Doug Winter Talks Building Seismic Into A Billion-Dollar Company in San Diego
Seismic Wants to Become San Diego's Next Publicly-Traded Company
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It was around eleven o’clock on Monday, when I met with Doug Winter, Founder and CEO of Seismic, in a large boardroom inside its new headquarters. His public relations executive had just finished giving me a tour of its brand new space based in Del Mar, where hundreds of San Diego-based employees work from on the fifth floor.
It has been an extraordinary past few years for Seismic. When I last chatted with Mr. Winter for a front page cover story in the San Diego Business Journal, Seismic had just hit $200 million in annual revenues, grew its employee numbers to 1,000 and raised more than $250 million in venture capital funding.
Today, more than two-thousand companies use the company’s software to drive revenue in various industries from banking to technology to life sciences firms. Seismic’s key advantage over rival products has been its ease of use and having built relationships with major clients such as IBM and Microsoft.
I was most interested in hearing how Winter built Seismic into a billion-dollar company and wanted to get his thoughts on: why he decided to grow the company in San Diego and whether the goal was still to become a publicly-traded company.
High-Level Overview
Founded in 2010, Seismic is a global technology company that develops sales enablement software for enterprise companies to grow revenue.
Over a million users from more than 100 countries have used the company’s products and it counts more than 2,000 organizations as its customers.
Headquartered in Del Mar San Diego, Seismic employs roughly 1,600 with 7 additional offices across the globe.
Today, Seismic has matured and grown tremendously, today it is recognized as a global software juggernaut and number one leader in its sector.
Founding Story
Seismic was started in Encinitas, hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley investors.
It experienced many inflection points, according to Winter — the biggest was getting raising capital after three years refining its product and purchasing an office in Solana Beach which held up to about 40 employees. A scrappy startup, Seismic was founded in 2010, in a three-story apartment in Encinitas with a basement full of engineers.
“The apartment was certainly not supposed to be used for business,” Winter said. “One bedroom was my office and other bedrooms were additional offices. We also had a basement — which is pretty rare for San Diego — that’s where most of our engineers worked from. We also had a few desks in the kitchen area. We stayed there until we couldn't fit any more people.”
Seismic was told “no” by the majority of the investors it pitched in 2013. However, Peter Solvik, an investor at Jackson Square Ventures (formerly, Sigma West) was an early believer and led its $4.5 million Series A round. It used some of that capital to purchase its first office in Solana Beach, before moving into a larger office in Del Mar.
Pitching Investors in San Francisco
“Most of our investors are in San Francisco,” said Winter. He recalled taking a Southwest Airlines flight in the Bay Area, to pitch investors in Sand Hill Road.
“When you're a small startup, you have to travel to them,” he said. “As you get bigger, they come to you.” Seismic was recommended to move to San Francisco from San Diego after raising capital by his investors.
Winter said he successfully negotiated around that request and credited Peter Solvik for allowing him to build the company in San Diego.
“At the time, I got basically two questions: number one, was that Seismic should implement a freemium model,” said Winter, but that was not Seismic’s model given that they were selling to large companies. “And number two, they asked if I was going to move the team up to the bay area.”
It’s safe to say, he made the right decision. “There's a lot of great talent in San Diego,” said Winter. “We love it here.” ServiceNow was based right down the street from us, and JMI Equity, an early investor in Seismic also has a huge presence here, he added.
Scaling a Billion-Dollar Company in San Diego
Seismic makes a suite of software tools for large sales teams, allowing companies to create and send digital materials that help salespeople win deals.
Over 1 million users from 100 countries have used Seismic’s products to improve their sales or marketing efforts. It counts IBM, Microsoft, American Express, Cisco and Illumina among its 2,600-plus clients
It had one of its most profitable years bringing in more than $300 million in annual revenues in 2022, with strong double-digit growth for more three consecutive years.
At this pace, Seismic believes it could reach have a billion in annualized revenue in the next five years. It has more than 1,600 employees, with offices in New York, Boston, and Australia, among others.
Potential IPO on the Horizon
The San Diego Union Tribune first reported that the company that an IPO was likely on the horizon, but Seismic stayed private even as tech stocks surged.
Missing the window hasn’t affected Seismic in the grand scheme of things — it remains a front runner as the next major company to go public in San Diego, and Winter said an IPO is very much still on the table.
“Absolutely, we’ve now reached a scale where it's like we could absolutely do an initial public offering (IPO)” said Winter. “The markets are terrible right now. We continue to march towards making a better and better company. When the time is right, Seismic will be even more successful.”
“There's no way we are here today without the other co-founders and leaders we’ve had over the years,” said Winter. “Of course that includes investors as well.”