Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Before we transition to the episode, I want to highlight the Founders Podcast, which is part of our Colossus Network. David Senra, who hosts Founders, has devoted his life to learning from history's greatest entrepreneurs and every week he distills the lessons of a different founder. If you want an entry point, I highly recommend starting with episode 136 on Estee Lauder or episode 288 on Ralph Lauren.
I hosted David on Invest Like the Best last summer and it's hard not to walk away insanely energized after listening to any episode with him. You can find a link to Founders and those episodes in the show notes of this conversation. You can also search all past transcripts on our website, joincolossus.com.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:55)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:27)
My guest today is Henry Schuck, the founder and CEO of ZoomInfo. I've gotten to know Henry over the past year by virtue of him being on the board of Tegus, where I'm a board observer. I meet a lot of people and Henry is one of my favorites. His energy is unmatched and he knows his business down to the tiniest details. He has tenacity and curiosity in spades.
ZoomInfo is a go-to-market software and data solution for B2B sales. Henry founded the business as DiscoverOrg in 2007 and bootstrapped it for the first seven years of its life. Today, it's an $8.5 billion public company with a database of over 140 million business contacts. We delve into the science of great sales. Henry shares some awesome stories and we talk about his business philosophy more broadly. Please enjoy my great conversation with Henry Schuck.
So Henry, this is a unique one because we have the benefit of having done an episode with you already before on the Business Breakdowns podcast. I didn't do it. Jesse Poojee hosted you and it was comprehensive. Like I thought it was like an incredible overview of the history of ZoomInfo. We'll talk on some of those elements, but I highly encourage people if they're interested in the business to also check that out. So we'll try to make them really complimentary with this conversation. I want to begin somewhere kind of fun, which is with an email that you wrote to your team soon after the business went public.
And the topic of the email was about what it means to be a championship team.
And I've read the email, I really liked it. It seemed like, especially at the time, like in stark contrast to some of the other similar communications you might see from a CEO to a large team. Can you describe what the email said, the gist of the message and why you wrote it?

**Henry Schuck** (4:05)
The gist of the message was, we're building a championship team here at ZoomInfo.
And not everybody is cut out for a championship team. And I used the analogy of the Pittsburgh Pirates and compared them to the Boston Red Sox. And I said, look, the Pittsburgh Pirates, they're a bunch of major league baseball players on the Pittsburgh Pirates.
And every year they show up and they play the game and they're never in the hunt for a championship title. And they never show up expecting to be in the hunt for the championship title. So they show up, it's a nice place to work, they make pretty good money, they finish the year and they're very mediocre or sub-mediocre.