Doug Winter Talks Building Seismic Into A Billion-Dollar Company in San Diego
Seismic Wants to Become San Diego's Next Publicly-Traded Company
Every week, we publish an article or exclusive in-depth story with original insights on San Diego’s venture capital scene that you can’t read anywhere else. Receive a weekly article each week and join 1,000+ founders and investors by subscribing below.
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.