Ring is one of the most underrated consumer hardware products of all time, going from an invention Jamie Siminoffâs garage to a 100M+ install base and $5B+ revenue run rate inside Amazon.
A few weeks ago I flew to LA and hung out with Jamie for a few hours. We talked through building a consumer hardware business from scratch, constantly operating on the verge of bankruptcy, why founders should always be going all-in on the next thing, inside Ringâs $1.15B exit to Amazon, why he came back to lead Ring again, how heâs operating differently the 2nd time leading the company, and how AI can make neighborhoods safer.
A great listen for anyone building consumer hardware or curious how a Shark Tank reject became a household name.
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Timestamps to jump in:
0:00 Leaving Amazon, coming back with fresh eyes
7:49 Deleting every useless meeting
10:21 Zero-based time budgeting
15:31 Bubble, or the golden age of AI?
19:50 $480M to âover 10x moreâ revenue
23:48 Lessons on obsession from MrBeast
30:17 The AI vision for Ring
34:05 The $10k feature he can't ship yet
38:50 Building apps on top of Ring
40:03 Building in his garage, the Kickstarter ban
44:45 The pre-sale, and the fear of getting copied
47:59 How he talked his way onto Shark Tank
49:24 Three dead units backstage
54:04 Threatening Shopify's CEO before air
55:23 The Christmas Ring almost died
58:59 The midnight fix that saved the company
1:01:22 Raising from True Ventures, the "ass hat" email
1:05:04 Hiring gritty ânew to businessâ people
1:07:15 Missionaries, not mercenaries
1:10:13 Building an authentic brand people trust
1:12:49 Buying Ring.com with the last $175k of cash
1:18:11 âWe were always on the verge of bankruptcyâ
1:19:12 Betting $1M on TV ads when the board said no
1:22:43 Why TV ads actually work
1:25:26 Richard Branson, and doubling mid-raise
1:28:46 Closing Shaq, how to do authentic celebrity endorsements
1:33:27 Selling to Amazon for $1.15 billion
1:35:16 Being paranoid to lose people's money
1:36:38 Mentors, and never meeting your heroes
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Jamie, welcome to the show.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thanks for having me.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thanks for doing this. So you sold your company to Amazon, you left, and then you came back. That doesnât happen that often, so what happened?
Jamie Siminoff:
I mean, a few things happened. I sold... I did stay for five years, so it wasnât like I...
Turner Novak:
Which is long. Thatâs actually very long.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, itâs long. So I didnât just peace out, sell it and go. Almost in some ways Iâm jealous of the founders that can do that. Itâs just not in me. I love what I built.
Turner Novak:
Youâre wrapped up in that thing.
Jamie Siminoff:
I do. I love it almost in a human way, not just in a business way. I really do think about what we built there, and I do love it. So after five years, I had built it... we really crushed it, got very profitable. So I felt like I left it having just won the Super Bowl, and Iâm like, âIâm gonna retire now.â
I did it. This is a good time to go out on top, hand it over. It sort of felt like it had more linear growth going from there. So when I left in 2023, thatâs how I saw it. Okay, itâll still grow, but more in a linear fashion, so give it to the professionals to take over.
Iâll go do something else. Then AI hits, and Iâm just basically like, âHoly shit.â Thereâs so much more to do with the foundation of what we built, and thereâs so many exciting things we can do, and my brain was just firing off.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
And on the outside, I would say I wasnât seeing the innovation overall in the industry that I had basically built, including Ring. And I was fortunate that Amazon was... itâs incredible, Iâd say, how it reflects on them to allow me to come back.
You can make your own decision on me coming back, on how that reflects on me, but I did wanna come back and sort of have my second at bat with it to see what we could do. AI overall was what made me wanna come back, just because of the speed of development, the features we could do. And our missionâs always been around making neighborhoods safer, so there was a lot we could do around that in general.
Turner Novak:
Were you like texting the team at 1:00 AM, like, âHey, you guys gotta try this thing. Check this outâ?
Jamie Siminoff:
So I actually tried to, and I think it was maybe healthy. These are always... theyâre like relationships, so when you leave, you... I tried to leave the team alone when I left. I did try. Because I think itâs easy to be this agitator on the sideline. So I basically went back to the heads of Amazon and said, âThis is what I wanna do.â
I tried not to infiltrate the Ring team and do that. Which was kind of funny, because when I came back, no one actually knew. The day I announced it, I literally came in the office and Iâm like, âIâm back.â
It was almost like a TV show. It was like walking down the Shark Tank thing again. It was interesting because literally no one knew I was coming back.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Jamie Siminoff:
The announcement was when I was there. And so I was like, âIâm back.â And it has been... if you look at the KPIs of what weâve done since then, itâs been pretty cool. Weâve just multiplied everything, on what weâve gotten: new products, invention, features, just impact, the business overall.
I just feel like weâve done a... Pretty proud overall of what weâve done. Thereâs always more to do, but...
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So what was it like coming back for the second time? Because a prior guest to the show, his nameâs Eoghan, heâs founder of Intercom. He left in 2019, came back at the end of 2022.
He kind of said he had these fresh eyes on the business. He basically was a founder again, but then also kind of was rehired as the professional CEO. And then they actually just sold the company to Salesforce a couple months ago, so it seems like overall a pretty good outcome for them.
So how did things change coming back the second time? How did you see the business?
Jamie Siminoff:
I do think there is something about... when you leave... When youâre in these businesses as a founder, I think you do get these blinders that form around you just from working in it, being in the trenches.
When I left Ring was when I realized the impact we were truly having. Obviously I saw it. I was, you know... But when I truly left, when I no longer had any connection to it, when I was out, thatâs when I really had the most, âWow, this thing is crazy.â
What weâve done here is crazy. Because when youâre in it, youâre fighting through it, youâre trying to invent new stuff, you know what the problems are, so youâre just in this daily grind. By leaving, I had such a fresh set of eyes. I felt like a Marvel superhero coming in.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
Because I feel like my decision-making was 10x better.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Jamie Siminoff:
My speed was 10x. Everything was 10xâd, because I had been able to cut all of the things that had built up over time, all these blinders that had come in. I kind of blew them off.
And so I did feel this superpower of coming back. It has been exciting. When you take fresh eyes with all of the experience that youâve had from the business, and you put those together, I think, just like Eoghan was saying from Intercom, itâs amazing.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Whatâs the biggest example of something that you did differently the second time around?
Jamie Siminoff:
I would say, definitely, around people. There were people that I think we probably were not allowing to fulfill their full potential. Giving them more room to fulfill their potential was something that was fun and exciting to do.
Even around product development and process, there were processes and things that... Whatâs interesting is everything usually starts with good intentions. Like a recurring meeting. Typically, a recurring meeting thatâs going on that people... If you ask anyone who works at a big company, theyâll tell you theyâve got a couple of those.
Turner Novak:
Got a couple of those.
Jamie Siminoff:
Theyâve got a couple of those, and they suck, and theyâre useless. Theyâre useless meetings. But if you go back to the beginning, that meeting was usually set up for a real reason that needed to solve a problem at the time. And no one has had the awareness or the fortitude to cut it at this point.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
So I think there were a lot of those things that I now looked at and Iâd just be like, âDelete.â I mean, just deleted everyoneâs recurring meetings. Just basically nuke stuff that Iâm like, âYou know what? If it doesnât have value, weâre gonna just kill it.â And so I do think we freed up a lot of time on the product development processes.
There was stuff that I probably even created the process for originally, like a QA thing. But now with AI, thereâs other ways. We had, letâs call it, arbitrary... to get a product out, you had this four-week testing period. Thatâs how long you test for.
And we just kept doing it. Now, when that was started, there were things that took a certain amount of time to test because that was the cycle. If you go now with AI, thereâs probably things we can test in hours, not even days or weeks. But we kept doing... we kept the same amount of time in places because that was the process.
The process is to have this many weeks for this many things. And so I would just, with a fresh set of eyes, Iâm like, âWhy? Why? Why? Why?â And then it was like, âOh, actually youâre right, we donât need that time.â Well, you take four weeks out of a process, and now the cycle times get faster.
Cycle times get faster, innovation goes up, new products come out faster. And this is, if you look at what Jensenâs done at NVIDIA, the reason NVIDIA is so far ahead is because their cycle times are shorter. They just spin chips faster than everyone else. Chips basically make chips, and so now theyâre just way ahead.
Turner Novak:
So whatâs a way to do that without leaving and taking a couple years off and coming back? Do you just... Is it like every... Do you look at your calendar? Do you look at all your work process documents of how things are done? Is there a way to do it without actually leaving?
Jamie Siminoff:
Yes. I think there are two mechanisms that you need to do. The two mechanisms are zero-based budgeting, so every year... And again, I think because the world is changing faster with AI, AI is enabling us to do things faster.
Zero-based budgeting at least every year is important, to say, okay, what are we here to deliver? What customer service are we here to do? What products are we here to deliver? What are we here to support? What do we want to build? And then just look at, if you were doing that again from scratch, what would that take to do?
And then you overlay that on your business, and you look at... By the way, you might have a deficiency in some places, you might have too much in other places. So zero-based budgeting is one, and then just first principles, which is really just asking why. Continue to ask why, empower your team to ask why, so that it has more leverage to it.
The two are obviously connected, but making sure that you are, with the least amount of movement, accomplishing the most. And then I would say, overarching on that, have people feel empowered.
Turner Novak:
So how do you do that? Because there might be a company where people have gotten fired for bringing up the wrong idea, or they get demoted for it. So how do you build a culture of empowered people?
Jamie Siminoff:
That is human nature, Iâd say. We see it at almost every big company. Even Ring, that I think was a good company. As these things get bigger, I think human nature takes over.
I think itâs hard. I think you just have to fight it, because I do think the best people still somehow, itâs like a Darwin thing, they just become more around that. And also, good ideas are typically dumb when they are formed. The best, most innovative things usually sound pretty stupid when youâre creating them, and so thatâs the problem: how do you get people to still innovate?
How do you get people to say, âWe can do this. Instead of doing a four-week process, we can do it in an hour,â and someoneâs like, âThatâs crazyâ?
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm.
Jamie Siminoff:
Because it sounds crazy when someone says those things, and usually you donât get promoted for that. So youâre absolutely right. How do you create the incentives to breed those outcomes? One thing weâve done is weâve changed internally. Our engineering is all... theyâre all called builders now.
Turner Novak:
So thatâs the official title?
Jamie Siminoff:
Builder. Youâre a builder. And what we realized is, with AI... I mean, it used to be, if you were a firmware engineer, thatâs because you mastered the knowledge around firmware. That was a specialty, around chips and all this stuff. You had to be... We needed that person to stay on that and not be also doing apps and back end and whatever else.
