bunch of uh chaos to my my life it was um i was enjoying it much more so it didn't hurt that that much but i had worked at a similar company when i was an undergrad um so i had a college job i was working 40 hours a week and i worked at this company that was doing something similar but it really wasn't building a business it was really kind of a lifestyle business there were a couple of college kids doing things but there was a huge demand for the product and for the service and essentially it was providing sellers and marketers with the data that they needed to identify their next best customer and there was all this demand the the owner was basically on the phone all day long just closing deals and then there wasn't much of a business apparatus behind it so i felt you know pretty convicted that we could build something real there that we could invest behind the business and then provide customers with a much fuller suite of products and services that they would need the fun story there is we actually went back and bought that company uh about six years after we founded discoverorg and then integrated it in so the company i worked at in college ended up being uh one of the companies we acquired along the way which was a you know an interesting fun day well and it saved the world from another lawyer which i mean i feel like i feel like we all won from that i can say that because i'm married i'm married to a lawyer so i'm allowed to say that uh um you know when when you when you first started the business you know what like what was your what was your vision of it where did you where were you expecting it to go and you know as as you know the last decade has rolled out and and you've gone from a startup company to a big company like how how has the actual execution of the company changed from your original vision yeah super interesting when we founded the business it's 2007 um and there weren't very many software or technology or data tools for sales people or for marketers and what we started building was essentially a platform that sellers could use to identify their customers to identify who makes a buying decision and what we realized was there were a whole bunch of other pieces of software and technology that sellers needed to go to market in a digital world that they were asking for that they were begging for that they were consuming from you know a number of different vendors in the marketplace but what we realized was when you plug data underneath any of those specific applications the applications really came to life you got better analytics you got better processes uh you were in one single pane of glass and so what what started off as hey let's build really great data that sales people can use really morphed into let's build a go to market platform that's modern that uses data at its foundation to drive up and through an application layer that sellers can leverage every single day to do everything from engaging with their clients to identifying who's in market for their services to uh doing website chat or voice analytics on their calls to understand which calls had positive sentiment or negative sentiment and so it's essentially now become a modern go to market platform for sellers but that vision you know i at 23 years old i was building a data company and it really evolved over time and uh you know technology has moved incredibly fast our space has moved incredibly fast and so you know if you're an entrepreneur sitting uh you know sitting down at home in your second or third year of business and you're like well i you know i can't think 10 years ahead i totally get it either could i um a lot of this came in an evolutionary way you do one thing you execute it really well and you put your eyes ahead for the next thing and i think that's one thing we've done really well at the company um is that we've executed really well on one particular part of our vision and then we opened the opus to other parts of the vision and started executing on those as well i find it so fascinating because you and i have talked about this in the past that there's so much data available to companies now both both their first party data and third-party data that they can procure that it essentially makes it almost impossible for a human to process and make and make the the most optimized decisions and so the idea of of being able to take these really complex data sets and being able to curate decisions for people i just i just find extra extraordinarily fascinating when when you think about where you guys are today and the evolution of data the evolution of uh technologies that process data like uh machine learning and ai like where where do you think where do you think we're headed you know what what is what is uh you know the sales person of you know 2030 look like with with these powerful data sets behind them yeah so i think first of all we're super early in that process we're super early in leveraging both first and third party data to make better decisions in the sales motion we're at the you know somewhere in the before the first inning ended um so really early in the process and i think what you see in the future is again today we have all of these systems that we're using to go to market and we are using systems right a seller today sits at a computer for most of the day and is making calls is making is doing emails is updating forecasts is in salesforce is in zoom info and and in every action that they're taking there's a system behind it and so it can capture all of this really interesting data and it's two-way right prospect responds that's a piece of data prospect responds with the with the words let's take the next step that's a key uh a key message that can be captured a key piece of data that can be captured and so today