Full Transcript for From Nearly Bankrupt to $5B+ Revenue, with Ring Founder Jamie Siminoff

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Jamie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for doing this. So you sold your company to Amazon. You left and then you came back. Like that doesn't happen that often. So what happened? I mean, a few things happened. I sold, I did stay for five years. So it wasn't like, so I didn't just like, it's long. So I didn't just like peace out, you know, sell it and go.

I'm in almost some ways jealous of the founders that can do that. Like, it's just not in me. Like I, I mean, I love what I built. You're repping it. I do. But I love it almost in a human way, not in just a business way. I really do think what we built there, and I do love it. So I did it after five years. I built it multi... We really crushed it.

It got very profitable. So I felt like I left it. I felt like... You kind of like it just won the Super Bowl. And I'm like, I'm going to retire now. Like I like I did it. This is a good time to go out, go out on top, give it like hand it over. It sort of felt like it had more linear growth going from there. You know, like like so when I when I left in 2023, like that's how I saw it was like, OK, it'll still grow, but like more in a linear fashion.

So like give it to the professionals that take over. I'll go do something else. Then AI hits. And I'm just basically like, holy shit. Like there's so much more to do with this sort of the foundation of what we built. And there's so many exciting things we can do. And I just like, my brain was just like firing off. And on the outside, I just, I would say I wasn't seeing the innovation overall in the industry that I had basically built, including Ring.

And, you know, it was fortunate that Amazon was, you know, like it's, it's it's incredible i'd say on how it reflects on them to allow me to come back um you know you can make your own decision on me coming back of like how that reflects on me but like i did want to come back and sort of have my second at bat with it to see what we could do and it is like i'd say ai as as the overall was what made me want to bring back you just because of the speed of development the features we could do like like you know and our mission's always been around making neighborhoods safer so like what we could do just around that in general Were you, like, texting the team at, like, 1 a.m.?

Like, hey, you guys got to try this thing. Check this out. So I actually tried to... And I think it was maybe healthy. I mean, these are like relationships. So it's like, you know, when you leave, you... And I tried to, like, leave the team alone when I left. Like, I didn't try... Because I think... it's easy to sort of be like this agitator on the sideline.

And so I did try to like... I basically went back to the heads of Amazon and said, this is what I want to do. I tried not to like sort of infiltrate the ring team and sort of do that. So I did try to do that. And then, which was... I'll say kind of funny because when I came back, like no one actually knew like the day I announced it, when I was like, I literally came in the office and I'm like, I'm back.

It was, it was almost like a TV show. Like, you know, it was like a, like walking down the shark tank thing or something again. Like it was kind of like interesting. Cause like, no, like literally no one knew I was coming. It was like, that was like, the announcement was like when I was there. And so I was like, I'm back. And it's been, I mean, it has been, you know, like the, if you look at the KPIs of what we've done since then, it's been pretty cool.

I mean, we've just like, you know, multi X everything, like on like what we've gotten, like new products, invention, features, just impact, like just the business overall. I just feel like we've just done like a pretty proud overall of what we've done. I mean, there's always more to do, but. Yeah. So what was it like kind of coming back for the second time? Because prior guests to the show, his name's Owen.

He's founder of Intercom. He left in 2019, came back in 20, the end of 2022. Yeah. He kind of said he had these fresh eyes on the business. He basically was a founder again, but then also kind of was sort of rehired as the professional CEO. And then they actually just sold the company to Salesforce a couple months ago. So it seems like overall, pretty good outcome for them.

So how did things change kind of coming back the second time? How did you kind of see the business? I do think, I mean, there is something about... When you're in these businesses as a founder, I think you do get these blinders that form around you, just from you're working in it, you're in the trenches.

When I left Ring was when I realized the impact we were truly having. Obviously, I saw it. But when I truly left, when I was like, I no longer had any connection to it, I was out. That's when I really had the most like, wow, this thing is crazy. Like what we've done here is crazy. Because I think when you're in it, you're fighting through it.

You're trying to invent new stuff. You know what the problems are. So you're just like sort of in this daily grind. And so by, yeah, by leaving, I had such a fresh set of eyes. I just felt like a, I felt like a Marvel superhero coming in. Because I felt like my decision-making was 10X better. My speed was 10, like everything was like 10X because I had been able to cut all of the, like, the things that had built up over time, all these like sort of, you know, like the blinders that had sort of come in, I kind of blew them off.