Today, the firmware engineer can also be building a feature, can be doing mobile, can be integrating it in. So we donât want that person to feel like theyâre pigeonholed into that. We want them to be a builder, that they can do anything. Now, obviously there are still specialties a little bit, and we want people to know where their area is, but you also want them to feel empowered. So the incentives breed outcomes. If youâre a builder and not a back end engineer, you feel more empowered to go across things.
Turner Novak:
You might come up with a feature idea even though youâre just the firmware engineer.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thatâs exactly it. And thatâs the problem: brand does matter. It matters in titles. It matters internally. It matters externally. Words do matter, and so when you say youâre a back end engineer, if you go and say, âI have this idea for doing this thing in the app,â people are gonna be like, âYouâre a back end engineer.â
Turner Novak:
Then you donât know what youâre talking about.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, you donât know what youâre talking about, or youâre a product this, or all these titles. And I do think with AI... AI is democratizing intelligence in a way that is superpowering all of us.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
And so my job is to get the most out of our team, and we want everyone to be superheroes while still having some focus on knowing the area that they need to focus on. Because if everyoneâs just running around building everything, probably nothing will get done.
So thereâs always a balance to anarchy. But I want the back end person to say, âI can do this,â and then mock it up. And maybe they even actually build the thing all the way through. Weâve seen people now build features literally all the way through.
Weâve seen people fix... theyâll see a bug, and instead of the back-end engineer putting it in as a ticket that then goes through this whole system, theyâre like, âI found it, I did it. Iâve fixed the end-to-end bug.â
Turner Novak:
Hmm. So whatâs the state of Ring today? I know when you sold it to Amazon, it was a billion dollar kind of price tag. Whatâs the state...
Jamie Siminoff:
Well, $1.15 billion, but itâs...
Turner Novak:
$1.15 billion, yeah, no big deal. Iâll give you the extra 150.
Jamie Siminoff:
I mean, the 150... But back then it mattered. Itâs like... Now itâs like a...
Turner Novak:
Thatâs like a...
Jamie Siminoff:
It kind of mattered.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Now you can just go out and raise $150 million bucks like no big deal.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, no, I always say... Itâs funny. Itâs only funny because of people that are in the world of raising money now. Because, like I said, we sold for a billion when a billion was actually a big deal.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
It is crazy that... there are just, on paper, startups that are raising... A billion dollars is actually not a crazy valuation for a startup today, which is... When I sold Ring, it was one of a handful of billion-dollar companies that were built.
Turner Novak:
What do you think is the change? Is it just purely hysteria and weâre in a bubble, or are people actually able to build bigger companies faster and more efficiently?
Jamie Siminoff:
The answerâs probably in the middle. Because if you look at the other things that have happened like this, yeah, out of the internet did come companies that we had never seen before. Amazon is a sort of child of the internet age, of this bubble of the internet. And it is a company thatâs worth multi-trillions of dollars, so it did actually achieve its... You know, if you look back at the crazy valuations that people said it had, it did actually not only achieve it, but it was a good investment.
So I think itâs in the middle. I do think, physically, you canât have this many companies have these kinds of values, this kind of money being spent this fast. I would say, if you wanted to look at how you parse this... when companies spend money quickly, historically that has never been something people have done well.
Turner Novak:
Spending money quickly.
Jamie Siminoff:
Quickly. Yeah. So the places where you see the... Amazon, if you look at Jeff, yes, they had a crazy valuation on stuff, but they actually were very smart about how they spent their money even back then. They were not just blowing it in every direction. If you actually look, they were spending their money pretty frugally.
So I think the companies that will come through this are the ones that could raise money, could have big valuations, it doesnât matter, but that make sure they donât too quickly build these infrastructures that they canât get a handle on, because everything just keeps getting bigger and bigger and multiplying.
In all of these times this has happened, usually the companies that kind of overnight are too big just can never get a handle on themselves. And so having the discipline, I think, is really important. I do think thereâs gonna be incredible companies coming out of this.
I do think this is like the golden age just started. I think AI is going to enable us to build incredible things, incredible value. I think itâs gonna be incredible for humanity. Iâm very positive on it, and I think it is the time to embrace it, especially young people who I talk to and who are so scared about what their futureâs gonna be.
And Iâm like, âMan, your futureâs gonna be bright, but you also do need to embrace it, because if you donât, it is gonna be tough if you are not an AI-native thinker in five years, if youâre in the job market.â That person, I think, is gonna have it tough. And I worry that this anti-AI talk is going to push people away from it, which is actually gonna hurt them in the value that they can take from this, because it is a transition thatâs happening.
And transitions... historically, if you look at any transition, if you were sitting there with a hammer, doing steel, and manufacturing was coming out, you wanted to be part of Henry Fordâs kind of new model. You didnât want to be a blacksmith. So you do wanna be part of these transitions, and you wanna be on the other side of it.
Turner Novak:
I heard, I think maybe you said it at the venture summit, a rev number. Is this all private, like youâre not public about how big things are?
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, I mean, Ring is... So when I sold Ring, it was doing just under five. So in 2017, when I sold it, we closed out the year just under $500 million. It was like $480 million...
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
...in sales. It was still losing a ton of money.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
But on a per-customer basis, the economics of a customer were fantastic. It just was subscale. The company needed to be a couple billion. We knew in the hardware space we needed to be a couple billion to be profitable, but we also knew the economics on a per-customer basis were very good. Itâs just the overall business was still growing so fast and adding so much.
And so our revenue went $330 million, $170 million...
Turner Novak:
$480 million. And this with a hardware business where you gotta order parts.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah. You gotta order parts. It was crazy. When I sold to Amazon, this thing was barely sticking together. To go from, in 2016, we did $170 million, and in 2017 we did $480 million. To go from $170 million to $480 million in hardware, I had to order, while weâre doing basically $10 million a month-ish, call it in the summer of â16, I have to order, in essence, $480 million worth of product when weâre doing $100 million a year in revenue.
Now, youâre projecting growth, but if the growth didnât happen, Iâd be sitting on hundreds of millions. Itâs crazy. If in 2017 we did $250 million, or even doubled, if we did $340 million, we probably wouldâve gone out of business, because we wouldâve had an extra $100 million of inventory just sitting there.
And youâre buying that stuff. Itâs not like you can go back to the store and return it. So it was a crazy growth rate going into Amazon. Part of why we sold it was we needed to be part of a bigger balance sheet and spread the risk allocation out over a bigger balance sheet, because we just had to raise so much money.
And at that time... the capital markets today wouldâve been much easier, because people started writing bigger checks into private companies later. At that time, you didnât see that. You didnât see this billion-dollar sort of Series D or E rounds coming in.
Turner Novak:
You probably needed Masa, basically.
Jamie Siminoff:
We needed SoftBank, yeah. And SoftBank was just starting to kind of go, I would say, 2016, â17. They were doing some checks, but it was, again, very small numbers. If you looked at... I mean, I donât know, my guess is that companies that had over a billion dollars of value that were private and raising big checks, you would count them on your hands.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
It wasnât like hundreds. Now itâs like...
Turner Novak:
Every day.
Jamie Siminoff:
Every day thereâs one. And also remember, thereâs now bankers that specialize in that, so thereâs an industry around that. Yes, that did happen every once in a while, but I didnât have the relationship with anyone to raise three, four... I mean, at Ring, in â17, if we were gonna continue to go, we needed to raise like $300 million probably to get ourselves to velocity of profitability, IPO, that kind of thing, and we just didnât have the... I just didnât have the relationship to do that. And so Amazon ended up being a great place, in terms of what it took to invest back in it to get it to profitability.
And now, Iâve well over 10xâd the business since itâs been at Amazon.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Jamie Siminoff:
Profitability, yeah. So itâs multiple billions of dollars of sales now, and itâs a healthily profitable business. Itâs a good business. Itâs a growing business still, innovative, has an impact. Ring has checked all the boxes.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You said $480 million the year before you sold?
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So itâs fair to say at least $4.8 billion in revenue?
Jamie Siminoff:
I think thatâs fair, yeah. Maybe five?
Turner Novak:
Iâll go with five for the title. Okay, perfect. Get the clickbait.
Jamie Siminoff:
Perfect. There you go. I guess you gotta get a little clickbait. I can appreciate that.
Turner Novak:
Thereâs actually some inside baseball: you wanna do non-exact numbers in those, because if you say $4.869 billion or whatever, itâs not a round number. People are like, âOoh.â Thatâs real. That must be real.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thatâs exactly right.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Versus if you say five billion, people are like...
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah. Never round anything off.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. The psychology of getting people to click on content and watch it is never-ending. You can never win it.
Jamie Siminoff:
I spent some time with MrBeast.
Turner Novak:
Oh, nice.
Jamie Siminoff:
With Jimmy, and the sophistication in that is something... And again, itâs an area, obviously itâs not my area that I think about all day. But you sit with someone who thinks about that all day, itâs incredible. Itâs like, this is why you specialize, why you do something that youâre good at. Because every single thing... thereâs people that kind of sort of do it and are never successful, and then thereâs the people that are just like MrBeast, Jimmy, whoâs just...
He is a ninja. The guy is like a surgeon on this. He is so focused and so good at this, and just understands every single thing that he does and how it works. Itâs amazing.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And I never thought I would be an influencer, because I was trying to get a job in VC 10 years ago, and people just started following me on the internet, and I kind of kept riding it. And Iâve sort of fought it the whole way. I donât really want to just make content and be a content creator and be an influencer. But to the point where itâs like, well, I guess Iâm pretty good at this, so why would I not do it?
Jamie Siminoff:
But again, in any business, authenticity is what matters. So the fact that you like it... I think thatâs what people miss with influencers. If you look at most of the influencers, and there are always gonna be examples of whatever, but most of them, when you look at where they came from or what they did, it is authentic.
It was what they liked. It wasnât that they wanted to get the numbers or be out there. Itâs that they actually were authentic about what they were doing. That got picked up. That became the thing, and now they are influencers. So the people that... youâll hear a kid being like, âI want to be an influencer,â and itâs like, no, you should want to be a VC, and then it turns out that wanting to be a VC, talking about it, doing this, then it was actually interesting for people.
So then you become an influencer, which then youâre fighting every day probably, but itâs fine.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Iâve kind of embraced it at this point. Itâs probably 50/50, in terms of 50% of the time is just, quote, unquote, âmarketing.â
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And when you really think about it, thatâs what most other investors are doing anyway. Itâs just theyâre doing, you know...
Jamie Siminoff:
AI slop, right?
Turner Novak:
Right.
Jamie Siminoff:
I would just say the platform changed, and so I think people think that... they think influencer is like... Influencer definitely has a derogatory tone to it at this point. But thatâs BS. Itâs where the platform is, and itâs where the people are. And so I think any business, any whatever, should be where the eyeballs are and where the people are. So you donât fight it.