i think we're in a world where now we're capturing a lot of data from a lot of systems and we're storing it and we're doing little things here and there with it but where we're going is really being able to not just capture that data but start making sense of it in a holistic way and so i think that the the sales rep of the future is going to come in they're going to sit down and they're going to be presented with a whole bunch of recommendations for their next steps that they're supposed to take in their business and it'll be it'll take advantage of every call you've had it'll take advantage of every customer meeting you've had every customer conversation that's happened and then it'll take advantage of third party data which of the your prospects are growing which ones are shrinking which ones just got funding which one's just hired a new chief information officer or chief executive which one added a specific technology or removed the specific technology from their stack and there's just too many key data points today for one sales person to triangulate but in the future all of that data will come into one place we'll do analysis on it and then we'll present the salesperson with their next best steps and so what's interesting about that is today that's a big value that a sales rep uh brings to the table that ability to prioritize and understand what's going on in their accounts in the future what's super interesting is that the relationships become significantly more important because now you know what to do your ability to build trust with your client your ability to build strong relations with ships with them where you're you're consultative and helping to drive their businesses forward that becomes again the sales rep super power because who you should be contacting what you should be contacting about contacting them about that'll be delivered to you through the systems yeah and i think i i think it's so exciting because you know to the point that you just made like in today's world so much of the sales process is um it's it's about how how many people can i contact and you know and unfortunately for sales people oftentimes it's how many people can i contact uh and and how many knows can i get before i get a yes and i think what you just described that's so exciting to me personally is how could sales people refocus or reinvest their time into the people that are likely to say yes in building relationships and expanding opportunities versus has so much energy into all the knows i think that to me that's one of the most exciting prospects of it yeah absolutely and then it's bi-directional right because if you're contacting the people who are in market for your services who have the biggest need who are most interested who all of the signals tell you this is the person you should be engaging with well they want to engage with you because they have a business problem they need to solve and you are likely a person with a product or service that can solve that problem for them i think that's one of the things i think sellers especially early in their careers they miss they think they're out there just like schlepping goods basically but the reality of the situation is you're providing a service or a product that helps another business person solve something in their business that they need solved it you know crea clears a bottleneck that allows them to grow and be more successful and hire more employees and open more locations and i think once you you you have that shift in perspective where you realize your product or services is is unlocking potential within businesses just this whole selling motion becomes much more enjoyable when you look forward to like you you mentioned ai there a couple of times i'm interested to get your perspective on uh technologies like ai and machine learning and where where you see them going because i i think you've even mentioned overall we're kind of at the infancy of of all the entire way that this big data gets managed but when you think about ai and machine learning when you think about technologies like uh 5g and edge computing coming in and like really reducing latency where where do you see that that market going what are some of the use cases that you think will emerge from from ai yeah so when i think about ai today especially in the go to market uh in the go to market motion i think about how we have this incredible opportunity like we just talked about to identify your next best customers to route uh to route customers to the right representatives at the right time um when i think about 5g today you know most business to business software gets built with a desktop first mentality it gets built for someone who's sitting behind a desk with a computer monitor and i think as 5g and edge computing becomes sort of commonplace for businesses that they're going to realize that we live in a mobile first world and all of that software that we've built with a desktop first mentality is gonna be is gonna need to be digitally transformed into a mobile-first uh workforce because more and more of uh more and more of the content we're creating more and more of the interactions we're having with our customers is happening on a mobile device uh and as the 5g technology is in our hands every day and gives us tremendous capabilities uh you're gonna i think we're gonna see people building much more in a mobile first way and so look i think for for us that means we have to rethink the way we build software we have to rethink the way our end users use our software and i think that's going to be a a very transformative moment in in software especially in the b2b in b2b software as as you think about your roadmap going forward forward in these capabilities that you're building we've we've talked a lot