And so I did feel this like superpower of coming back and like what that was. So it was, it was, has been exciting. So when you take like fresh eyes with all of the experience that you've had from the business and you put those together, I think just like Owen was saying from, from Intercom is like, you know, it's like, yeah, like I think it's like, I mean, amazing.

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I would say I'd say around people just like, you know, bringing, there was people that I think we probably were not

allowing to fulfill like their full potential. And, and so like, I would say like giving them more room to sort of fulfill their potential with something that was like, you know, fun and exciting to do even around product development and process. there's processes and things that sort of like, everything, what's interesting is everything usually starts with good intentions.

Like everything, like a recurring meeting. Typically a recurring meeting that's going on that people, like if you ask anyone who works at a big company, they'll tell you like they're- They got a couple of those. They got a couple of those and they suck and like they're useless. Like they're useless meetings. But if you go back- The beginning, like that meeting was usually set up for like a real reason that needed to solve a problem at the time.

And just no one has like had the awareness or the whatever fortitude to like cut it at this point. And so I think there was like a lot of those things where I now looked at and I'd just be like, delete. I mean, just deleted everyone's recurring meetings. Just basically nuked stuff that I'm like, if it doesn't have value, we're going to just kill it.

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 originally of a QA thing. But now with AI, there's other, like, you know, we had, let's call it like there's just like arbitrary, like to get a product out, you had this four week testing period of always like, you know, just was like, that's how long you test for.

And we just kept doing it. Now, when that was started is it took us like there was things that took a certain amount of time to test because that was the cycle. If you go now with AI, there's probably things we can test in hours, not even days or weeks. But we kept doing, we kept the same amount of time in place just because that was the process.

The process is to have this many weeks for this many things for this, so look at this. And so I would just, with the fresh set of eyes, I'm like, why? Why, why, why? And then it was like, oh, actually, you're right. Like, we don't need that time. Well, you take whatever weeks, four weeks out of a, like, now you start to, like, the cycle times get faster.

Like, cycle times get faster. Innovation goes up. New products come out faster, which means you're like, and again, so like, and this is, if you look at like what Jensen's done at NVIDIA, The reason NVIDIA is really so far ahead is because their cycle times are shorter. They just took out... They just spin chips faster than everyone else.

Chips basically make chips. And so now they're just way ahead. So what's a way to do that without leaving in... you know, taking a couple years off and coming back. Like, do you just, is it like every, do you look at like your calendar? Do you look at like all your work process documents of like outlining how things are done? Yeah, is there a way to do without actually? Yes, I think there's two mechanisms that I think you need to do.

So two mechanisms are zero-based budgeting. So every year, I think, and again, I think because the world is changing faster with AI, I think AI is like enabling us to do things faster. zero-based budgeting at least every year is important to say like okay what what is like what are we here to deliver Like, what customer service are we here to do? What products are we here to deliver? What do we have to support? What do we want to build? And then just look at, like, if you were doing that again from scratch, what would that take to do? And then you overlay that to your business.

And you look at, like, by the way, you might have a deficiency in some places. You might have too much in other places. So I think it's like zero-based budgeting is one. And then just first principles, which is really like... First of all, it's just asking why. Just continue to ask why. Empower your team to ask why so that it has more leverage to it.

But really just like, yeah, the two are obviously connected, but making sure you are with the least amount of movement accomplishing the most. And then I would say overarching on that is have people feel empowered. So how do you do that? Because there might be a company where... you know, people have gotten fired for bringing up the wrong idea or they like are demoted for it.

So how do you, how do you build a culture? And that is like human nature is that I'd say, like, I mean, we see it at almost every big company, even, I mean, again, even ring that I think was a good company. I mean, it's like, it's just like, as these things get bigger, I think the human nature takes over of that. I

think it's hard. You just have like fight it because I do think, the best people still somehow it's like a Darwin thing. They just become more around that. And, you know, also good ideas are typically dumb when they are formed. Like the best ideas, the best, most innovative things usually sound pretty stupid when you're sort of creating them.

And so that's the problem is like, how do you get people to still innovate? How do you get people to say like, we can do this with, you know, instead of doing a four week process, we can do it in an hour. And someone's like, that's crazy. And it's like, because it sounds crazy when someone says those, like those things and usually I'll get promoted for that.