Now, Iâm sure thereâs older people in the industry that are like, âOh, thatâs... theyâre an influencer.â Well, thatâs where the people are. By the way, as an investor, youâre supposed to be investing in the new stuff, not the old stuff. So if youâre investing in concrete plants, donât be an influencer. But yeah.
Turner Novak:
Thereâs actually some people that would argue that that is the play. If youâre doing dirty, blue collar type industry stuff, thereâs less content for it and thereâs less competition, especially when you have the more sophisticated banker investor type that would be buying a concrete plant. So if you create the content to source those opportunities and lay the groundwork, thereâs actually an opportunity to do it.
So I think maybe the takeaway is just thereâs so many things it unlocks. Itâs basically just marketing. People donât wake up and read the newspaper anymore.
Jamie Siminoff:
Itâs...
Turner Novak:
They wake up and look at their Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thatâs what I... I do think itâs funny, because if you go to a coffee shop, someone will say, âLook, everyoneâs on their phone.â And itâs like, yeah, but 20 years ago everyone would have a newspaper out. And no one said, âWow, everyoneâs on the newspaper.â
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
âLook at these idiots. Most people on their phone...â I mean, there are some people who are just going on TikTok, and their brains are slowly being turned into mush, algorithm mush. Thereâs a lot of people that actually learn. I learn stuff on Twitter and these areas, and itâs incredible the knowledge that Iâve been able to gain from this.
And then with AI... I donât know if you do this, but I love it. Iâll see an article on something, whatever, and then I go into AI, and I become an expert. I dig so deep with my team, as I call it, of researchers. I love it. I can have a full team go research something that Iâm like, âWait, Iâm interested in this.â
And so, yeah, I sit on my phone in a coffee shop, but Iâm actually running a team of researchers from there and learning.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. An AI army doing your bidding.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I guess today, inside Ring, youâve grown about 10x since you sold to Amazon. What is the vision of everything around AI? You mentioned thereâs a bunch of opportunities. So have there been new products you guys have launched?
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah. Iâll say, the vision around AI... I think we should look at AI like electricity. I wasnât around when electricity came out, but itâs almost like I feel like AI has become this thing where you say, âWhere do you use AI in your business?â Itâd be like, âWhere do you use electricity in your business?â It turns out you use electricity in a lot of places in your business.
Turner Novak:
No, we actually use candlelight.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, youâre a candlelight VC. But for most VCs, they use electricity all over the place.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
So I think it is, wherever you use AI, thatâs the thing. To be AI-native, which means itâs every part of the business. Itâs from inception of product, to product development, to literally everything. How we talk to our customers, how we interact with our customers, how we build features, what features we can build. So I think it just really should be in everything we do, everywhere weâre doing it.
And from the customer side especially, I donât want them to think of it like, âOh, this is AI, this is not AI.â I just want them to be like, âThis is...â You know, our job is to make your home and your neighborhood safer. So I just want people to be like, âI feel more peace of mind in my home.â They shouldnât know why. Not that weâre hiding it, but they shouldnât know why, in terms of, âThis feature that came out because of AI makes me feel safer.â
It should just be like, âYeah, with Ring, I love it. We get smart video descriptions now.â
Turner Novak:
So what is that? Actually, it might be interesting... Iâm assuming most people know what Ring is, but quick 10 seconds: what is Ring for people whoâve never come across it before?
Jamie Siminoff:
Ring is a mission to make neighborhoods safer that has mainly been known as our doorbell cameras, floodlight cameras, alarms. We have products around the home that come together, that you can watch from your phone and keep your home and your neighborhood safer. Thatâs really Ring in a nutshell.
But we have this thing, smart video description. So instead of... It used to be, when we came out, you had to get motion alerts, and then you get a motion alert, and youâre like, âOh, Iâm filming a podcast, but I have a motion alert at my house. Let me look at it and see whatâs going on real quick.â Itâs not a great thing to do. Now we have smart video descriptions, so you get this thing that says a person is mowing the lawn. Youâre like, okay, I know whatâs happening there. And you donât need to look at it.
Or you get someoneâs walking around your yard, and youâre like, wait a second, no one should be in my yard, give me one second. So you have now more context with that. It turns out that... the hardest thing about AI to consumers, at this point, is not what you can do, itâs delivering that at a price that is reasonable to people.
If you just have all the tokens, and you wanna just rip GPUs, you can deliver incredible... you can go crazy with what you can do right now with AI. The problem is itâs gonna cost you thousands to tens of thousands a month for that feature, and obviously people arenât gonna say, âOh, Iâll pay to see what my Ring cameraâs doing. Iâm gonna pay $10,000 a month.â Itâs not gonna happen.
And so it is, how do we take that $10,000 a month of value that someone wants, and how do we deliver that for single dollars a month? Thatâs one of the hardest things we have internally, the thing that we have to work on: how do you streamline this stuff so that youâre giving the value to people and getting them the technology? Because there is a constraint around price, and AI is expensive. These GPUs, itâs a lot.
Turner Novak:
Is there anything that you wanna do but you just canât yet because of the cost equation?
Jamie Siminoff:
What I want to do is, I want every customer, every... We call them neighbors, our customers. I want every Ring neighbor to feel like they have a security team that has worked at their house for 30 years. So if you had a house and you had full-time security there, and not just overnight, but if theyâd been there for a long time, so they knew everything about your home, how you live, what you like.
Some people probably would be interested if there was a bear walking down the street that morning, and some people wouldnât. So itâs, like, truly knew your preference. Because itâs not just security in that Iâm keeping your house secure, but itâs also, how do you wanna live in your house? What do you wanna be notified by? Maybe some people wanna know when their wife comes home in the afternoon, and maybe some people donât. Same thing with their kids.
And so I wanna deliver that feeling of a full team at your house 24/7 that knows you. And weâre getting there in pieces. To deliver that full thing right now probably is too expensive. We have a thing called Virtual Security Guard. Thatâs $100 a month, so thatâs an expensive subscription. That is delivering as close to that, but it also still uses humans. So someone walks on your property, thereâs an AI that says, âPerson on the driveway, youâre doing whatever,â and then it clicks over to a human if it needs to.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
So itâs still a little bit kludgy. Itâs a little bit expensive. It does the security job. Where do I wanna go? I want that at $20 a month, so that everyone can have it. To me, I wanna democratize. I always like to democratize everything to everybody. And itâs part of Ringâs thing, to be a high volume, low cost supplier of democratized security.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I could see even my wifeâs grandma, sheâll always give us these updates when sheâs walking through the neighborhood, like, âOh, the Joneses got a new dog,â or something.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yep.
Turner Novak:
So you could even get, like... Or, âMrs. Williamson did not walk past today, and she walks past every day. Might be worth checking in on her, seeing if sheâs okay.â
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, so I love those examples I like, which is the intelligence behind the example. Itâs not a hard-coded thing of, âTell me when this happens or tell me that happens.â Itâs taking multiple things together and being like, wait a second, itâs not a holiday, itâs not... Hereâs all the things Iâm gonna, as a human, think about.
One of the examples I give the team is, if people have gardeners that come on, call it, Tuesday. If itâs Tuesday, and itâs 4:00 PM, and they usually come at 11:00 AM, and itâs not a holiday. Instead of saying, every week, âThe gardeners are here. The gardeners are here,â itâs more like, âHey, itâs 4:00, and just FYI, they didnât show up, and itâs not a holiday.â And maybe you can get more knowledge over time, but I donât have any reason to think they shouldnât be here.
Turner Novak:
No email receipts.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, thereâs no email receipts, no gardener emails. And Iâve looked. âDo you want me to...â And then itâs, again, smart. âDo you want me to call them? Do you want me to ping them?â And by the way, it might even come to the point where it should be... âI did it. Iâm your assistant. I called them, and they said theyâre gonna be here.â Yeah, the gardener showed up. âThey said theyâre gonna be here tomorrow, just FYI.â
So thatâs the stuff, if we can... Owning a home is the greatest thing you can have. Itâs probably your biggest investment. Itâs also a hassle. It takes a lot of mental cycles to own a home. Thereâs lots of things happening in there. Thereâs things breaking, whatever. The security side of it. And so I think we can take our piece and focus on that. It would be really cool.
And then, yeah, in the neighborhood, you can do great things to bring everyone together. So thatâs where we wanna go with it. And then the other thing weâre doing, which we also launched, a little bit off of this, is an App Store. Because it goes into things like... my mother-in-law lives alone. So if I can buy an app that watches her when sheâs walking outside of the house, and, is she limping today versus yesterday? Did she not leave the house this morning for five hours?
And so, Ring, we donât wanna build these long tail, super specialized verticals, but I think thereâs lots of, again, with AI, thereâs lots of groups that can build these very specialized apps, that then someone could be like, âYeah, I wanna put this app on my mother-in-lawâs home.â
Turner Novak:
So I could build a Ring app if I wanted to?
Jamie Siminoff:
You could build a Ring app today, yeah. And weâre kind of figuring it out, because it is a new concept.
Turner Novak:
Hm.
Jamie Siminoff:
But we have, you know, thereâs tens of apps now in the App Store, and theyâre like...
Turner Novak:
Tens of apps. Okay.
Jamie Siminoff:
Tens. So pretty, pretty... It was figured out. We launched it. Itâs growing. Weâre kind of figuring it out.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And then, so why would someone build an app on it? Because it sounds like only 10-ish people... it doesnât sound that popular. How many customers can you potentially hit by doing a Ring app?
Jamie Siminoff:
So thatâs why you build a Ring app. And thatâs why we think itâll become... Again, start humble, get bigger. But you have tens of millions of homes and businesses to be able to... that already have invested the money.
So think of a coffee shop. If a coffee shop uses Ring as security, theyâve already invested the money in the infrastructure of having all these cameras. Now you can build an app that says, âOkay, when you have a line, Iâll tell you.â
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting.
Jamie Siminoff:
So it just rides over. Versus if you wanted to build a line-checking thing for a coffee shop, youâd have to say, âOh, and buy this hardware.â Now itâs just already there.
Turner Novak:
Mm. So you said tens of millions. Is it closer to 10 or closer to 100 million of installed base?
Jamie Siminoff:
Itâs definitely way above 10.
Turner Novak:
Way above 10. Yeah. Okay. So whatâs been, like, the most...
Jamie Siminoff:
I mean, I think weâve announced thereâs over 100 million cameras out there. So I think weâve announced that.
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting. Thatâs a lot.
Jamie Siminoff:
I think.
Turner Novak:
When you first started it, did you think it was gonna be that big?
Jamie Siminoff:
I mean, I...
Turner Novak:
You almost choked.
Jamie Siminoff:
I almost spit my coffee all over the microphone. I almost ruined this thing. You know, I didnât think... When I first started, I was in my garage and I couldnât hear my doorbell.
Turner Novak:
Well, because you tried making a bunch of different products, right?