about it in the context of sales people and the interactions that sales people are having with their customers are you thinking about you know other uses for it are there other applications that you see for the platform that you've built and the data sets that that you guys have yeah absolutely i think uh one of the you know one of the things we're providing data to our customers and our customers expect that data to be incredibly high quality and so we've built machine learning and ai into the ways we collect data and the way that we identify when data is accurate or inaccurate and we're combining you know multiple data sets we have over a million different unique sources that come into zoom info and then we're making decisions about what's accurate and what's not accurate we're making those decisions based on historical values of different sources of information that come in we're making those decisions based on triangulation of different data sources and machine learning is really at the heart of every decision we make about what to publish in our platform or what not to publish in our platform and as those technologies advance and we've seen it within our business really just in the last year where we've embedded new machine learning technology new ai technology and we've increased accuracy rates of the data that we provide our customers in real material ways across the business any other industries you think are ripe for disruption i mean i think you're already seeing it or you're seeing the opportunity in health care um there was actually this weekend there was a new york times article about watson um and ibm's watson and sort of what's happened with that from an ai and machine learning capability but any sort of industry where there's a tremendous amount of data that can be crunched to provide predictive outcomes that's where i think you're going to see ai and machine learning really take hold and i think you know healthcare financial services even in retail especially with e-commerce i think when you can crunch a whole bunch of data to make the right recommendations you'll see you know ai and machine learning really take off just out of curiosity this this past year as we were on the pandemic and everybody's remark were excuse me working remotely and a lot of our interactions were through you know forums like this you know digital people were in front of their computers a lot often a lot more often did you see an expansion of of data sets uh you know this year relative to previous years yeah absolutely um there were so you know when you went from many of many sales teams being in the field and many interactions being face to face to a world where every interaction was digital we saw the number of emails our customers were sending skyrocket we saw the number of zoom meetings skyrocket both internally and externally we saw the number of um we saw the number of phone calls being made to customers and prospects skyrocket and so you really you in a world where you're forced to act digitally you know we saw sellers taking advantage of those digital tools we saw interaction on chat significantly increase across the company as well so a lot of sort of uptake of these digital technologies that were in place but were not being leveraged as fully as they are as they are now makes sense and it makes you wonder how much um i mean i think we're all asking ourselves that in the in the new the new normal whatever you want to call it uh how much of those things will persist versus you know conversations where you're fit where you're physically there where you may get the benefit of uh building a stronger relationship potentially if you're physically there and can actually shake hands but you lose potentially the the benefit of of robust data collection and record keeping um yeah it's a lot easier to do in this in the digital virtual environment i get the feeling mike that most of the interactions we have with our customers and our prospects in the future will be a mix of both digital and in-person so even if i'm sitting in the office if i'm sitting the office in boston and i'm having a meeting with a customer then my sense is somebody's going to be teleconferenced into that meeting as well and once you bring in sort of the digital teleconference motion into the into the uh into the fold from a business meeting perspective you get all those benefits of the digital signals alongside it like it's hard to imagine a meeting where there isn't some digital component to it in addition to the in-person components yeah it's amazing how that's changed hasn't it um we've gone from a world where it was hard to imagine that actually happening to now imagining it not happening it's it's crazy how fast yes that's impossible absolutely um hey if you don't mind i wanted to jump into uh talking a little you know a little bit about you as a business leader because uh you've had an amazing journey um you know what you've done and what you've built with this company has just just been incredible and it's you know it's the dream for many many entrepreneurs um and i was hoping you could just talk a little bit about um you know you you've been involved in lots of mergers and acquisitions you've been involved in a you know company that was a startup to now one that's publicly traded um you know if you were to summarize a couple of the nuggets of things for other entrepreneurs to do a version of what you've done you know what what are some of the top things that you point to yeah i think the biggest thing is um and also thanks thank you for that mike it's been uh it's been a pretty great journey and i'm thankful for it every day um i think i i realized so much more today than i ever have that none of it is possible without the great employees that we've hired