Dear Friends of Seismic –

Whether you’re an investor, a prospective investor, partner, advisor, director, interested party, supplier, one of our lawyers, accountants or auditors, or a friend of the company, welcome!

This is the first update we’re issuing about Seismic and its development. This update is pretty “meta” – a newsletter with news about a newsletter, about starting a startup that’s investing in startups starting. We’re not setting a publication frequency just yet. Let’s see how that develops.

As a former (“recovering”) journalist, I (Steven) will probably be doing most of the writing, but over time, you should expect to hear from my partners and others in our sphere, including company founders who are going to be partnering with us to grow their ideas into a reality.

Our hope is that we can report progress whenever we send you an update. Recently, for instance:

• Our registration Form 1-A has been at the SEC for three weeks. The examiners over there are supposed to give us comments back within four. So far, they’ve confirmed that our physical address meets their standards. That seems like a good sign — at least the process has begun. Once our offering is qualified by the SEC, we can start fundraising from the general public.
• We’ve formed our Board of Advisors and have scheduled the first meeting for mid-November. Each of our 11 advisors brings unique knowledge of a particular field to Seismic. We expect the advisors will help guide us as we form our own strategies for corporate growth, and they’ll also help our portfolio companies do what we’re expecting them to do: develop technology, build product, acquire customers. We’re blown away by the depth and breadth that our advisors bring, and we’ll tell you about them over time.

Here’s one of our advisors:

Brad Paden
Incubation Advisor

• Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
• Founder of LaunchPoint Technologies, a high-tech incubator begun in 1992.
• LaunchPoint has had multiple investment successes in the areas of medical devices, aerospace, transportation, energy and energy storage, and nanotechnology.
• Dr. Paden has authored over 80 publications and holds 17 patents in the field of engineering systems.

As we develop this newsletter, we may have to occasionally share an update about things that didn’t go exactly as planned. Right now, happily, we don’t have any of them.

Over time, we will cover such diverse topics as:

• Why, in the face of the pandemic and the economic shut-down, we are pushing forward – full steam ahead – to begin investing. (Hint: the world is changing, and by the time it finds its footing again, we want to have a slate of companies ready to take advantage of the new economy).
• Why we chose to use Reg A as our funding vehicle, and how it can help (and how it may constrain) our growth. (The easy answer on the plus side is that Reg A plus our holding company structure allows us to open our doors for investment to all parties, not just the well-heeled and well-connected. On the negative side, if we ramp swiftly, we won’t be able to raise enough money via Reg A to feed the beast). When we write about this, we’ll go into more detail on this critical topic.
• Why we are a holding company, not a fund or a SPAC, or a blank check company or a blind pool. Lots of folks are talking about all those things that we’re not, and people involved with us should understand how we’re different. This is important to anyone who’s making an investment in Seismic, or who is being funded by Seismic. So down the road we’ll cover that.
• How we are developing a plan to evaluate our success according to multiple bottom lines – measuring people, planet, profits. The financial metrics really are the easy ones to track. The others – diversity, inclusion, being a good corporate citizen, not damaging the earth – will take more finesse to evaluate. This is one of the most exciting aspects of our work today.
• How we are going about identifying our prospective companies, so we’re finding opportunities that others are not seeing – and so we are not competing for deals that everyone is chasing. This is how we hope/expect to uncover the hidden value that will make our shares increase in value.

Of course, as we go forward, we’ll also have news and updates on:

• Capital raising
• Investing
• Our own progress and that of our portfolio companies
• Opportunities for others to partner with us as they emerge

Plus there will be pointers to published news about us (which also will be on our website) and relevant coverage of events that will shape how we move forward.

We hope you’ll look forward to hearing from us, and that you’ll be interested (and maybe even pleased) with the updates we’ll be sharing.

We also want to hear from you, and you can reach us at the emails below.

• Eric White, President ebw@seismic.company
• Alice Neuhauser, CFO apn@seismic.company
• Yann Geron, SVP yg@seismic.company

Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom.

Best,

Steven Weinstein, CEO
spw@seismic.company
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