Jamie Siminoff:
Oh, yeah. I was like... This was not an aha moment. It wasnât like I invented lightning. I was just like, I canât hear my doorbell, Iâm gonna build something. So the first thing was, Iâm gonna fix my own problem.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
Then I did a pre-sale with it, and Iâm like, âI hope I can sell enough to build these.â
Turner Novak:
Didnât you make a crowdfunding custom website or something?
Jamie Siminoff:
I did, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Why didnât you use, like, a... Were there not any when you launched, or...
Jamie Siminoff:
So I was building a bunch of other... I was in my garage, trying to do inventions.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Jamie Siminoff:
Iâm more of an inventor.
Turner Novak:
And you call yourself the chief inventor of Ring, and not the CEO?
Jamie Siminoff:
Chief inventor of Ring, yeah. I like the idea of invention and inventor. Thatâs more of where my focus is. I was in my garage, literally building stuff, couldnât hear the doorbell, built this thing.
At the same time, Kickstarter was becoming very popular, and they had just recently thrown off... You couldnât go on there with a hardware product anymore.
Turner Novak:
Really? Why not?
Jamie Siminoff:
Itâs funny, because you gotta go back now, but Kickstarter started, it was growing very fast. All these people came on there with hardware projects. None of them shipped. Kickstarter was like, âUh-oh.â
Turner Novak:
And thatâs not gonna...
Jamie Siminoff:
So they did a moratorium, a âWeâre not...â Like, âYou canât go on here with a hardware product anymore.â
Turner Novak:
And thatâs what you were making. You were making a bunch of hardware products.
Jamie Siminoff:
Hardware products. We were like, âUh-oh, thereâs no place for this.â So I saw it firsthand as the inventor in the garage. I just lost my distribution. And so then I basically was like, âWe should launch a Kickstarter for a product.â We called it Christie Street, which was the street that Edisonâs lab was on in New Jersey.
We were gonna launch it. We needed to put a product, obviously, Christie Street needed a product to launch. And so we ended up... What product should we launch? I was actually doing it at a friendâs conference in Paris called LeWeb, Loic Le Meur, and Iâm talking to Loic and Iâm like, âWhich product should we do?â
I had all these ideas, it was Snap Guard and all these ideas, and I get to the doorbell and heâs like, âZe Doorbell.â And so he was like, âThatâs the one.â And so, at that point... gosh, I was like, âWhatever.â I honestly didnât care.
Turner Novak:
So you thought that the crowdfunding site was almost the big product?
Jamie Siminoff:
Oh, the crowdfunding site was the business.
Turner Novak:
And it was like...
Jamie Siminoff:
In fact, I donât think people even know this. Charles River Ventures... I donât think weâve ever... Itâs not crazy, itâs not controversial, but I actually raised money from Charles River Ventures for Christie Street.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Jamie Siminoff:
They were the seed check in that. And Saar Gur, whoâs at Charles River, still a good friend...
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I know Saar pretty well.
Jamie Siminoff:
So he writes the first check in. I go and pitch him on it. Heâs like, âSure, hereâs, like, whatever,â like a hundred and something thousand bucks I guess, seed check. And pretty quickly we launched Christie Street at LeWeb, and it was Ze Doorbell.
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Jamie Siminoff:
And we launched it, and all the people wanna talk about is the Doorbell and not Christie Street. And we realized that Christie Street was probably a terrible idea, or we just werenât gonna do well with it, and that the Doorbell was the thing.
And so I went to Saar and Iâm like, âHey, dude, really sorry, this thing...â And Saarâs like... I love great VCs. Saarâs like, âAll right, itâs fine, do the Doorbell.â He meant, do the Doorbell. Like, âWhat I put money in didnât work, itâs fine.â And Iâm like, âNo, Iâm gonna roll you into DoorBot,â which was the name of it at the time. And Saar was like, âDonât worry about it.â He wasnât flippant like that. He was like, âItâs fine. We didnât invest in that, itâs fine.â And Iâm like, âNo, Iâm gonna roll you in.â So he actually became the first money into DoorBot.
Turner Novak:
Hmm.
Jamie Siminoff:
Which, that return on that investment was extremely good, looking back.
Turner Novak:
Thankfully for him, even if he wouldâve said no, I think heâs had some other pretty good ones, too.
Jamie Siminoff:
Saarâs fine. So Saar and CRV are both gonna be fine. So anyone whoâs out there worried about Saar, heâs okay. But heâs also just... Itâs nice when people are just good. Itâs nice to see good people also make it. Heâs a good, founder-backed person who was like, âNo, I put money into this, thatâs not what I put money into.â So I went out and tried to do it. It wasnât like we didnât try to do it. And I was like, âNo, weâre just gonna roll your basis into Ring,â or... At the time, DoorBot.
Turner Novak:
Which...
Jamie Siminoff:
Did not look like it was that successful either.
Turner Novak:
So how did that pre-sale go?
Jamie Siminoff:
It went... It was good enough. It was actually almost... It was bad. It sold enough that we had to build the product, but it didnât do tens of millions. At that time you had... What the hell was that thing called? Tile came out, and Tile was this little tracker thing, like a Bluetooth tracker tile.
Turner Novak:
I actually have one. They got acquired. Did they get acquired by...
Jamie Siminoff:
They were acquired by Life360. And so Tile... Tile looked, for a minute, like they were gonna be a trillion-dollar company. And they did like $20 million.
Turner Novak:
Wow.
Jamie Siminoff:
So we werenât the biggest out there. And there was a bunch of hardware companies raising money that were the belle of the ball at that time. There was this helmet for motorcycles that raised like $40 million or something. There was a lock company that raised a lot of money. There was a whole bunch of stuff in San Francisco that was the... And we were a solid tier below that.
Turner Novak:
You basically were the thing Kickstarter did not want, where you...
Jamie Siminoff:
Oh, we were...
Turner Novak:
You wouldnât actually get to launch, because you didnât raise enough money.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, no, we were totally what Kickstarter was worried about. To be fair to Kickstarter, they were not wrong. And so, yeah, we basically sold enough. Weâre like, âWe have to build this thing. Shit.â And so we scraped together to build it.
And the first DoorBot was tough. It worked, but it just barely worked. It was not a...
Turner Novak:
Did it have a camera on it?
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah. It had no motion detection. But it was a doorbell with a camera. You have someone ringing the doorbell, you talk to them through the DoorBot, and they had a camera into your phone. But the Wi-Fi was super challenged. Everything was tough on it. It worked, but Iâll say it worked-ish. It definitely was not... It was a few people in a garage building a consumer electronics product. It turned out it was really hard.
Turner Novak:
And were you nervous that someone was then gonna steal the idea, because it was public?
Jamie Siminoff:
So, I wasnât nervous. When we put it out there, I wasnât nervous. I didnât think anything of it. We went on Shark Tank.
Turner Novak:
Okay. That was pretty soon after this?
Jamie Siminoff:
Actually, Shark Tank was... We launched the web in December of 2012, and then we went on Shark Tank in November of 2013.
Turner Novak:
So over a year later. Well, was that...
Jamie Siminoff:
Basically a year later.
Turner Novak:
Okay. And so, were you basically still figuring things out? Had the market taken off yet?
Jamie Siminoff:
So when we went on Shark Tank, we were two weeks away from starting to ship the product.
Turner Novak:
Oh, okay. This is when you recorded it or when it went live?
Jamie Siminoff:
Recorded it September 11th, which, you know, a date you remember, of 2013, and then we went on in November of 2013.
Turner Novak:
But you were shipping around Christmas time?
Jamie Siminoff:
That time. Which ended up being, from a sales... If you could be on Shark Tank, if you could have your 12-minute commercial on ABC right before Christmas, because Shark Tank was the top-rated show. I think at the time it was the number one rated show that year. And so, if you could pick your time, that was the time, and you were about to start shipping.
Turner Novak:
So how did you get on Shark Tank? Because that was probably a hard slot.
Jamie Siminoff:
So there were like 30,000 people that applied the year I did. They were saying that they wanted a little bit more complex businesses on there. So they wanted stuff like a DoorBot, something that was a little bit more of a tech and product, a little bit further along than... They were getting a lot of stuff like people baking something in their house kind of thing.
Which is fine, but they wanted, I think, to mix it up and have a little bit more of these almost mature-ish businesses. And so they were looking for that. They had emailed some people in LA, and one of the people I was talking to said, âOh, you should email this producer. Theyâre looking for stuff like yours.â So I emailed the producer, and an hour later theyâre like, âOh yeah, you should be on Shark Tank.â And it ended up being way more complex than that. But that was the initial thing that got us on there.
And Shark Tank was probably one of the most critical things in getting us to survive, because, again, you need to scale. We had all of these DoorBots coming in that I couldnât even pay for, and I go on Shark Tank, and now we were basically selling them immediately, able to literally pay the factory to start shipping them, to release them, so that we could do it. And so the Shark Tank thing was just critical in terms of timing and also credibility, awareness, everything. It really let us go.
Turner Novak:
But then what happened backstage at Shark Tank? Because it wasnât the smoothest, was it?
Jamie Siminoff:
Nothing in my whole thing has been smooth, but yeah. So Shark Tank says you have to do a live demo. And Iâm like, âYeah, of course we should do a live demo.â
Turner Novak:
Did the product work at that point?
Jamie Siminoff:
Uh.
Turner Novak:
No? Okay.
Jamie Siminoff:
Eh.
Turner Novak:
It was close?
Jamie Siminoff:
Ish. Eh, you know? So the producer, âJamie, gotta do a live demo.â Of course, 100% weâre gonna do a live demo. But I think we should record something, blah, blah, blah, and play that. Theyâre like, âNo, we think we should do a live demo.â Iâm like, â100% weâre gonna do a live demo. But why donât we...â I literally kept trying to be like, âBut hereâs a better idea than a live demo.â Which is not a live demo, which is something that we can put in a can and just shoot it and throw at them. So they forced me to do a live demo.
Turner Novak:
So this was happening backstage or before you went out there?
Jamie Siminoff:
Well, so weâre getting the stages... They do like eight episodes a day they film.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really? I didnât realize that.
Jamie Siminoff:
And they film them back to back. What you see in the episode on TV, each vignette is filmed separately, and they just mix them up. And it depends on how they come out. So who films before you and after you, when youâre out there, is not necessarily gonna be on your episode. So theyâre switching the sets very quickly. And so you have like 15 minutes to get set up before they start shooting you.
And at that time you had to build your own set, and so we build our own set. We bring it in there, weâre setting this thing up. Itâs like a front of a house. And Mark Dillon, whoâs my CTO and the tech guy, we had three or four of our five DoorBots in there. Thatâs how many we had produced total, not just with us, that was it.
Turner Novak:
You brought the entire warehouse.
Jamie Siminoff:
We brought the entire set of DoorBots we had. So we bring them, weâre testing them before we go out there. Weâre in this little trailer in the Sony lot, and weâre testing them. And theyâre working... Again, it wasnât perfect, but we could get them working.