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So like, you're absolutely right. It's like, how do you create the incentives to breed those outcomes? I mean, one thing we've done is we've changed internally. Our engineering is all, they're all called builders now. So that's the official title. Builder. Okay. You're a builder. And what we realized is with AI, it used to be, and this was just real, if you were a firmware engineer, that's because you mastered the knowledge around firmware.

That was a specialty. And 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 backend and whatever else. um today the firmware engineer can also be a you know building a feature can be doing you know mobile can like integrating it in and so we don't want that person to feel like they're like pigeonholed into that you want them to be a builder that they can do anything now obviously there's there are still specialties a little bit and we want people to sort of know where their area is but you also want them to feel empowered.

So the incentives breed outcomes. It's like if you're a builder and not a backend engineer, you feel more empowered to like go across things. You might come up with a feature idea, even though you're just the firmware engineer. That's exactly. And that's the problem is like brand does matter. It matters in titles. It matters internally. It matters externally.

Like words do matter. And so when you say you're a backend engineer, if you go and say, I have this idea for doing this thing in the app, People are going to be like, you're a backend engineer. You don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, you don't know what you're talking about. You're a product this. All these titles. And I do think with AI, AI is democratizing intelligence in a way that is superpowering all of us.

And so for my job is to get the most out of our super, like our team. And so like, we want everyone to be superheroes while still having some focus on knowing, I'll say the area that they need to focus on. Cause if everyone's just running around building, call it everything, like probably nothing will get done. So there's like a, there's always a, there's always a balance to anarchy, but yeah, like I want the backend person to say like, I can do this and then mock it up.

And maybe they even actually build the thing all the way through. We've seen people now build features like literally all the way through. We've seen people fix, like they'll see a bug and instead of like the backend engineer putting it in as a ticket that then goes to this whole system or whatever, they're like, I found it, I did it. And I've like fixed the end to end bug.

So what's kind of the state of Ring today? Like I know when you sold it to Amazon, it was a billion dollar kind of price tag, it was public. What's your- 1.15. 1.15, yeah, no big deal. No, it's fine. I'll give you the extra 150. I mean, the 150, but back then it mattered, you know? It's not, it's like a- It kind of mattered. Yeah. Now you can just go out and raise 150 million bucks.

I mean, it's like, I mean, it's funny. I mean, it's only funny because of people that are in the world of raising money now. Yeah. It's like I said, like, you know, we've sold for a billion when a billion was like actually like a big deal. Yeah. You know, it is crazy that, I mean, like there are just like on paper startups that are raising, I mean, 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. What do you think is the change? Is it just purely hysteria and we're in a bubble? Or are people actually able to build bigger companies faster and more efficiently? The answer is probably in the middle. Because if you look at the other things that have happened like this...

out of the internet did come companies that we had never seen before. Like, I mean, Amazon, is a sort of child of the internet age of this bubble of the internet. And it is a company that's worth multi trillions of dollars. So it did like actually achieve it's like, what was a, you know, if you look back like the crazy valuations that people said it had, like it did actually like not only achieve it, but it like was a good investment.

So I think it's in the middle. I do think like physically you can't 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 do you parse this, when companies spend money quickly, I'd say historically that has never been something people have done well. Spending money quickly.

Quickly. So the places where you see Amazon, if you look at Jeff, yes, he had a crazy valuation and all that stuff, but they actually were very smart about how they spent their money even back then. They were not just like... blowing it in every direction. If you actually look, they were spending their money actually pretty frugally. And so I think the companies that will come through this are the ones that they could raise money, they could have big valuations, it doesn't matter.

But it's making sure that they don't too quickly build these infrastructures that they sort of can't get a handle on because... Everything just keeps

getting bigger and bigger and multiplying. And so 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 it is like the...

Having the discipline, I think, is really important. I do think there'll be some... I mean, there's going to 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 it's going to be incredible for humanity. I'm actually...

I'm very... positive on it. And I think it is the time to embrace it, especially young people who I talk to and are so scared about what their future is going to be. And I'm like, man, your future is going to be bright, but you also do need to embrace it. Because if you don't, I think it is going to be tough if you are not an AI native thinker in five years if you're in the job market.

