He Maxed Out $50K in Credit Cards to Start His First Business. Now It’s Worth $1.8 Billion.

Henry Schuck grew up measuring time in double shifts and bus transfers. He was raised in Southern California by a single mother working three jobs, who would disappear before dawn and slip back in long after dark. “My mom was a nurse. She worked three jobs, so she was often working the morning shift and then night shift,” he recalls in a new interview with Entrepreneur. “I’ve always appreciated how hard work was a necessity to getting somewhere.”

In a small household that consisted of Schuck, his sister and his mom, there was only one non-negotiable rule: “Get good grades in school.”

Schuck started working at 12 years old, selling newspapers door-to-door in Southern California. The job wasn’t glamorous, but it reinforced a belief that hard work was essential to getting ahead. 

When he left for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), his mother handed him everything she could scrape together: $5,000 from cashing out a life insurance policy. “That was my college fund. Got me through the 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 graduating? it seems like an intense job to have in school, but he then says he was planning to become a lawyer], but a job posting on the UNLV job board quietly rerouted his life. The posting was for a tiny 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, the work was almost clerical. “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 the company’s research, including organizational charts and contact details inside Fortune 1000 IT departments, to sales teams that needed warm 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 into using email for sales and marketing use cases,” Schuck says. “We went from sending like direct mail to 16 people a week to sending email out to hundreds or thousands of sales leaders across the country.”

As a result, iProfile grew from roughly $300,000 to $5 million in revenue in four years, while Schuck was still in college. 

Still, Schuck couldn’t see a real path forward there. “I didn’t think I had a future at iProfile,” he says. There weren’t that many growth opportunities at the firm. 

At the time, law, not business, looked like the respectable, stable route. “I felt like being a lawyer was like a noble profession, and I didn’t feel that way about business at the time,” Schuck admits. So in 2006, he enrolled at The Ohio State University’s law school. 

Starting a business while going to law school

Law school didn’t quiet his entrepreneurial instinct; it sharpened it. In 2007, after his first year, a close friend [and former coworker? seems a little random if they didn’t both work at iProfile], Kirk Brown, called with a proposal: replicate the iProfile model, but for a neglected part of the market, the mid‑market companies that traditional vendors ignored. Brown was “super bullish” and willing to “drop everything,” quit his job and even relocate to Columbus, Ohio, if Schuck would partner with him. They would split the company 50‑50. Schuck agreed, and Brown made the move.

They named the company DiscoverOrg. It began as an online subscription database focused on decision-makers at mid-market companies, particularly IT leaders. The work mirrored what Schuck had seen succeed at iProfile, but for a different segment of the market. 

The model was brutally manual at first. “We did online research, and then we called the companies to validate the information that we found,” he says. Much of the work was simply confirming: “Do these people still work at the company?”

To get the company off the ground, Schuck maxed out $50,000 in credit cards. For the first three years, both founders paid themselves $24,000 a year. Every new customer became a funding event. “We were using the dollars that we were generating from new clients to fund the growth of the business,” he says.

There wasn’t really an opportunity to find venture capital money in Columbus, Ohio, in 2007, Schuck says. [Was he still in law school this whole time? I think we need that noted here] That left two options: build a ruthlessly efficient business, or run out of money. They chose the first option. 

“We were really disciplined about how we spent money,” Schuck says. “We were really disciplined about how we thought about return for every dollar that went into the business.”

That discipline carried the founders to $30 million in revenue before they took their first outside investment in 2014. 

Bootstrapping also shaped how Schuck built the team. Without VC cash, he couldn’t lure in polished executives with lavish salaries or shiny offices. So he looked for something else from new hires: hunger. He hired people very young in their careers, maybe their first jobs. One early hire was a former professional poker player who showed up wanting to be in sales — but didn’t know what Microsoft Outlook email inboxes were. “We were starting from a very raw place,” Schuck says. That hire ended up being Schuck’s first chief revenue officer. 

Working a double life

All the while, Schuck kept a double life going. During the early years of DiscoverOrg, he worked at the company from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., then went straight to law school class until 10 p.m. He chose his law school curriculum purely based on what would fit around the business. When it came time to take the bar exam in 2009, he stepped away for two and a half months to study, checking in with his co‑founder and a small six‑person team only in the mornings and evenings. He passed the bar — and kept building.

That legal background turned out to be a strategic asset, he claims. As data privacy laws proliferated, Schuck’s training helped DiscoverOrg navigate an increasingly complex landscape. Having a lawyer‑CEO made investors, customers, and regulators more comfortable. “Having a legal background puts me in a strong position to be able to understand them, understand the regulation…know how to navigate them, know the things that we need to do to manage the risk,” he says.

By 2019, DiscoverOrg was a highly profitable, niche powerhouse selling deeply verified IT decision‑maker data primarily to software companies. But customers wanted more: HR, finance, supply chain, procurement, marketing. ZoomInfo, then a separate company, had exactly that: a broad but less precise dataset that spanned the org chart. Schuck acquired ZoomInfo in 2019, merging DiscoverOrg’s quality with ZoomInfo’s quantity. “We ended up with kind of the best of both worlds,” he says.

The combined company took on the ZoomInfo name, expanded its reach beyond IT into every corner of the enterprise and went public in June 2020. Today, ZoomInfo is a $1.8 billion platform used by over 35,000 customers to find the right buyers and reach them through email, phone and digital channels, well beyond the confines of any single network. The company counts Airbnb, Snowflake, Adobe and Capital One as some of its biggest customers. 

When Schuck is asked if he has advice for other burgeoning business owners, he emphasizes that financial discipline matters, especially early on. “It gives you control of your destiny,” he says.

Schuck also says that developing people matters. He has had conversations with his leaders where he would tell them that their job “is to create champions.” 

“Don’t come and complain to me because the person you hired three weeks ago doesn’t feel like a great fit,” he says. “Go coach them. Go help them, go put them on a path to be successful here.” 

Henry Schuck grew up measuring time in double shifts and bus transfers. He was raised in Southern California by a single mother working three jobs, who would disappear before dawn and slip back in long after dark. “My mom was a nurse. She worked three jobs, so she was often working the morning shift and then night shift,” he recalls in a new interview with Entrepreneur. “I’ve always appreciated how hard work was a necessity to getting somewhere.”

In a small household that consisted of Schuck, his sister and his mom, there was only one non-negotiable rule: “Get good grades in school.”