So he goes out there, and Mark was a fidgety, kind of a nervous little fella anyways. One of those engineers who likes working late at night when no oneâs around and it was dark. He was that kind of engineer.
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Jamie Siminoff:
Great guy, but a little bit nervous. And so Iâm getting set up, âOkay, this is where you stand. This is what you do. This is the camera youâre gonna look at,â whatever, right? And I keep seeing, over in the corner of my eye, Mark, and heâs like... Every time I look over, thereâs more sweat on him.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
To the point where I look over and it looks like heâs still in a pool. Iâm like, âUh-oh.â So Iâm just like, âOkay, um, wait, one second.â Very quiet. âHold on one second.â So I go over, âMark, everything okay?â Iâm trying to, like, looking around, doing thumbs-up, and Markâs like, âNo, theyâre not working.â Iâm like, âOkay. Well, get it fucking working, Mark.â Very nice and calm, and Mark just looks at me. Iâm like, âGet it working.â And so then I have to go start the shooting of this thing.
Markâs behind the house. If you look at the Shark Tank episode, literally Markâs sitting behind there the entire time, behind this house. Thereâs nowhere for him to go.
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm.
Jamie Siminoff:
And heâs trying to get things working. I literally have to do my whole song and dance, and at the end of it, I had to hit the DoorBot button and show the phone. And that was live. It was either gonna work or not work. I didnât know if it was gonna work. So Iâm out there. I hit the button. The thing comes up. Itâs the best picture we ever had on a DoorBot. And Iâm like...
Turner Novak:
Oh, like, highest quality?
Jamie Siminoff:
Highest quality. It was amazing. Iâm like, âOh my God, this thing freaking worked.â Iâm like, âHoly...â And so we smashed it. It worked, but the first three he put up literally just would not work. So he keeps installing new ones, and I donât know what actually... I donât think any of us know what actually happened, because we werenât smart enough to even know what the product was doing at the time. It was almost like luck when it worked.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And then didnât you get an offer, but you turned it down?
Jamie Siminoff:
Uh, yeah. It was a Mr. Wonderful offer that was kind of, I would say... Part of that is part of the TV, to make it a good thing, so he gives me an offer. He certainly wouldâve done the offer if I had done it, but it was such a bad... from a business side, it was a kill shot.
Turner Novak:
He always does a revenue share, doesnât he?
Jamie Siminoff:
The rev share, and it was a kill shot. You couldnât take that offer.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
But...
Turner Novak:
Iâve never met the guy, but...
Jamie Siminoff:
We didnât either, but... And then of course now everyoneâs like, âWell, youâre so lucky you didnât take the money. Of course you didnât take the money.â And Iâm like, I needed... We were out of money when I was on there.
Turner Novak:
So whyâd you say no then, if you needed it?
Jamie Siminoff:
Because it was a deal that the business wouldnât... You couldnât have survived that. They just would never get ahead of it.
Turner Novak:
So then it went live a couple weeks later?
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay. And then...
Jamie Siminoff:
Which, again, another funny story is, so Shopify, this is 2013. So Shopifyâs pretty... Theyâre out there as a company, but theyâre not huge. And so I called Tobi, whoâs the CEO founder of Shopify. Again, itâs not that big of a company, so calling him was like... Now itâs like a hundred billion dollar business or something.
Turner Novak:
They werenât public yet, were they?
Jamie Siminoff:
No, no, no. This is when theyâre like a startup. Like us. I mean, he was probably a little bit ahead of us, but they werenât huge. And so I basically threatened his life. Iâm like, âWeâre going on Shark Tank. This thing cannot go down.â And heâs like, âMan, we have...â And itâs actually on email, this... We both laughed about it recently. Heâs like, âWe have millions of dollars of equipment. Donât worry.â Millions. Now Shopify has literally tens of billions, itâs so big. And so it is just so funny, looking back, Iâm like, âNo, man, but seriously, thereâs so much traffic. If you go down... Iâm gonna drive to Toronto and get you.â And heâs like, âNo, no, I have millions of dollars of equipment.â So heâs like, âTwo small startups,â and Shopify did not go down. It was amazing. It was a very cool thing. But it is just, looking back, itâs a long time ago. Itâs 13 years ago.
Turner Novak:
But I think, was that the Christmas that you almost went bankrupt?
Jamie Siminoff:
So then we started shipping DoorBots.
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Jamie Siminoff:
And, again, like I said, it wasnât that they werenât working. It wasnât a product that didnât work. It just had a lot of challenges. And then we were going so fast, weâre trying to get them in from the factory, and weâre sending them out. Weâre literally sending them out from our little place we rented in Santa Monica with a garage. And so weâre taping boxes and shipping them out. And so we were way behind.
People are like, âIâm gonna cancel my order if I donât get it for Christmas.â
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
Weâre seeing that, so weâre like, âUh-oh, that would be bad.â
Turner Novak:
So you were having delays, and people were like...
Jamie Siminoff:
Delays with stuff coming in, and people were like, âIf I donât get it for Christmas, Iâm out.â
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
And so Iâm like, âUh-oh.â And I donât think it was that people necessarily wanted it for Christmas. I think that was kind of their line in the sand. So we got a big shipment that was being produced, and we had a new engineer, and he put code to fix the camera to make it even better, put it on there.
Shipment comes in, and, again, looking back, itâs so stupid. We donât test the product. It comes in, we send it out. Weâre so behind, weâre just like, âShip it, ship it.â So I started hearing people emailing me. My emailâs on the box.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Still is today.
Jamie Siminoff:
Still is today. And theyâre saying, âItâs not working,â and theyâre showing us pictures that are like... Iâm like, âOh, this is different than before.â So I started taking ones out of the boxes that are in the warehouse, next to my desk basically, and testing them. Iâm like, âUh-oh, somethingâs really wrong here.â
So we figure out that this new engineer we had had put basically just junk code onto this chip for the camera. Sadly, that camera chip, you couldnât upgrade. You couldnât over-the-air upgrade it, because it was not the way we had built it, which was a mistake, but just happened to be that that one chip was not in the line to get over-the-air upgrades.
And so we basically had shipped out like a thousand, maybe 10,000, I remember it was thousands of cameras that were just broken. They didnât work. And so we figured this out Christmas Eve Eve. So all day Christmas Eve Eve, the day before Christmas Eve, Iâm literally trying to figure out, is there any way to fix it? Is there some way we can OTA that chip? Is there some way we can, whatever.
And we end up getting to that night, Iâm out to dinner with my wife and my son, who at the time was, like, six or seven. And Iâm like, that was a fun run. This thing was interesting, but itâs done. Because if they were all broken, we couldnât afford to replace all of them with a new unit. Just the process of buying new units, sending them back out, we would... We didnât have enough. We barely had any cash to even stay afloat, let alone to change out 5,000 units or something. Not even close.
Turner Novak:
Had you raised any more money since that $100K?
Jamie Siminoff:
We had not raised at that point... We had raised up about a million dollars up to that point.
Turner Novak:
And thatâs to your inventory problem, right?
Jamie Siminoff:
We needed like $5 million more kind of thing. And, by the way, youâre not raising money saying, âHey, just FYI, I need money because everything we sent out was broken and we need your money to fix the issues.â So itâs very hard to raise money on that also. And so we were like, âThis is really bad.â
Turner Novak:
So howâd you get through this?
Jamie Siminoff:
So Iâm driving home from dinner, and I was actually calm in a weird way, kind of almost like it is what it is. At some point, youâre just like, I canât fight it. Weâre just gonna have to shut down. And it was very... I was very sad, but I was kind of calm.
And I called Mark, the sweaty engineer from Shark Tank. And Iâm like, âMark...â We had been using a licensed thing in our cloud for doing the video encoding, a licensed software, and then we switched to an open source one, because it was obviously a lot cheaper, as we were building stuff out. But the licensed one was always better. The open source one worked fine, so who cares?
So I said to Mark, âRemember that licensed one we used?â Heâs like, âYeah.â Iâm like, âDo you think somehow it could figure...â Because we didnât even know what was coming out of the camera. Something was coming out, but it was showing up on the phone as junk.
Turner Novak:
So it wasnât even the actual camera feed?
Jamie Siminoff:
The camera was sending basically a bunch of bad bits and stuff. And so the encoder we had just saw it and basically crapped out.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
And Iâm like, âDo you think the paid one would, in essence, figure out whatâs going on and basically be able to do this?â Heâs like, âI have no idea. Itâs gonna take me like eight hours.â And this was now heâs in New York. Iâm driving home from dinner, so itâs probably 8:00 or 9:00 at night. And so heâs like, âItâd take me like eight hours to switch it over.â I was like, âOkay. Start.â
Turner Novak:
You might as well.
Jamie Siminoff:
âIâll start the clock right now.â And Markâs the kind of guy who was like, âIâm starting it.â I knew he would do it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
And so he calls me. He wakes me up at like 6:00 AM Christmas Eve. And heâs like, âIt fucking works. It fucking works,â screaming. And Mark was not a screaming guy. But I start looking. Not only does it work, itâs the best picture. It actually was amazing picture. It was great.
And so that was still our favorite Christmas at the Siminoff house, the Christmas of 2013, because not only did we fix it, but then, weâre actually doing good, they were selling. So then you could go raise money, which is what we did. And you could then build the next product. So it allowed us to sort of... But if that had happened, it wouldâve been the kill shot.
Turner Novak:
So then did you just send one email and raise a bunch of money like people do nowadays? Or what was that like, raising at that time?
Jamie Siminoff:
No, raising money was still a slog. I actually got introduced to True Ventures. So, Om Malik... I donât know if you know Om.
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, Iâve actually met him.
Jamie Siminoff:
He just passed away. Which is very sad. But a great guy. And so I got introduced to him, and I told him, âI have this mission to make neighborhoods safer. This is what Iâm doing,â whatever, and everyone kind of thought I was crazy. And Om was just this classic guy, and was like, âNo, I think this is good.â And he introduced me to his partners at True Ventures, and this guy Adam DâAugelli, whoâs one of the... He was just brand new out of college, not even a partner. He was just an associate.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
Kind of like, they gave it to him, and Adam ended up coming in, being on the board. Heâs done phenomenally well. Heâs now a partner at True. And so Adam really had a passion for it and helped us raise our first, that was our first A round that we raised. And True Ventures was the big sort of thing behind it. And then there was, Iâd say almost, you could almost, of that vintage of VC, almost every single VC had some part of Ring.
Turner Novak:
Wasnât there an email that got passed around to people where you kind of told someone off or something? I forget exactly what happened.
Jamie Siminoff:
Well, there was a group out of the East Coast, and theyâre like, âOh, weâre a bunch of founders, and weâre founder-friendly,â and all this stuff. And they were basically in, and then right at the last second they backed out. And they backed out because they said, âYeah, we think you have a great business, but weâre worried that youâre in Los Angeles, and that if you try to raise the next round, you wonât be able to do it.â And so it was a very un-founder-friendly...
