• We went “international,” acquiring competitor iProfile and providing deep sales intelligence on the IT departments of corporations based in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. This decision was also a personal milestone: DiscoverOrg co-founder Kirk Brown and I met in the early 2000s while working together at iProfile, which later became inspiration for our future business in 2007; it went from being a former employer to a top competitor to an acquisition.
• We expanded our datasets to include IT, product development, marketing, finance and human resources departments at corporations. We doubled the size of our in-house research team in order to expand the datasets we provide and increase the market of our offerings.
• We have been creating jobs, but hiring has not been the easiest part of our operation. We have relied on recruiters from local companies to help us get talent in every department. We apparently can’t just place an ad and expect people to come flooding in. With the help of recruiters, we’ve staffed up our engineering and sales teams.
• We relocated to downtown Vancouver during 2015. We are now all under one roof, with 27,000 square feet, and are currently looking at adding an additional 20,000 square feet of space.
• We opened a new office in Philadelphia to take advantage of the network of sales professionals our newly hired senior vice president of customer success has in the area. David Sill commutes between Vancouver and Philadelphia each month: three weeks here, one week there.
Our plans for 2016 are very aggressive and almost every department at DiscoverOrg is looking to double in size. Our goal is to grow revenue 60 percent in 2016.
The macroeconomic environment continues to be positive, and we are hopeful that will last at least through 2017. The investment bankers and private equity professionals we talk to are bullish about the economic prospects, at least through the end of 2016. Although we founded DiscoverOrg at the bottom of the economic downturn, we obviously prefer operating during a time of growth.
In the last few years, we have seen a deluge of investment into our customer companies. Almost without fail, that investment comes with a directive to grow sales at the company. That’s when customers turn to us to provide them with the data they need to sell more and live up to the expectations of their forward-looking valuations.
According to CB Insights, in the first quarter of 2015, investment venture capital, private equity and hedge fund investment into companies reached an all-time high of $17.7 billion — more than double the same quarter in 2013 and 40 percent higher than the same quarter in 2014.
Business looks promising for 2016 — for us and, hopefully, for everyone.
Henry Schuck is co-founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg.
