Henry Schuck, founder and CEO of ZoomInfo, recounts why he rejected a 2012 private equity buyout offer after the investors attempted to retrade the terms.
Insight
A first-day IPO stock pop is not a sign of bad pricing
“Yeah, there's gonna, you're gonna read articles that say, like, oh, the pop on day one, like, that just means you, like, did a bad job of pricing your IPO. It's not really true. Like, we had the best advisors, the best people around the table on this. You don'…”
Insight
Half of private equity firms misrepresent their founder-friendly approach
“Because you meet all these guys and they're like, oh, it's just like a marriage. We're going to be partners. You know, we like to let entrepreneurs run their businesses. And like half of them are telling the truth and half of them are not. The half that are no…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
The DOJ held RainKing's antitrust review to the final decision deadline
“When we made the acquisition of Rain King, we actually, you have to get antitrust approval. And so we went, and the regular, the regulators didn't love the ranking acquisition because they felt very similar, two very similar companies, and so we actually went …”
Disclosure
Passing on ZoomInfo at $240M was right because the company wasn't ready
“A year earlier, I had an opportunity to buy Zoom Info for two hundred and forty million dollars and I passed. And that might feel like a bad decision. Like, oh, that was dumb. He had to pay eight hundred million dollars one year later. It wasn't a bad decision…”
Insight
Selling majority equity reduced pressure and improved Henry Schuck's operational execution
“I sort of viewed the first transaction like an exit. And then once that happened, it took a lot of sort of day to day pressure off of my shoulders. And so I could operate in a better way because it wasn't like all of my money in the company. It was like we wer…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
DiscoverOrg expanded RainKing's profit from $10M to $35M in three months
“We made this acquisition of a company that was doing forty million dollars in revenue and ten million dollars of profitability. We acquired the business, and then three months later, it was doing forty-five million and thirty-five million dollars of profitabil…”