Turner Novak:
Classic East Coast early stage VC, honestly.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah. But to say you were founder-friendly and then do that... just say youâre a hedge fund jerk and be who you are. Donât say youâre founder-friendly and then write the standard jerk finance person email.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
And so I kind of called them out for it, and then that got passed around. And so then I was at dinner with one of our VCs, and theyâre like, âOh, I didnât know weâre all ass hats,â because I used âass hatâ as one of my examples of who they were.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
And even some other, even choicer words. And I was like, âUh-oh.â But itâs kind of... Looking back, I was under so much stress. Itâs not like a... Now itâs kind of funny, and itâs a little bit of a badge of honor, I feel like, doing it. I think at the time, what a dumb thing. Why? Donât poke the bear. There was no value in it. But itâs kind of also my personality, I guess. Iâm just like, you canât take the whatever out of the something. I donât know. Thereâs some saying there.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like if youâve ever raised money before, you kind of go through that. Someoneâs like, âOh, yeah, this is awesome. Iâm in.â And then... I mean, that happened to me in 2022 when I was raising my second fund. I had a ton of people who kind of pulled out when I was doing the close, and, fair, it was the summer of 2022. That was not an easy time to be raising money. But so I was kind of like... I could have said more things than I said. But I was kind of like, whatever. Itâs just...
Jamie Siminoff:
It is what it is. It is tough. It is emotional. People are always like, âItâs just business.â And I go, âItâs not just business. Itâs your life.â This was my life. And so, yeah, I was... But the email has definitely aged well, now that... Thank God I made it. So Iâm okay now. If I hadnât made it, it would have aged much more poorly, because... But it was, yeah, so itâs pretty funny.
Turner Novak:
And so, what... Yeah, I think you hired a bunch of people off Craigslist, right, when you got a bunch of money in the bank? Youâre really ramping the team. How did that go? Because in 2026, hearing somebody say, âI hired people off Craigslist,â Iâm like, what are you doing? So this was probably a couple years ago.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, and I think that is something thatâs gonna become, again, how you build successful businesses: finding these... Iâll call them ânew to businessâ people. So theyâre eager, gritty, wanna work hard people that you find that are not necessarily getting the attention of the world. Theyâre not the pedigreed resume, whatever. And with AI, I think thatâs democratizing intelligence.
So you donât necessarily need someone whoâs gone to Stanford to do your thing, because Stanford is now in the cloud, and you can access it. What we found is these... We hired the person in the shipping department who... And I mean shipping department, meaning the person putting tape...
Turner Novak:
Just packing boxes.
Jamie Siminoff:
Putting tape on the box. And he came to me and said, âJamie, we donât have enough whatever. Youâre not buying enough screwdrivers for the boxes, to pack.â And Iâm like, âDude, I donât freaking know. Why donât you order them?â And so I just said, âYou figure it out.â And then it was, we werenât buying enough door bots, whatever, and Iâm like, âThen you figure it out. I donât care. You go figure it out.â He still runs all our procurement today for the entire business.
So I think, give people opportunity, and find these great nuggets, these diamonds in the rough. And I think businesses today... if I was starting something new, if I was looking at transforming a business, thatâs what Iâd be looking for: how do you get these new AI-native thinkers that are not the resume, long-term, that havenât formed too many of the blinders, going back to what we said about coming back in. I want these fresh eyes that come in that can just rip through with what we have available to us today.
Turner Novak:
So what might one of those undercover gems look like? If youâre trying to figure out... Because a lot of what people do when theyâre hiring is real quick look at the resume. Does it match something? Maybe Iâll give him an interview. Iâll ask him some canned questions, and then weâll make a decision. So how do you run one of those processes, and what do you look for?
Jamie Siminoff:
So Iâve always tried to... Our missionâs to make neighborhoods safer. Are you passionate about that? Let them talk. Let them go through it. Obviously, as you get bigger and bigger in a company, now you have to hire for more specific things. But when youâre smaller, you just want these Swiss Army knife type people that can do multiple things, believe in what youâre doing.
And now Iâm also like, âHow do you use AI in your life?â If theyâre like, âOh, I use it like I use basically Google. I search things,â Iâm like...
Turner Novak:
Hmm.
Jamie Siminoff:
âThatâs interesting.â But a lot of them are like, âI built this app for my family, to reorder bathroom supplies, because we were arguing about the...â And you see what they did, and youâre like, oh, okay, youâre in a world where youâre realizing that you can just unlock anything. You can do anything. I want that unlocked brain, that person who feels like there are no constraints anymore. They can do anything.
And then passion for what youâre doing. There still is an authenticity there. You donât want coin-operated people. You want missionaries, not mercenaries. Because no matter what you pay someone, money always becomes boring quickly. Money is a terrible motivator in the long term, because whatever you have, you want more of it. And, by the way, people should have money. Iâm not anti-capitalist. But I do think that we misunderstand, when you hire someone, that if you give them a bonus or whatever, all that does is reset the floor for them.
In six months, youâre now making whatever that is, even if itâs double what you were making before, well, thatâs your new floor, and now you wanna do more than that. So if youâre driven by that, youâre just gonna want to have more. And if youâre driven by, âI wanna make neighborhoods safer, and Iâm excited about the products weâre working on,â then yes, making more money as you go and become more successful is good, but itâs not the main thing youâre showing up for every day.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thatâs right. You wanna make sure you can take care of yourself. Having money is great.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, like your family. This is it. I appreciate that people need it, that they should grow with it, but if itâs what youâre doing the job for, youâre usually never satisfied. And youâre usually at your best when itâs that, unless youâre literally at a hedge fund. The job is making money. That is the job. Thatâs great. Youâre good at making money because thatâs what you do every day, and that is the KPI. But at Ring...
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm.
Jamie Siminoff:
The KPI is making neighborhoods safer. So if you focus on that and that excites you, and then we get more successful and, because of that, you end up growing in your career, then both things happen. And thatâs great.
Turner Novak:
So then how did you think about building the brand? Because I know you were kind of the face of it, in some sense. Youâre on Shark Tank. People say, âOh, thatâs the Ring guy.â âThe doorbell guy.â How did you think through building that intentionally over time?
Jamie Siminoff:
If you look at most brands, they come from humanity, trust, authenticity. These things are true to the brand when they started. Big brands over time become their own thing, and they lose that need. But it wasnât that I was the best person to be part of a brand. A doorbell itself, that we made, was PCB boards and plastic. It turns out people donât get very passionate about PCB boards and plastic.
But when you talk to them about making their neighborhood safer, and you humanize it, and you put your email address on everything, and people can talk to you, and youâre accessible, I think thatâs how the brand becomes something over time. Itâs also how you become a better brand, because youâre also listening, youâre out there, youâre adapting to that.
So I think in every way, Ring today has become one of the big brands of the last decade. Not century, decade. Maybe century, but definitely the last decade. One of the bigger consumer brands that has formed. And I think a big part of that was me being out there, and not necessarily me being me, but a person being attached to it, so that it wasnât just selling PCB boards and VGA or HD camera, whatever feature thing that was out there. And a part of that was my email. My real emailâs on every box.
Turner Novak:
Well, even, I think, the name, too, Ring, and having a domain like ring.com. Thatâs pretty...
Jamie Siminoff:
All of that matters. The four-letter domain name feels credible. Ring turned out to be a great name, because it just felt warm. There was something nice and warm about it. There was something you could brand around. But, yeah, all that stuff matters. And so I think building a brand is basically impossible, which is why theyâre so... You donât see them get built.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
And it is lots of little things, but certainly itâs very hard to find. And thereâs always examples of this stuff. But Iâd say most brands, if you look back, they were usually built with authenticity...
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
...at their core. There was authenticity, people, humans, things. It mattered. There were reasons why they made decisions, products. They didnât just put stuff out there.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. How did you get ring.com?
Jamie Siminoff:
So the name came, uh, Upfront Ventures was one of our investors, and one of their partners, Himay, I was in a thing pitching them, telling them all the... what weâre doing, an update, and I said, âWeâre looking for a new name.â This is when we were DoorBot. Because DoorBot was a terrible name.
Turner Novak:
Talking about, like, human and the personality...
Jamie Siminoff:
Exactly, because itâs a robot. When we branded, I was literally building a thing for my house in my garage. It was a DoorBot. Door robotâs funny. But as a brand, it was a terrible brand. And so I said, âWe need a new brand.â And so Himay said, âYou keep saying rings of security and ring of this,â and I kept using the word ring. I didnât actually hear myself. He said, âWhy donât you just call it Ring?â
And I was like, âEh.â My first reaction was not like, âOh, my...â Epiphany, like, Ring. It was like, âHmm, I donât know. Would Ring actually be a good brand? Maybe.â And so then I think he looked, or I looked, and ring.com was available, meaning there wasnât a company. It was for sale.
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm. What was the price tag?
Jamie Siminoff:
It was over a million, I think, was the initial offer. From them, it was over $1 million.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Jamie Siminoff:
We ended up getting it. I had $187,000 in the bank when I was negotiating for the Ring domain. I ended up agreeing to a million dollars, and then at the day of closing, I said, âListen, the board decided that we couldnât do it.â Now, the board was just me at the time, but...
Turner Novak:
Was this right before Shark Tank?
Jamie Siminoff:
No, this was after Shark Tank.
Turner Novak:
Oh, so you went on Shark Tank as DoorBot?
Jamie Siminoff:
DoorBot, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Jamie Siminoff:
This was after Shark Tank. This was basically four months after Shark Tank, as we were trying. This was before True Ventures came in, but right around that time.
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Jamie Siminoff:
And weâre in this process of about to raise money. Weâre gonna need to rebrand. We realized that DoorBot was gonna be a bad brand. And so I told the guy, which is true, the board did say I couldnât buy it for a million dollars. Or maybe it was 750. We had it for $750,000, we had an agreement. And I said, âThe board said we couldnât.â I was the board. It was a small board. I said, âBut they did allow me to do $175,000 today, and weâll do a million dollars total paid out over two years.â
So I actually raised the price, but lowered the upfront, and the guy basically was like, âF you.â He yelled at me a bunch, and then right before he hung up the phone he said, âFine, wire the $175,000.â
Turner Novak:
Oh, and he did it.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, and I did it. So it turned out it was a good way to... I donât know if it was the most upfront negotiation, but yeah. I just didnât have the money. Iâd obviously thought we were gonna raise the money, we just werenât raising the money. I didnât have it.
Turner Novak:
So then you had $12,000 in the bank after this, essentially.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah. And then, so then True Ventures was coming in, and I had to then tell them two things. I basically had to admit that I bought this domain name, which I had not told them yet, because I didnât want them to know I bought a $1 million domain name when theyâre putting a couple million dollars in the company. Obviously, a major part of itâs going out to the domain name. And so I had to tell them before they wired, which was a little bit difficult.