That person, I think, is going to be tough. And I worry that the...

talk about this sort of anti-ai talk you know is going to push people away from it which is actually going to hurt them in what they in the value that they can take from this because it is a transition that's happening and transitions are like again historically if you look at any transition you know like you were sitting there with a hammer and you know doing steel and like you know like you had manufacturing coming out and and you know like yeah like you you wanted to be part of henry ford's kind of you know like you know the new model and so i i think like you didn't want to be a blacksmith and so i think like you gotta like you do want to be part of these transitions

and you want to be on the other side of it so I heard it, I think maybe you said it at the Venture Summit, like a number, like a revenue number. Is this like all private, like you're not public about how big things are? Yeah, I mean, Ring is, so when I sold Ring, it was doing just under five. So in 2017, when I sold it, it was doing basically, we close out the year, just under 500 million.

It was like 480 million in sales. It was still losing a ton of money, But on a per customer, like the economics of a customer were fantastic. It just was subscale. So the company needed to be like a couple billion. We knew like in the hardware space where we were, like we needed to be a couple billion to be profitable. But we also knew like the economics on a per customer basis were very good.

It's just the overall business was still growing so fast and adding so much. And so we went, our revenue went $330, $170, $480.

And this was with a hardware business where you got to order parts. You got to order parts. It was crazy. So like when I sold to Amazon, I mean, this thing was like barely sticking together. Because to go from, you know, in 2016, we did 170. 2017, we did 480. To go from 170 to 480 in hardware, like I had to order while we're doing basically 10 million a month-ish, like call it like in the summer of 16.

I have to order, in essence, $480 million worth of product.

when we're doing like $100 million a year in revenue. So it's, no, you're projecting growth, but if the growth didn't happen, I'd be sitting on hundreds, like literally, it's crazy. Like if 2017, if we did 250 million, like if we had like, you know, like even doubled, if we did 340, we probably would have gone out of business because like we would have had an extra $100 million of inventory just sitting.

And so like we probably, and so, and you're buying that stuff i mean it's not like you can you can't go back to the store and return it so so it was a crazy growth rate going into amazon part of what i mean part of why we sold it was i we needed to be part of a bigger balance sheet and spread it out over like a bigger like you know like the risk allocation of it um because we just had to raise so much money and at that time you know, the capital markets today would have been, I would say, much easier because people are, you know, started like writing bigger checks into private companies later.

At that time, you didn't see that. You didn't see this like billion dollar sort of series D, E rounds kind of coming in. You probably needed Masa, basically. We needed SoftBank, yeah. And SoftBank was just like, they were just starting to kind of go, I would say, 2016, 17. Like they were doing some checks, but it was, you know, again, very small numbers.

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Like if you looked at like I mean, I don't know. My guess is that companies that had over a billion dollars of value that were private and raising big checks was like you'd count them on your hands. Yeah. It wasn't like... Now it's like... Every day. Every day. And I mean, also remember, there's now bankers that specialize in that. So there's like an industry around that.

Yes, that did happen every once in a while, but I didn't have the relationship with anyone to raise... three, four, I mean, in 17, if we were gonna continue to go, we needed to raise like 300-ish million probably to get ourselves to like velocity of profitability, IPO, like that kind of thing. And we just didn't have the, I just didn't have the relationship to do that and so i mean amazon ended up being like a great place and it's about what it took in terms of investing back in it to get it to profitability and now i mean it's it's uh i mean i've over well over 10x the business since it's been at amazon um profitability yes i mean it's multiple billions of dollars of

sales now and very you know and it's a a healthily profitable business. I mean, it's a good, it's a good business. It's a growing business. Still innovative, uh, has an impact. So it's kind of like, it really does. Like ring has checked all the boxes. So, yeah, you said 480 million year before you sold. Yeah. So it's fair to say release 4.8 billion.

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I'll go, I'll go with five for the title. They get the clickbait. Perfect. You got to get a little clickbait. I can appreciate that. There's actually some inside baseball of you want to do non-exact numbers in those because if you say 4.869 billion or whatever, it's like not a round number. People are like, ooh, that must be real. That's exactly right.

Versus if you say 5 billion, people are like, yeah. Never round anything off. Yeah. The psychology of getting people to click on content and watch it is... It's like never ending. You can never win it. I spent some time with Mr. Beast. Oh, nice. With Jimmy. And the sophistication in that is something. And again, it's an area like obviously I don't like.

It's not my area that I think about all day. But you sit with someone who thinks about that like all day. It's incredible. I mean, it's like this is why like specialize, do something that you're good at. Because every single thing, like there's people that like kind of sort of do it and never successful. And then there's people that are just like, like Mr.