along the way um and who you know today i think par one one of the problems is today the ceo or the founder is put on like some sort of special pedestal like i'm some kind of special genius i think the biggest thing i've done well is i've hired well um and i've been vigilant about talent and i've made sure that i hired the right people and the key roles and i gave them the support that they needed to be successful and their success really is just my success and so really believing that about your key employees really about all of your employees i think is a major differentiator every ceo will give you that same advice hire well but like what does it actually really mean it means that sometimes hiring takes a long time it means that you have to be really patient with hiring and so if you know you have a key role we oftentimes go out to market and then we find sort of like five potential people and we go okay it's been six months looking for this person which one is it gonna be and you just make the choice and i think the the biggest lesson i've learned along the way is be patient about that process feel really great about the person you're bringing into your company and then give them a ton of support to be successful in the different roles that you feel but i've seen time and again at the startup phase in the public company phase there's something in the company that's not running very well you go out you hire a great talented person and all of a sudden boom that thing turns around i remember sitting at a conference one time watching the ceo of a public company and they asked him you know what's unique about your business that's made you so successful and he said it was actually a fitness company he said look we make great fitness devices but really it's all about our people and it's all about our culture and i remember being so frustrated hearing that because i was like no just like tell me the thing so i can go make sure that i'm mimicking that thing and everybody says you know it's people and i just thought it was such a like a corporate answer to the question um and then i went home and because i really respected the ceo i ran it through my head over and over and over again and i realized you could have i've said dozens and dozens and dozens of times at that point if i could have just um if i could just clone this person 100 times if i could clone that person 20 times or 30 times this business would be far bigger than it is today and i believed in that but i really didn't think that like an answer that says your employees are the most important part of your business was also true and i realized i had just been saying all along it's all about the employees um and so if you hire really well um and you build the right culture and you let people run as fast as they possibly can i think that's a that's you know it's a winning strategy i think one of the things that i've always done uh with my with the different people on my teams is i've had a very big vision for them and oftentimes that vision was bigger than what they saw for themselves and so my job became getting them to see that same vision that i saw for them and giving them the confidence that they could execute on that same vision uh and in a startup environment um and in a small company environment that's incredibly important because you're often hiring people with not a lot of experience you're hiring people who are talented and hard-working but they haven't seen the story happen and so it is incumbent on you to create that story and create a vision for them to really uh really live up to uh and i've been most proud of of that at zoom info uh is really helping our young leaders see a vision for themselves that they are they didn't see on their own and then really helping them reach uh reach their potential i think that's that's incredibly rewarding um and then i'll and then you know maybe one anecdote is really until we ipo'd really until we ipo'd which was last year in the middle of the pandemic i think i like many other startup founders and entrepreneurs had what's wikipediable as imposter syndrome which is basically like you don't think you had anything to do with it uh that your skills are not particularly needed in the success of the business but you were kind of in the right place at the right time you caught some lucky breaks along the way and geez if someone actually came into the business and saw what was really happening they'd be so disappointed in you and realize that you're just kind of like a fraud you're not really like a great leader or you're not particularly inspirational or running a very good company i think that's really hard to get over it also gives you a great chip on your shoulder but i think really taking time to self-reflect about what you're great at and what you need to improve as a leader is really valuable i tell our team all all the time like i am not i am not the right ceo for this business right now two years from now right now i am two years from now if i'm the same ceo as i am today i will not be the right ceo for this business two years from now things are moving too fast the business is growing too fast there will be more complexities and new things that i have to learn along the way over those next two years and unless i'm committed to improving every day and learning every day then i can't be the best ceo that this company can have two years from now and so the the last thing i would say is being committed to learning and getting better and improving and identifying the places that the business needs you to improve and up level at that's a key part of being a great leader and at some phases in my career it was like very tactical i had to know how to run the best marketing program i had to know how to run to give the best sales