Turner Novak:
Had you already signed all the docs?
Jamie Siminoff:
We had signed the docs.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Jamie Siminoff:
And so they were about to wire. And then I kept being like... They had all our stuff, but VCs are actually surprisingly lazy on digging through the finances of these companies. I think because they know theyâre so messed up that they donât even care.
Turner Novak:
You almost just donât wanna know.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah. Exactly. So Iâm like, âOh, the wireâs coming on Tuesday.â And Iâm like, âOkay, any chance it could come Monday?â And theyâre like, âI think we can do Monday.â Iâm like, âOkay, great, just because I have our finance personâs in the office on Monday, and so itâd be easier to accept.â Iâm literally just talking, whatever. Theyâre like, âOkay.â Well, Tuesdayâs when payroll got pulled.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
We didnât have enough for payroll.
Turner Novak:
You wouldâve missed payroll.
Jamie Siminoff:
Wouldâve missed payroll.
Turner Novak:
Which is illegal, right? If you miss payroll, thatâs...
Jamie Siminoff:
Well, yeah. Itâs not...
Turner Novak:
As long as the employees... Because thereâs sometimes you can, the employees can agree and stuff like that.
Jamie Siminoff:
Itâs not good, Iâd say. Itâs not good. Missing payroll is bad. We actually never missed a payroll. I had to bridge the business a few times. And we were starting to get big enough where I couldnât... When your payrollâs, if itâs $25,000, not that I had a lot of money, but I had enough to scrape $25,000 from my brother or whatever. You scrape it together quickly. When itâs now $100,000, youâre like, âI canât just scrape that together by asking people.â And so, luckily, True wired in, payroll happened, domain name kept going, launched Ring in October of 2014.
So basically less than a year after being on Shark Tank, we completely rebuilt the whole thing. And then once Ring, it just hit. You could feel it. Definitely, maybe not as successful... When youâre in these things, itâs hard to see how successful they are. But looking back now, the brand, everything, really hit from day one. You can kind of see how it just kept going. Massive struggle all the way through, but it really, thatâs when the momentum really started.
Turner Novak:
How many times would you say you were at that kind of verge of bankruptcy, if you wanna call it that?
Jamie Siminoff:
I think there were like four main ones. But I would say we were kind of always on the verge of bankruptcy, because we were a hardware business.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Because you were just taking all the money and just buying inventory, and if you didnât sell it, you died.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thatâs exactly right. Thatâs when it would... If the sales had slowed down... Because if we had been growing slower, you wouldâve been less top-heavy, because you would have the profit coming in. Youâd have more cash flow. But because youâre growing so fast, your cash flow is so upside down that if it went from growing at 300% to 200%, the difference of that from a cash flow, you wouldâve been dead. So we were basically always fully at the edge of this thing. It was definitely the shuttle with the tiles falling off as weâre coming through the atmosphere, and we barely made it through without blowing up.
Turner Novak:
And I know you were talking with the board earlier. Your discussions with the board. I know there was a couple times where, especially on the marketing side, I think one... you wanna spend a million bucks on TV ads, which, like...
Jamie Siminoff:
Yep.
Turner Novak:
Thatâs a pretty big commitment. How did that conversation go, and why were you so gung ho on buying a bunch of TV ads?
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah, one of my mental models was with Ring, and I think itâs a good one for a... If youâre VC-backed, if youâre taking venture capital money, and youâre doing what Ring was doing, I think going for it is actually the right thing for everybody. It aligns everybody. I think a lot of times you start to try to de-risk stuff at that point, and thatâs bad for everyone.
Because a venture capitalist needs a big outcome. They donât need you to build a $5 million a year doorbell business thatâs barely making it. And so we had about a million dollars left at the time. We were growing, but we werenât shooting up. You asked earlier, did you feel like someone else was gonna copy you and take it? I could feel the pressure of competition coming in.
Turner Novak:
Really? What was the competition at the time?
Jamie Siminoff:
At the point that I wanted to do commercials, that was in 2015. In January 2015 at CES, there was at least 30 people that launched a competitive product to Ring.
Turner Novak:
So they were at zero.
Jamie Siminoff:
They were at zero. And we had launched... Remember, we had kind of DoorBot, we had all this stuff, but we had only launched Ring October of 2014.
Turner Novak:
So youâre like a year in.
Jamie Siminoff:
So we had luckily, from the press or whatever, established ourselves as this, but we were not established. We werenât doing crazy sales.
Turner Novak:
Were you doing a million a month yet in revenue?
Jamie Siminoff:
No. We were probably going into January $500,000 or $600,000 a month or something. So we were maybe a... But in consumer electronics, doing less than... doing $100 million a year in consumer electronics would be small. So the market, Iâd say, was still very open in â15.
Turner Novak:
So if I wouldâve had a company and Iâm like, âFuck it, Iâm gonna spend $10 million on TV ads,â I could have probably...
Jamie Siminoff:
You wouldâve crushed us.
Turner Novak:
Crushed you.
Jamie Siminoff:
Wouldâve crushed us.
Turner Novak:
So your thinking was, I just need to get out there and...
Jamie Siminoff:
Someoneâs gonna take it. And I would say, our office was in Santa Monica, and I said, âIn Santa Monica, if we go out of business, I want the hole to be so deep that it can never be filled.â I donât wanna just, like a lot of these VC-backed companies over 20 years go out of business and they just kind of squeak out of business. I wanted to be a massive explosion if we were gonna go out of business. I wanted to blow a hole in the ground.
And so we have basically a million dollars left. Weâre selling, so weâre not just ripping through cash, weâre selling some product. And so Iâm like, if itâs a million dollars, I wanna jump to the next level. And a friend, this company GoodRx, had just launched. It was at soccer with my son. The son of one of the founders of GoodRx is there. Weâre talking. Again, weâre both super small companies. And heâs telling me, âOh, yeah, we just went on doing TV, and this is the results weâre having.â And itâs unbelievable.
So I tell my wife, at the end of the soccer game, âIâm going to the office. Weâre gonna do TV.â And sheâs just like, âI donât even know what youâre talking about.â Iâm like, âIâll see you later.â And that was a Saturday. I came home, like, I didnât come home. Iâm figuring out how to do TV. And so I go to the board, and Iâm like, âI wanna basically spend, weâre gonna blow a million dollars on TV.â
Turner Novak:
So why are TV ads so good? Because a lot of tech people would say theyâre unmeasurable, you donât know where the moneyâs going. So why was it such a good idea?
Jamie Siminoff:
Well, I could see what GoodRx was doing. And I did feel also that, to this competition thing and seeing what... One of the companies that I tried to mimic was Dyson. If you look at how James Dyson did his ads and the authenticity, and you go back to when he started Dyson. Heâs no longer on the ads, so people donât see it. But for a long time, it was like James Dyson was on our TV being like, âI spent 300 years trying to build this thing.â
And so Iâm like, âWe need to be the James Dyson, the Dyson of home security, in our own voice.â And so I felt like TV was the way to do it. Iâm seeing this company having success with it, and Iâm like, âWe should just drop the hammer, and letâs get this.â And we had a board meeting, and there was definitely a bunch... The board overall, Iâd say, was like, âIf you think thatâs good, letâs do it.â There was one person who was like, âThatâs... Youâre insane. At your size, you canât do TV.â This goes to your Silicon Valley question. Which I always think Silicon Valleyâs funny. Itâs a place that youâre supposed to be the most creative, yet they have so many rules. Itâs like, âOh, you canât do TV until youâre 100 mil-â He said, âTill youâre doing $100 million in sales, you canât do TV.â And I was like, âI can do whatever I want.â
And so we did TV, and it is actually very hard, and it is hard to measure, and itâs also... It usually is like a rubber band where you pull and pull and pull and nothing happens, and youâre like, âOh my God, this isnât working,â and then all of a sudden the back shoots forward. So it did for the first couple weeks. Sales were basically the same, and youâre like, âUh-oh, this isnât good.â We had this Google tracker, this Google sheet, that we were tracking the sales and putting in how much we spent every day, and itâs like, oh, this is... And then all of a sudden the sales start climbing.
Turner Novak:
And you think it was the TV ads?
Jamie Siminoff:
At that point, it was all we were doing. We were doing a little other, but you could definitely see it materially doing it. You could see the brand awareness coming up. It all started to come up. And then, of course, instead of me being like, âOkay, letâs just stay at that spend,â Iâm like, âOkay, double the TV spend. Triple the TV spend.â
And then we went from, like, $500,000 a month or whatever in January to a million a month. We started raising our B round in, call it, end of spring, early summer of â15. And Iâll never forget this. Richard Branson was one of the big investors in that. When I talked to Richard in June, we were doing about a million a month. And growing. And our projection was to be, like, basically two million a month by the end of the year.
And we ended up, by the time we closed the round in the end of July, early August, we had already doubled. We went from a million to two million a month by that time. So during the round closing, we doubled. Our revenue was growing so fast at that point that we couldnât even track it ourselves. Our projections were off. So it was wild. And obviously that round was like, people were like, âOkay, Iâm glad I invested,â because we basically priced it off of numbers that were just... Itâs very rare you close a round and the companyâs like, âSurprise. Weâre doing twice as big as we thought we were.â And theyâre like, âNo way.â
Turner Novak:
Yeah. A lot of times what you see is they time the fundraise at the optimal...
Jamie Siminoff:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
...time to price it.
Jamie Siminoff:
And we just were like... It was out of control. The bad part was, the costs were out of control a little bit too, because we were just... When youâre growing that fast, customer service, youâre just hiring people. Youâre just trying to get ahead of these systems, because systems are breaking daily. A $10 million run rate company and a $20 million run rate company are almost two different companies. And then we went from there to three million a month, four million a month. So it just kept compounding.
Turner Novak:
Whatâs the hardest part to get right? Or what was the biggest thing that would break at that point?
Jamie Siminoff:
I think the hardest part is that people think that fixing something means itâs fixed. The person running customer service of a $10 million business is very different than the person who runs it of a 30 and of 100. All of that happened in 12 months. And so you finally get customer service, you get the person in there and itâs good, and the systems, and you have the location in Scottsdale now because thatâs more scalable. And you turn around to fix the next thing, and you already suddenly realize customer service is broken again.
Because itâs now doubled again, and thereâs no space, and the fire department came and told us that we couldnât have all these people here. So this is before remote work was easy. And so the problem was, you didnât even get to fix things, because youâd fix something, and then it would break again, because you just were scaling so fast. Youâre jumping through too many gates too quickly. Company size-wise, the people that are able to do these things, very few of them can scale from zero to... And there are, thereâs Dave Savage, who runs our procurement, the person who was doing the boxes, still with us today.