Beast, you know, Jimmy, who's just... He is a ninja. I mean, the guy, he's like a surgeon on this. I mean, he just is so focused and so good at this and just understands every single thing that he does and how it works. And it's amazing. Yeah. And I never thought I would be like an influencer. I was trying to get a job in VC like 10 years ago.

And people started following me on the internet, kind of just like kept riding it. And I've sort of like fought it the whole way of like, I don't really, I don't really want it. to just make content be like a content creator be an influencer but to the point it's like well i guess i'm pretty good at this so why would i not do it in any business authenticity is what matters so the fact that you like i think that's what people miss with influencers is like if you look at most of the influencers there's always gonna be examples of like whatever but most of them are like when you look at like where they came from or what they did it is authentic Like, it was what they, like,

it wasn't that they wanted to get, like, the numbers or be out there. It's that they actually were authentic about what they were doing. That got picked up. That became the thing. And now they are, like, influencers. So the people that, like, I, like, you'll hear a kid be like, I want to be an influencer. It's like, no, like, you should want to be a VC.

And then it turns out that, like, wanting to be a VC, talking about it, doing this, like, then it was actually interesting for people. Like, yeah, so then you become an influencer, which then you're fighting every day, probably, but... It's fine. I mean, I've kind of embraced it at this point. It's probably like 50-50 in terms of 50% of the time is just, you know, quote unquote marketing.

And when you really think about it, that's what most other investors are doing anyways. It's just like they're, you know, they're doing a slot. Yeah. It's like the platform changed. And so I think people think that, again, they think influencer is like influencers definitely has like a derogatory tone to it at this point. But that's BS. It's where the platform is and it's where the people are.

And so I think any business, any whatever, should be where the eyeballs are and where the people are. And so I think that's like, you don't fight it. Now, I think probably, I'm sure there's older people in the industry that, yeah, they're like, oh, they're an influencer. Well, that's where the people are. I mean, by the way, as an investor, you're supposed to be investing in the new stuff, not the old stuff.

So if you're investing in concrete plants, don't be an influencer or whatever that... Yeah. But yeah, there's actually some people that would argue that that is the play is if you're doing dirty, like, you know, blue collar type industry stuff, there's less content for it and there's less competition, especially when you have the more sophisticated banker investor type that would be buying a concrete plant.

So if you like create the content to, you know, source those opportunities and lay the groundwork, there's actually an opportunity to do it. So I think maybe the takeaway is just there's so many things that unlocks. Like it's basically just marketing. Like people don't wake up and read the newspaper anymore. They wake up and like look at their Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn or

I do think it's funny because if you go to a coffee shop and someone will say, look, everyone's on their phone. It's like, yeah, but 20 years ago, everyone would have a newspaper up. And no one said, wow, everyone's on the newspaper. Look at these idiots. Most people on their phone, I mean, there are some people that are just going TikTok and their brains are just slowly being turned into algorithm mush.

I learned stuff on Twitter and these areas. It's incredible the knowledge that I've been able to gain from this. And then with AI, I don't know if you do this, I love it. I'll 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 I'm like, wait, I'm interested in this.

And so, yeah, like I sit on my phone in a coffee shop, but I'm actually like, you know, running a team of researchers from there and learning. An AI army doing your bidding. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Numeral. Numeral is the fastest, easiest way to stay compliant with US sales tax and global VAT. It's easy to set up and they automatically handle all registrations, ongoing filings, and their API provides sales tax rates wherever you need them with all the integrations you need.

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I guess today, inside Ring, you've grown about 10x since you sold to Amazon. What is kind of the vision of everything around AI? You kind of mentioned there's a bunch of opportunities. So have there been new products you guys have launched actually? The vision around AI, I think we should look at AI like I wasn't around when Electricity came out, but...

you know, it's like almost like, I feel like AI has become this, like, where do you use AI in your business? It'd be like, where do you use electricity in your business? Like it turns out you use electricity in a lot of places. No, we actually use candlelight. You're a candlelight VC, but for most VCs, they use electricity all over the place.

So I think it is like wherever you use AI, like that's the thing I think is to be AI native. which means it's every part of the business. It's from inception of product to product development to literally... I mean literally everything.