pitch and at some points in my career like today a lot of it is about how do i communicate the vision for what we're building to the public markets to our shareholders to our employees but that's all those different stages required me learning some new skill and so being committed to learning is uh you know it's the greatest advantage i i love that i i particularly love your comments about the focus on people bringing the right people in taking big bets on people um really really leaning into building a unique distinct culture i i just i just really resonates with with me a ton um when you when you kind of think back on these this you know last 13 14 years as you've been you've been building this company anything that sticks out to you that you know if you went back you're like man i wish i had done this differently or i wish i'd made this decision earlier anything big like that that sticks out to you um you know i wish i was committed i wish i was vocally committed to improving every day and sending a message like that through our teams and i think when once our once we sort of realize that one of the core value drivers at zoom info is the ability to improve one percent a day every single day people really buying into that idea of self-improving and being the best versions of themselves i think the the business took a you know inflected and i think along the way a lot of times we were almost embarrassed about that because it required lots of changes so we would come in and we'd go like you know that thing we were doing for the last six months we don't think that's a good idea anymore we're gonna do it this way now and people would be like oh my god like why would you do this to us and like once you realize it's because we're committed to improving every day um it it it gets people bought into that vision in a much different way today we do this thing called uh we do the shark tank internally at zoom info where we basically go out to all of our employees and we say hey pitch us your best idea for what zoom info should be doing from a product perspective and from a process perspective and so from a product perspective then they get in front the the finalists get in front of the entire company they pitch the idea and then the winner we commit resources behind seeing that product idea and bringing it to market on the process side i actually think it's even more exciting because our frontline employees have so much visibility into things that we're doing in an old way that should have been fixed along the way and they're able to come to us and go look this process requires 17 steps i bet we can do it in three and this is how we do it one two three and we go oh that's the great we should do that tomorrow and so even if you don't win that competition the second third fourth and fifth place finalist we're implementing those suggestions into the business and so really just embedding this idea that we can improve every day is uh just a tremendous force multiplier for us when you think about again the evolution of your business and i actually want to come back to the at the point that you're just making about how you know the continuous relentlessness on push and pushing i want to come back to that in a second but when you think about the the last you know 12 13 14 years at what point do you did you feel like you guys made a pivot from a startup into um you know into a you know mature company yeah was there was there did it happen slowly over time or was there like a catalyst moment for that like when did that pivot do you think occurred for you yeah so we were discover org until february of 2019 when we acquired zoom info and when we acquired zoom info the day that happened it did feel like we became uh you know more than just a startup company we had a thousand employees we went from 500 employees to a thousand employees overnight which by the way brings all sorts of infrastructure to challenges and people challenges and when you're instrumented to be a 500 employee company it's a lot different than instrumenting to be a thousand employee company we have to catch up real quick um but that day i think it felt like we had a product and a team that could take us to the next level and it didn't you know it also felt like um much of the of the the lift for the next stage of the company was not going to be particularly on my shoulders but that it would be on the leaders that we acquired from zoom info really merging with the leaders at discoverorg to take us to the next stage and you know and to the hey always we're a best ideas wins company you know i founded the company i founded in 2007 was called discoverorg we acquired this business zoom info in february of 2019 and for lots of reasons including ev nobody called discoverorg the right name they would call it discover.org or discovery.org or discover or discovery we switched the name to zoom info um and i remember when we did that people were like whoa are you gonna be okay like henry are you personally are you gonna be okay and it was such an interesting comment because it was like look i'm focused on building a great business and this is the best business decision for the company um and so that i think stems throughout the business today everyone's looking to make the best decision one of the things i so much appreciate about you is is what you were talking about a second ago which is just this relentless pushing you know and it's it's something that i think is so important for any company that's in a big growth stage it's it's the the mentality of hey what was what was good enough yesterday isn't going to be good enough for us tomorrow and you know really challenging the status quo i know you hate when people say hey that's the way it's always been done and obviously that's