Doug Winter - CEO & Founder of Seismic

Meet Doug Winter, founder and CEO of Seismic, an enterprise SaaS tool for sales enablement that’s been around for 8 years. It helps sales and marketing teams work together more effectively and efficiently as it relates to sales cycles.

Thanks to our friends at Cox Business for their support of this episode.

While Doug grew up in Ohio, he went to Virginia Tech and studied electrical and mechanical engineering. After college, he took a job with Westinghouse in their Navy Nuclear program training sailors on running the nuclear machinery on boats at sea. It was a great leadership experience as he was given a lot of responsibility quickly but decided to go back to school - for a degree in Leaders for Manufacturing at MIT, a combo of business and engineering with an eye towards operations.  

His last winter there was ‘the worst winter in Boston’ and he asked ‘how far away from this can I get? Enter San Diego.

Doug landed a job at Qualcomm in 1996. Qualcomm had just won the battle of CDMA and just started a division building their own phones and infrastructure. He took new products from engineering and was the bridge to put them into production. He had great bosses and mentors at Qualcomm but kept hearing about the Dot Com buzz and knew that he’d eventually leave Qualcomm and become an entrepreneur. His dad was an entrepreneur and Doug saw how happy his dad was doing this kind of work and it stuck with him.

Doug rode through the Dot Com boom and bust and tells some sentimental stories that paint a graphic picture of the times. It was exciting for him to sit front row and ride the rollercoaster of starting a company and was a valuable learning experience.

Over the next decade, Doug started another company, Objectiva. Objectiva was hired to rebuild Document Science’s product line. Great relationships were formed from this partnership and Document Sciences ended up buying Objectiva and Doug became COO of Document Sciences, which was then bought by EMC. EMC had also bought Carlsbad-based Captiva. Very quickly he realized that the big company culture wasn’t for him so worked through a transition to leave, but observed that the existing tools for content management were clunky and nobody was doing a real SaaS business around content development. The problems they saw at Document Sciences were real and thought they could do what Salesforce and Workday - taking CRM/HRM and consumerized it and put in on the cloud. Nobody was doing this for content management and they set out to fill this void.

Enter Seismic in 2010 to solve this problem. The first office was a basement in an apartment building in downtown Encinitas. By the time they left they had about 12-14 people working there so it was quite cozy. Through all the growth they’ve remained in North County, to Solana Beach and now residing in Del Mar Heights. One of SD’s challenges is how wide-spread out everything is so they’ve tried to stay central for their employees.

One of the founders, Ed Callan, is born and raised in Boston. Started an office in Boston in an addict and really grew as a two-office company from the very beginning and both offices are about the same size. They recently acquired a business in Chicago - their competitor Savo - and now have a foothold in that major hub.

Curious where the term sales enablement came from? Listen in!

Two years ago they acquired local Email Co-pilot which brought in expertise on data and AI.

Listen how Doug explains the capital environment and where Seismic is headed in the next few years. A great later stage San Diego story that has plenty more to write. Doug would love to continue to grow here and put SD on the map as would we all.

Some of Doug’s local food favorites -

Tacos - Sara’s in Mission Beach.

Coffee - Coffee Coffee and Pannikin in Leucadia.

Beer - A fan of Green Flash

Follow Doug on social:

Twitter

LinkedIn