How we talk to our... How we interact with our customers. How we build features. What features we can build. So I try to... I think it's just really should be in everything we do, everywhere we're doing it. And it really, from the customer side especially, I don't want them to think of like, oh, this is AI, this is not AI. I think I just want them to be like, this is...

you know, our job is to make your house, your home and your neighborhood safer. So I just want people to be like, I feel more peace of mind in my home. Like, I don't, I don't, they shouldn't know why. I mean, I mean, not that it's, not that we're hiding it, but they shouldn't know why in terms of like, they shouldn't be like this feature that came out because of AI makes me feel safer.

Just be like, yeah, with Ring, like, I love it. Like, like we get smart video descriptions now. so what is that actually it might be interesting for somebody who i'm assuming most people know what ring is but like quick 10 seconds like what is ring for people who've never come across it before i mean ring is i mean it's a mission to make neighborhoods safer that is mainly been known as our doorbell cameras floodlight cameras like alarms we have like products around the home that you know sort of come together that you can you know watch from your phone and keep your home in your neighborhood safer like that's like that's That's really kind of ring in a nutshell.

But we have this thing, it's for our video description. So now instead of like, it used to be like, when we came out, you had to get motion alerts and you get like a motion alert and you're like, oh, I'm filming a podcast, but I have a motion alert at my house. Let me like look at it and see what's going on. Like, it's like not a great thing to do.

now we have smart video descriptions. So you get this thing, it's just like a person is mowing the lawn. You're like, okay, like I know what's happening there. Like, and you don't need to look at it or you get like, someone's walking around your yard and you're like, wait a second, no one should be in my yard. Give me one second. So like, you know, you have now more context with that.

It turns out that's the hardest thing about AI to consumers

at this point is not the, it's not the like, What it can do, it's delivering that at a price that is reasonable to people. Like you can have, if you just like have all the tokens and basically like if you want to just like rip GPUs, you can deliver incredible, like you can go crazy with what you can do right now with anything with AI. The problem is it's going to cost you like thousands to tens of thousands a month that feature and obviously people aren't going to say like oh i'll pay to see what my ring camera is doing i'm going to pay 10 000 a month like it's not going to happen um and so it is like how do we take that 10 000 a month of value that someone wants and how

do we deliver that for you know like single dollars a month um and that's like that's i say one of the hardest things we have internally like the the the thing that we have to work on is like how do you how do you streamline this stuff so that you're giving the value to people and getting them the technology with you know because it is like there is a constraint around price and and ai is expensive like these gpus and these these set you know it's it's a lot is there anything that you want to do but you just can't yeah because of the cost equation I mean, what I want to do is I want every customer, we call them neighbors or customers, but I want every ring neighbor to

feel like they have a security team that has worked at their house for like 30 years. So if you had a house and you had full-time security there, and not only like... having them, like, not just overnight, but if they've been there for, like, a long time, so they knew kind of everything about your home, how you live, what you like. I mean, some people probably would be, like, interested if there was a bear walking down the street, you know, that morning, and some people wouldn't.

So it's, like, what, like, truly knew, like, your preference. Because it's not just, like... security in that I'm keeping your house secure, but it's also like, how do you want to live in your house? What do you want to be notified by? Maybe some people want to know when their wife comes home in the afternoon, and maybe some people don't.

Same thing with our kids. And so I think it's like, I want to deliver that feeling of a full team at your house 24-7 that knows you. And we're getting there in pieces. I'd say to deliver that full thing right now probably is too expensive. We have a thing called Virtual Security Guard. That's a hundred bucks a month. So that's like, I'd say it's an expensive like subscription that is delivering, I'd say as close to that, but it also still uses humans.

So like someone walks on your property, there's an AI that says like, you know, person on the driveway, you're doing whatever. And then it clicks over to a human if it needs to. It's still a little bit kludgy. It's a little bit expensive. I say it does the security job. Where do I want to go? I want that at $20 a month so that everyone can have it.

To me, I want to democratize. I always like to democratize everything to everybody. That's part of Ring's thing. Overall, I'll be a high-volume, low-cost supplier of democratized security. I could see even like my wife's grandma, she'll always give us these updates when she's walking through the neighborhood, like, oh, the, the Joneses got a new dog or something.

So you could even get like, or like, you know, Mrs. Williamson did not walk past today and she walks past every day. Like might be worth checking in on her, seeing if she's okay. Yeah. So I like, and it is like, I, so I love, like, those are the examples I like, which is like, it's like the intelligence behind the example. It's not like a hard coded thing of like, tell me when this happens or tell me that happens.

