The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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'…”
Berman: ZoomInfo rarely refreshes the specific data customers actually need
“Last time we used ZoomInfo, because we were ZoomInfo customers we had a very hard time finding up-to-date data, regardless of what they said, because they'll spend their ten million a month, and they'll update data that's completely different from anything tha…”
Prospective 2012 buyers cut DiscoverOrg's acquisition offer in half after diligence
“These guys retraded me right at the end. They said, oh, come down to San Francisco, have lunch with us. So I came down to San Francisco, and they were like, yeah, you know, there's some things in diligence we didn't like, and so we're gonna cut the deal in hal…”
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…”
D&B and ZoomInfo are handicapped by relying on inaccurate public data
“All these other sources, whether it's done in Bradstreet or Mattermark or DataFox or, you know, NetProspects or ZoomInfo, these are all really handicapped by the fact that they're relying on publicly available data sources that tend to be very inaccurate.”
Gilkey: Raw B2B Contact Data Is a Commodity
“I don't want to be a data provider in the sense of I'm not trying to compete with ZoomInfo and those guys. I think data is a commodity.”
Acquiring a PE-backed company early requires paying their future return upfront
“A private equity firm came in at two hundred and forty million dollars that year before, and they're happy to hold the investment for four to five years because that's the hold period they had. I had to come in a year into that hold And pay them for what they …”
Marco Hojan claims ZoomInfo suffers from poor contact data accuracy
“Just the quality of data. So for example, you get a phone number, you call, and they say the person is not working there anymore, or you get an email, and it should be accurate, but it's not. Just the quality of data, the most important thing that they should …”
Latka predicts ZoomInfo, Gong, or SalesLoft will acquire RevGenius by 2023
“Guys, mark my words. RevGenius will sell for a very large number in the next two years. Jared doesn't know it yet, but like Henry at ZoomInfo and like Amit from Gonger, I'm going to compete like hell to take, or Kyle from SalesOff.”
Chevalier: Surfe partners with HubSpot alongside ZoomInfo and Apollo
“We are now one of the partners of HubSpot's prospecting agent next to ZoomInfo and Apollo, which are massive brands.”
ZoomInfo does not disclose Annual Recurring Revenue to public investors
“We don't release an ARR number. We don't tell investors what the, ah, the ARR number is. And instead we just tell them the revenue number.”
Founders reaching $10M ARR should hire an experienced CFO strategist
“One, if you get to like, ten million dollars of ARR, you don't have a great CFO, you should probably get yourself a great CFO... The great CFOs are business strategists, and they help you understand the rhythm of the business. They help you see where to invest…”
DiscoverOrg generated $35M in revenue with 50% EBITDA margins in 2014
“So at this site, at that point, the company's thirty-five million dollars of revenue, it's growing 60%, and it has 50% EBITDA margins.”
Henry Schuck: Being a scaling public tech CEO is not fun
“Someone asked me the other day if I'm having fun. I'm not, like, by the way. The job is just too hard. It is just too hard. There are too many moving pieces. It is not fun. I am fulfilled. I am challenged. I would never do, I had, there's nothing else I would …”
DiscoverOrg had $20M in revenue and $10M profit around 2012 buyout offer
“Revenue was it was probably twenty million and it was like ten million dollars of profitability.”
TA Associates bought 50% of DiscoverOrg at a $275M valuation in 2014
“They built sort of the marketing material, started talking to private equity firms, and then we brought in our first institutional capital, a firm called TA Associates, who bought 50% of the business at a two hundred and seventy five million dollar valuation.”
Medina: ZoomInfo uses SDRs to drive expansion revenue
“Henry, Henry's a genius because he has SDRs doing his expansion.”
Vandenberg: Chili Piper Will Not Sell to ZoomInfo or Gong
“That is not in our future. No, Alina
and I have built this company. We having a blast.”
Gupta: Senzilla Will Shift to Compete with ZoomInfo and Outreach
“I'm not going to stay in that space. I'm not going to compete with them. I, my sights are set more on the zoom input and outreach of the world than the expandee and ducks, because I feel, you know, the world is moving towards more multi-channel prospects tune …”
Microsoft and LinkedIn dwarf all other sales solution providers combined
“And, like, in our space, Microsoft is the big player. And so all of us combined Have nothing on on the size and scope of LinkedIn and Microsoft as a sales solutions provider. And so I view Microsoft as the 800 pound gorilla, and then there's a whole sort of li…”
Medina: Henry Schuck is a genius for using SDRs for account expansion
“Henry's a genius because he has SDRs doing his expansion.”
ZoomInfo pioneered a promotion and relegation model for distributing inbound leads
“And there's companies like Zoom Info that pioneered almost like a Champions League idea of relegation and promotion, where to get the best leads, you need to perform at a certain level, and if you perform under that level, then you go down to the tier B, you g…”
Suvanto: Vainu has had no concrete acquisition talks with ZoomInfo
“No, not, not, not, not really. I think, of course, the market is very active. The go-to-market space is very active these days. So, of course, discussions are all over the place, but nothing like, nothing concrete and not, not really with the, yeah, zooming fo…”
Swiavich: Public library cards provide free access to 78M ReferenceUSA business records
“Did you know guys that you can get free leads to pretty much the same leads that ZoomInfo and InfoUSA reference series is selling to you? If you go to library, You know, there's such a thing as a library. In every city, it's kind of government thing. You go in…”
Cognism saved $1M in banking fees by keeping Kaspr M&A in-house
“One of those people was Phil Garlick, who is Head of Corporate Development at ZoomInfo, and Phil Garlick really helps us to do the transactions and to do the acquisitions, and particularly Casper, that saved me at least a million dollars in fees from bankers, …”
DiscoverOrg replicated a college data business that reached $5M in revenue
“I had worked for a similar company when I was in college, and we grew the company from about 300,000 dollars in revenue as a lifestyle business to five million in revenue. At five million in revenue, it was like 4.8 million dollars in EBITDA, and so there wasn…”
Board pushed for ZoomInfo IPO three months after closing the acquisition
“Three months into the acquisition, the board went, hey, maybe you should IPO. And I went like, well, I'm kind of putting two companies together right now, and so I don't know how I'm gonna find time to set up for IPO, but They didn't care. So we started the pa…”
ZoomInfo was initially funded using $50,000 in Chase credit card debt
“I was actually, like, a 150,000 dollars in debt. You can't tell by my smile in this picture, but I was a 150,000 dollars in debt if you count law school, undergrad, and then when we started the business, I put 25,000 dollars on my credit card, and my co-founde…”
Volpini denies WordLift is in acquisition talks with ZoomInfo
“Not at all. Not at all. Not yet. I mean, I haven't got a proposal”
Volpini: WordLift works with ZoomInfo to structure search data
“We're working, for instance, with ZoomInfo and other, you know, database-oriented companies that use WordLift to present their data at best to search engines.”
Unomy licenses Crunchbase's entire database and partners with ZoomInfo
“For example, Crunchbase. So we've licensed their entire database. You can find it on Unami, every single company from Crunchbase. And we have a lot more built with Alexa, ZoomInfo, And many, many, many others.”
Afsahi: ZoomInfo and Clearbit target sales, but Verified targets fraud
“So ZoomInfo or Clearbit and other types of, like, these type of softwares are built for sales mostly, but we are building these for fraud detection and verification. So we are mostly providing reg tech.”
QCC's business model resembles CapIQ and ZoomInfo
“I look at it, it's, the business model is very much similar like CapIQ or ZoomInfo.”