Hey, I'm Dan! I'm the CEO of Plus and a venture partner at Madrona. I write the DL, a newsletter about tech in the Pacific Northwest

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+1 for Vancouver! 🦄

PNW startups are pretty understated relative to their Bay Area peers. So it’s amazing to see a ~$20B company in Vancouver (WA) go public with so little fanfare that Techcrunch wrote, “The ZoomInfo IPO slipped through our fingers in the last news cycle, so we’re going to catch up.”

ZoomInfo is a business database that helps sales and marketing teams identify and connect with prospects. Turns out many companies want access to this data: in Q1 2020, ZoomInfo earned $102M in revenue (up ~90% YoY). AND they managed this growth with a 50%+ adjusted EBITDA margin.

They have a great founding story, too. In college, the CEO worked at a sales intelligence firm, but didn’t see a big opportunity, so he decided to leave and go to law school. A few months later, a colleague reached out with an idea for a better sales intelligence company, so while he was still in law school, they took out $50K of credit card debt and started the company.

Thirteen years later, ZoomInfo is the second most valuable company in the Portland area (after Nike), and both founders are billionaires! Awesome.


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