There are definitely people that are able to scale all the way through. But Iâd say a lot of them did not have that same ability. It sort of escaped their capability at that time, or whatever it was. But maybe it was us too. Itâs not an indictment on them. But for whatever the reason, they werenât able to keep handle of that area. Finance, a person whoâs used to doing finance for a $20 million a year business, probably not the same person for a $100 million a year business thatâs growing fast. Again, less than 12 months.
Turner Novak:
And I know you did some really good athlete, celebrity endorsements, partnerships. That can also be a disaster sometimes. So I think one you did that worked out really well was with Shaq. So how did that come about? And then how did you work with him in a way that was very effective for the business?
Jamie Siminoff:
So Shaq, again, go back to authenticity, right? Shaq was... Heâs a celebrity, so thatâs good. But why did we want Shaq? Because Shaq was a police officer.
Turner Novak:
Oh, was he? I didnât know that.
Jamie Siminoff:
Exactly. So Shaq was a cop. He became a reserve officer in Los Angeles while he was at the Lakers.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
So Shaq was very connected to security, neighborhood security, caring about that, caring about what we cared about. So it was authentic to him to be part of this. So that was, for us, a great thing. How we got him was, I started thinking about, at the end of â15, weâre spending all this money on TV. Iâm like, âWe should do a Super Bowl commercial.â Now...
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thatâs crazy, because thereâs no way we couldâve afforded it. But it just made me start doing the exercise of it, and I asked an agent in LA, âHow do you hire celebrities to do commercials?â I literally didnât... I kind of knew you had to pay them. But I didnât know who you talk to. And they said, âThatâs what I do. Iâm an agent. Thatâs what I do.â And so I was like, âGreat.â Iâm talking to him about what weâre doing, and Ring was starting to get out there. And Shaqâs people... They do these calls with agents, and they were talking about stuff. And Shaq said, âYou know, I would like to get in touch with the Ring company. I just bought their stuff for my house. Theyâre better security.â
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Jamie Siminoff:
And the guyâs like, âThis is insane. I just talked to them. They wanna do stuff.â And so they put us... The guy calls me. The agent is like, âShaq would like to meet you.â And Iâm like, âOh, okay.â
Turner Novak:
Like, âHappy to meet Shaq.â
Jamie Siminoff:
Iâm like a kid from New Jersey. Iâm like, âSure, Iâm happy to meet Shaq.â And so we end up meeting at CES. He comes to our booth at CES, which was crazy.
Turner Novak:
And was this a planned, scheduled meeting, or he just walked up?
Jamie Siminoff:
Well, they scheduled it. They said, âHeâs gonna come to your booth at,â whatever, noon on Thursday. I didnât tell anyone, because thereâs no way Shaqâs showing up, so I donât wanna... If I tell the whole team that Shaqâs showing up to our booth...
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
...and he doesnât show up, Iâm gonna look like an idiot, so I donât tell anyone. At the time, my head of comms, this girl Yassi, is still with Amazon, and she was the biggest Lakers fan in the world. And so all of a sudden, Shaqâs walking down. Sheâs like, âOh my God, Shaq.â And Iâm like, âYeah, and heâs coming here for a meeting.â âNo way.â Iâm like, âYeah.â So that was fun. Iâll never forget her face. So Shaq came, we started talking. I told him about, we care about neighborhoods and neighborhood security, and this is what weâre doing.
And Shaqâs like, âI wanna work with you.â And so Iâm like, âOh, okay. I wanna work with you, Mr. OâNeal.â And I said to him, âWell, I donât know how this... Do I... What do we pay, or...â And he just puts his fingers in his ears. And this guy is like... I mean, Shaqâs very large. Weâre in this little tiny room that can barely fit Shaq and me, because itâs in our booth, and heâs just going, âLa, la, la, I do not talk about money.â And the person with him is like, âYeah, well, youâll talk to me. Shaq likes to only do things that he cares about.â
And so thatâs, again, why is Shaq such a great brand, and what heâs done, is because he stayed authentic. And so then we ended up working together. He said heâll take his fee in equity, which ended up being great for him, which is great, because he was a huge benefit. And Shaq became a great spokesperson with us. Really helped us, again, part of building that authentic brand. So it did work.
Turner Novak:
You FaceTimed him during board meetings, I think.
Jamie Siminoff:
Oh, weâd have... Yeah, Shaqâs a big FaceTimer, so youâd FaceTime him or heâd FaceTime you. I still talk to him a little bit, not as much, just because, when we were working together, obviously you talk to someone a lot more. And it would be funny, because Iâd be somewhere and, we were growing the business, I wasnât that big of a thing, and Iâd be somewhere and Shaq would be FaceTiming me. Of course, Iâd be like, âOh, look who it is.â Itâs Shaq. Iâd be like, âHoly shit.â Itâs Shaq.
Turner Novak:
Shaqâs just FaceTiming this guy.
Jamie Siminoff:
Shaqâs just FaceTiming me. Heâd be telling me stuff.
Turner Novak:
Did you end up doing a commercial with him?
Jamie Siminoff:
Oh, many.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Jamie Siminoff:
Many. And even my favorite one, I did one, my son was probably eight or nine or something, and we did Shaq and Go Seek. So we had this thing where Oliver, like, Ring was so easy a kid could use it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
And so we had Oliver, my son, basically, on the phone with a camera being like, âShaq, I see you.â
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
And he was like jumping up and jumping down, and it was a really fun... That was one of my favorites, so that was cool.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, and so you sold the company to Amazon. What was that like, selling? Because you were continuing to just scale, and you obviously, again, you needed money, you realized you need $300 million bucks. How did that conversation come about and happen?
Jamie Siminoff:
It was definitely a crazy time for the business. We had been working... Iâd say the one thing, and this is like everything in life, is be long term. We were working with Amazon. Weâd been talking to them for years. They had Alexa. You were probably a big...
Turner Novak:
A seller on the platform, Iâm assuming.
Jamie Siminoff:
Seller, but also we were working with Alexa. And for the right, good intentions. We werenât just talking to them to sell the company or to have a relationship. We werenât trying to have a relationship. We had a real relationship, we were actually working with them and doing stuff. And I always think, get out there and create these real relationships. Donât just be transactional. This is the missionary versus mercenary.
And so at some point, yeah, Amazon then was like, âThis is a part of the home and what weâre doing, and we see that Jamie, with the mission to make neighborhoods safer.â And so they ended up finally saying, âYeah, letâs do this,â and they came to me, and at that point I was definitely ready, Iâd say I was ready to sell. Just because it was so... I really wanted to... And I was ready to sell, meaning I still wanted to be at the business. I wasnât ready to sell to get rid of it, but I needed a partner to come in.
Thatâs what I really needed, someone to come in and help me, because I actually did wanna stay, I just couldnât take the emotional ride anymore. It was just killing me. So it was the point where... And I knew Amazon, if you look at other founders that had sold companies to Amazon that had stayed, like Audible, and like Zappos and Tony Hsieh. And so I was like, theyâll let me sort of do what I wanna do.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I feel like you were kind of... From what I know, you were kind of nervous the whole way, like, âThis could just blow up at any time.â Like, âI donât wanna lose peopleâs money.â
Jamie Siminoff:
That was... Yeah, that was definitely a weight. That does weigh on you at some point. And the more money you get. And the risk was getting worse, not better, because the bigger we were getting, the smaller number of people that could bail us out. When we were doing... that year when we did the B round with Richard Branson, if things had changed then, if the growth had slowed, you wouldâve been off by, call it, even $10 million, which is not nothing, but you can get Richard Branson to give you another 10 million if the business is good. I couldâve called Richard and said, âListen, weâre off by this, but hereâs whatâs going on. Can you help us?â Mightâve cost us a little bit of equity, but you couldâve raised that money. True Ventures probably. You couldâve raised that money.
When youâre doing $480 million and youâre going to a billion, if youâre off by a couple hundred million, Richardâs not like, âI can wire you a couple hundred million.â True Ventures is like, âI canât.â So, in a weird way, the bigger it got, the riskier it got, because there was just less people that could bail us out. A small mistake became a much bigger blemish.
Turner Novak:
Do you have any founders or CEOs, or maybe people from history, that youâve gotten a lot of inspiration from, or that youâve learned a lot from?
Jamie Siminoff:
The company grew so fast and became a different business, there were people at different stages that I really... When I was first about to ship a product, this guy Jim Hyman helped me, because he does safes in Los Angeles. Makes safes. Literally...
Turner Novak:
Like locking...
Jamie Siminoff:
Like locking safes, a safe to put your jewelry in or whatever.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Jamie Siminoff:
And under the Honeywell brand. And so he helped me with, how do you insure a product? How do you get it here? How do you pay tariffs? I donât know how to do any of that. I didnât really know how to do anything. But then all of a sudden our business was doing more than Jimâs was, and so then it was like... I mean, still a great friend, but from a mentor side, I kind of jumped it.
Thereâs Sky Dayton, whoâs the founder of EarthLink.
Turner Novak:
Internet connectivity?
Jamie Siminoff:
Internet connectivity.
Turner Novak:
Was that dial-up back in the day?
Jamie Siminoff:
Dial-up back in the day. Heâs one of the founders of dial-up, and heâs done a ton of...
Turner Novak:
Is it still around?
Jamie Siminoff:
No, he sold it. He founded it when he was like 16 or something. But heâs a great investor and local LA tech person, and still a mentor today. Heâs one of those people who grew with me the whole way and really helps me.
Turner Novak:
I think we all had that as a kid.
Jamie Siminoff:
We all had dial-up.
Turner Novak:
Trying to remember. Yeah, AOL and EarthLink were the two big ones.
Jamie Siminoff:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So my mom... We would move every year, and my mom would sign up for a new, free for six months internet.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thatâs hysterical.
Turner Novak:
And that was the trick for getting internet, yeah. We definitely had EarthLink at one point.
Jamie Siminoff:
Next era. Yeah, it was... I see different people at different times, and then even, you know, James Dyson doesnât know it, but he was my mentor that I used. And I think you can also do that. In some ways itâs funny, because people think they have to meet their mentor. Itâs like, you can also look at a company. The trick is, you donât copy. Copying usually doesnât work well. But I looked at, what did Dyson do to build this brand that people love for what it is? And then Iâm like, âI wanna build a brand like that for my area.â What translates, and how do I translate it to my voice, to what we do, to whatâs authentic to us? But I definitely saw a lot of patterns in what they did. History doesnât repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
And so...
Turner Novak:
Iâve also heard that, donât meet your heroes. So maybe just get inspiration from them, learn from them, but you meet them and you kind of hate them after or something like that.
Jamie Siminoff:
I think that is definitely a... I still would like to meet James Dyson. I think heâs probably awesome, but...
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Jamie Siminoff:
But yeah, never have, so heâs like a superhero right now.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. Well, cool. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on the show.
Jamie Siminoff:
Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great.
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