ZoomInfo Duo Become Billionaires With Stock Doubling Since IPO
ZoomInfo Duo Become Billionaires With Stock Doubling Since IPO
(Bloomberg) -- Henry Schuck was 23 years old when he and college classmate Kirk Brown put $25,000 on their credit cards to start a company selling business-intelligence data. Schuck was in law school, and Brown had recently finished a stint as a caddy on the PGA Tour.
Today they’re both billionaires. Shares of their firm, ZoomInfo Technologies Inc., surged 15% to $44.76 at 1:10 p.m. in New York, boosting its market value to $17.1 billion, more than doubling since last week’s initial public offering.
“We’re building a company for the long term,” Schuck, the chief executive officer, told Bloomberg TV in an interview Thursday, adding he hadn’t been paying attention to the share price. Schuck has a 10% stake and Brown owns 7.3%, according to a prospectus.
They join the relentlessly growing ranks of entrepreneurs notching hefty returns through IPOs as markets remain buoyant despite unprecedented job losses and a steep drop in consumer spending.
Nikola Corp. founder Trevor Milton’s net worth soared to $4.4 billion last week, after shares of the hydrogen-truck maker completed a reverse merger with acquisition firm VectoIQ, and the stock surged again on Monday, climbing as much as 71%. Len Blavatnik’s fortune jumped by $9.1 billion to $32.8 billion since the market debut of Warner Music Group Corp. on Wednesday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Urgent Need
ZoomInfo sells subscriptions to a cloud-based business-intelligence platform that’s used by corporate sales and marketing teams. The Vancouver, Washington-based company posted a net loss of $51 million on $335 million of revenue for last year.
Schuck and Brown founded ZoomInfo’s predecessor company, DiscoverOrg, in 2007, two years after graduating from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They rebranded it ZoomInfo last year following the acquisition of a rival by that name. That now seems fortuitous, given the success of Zoom Video Communications Inc., which has more than tripled this year on surging demand for its conferencing service.
Schuck, 36, got the idea for the company about two decades ago. In urgent need of money to pay tuition, he took a job as a marketing analyst at a software-as-a-service firm, according to the prospectus.
“Four years later the company sold to private equity and I entered law school,” Schuck wrote in a letter that accompanies the filing.
“I tried to quiet the voice in my head that was telling me the opportunity in that space was too big to ignore,” he wrote. “It turns out I couldn’t.”
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.