something that you really embody as a leader but when you think about now a company that's you know thousand plus people how how have you you know really and you talked about the the shark tank and what you're doing to engage your front line but what are some of the other things that you're doing to really infuse that into the culture of zoom info yeah so a number of things but our regular operating cadence is that we bring together every month uh all of the key members of every department at the company for a monthly operating review that i sit in on our president sits in our sits in on our chief financial officer sits in on and essentially that you know that meeting is designed to number one show what things went well and really the things that went well are important because you want to make sure you're you don't miss those things but things that go well tend to continue to go well if you nailed the execution on something you know you'll probably continue to nail the execution on something and so a lot of those month or most of the monthly operating review is to really dive into the things that didn't go well identify what didn't go well and then articulate a plan to solve those things for the future and so every month every department comes in we look at how we operated for the month the month previously and then we're digging into areas of improvement across uh across the company um and it's super valuable because everybody comes in there within a like a an improvement mindset and they know i think you know maybe the most important thing there mike is they have to trust that we're all have the same motivation like my goal is not to like tear down bad performance in a given month it's to work with you to solve it to identify it make sure we both see it right like i can't see it and you not see it and us get to a good outcome we have to both be on the same page about what it is that we're solving and then if you really believe that my motivation is to build uh to build the the best possible company that we can build then we're totally aligned on going and solving that together but if you think like my motivation is to be the smartest guy in the room or prove that i know marketing better than you or that i understand something or or to just show off my intelligence in a meeting we're never going to get anywhere and so we have to have a foundation of trust where you truly believe that my goal is to improve the company and if we're aligned on that then it's super easy to go like you know point at things and poke at things and say look how do we make that a little bit better how do we make that a little bit better i i think it's such an important and such an important thing for a leader again you know especially one that's in a position like you with a hyper growth growth company to have that mentality so it's so it's so cool to hear about how one you're living it and then how you're pushing it through your org so thanks thank you so much for sharing that um yeah absolutely we've we've now reached everyone's favorite time in taking care of business which is the rapid fire section so if you're uh if you're a game for i'd love to hit you with some rapid fire questions the most important questions um some will argue of this entire segment um so first one talker text talk ah this this is gonna be a controversial one ios or android they're both customers so both he's carrying two phones with it i have plenty of systems that run on ios and plenty of systems that run on android um there's only one right answer to this the other one will be uh deeply offensive to me but music or podcast podcast of course okay yeah of course it's a leading witness mobile or console games you know i'm not a gamer i don't play games i i so i couldn't tell my daughter plays them on ipad so uh i'll i'll go with my my daughter's answer so mobile okay uh slides or flip-flops what are so i saw this question what are slides it's so funny when we were writing these somebody asked me the same questions like you don't know what slides are i feel like that's the only footwear my kids wear my here's my i don't know if this is the right technical description of them but i i describe them as their flip-flops without like the thing that goes between your toes got it flip-flops okay running or hiking running uh early bird or night owl definitely an early bird okay well henry i can't tell you how much i appreciate you being here um it's it's so incredible to hear about the story and the journey that you've you've taken zoom info on and i know for a lot of people that are listening uh that really um you know have a goal of doing something similar to what you've done hearing uh how you've done it uh is is i know i know really inspiring and i and i think i love how you kind of boil it down to a couple of really key concepts it's it's about people uh it's about pushing uh the status quo it's about building uh a differentiated powerful culture and there are things that sound really really easy but you know i think you know better than anyone else because you've been doing it in a super successful way for the last decade plus that it's hard and it takes it takes a lot of work but it was so so incredible to hear from you to hear your story and i can't tell you how much we appreciate you joining us well thank you for having me here on the show mike i really appreciate it i had a lot of fun every episode of taking care of business as part of t-mobile's project 10 million we donate to a school of our guest choice this time we're closing the homework gap with a donation to evergreen school district in vancouver washington thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time on taking care of business you

2021-09-21 05:39

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