Key takeaways
- Henry Schick was raised by a single mother who worked three jobs, instilling in him early on that hard work was necessary.
- He started DiscoverOrg with a co-founder during law school, racked up about $50,000 in credit cards, worked 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. at the business and attended classes until 10 p.m.
- DiscoverOrg became ZoomInfo in 2019 with an acquisition, and the company went public in 2020.
Henry Schick grew up measuring time on double shifts and bus transfers. He was raised in Southern California by a single mother who worked three jobs, disappearing before dawn and slipping back long after dark. “My mom was a nurse. She worked three jobs, so she often worked the morning shift and then the night shift,” he recalls in a new interview. Entrepreneur. “I’ve always appreciated how much effort it took to get somewhere.”
In a small household consisting of Schuck, his sister and his mother, there was only one non-negotiable rule: “Get good grades in school.”
Schick began working at age 12, selling newspapers door-to-door in Southern California. The work wasn’t glamorous, but it reinforced the belief that hard work was necessary to get ahead.
When he left for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), his mother gave him everything she could scrape together: $5,000 from cashing out a life insurance policy. “It was my college fund. It got me through my first year of college,” he says.
A job that changed his life.
At school, Schuck thought he would become a hotel manager in Las Vegas (After graduation? It seems like a serious job after school, but then he says he was planning to be a lawyer.)but a job posting on the UNLV job board quietly changed his life. The posting was for a small business-to-business data firm called iProfile, which sold employee contact information at companies like Ford and General Motors to sales teams at other companies.
At first this work was almost exclusively for the clerics. “Originally, my job was almost like an admin, and so I was researching companies that we would send marketing materials to,” he says. He labeled and mailed CDs of company research, including organizational charts and contact details within Fortune 1000 IT departments, to sales teams who needed hot leads.
Schuck took ownership of the marketing channel and pushed the company into early email outreach at a time when most were still stuck in direct mail. “We were really early in using 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 leaders across the country.”
As a result, iProfile’s revenue grew from about $300,000 to $5 million in four years, while Schuck was still in college.
Still, Schuck couldn’t see a real way forward there. “I didn’t think I had a future at iProfile,” he says. There were not so many opportunities for advancement in the firm.
At the time, law, not business, seemed the respectable, stable path. “I realized that being a lawyer was like a great profession, and I didn’t feel that way about business at the time,” Schuck admits. So in 2006, he enrolled in law school at Ohio State University.
Starting a Business While Going to Law School
Law school didn’t silence his entrepreneurial instincts; He accelerated it. In 2007, after his first year, a close friend (And former co-workers? Seems a bit random if they don’t both work at iProfile)Kirk Brown, called in with a proposal: replicate the iProfile model, but for a neglected segment of the market, mid-market companies ignored by traditional vendors. Brown was “super blush” and was willing to “drop everything,” quit his job and even move to Columbus, Ohio, if Schuck would partner with him. They will split the company 50-50. Schick agreed, and Brown took action.
They named the company DiscoverOrg. It began as an online subscription database focused on decision makers in mid-market companies, particularly IT leaders. This work mirrored the work Schuck had seen in Eye Profile, but for a different market segment.
The model was brutally manual at first. “We did research online, and then we called companies to verify the information we found,” he says. Most of the work was just confirming: “Do these people still work at the company?”
To get the company off the ground, Schuck racked up $50,000 in credit cards. For the first three years, the two founders paid themselves $24,000 a year. Each new customer became a funding event. “We were using the dollars we were generating from new clients to fund the growth of the business,” he says.
Schuck says that in 2007 there was really no opportunity to find venture capital money in Columbus, Ohio. (Was he still in law school this whole time? I think we need to note that here.) That left two options: build a ruthlessly efficient business, or run out of money. He chose the first option.
“We were really disciplined about how we spent money,” says Schuck. “We were really disciplined about how we thought about getting a return on every dollar that went into the business.”
That discipline led the founders to $30 million in revenue in 2014 before making their first outside investment.
Bootstrapping also shaped how Schuck built the team. Without VC cash, he couldn’t lure polished executives with lavish salaries or shiny offices. So he looked for something else from new hires: hunger. He hired very young people in his career, perhaps his first job. One early hire was a former professional poker player who wanted to get into sales – but didn’t know what a Microsoft Outlook email inbox was. “We were starting from a very raw place,” says Schuck. On this hire he became the first Chief Revenue Officer of Sikkim.
Working a double life
All the while, Suk continued to lead a double life. During DiscoverOrg’s early years, he worked at the company from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., then went straight to law school class until 10 p.m., choosing his law school curriculum based purely on what would fit the business. When it came time to take the bar exam in 2009, he committed to studying for two and a half months, checking in only in the mornings and evenings with his co-founder and a small team of six. He passed the bar — and kept building.
He claims that the legal background turned out to be a strategic asset. As data privacy laws expanded, Schuck’s training helped DiscoverOrg navigate the increasingly complex landscape. Having a lawyer-CEO makes investors, consumers and regulators more comfortable. “Having a legal background puts me in a strong position to understand them, understand the regulation…know how to go over them, know the things we need to do to address risk,” he says.
As of 2019, DiscoverOrg was a highly profitable, niche powerhouse that primarily sold deeply authenticated IT decision-making data to software companies. But customers wanted more: HR, finance, supply chain, procurement, marketing. ZoomInfo, then a separate company, had exactly that: a vast but less accurate dataset that spanned the org chart. Schuck acquired ZoomInfo in 2019, combining the quality of DiscoverOrg with the quantity of ZoomInfo. “We ended up with kind of the best of both worlds,” he says.
The combined company, renamed ZoomInfo, expanded its reach beyond IT to every corner of the enterprise and went public in June 2020. Today, ZoomInfo is a $1.8 billion platform used by more than 35,000 customers to find and reach the right buyers through email, phone and digital channels. The company counts Airbnb, Snowflake, Adobe and Capital One among its biggest customers.
When Schuck is asked if he has any advice for other growing business owners, he emphasizes that financial discipline is important, especially in the beginning. “It gives you control of your destiny,” he says.
Schuck also says that developing people matters. He has conversations with his leaders where he tells them his job is to “create champions.”
“Don’t come and complain to me because the person you hired three weeks ago doesn’t feel good,” he says. “Coach them. Go help them, put them on the path to success here.”
Key takeaways
- Henry Schick was raised by a single mother who worked three jobs, instilling in him early on that hard work was necessary.
- He started DiscoverOrg with a co-founder during law school, racked up about $50,000 in credit cards, worked 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. at the business and attended classes until 10 p.m.
- DiscoverOrg became ZoomInfo in 2019 with an acquisition, and the company went public in 2020.
Henry Schick grew up measuring time on double shifts and bus transfers. He was raised in Southern California by a single mother who worked three jobs, disappearing before dawn and slipping back long after dark. “My mom was a nurse. She worked three jobs, so she often worked the morning shift and then the night shift,” he recalls in a new interview. Entrepreneur. “I’ve always appreciated how much effort it took to get somewhere.”
In a small household consisting of Schuck, his sister and his mother, there was only one non-negotiable rule: “Get good grades in school.”
