How Did Ring Fix Thousands of Broken Doorbells on Christmas Eve?

Jamie Siminoff says Ring found out on Christmas Eve that thousands of doorbells were broken. A new engineer had put junk code on a camera chip that could not be updated over the air. He remembers shipping a thousand, maybe 10,000, cameras that did not work. They were taping boxes in a garage they rented in Santa Monica, customers were saying they would cancel if a unit missed Christmas, and the batch went out untested.

They could not afford replacements. He says they barely had cash to stay afloat, let alone to swap something like 5,000 units. They had raised about a million dollars. Turner Novak puts the earlier round at about 100,000, and Jamie says they had not raised since. Driving home from dinner, he thought they would have to shut down.

He called Mark Dillon, the engineer from the Shark Tank shoot, who was in New York. Ring had switched from a paid video encoder to a cheaper open-source one, and that encoder was choking on the junk the camera sent. Jamie asked if the paid one might recover the picture. Mark said he had no idea, that it would take about eight hours, and started that night. He woke Jamie at about 6 a.m. on Christmas Eve: it worked, and the picture was the best they had. Jamie still calls Christmas 2013 the favorite at the Siminoff house. The cameras could sell, and they could raise money. If the call had failed, he says that would have been a kill shot.