Forbes
This MIT Graduate Sold His First Startup For $90 Million And Then Built A Billion Dollar Business
By: Alejandro Cremades
From selling his first company for $90 million to raising $179 million at a billion dollar valuation for his current business, Doug Winter has learned something about the art of fundraising and entrepreneurship.
In his exclusive interview on the DealMakers Podcast, Doug Winter shared his story on taking the leap as an entrepreneur, his techniques for raising capital, what it takes as a CEO to build culture, and how to keep a startup ship headed in the right direction through the storms and sunshine.
From Midwest to MIT and Beyond
Doug Winter is originally from a small town in Ohio in the Midwest. While he says he appreciates the focus that gave him early on life, he’s taken his career to both coasts and beyond.
Although he is an engineer at heart, working in nuclear power after attending Virginia Tech just didn’t turn out to be the most exciting gig for Doug.
He returned to graduate school and attended MIT. There he participated in what is now the Leaders for Global Operations Program. A joint program between the business school and the engineering school sponsored by some large U.S. manufacturing companies like Intel, Motorola, and Amazon and Dell. While he learned a lot he also found that the classroom is no substitute for practical, real-world experience.
His classmate's brother worked at what was this tiny little startup company out in San Diego called Qualcomm. It was a combination of this experience, MIT instilling the purpose of being a change agent and watching his father’s joy of starting his own business that really lit the entrepreneurial fire in Doug.
His first voyage into startup life was founding Objectiva Software Solutions, a software services business. After hitting millions of dollars in revenue, that company ended up selling to Document Sciences after a couple of years. In turn, that company sold to EMC for around $90 million.
The Seismic Shift: From Bootstrapping to Millions in VC Money
After Objectiva, Doug launched Seismic with three other co-founders. They started off bootstrapping not wanting the pressure or distraction that comes with fundraising.
Seismic is a SaaS provider which sells to enterprise companies. Their sales enablement platform conquers the common challenges businesses are facing with content. All too often, sales is drowning in content making it difficult to find what you want. While marketers grow frustrated with creating volumes of content that is never seeing the light of day Seismic aligns sales and marketing in a way that makes content more useful and relevant for each buyer interaction.
At one point, the founding team realized they were going to watch the whole market go fly by if they didn’t accelerate and go a little bit faster. They recognized that this space was a much bigger opportunity than originally imagined. They saw the potential to not just build a $1 billion business, but a $10 billion business. To make that happen, they not only needed to go faster, but would need help from advisors who had done this before, and obviously a need for capital.
Doug says “I'm sure I heard ten no’s before we ended up hearing a yes.” They’ve now landed investors including JMI Equity, General Atlantic, Jackson Square Ventures, Lightspeed, and T. Rowe Price. That includes their recent $100 million Series E financing.
This founder’s tips for fundraising:
- Start every investor presentation by focusing on the customers
- Be talking to potential investors and updating them all the time
- Get warm introductions
- Make sure you have a good story
Cultivating Distributed Company Culture
Seismic now has around 600 employees. They are spread out from the headquarters in San Diego, California to Boston, offices in Chicago, Durham and New York. Overseas they now have people in London, Paris, Sydney, and Melbourne.
While Doug is proud of the diversity of cultural ecosystems these offices have, he also appreciates the importance of connectivity, even if all of your team is remote.
A core part of this culture is over-communicating. Doug says he wants people to be able to ask anything they want, even if he can’t share the answers. Post-board meetings this founder hosts an all-hands meeting to download as much as he can with the rest of the team.
Also critical to Seismic’s culture is celebrating each other's’ successes. Every time the sales team lands a new customer, they send out an email celebrating and crediting that success to all the others involved, from marketing to the Customer Success department, contracts and product team.
Your Job as CEO
Asked what one piece of advice he’d give himself as an entrepreneur before starting a business, Doug Winter says “You have to believe in yourself, and you have to not question and dwell on all the reasons why you can't do something.”
He goes on to say “The only way you can possibly be successful is you go all in and you trust in your own judgment and your own ability to execute.“ He adds “Realize that you can be successful and that making mistakes is part of the process, and not to get too fixated on those things.”
From his perspective, there is going to be a lot of persistence required. From getting those first sales to fundraising, and growth pains, there will be as many dark days as there are great ones. As he puts it “just don’t quit and never give up.“
Doug recommends that when everyone is celebrating funding or sales goals being hit, founders need to keep the staff focused on doing the work.
Listen in to the full podcast episode to find out more, including:
- The challenges of bootstrapping your business
- Fundraising techniques
- How to build a great company culture
- Staying focused when distractions are always around you
