- ZoomInfo CEO and cofounder Henry Schuck shared insight into the cloud business intelligence platform's successful IPO in June during Business Insider's Global Trends Festival.
- ZoomInfo went public in the middle of the pandemic after seeing strong demand for data and insights that businesses could use to navigate a dramatically changed market.
- Schuck said the IPO did lead to an unhealthy obsession: checking the company's stock price constantly in the first few months since going public.
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Eventually, he realized that focusing on the daily price swings wasn't serving the company's long-term ambitions: "I'm happy to share that I quit cold turkey," he said. "I don't look at the stock price all day anymore. "
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ZoomInfo saw its stock soar more than 60% when it went public in June , highlighting the cloud business intelligence platform's solid momentum despite the pandemic that upended the broader economy.
But ZoomInfo's IPO found CEO Henry Schuck wrestling with what he himself described as an unhealthy obsession: checking the company stock price multiple times throughout the day.
"Myself and others got a little bit wrapped up in the stock price," he admitted at Business Insider's Global Trends Festival on Thursday.
Eventually, after a few months, Schuck realized that constantly checking on the price wasn't serving the firm's aim "to build a sustainable growing profitable long-term business."
"I'm happy to share that I quit cold turkey," he said. "I don't look at the stock price all day anymore."
He and fellow employees make a point to keep eyes on the larger goals while "keeping the stock on the side and looking at it, you know, once a week or at the end of the day once" which "is a much more healthy experience for everybody," he said.
Founded as DiscoverOrg in 2007 and rebranded with its current name last year, ZoomInfo offers data and intelligence that businesses use to plan, launch and fine-tune campaigns for marketing, sales, and recruiting.
The Vancouver, Washington-based company has more than 15,000 customers worldwide, including Fujitsu, Box, and Zoom.
ZoomInfo's growth underscores the growing importance of technologies that are able to process massive amounts of data for making faster, more precise business decisions.
The company gives clients access to data and intelligence on other businesses "from the technologies a company uses, to how much funding they've received, to when their 401K plan comes up for renewal, and other key attributes," Schuck said.
Like other tech companies, ZoomInfo, which has 1,300 employees, was forced to adapt quickly to the pandemic, including the sharp pivot to remote work.
The company's IPO had been scheduled for March, but the escalating global crisis forced Schuck's team to postpone it.
But the crisis also led to a change that created new opportunities for ZoomInfo. The shift to a remote workforce forced businesses to embrace cloud-based technologies, Schuck said, including corporations that use to rely on sales reps that were typically "out in the field, taking people out to dinner, taking them out to ball games, and building relationships."
Because of the pandemic, "these expensive high-value resources are sitting at home, behind a computer screen, and they're expected to have that same level of productivity," Schuck said.
ZoomInfo gives its clients more pinpointed business intelligence to enable sales reps to do their job effectively even while working remotely.
"You don't need to hop on a plane and fly across the country to have one meeting and fly back," he said. "We should be leveraging technologies to do that."
Schuck cited the example of a ZoomInfo client that makes outdoor tents for big events. "The pandemic hit and literally every event on the face of the earth disappeared," he said. ZoomInfo's database helped the company explore options and eventually expand into a new market: hospitals and health care facilities that needed outdoor tents for COVID-19 tests.
"We have dozens of stories like this," he said. "Companies are becoming more and more focused on using these sorts of digital repositories of data."
ZoomInfo's momentum in the middle of the pandemic also convinced the company's investors that it was a good time to go public, he said. They did have concerns about ongoing market volatility and the overall uncertainty in the global economy, which had an impact on the way the firm planned the IPO, he said.
"During that time, we didn't really know when you woke up on a Monday what Friday was going to be like," he said. "The big concern was that some macroeconomic thing would happen in the midst of our roadshow and things would get confused and more difficult to execute on."
But ZoomInfo's trading debut — which, in June, was one of the first software IPOs since the crisis began in late February — was a resounding success and, for Schuck, a validation of his company's successful journey.
"We've been a private company backed by private equity," he said. "We weren't sort of bannerized all over the VC world. So that moment, when we kind of came into the spotlight was incredibly validating."
Got a tip about ZoomInfo or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com , message him on Twitter @benpimentel or send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop .
Via PakApNews