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It's like taking multiple things together and being like, wait a second. It's like, it's not a holiday. It's not like, here's like all the things I'm going to like, as a human would think about, like, like I was thinking about like one of the examples I give the team is if people have gardeners that come on call it Tuesday. Um, if it's like tuesday and it's 4 p.m and they usually come at 11 a.m and it's not a holiday like instead of saying like every week like the gardeners are here the gardeners are here it's like more like hey it's four o'clock and just fyi they didn't show up and it's not a holiday and i and again like maybe you can get more knowledge over time like

and i don't have any reason to think they shouldn't be here no email receipts so there's no email receipts whatever and like i've looked do you want me to like, and then it's like, again, smart. Like, do you want me to call them? Like, do you want me to ping them? And, but it might even be like, might come to the point where we, like, I did it.

Like, I'm your assistant. Like, I called them and they said they're going to be here tomorrow, just FYI. So I just think it's like, that's the stuff. If we can, like, you know, owning a home is, it's like, it's the greatest thing you can have. It's probably your biggest investment. It's also a hassle. Like, it takes a lot of, like, mental cycles to own a home.

Like, there's lots of things happening in there. There's things breaking, whatever, security side of it. And so I think we can take, like, our piece and focus on that. um it would be really cool and then like yeah in the neighborhood like if like you can you can do great things to kind of bring everyone together and so i think that's uh that's where we want to go with it and then the other thing we're doing which we also launched a little bit off of this is an app store because it goes into things like um like my mother-in-law lives alone And so if I can buy an app that watches her when she's walking outside of the house and like, is she limping today versus yesterday?

Did she not leave the house this morning for five hours? And so Ring, we don't want to build these like long tail, super specialized verticals, but I think there's lots of, and again, with AI, I think there's lots of groups that can build these like very sort of specialized verticals. apps that then someone could be like yeah i want to put this app on my mother-in-law's home and so i could build a ring app if i wanted to you could build a ring app today yeah yeah we're just we're kind of figuring it out because it is a new concept but we have you know like there's tens of apps now in the app store and they're like tens of apps okay but we launched it it's growing it's

like we're kind of figuring it out So why would someone build an app on it? Because it sounds like only 10-ish people. It just doesn't sound that popular. How many customers can you potentially hit by doing a ring app? So that's why you build a ring app. And that's why we think it'll become... I mean, again, start humble, get bigger. But I mean, you have tens of millions of...

of homes and businesses to be able to so that already have invested the money so they have like a coffee shop like if a coffee shop uses ring as security they've already like invested the money in the infrastructure having all these cameras now you can build an app that says okay like when you have a line i'll tell you so like like so it just rides over so now you like versus if you want to build a line checking thing for a coffee shop you have to say oh and buy this hardware now it's just like it's already there

So you said 10 to millions. Is it closer to 10 or closer to 100 million I've installed? It's definitely way above 10. Way above 10. Okay. So what's in the most... I think we've announced there's over 100 million cameras

out there. So I think we've announced that. That's a lot. When you first started it, did you think it was going to be that big?

I mean, I almost spit my coffee all over the microphone. I almost ruined this thing. Um... I, you know, it's like, I didn't think, I mean, when I first started, I started to, I was in my garage and couldn't hear my doorbell. Well, cause you tried making a bunch of different products. Oh yeah. I was, I was like, this was not like an aha moment.

It wasn't like, I didn't think I like, you know, invented lightning. Like I was just like, I, you know, I'm like, I'm going to just, I can't hear my doorbell. I'm going to build something. So like the first thing was like, I'm going to fix my own problem. Then I did pre-sell with it. And I'm like, I hope I can sell enough to build these. um didn't you like make a crowdfunding custom website or something like what why didn't you use like uh were there not anyone so i was building so i was building a bunch of like other like i had like a i was like in my garage like trying to do like inventions okay i'm like more of an inventor so And you call yourself the chief inventor.

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Chief inventor. So I like the idea of like invention and inventor. And like, you know, that's more of like where my focus is. I was in my garage, like literally building stuff. Couldn't hear the doorbell. Built this thing. At the same time, Kickstarter was like becoming very popular. And they had just recently thrown off any, you couldn't go on there with a hardware product anymore.

Really? Why not? So if you like, it's like funny because you got to go back now, but like Kickstarter started, they were like, you know, it was going very fast. All these people came on there with hardware projects. None of them shipped. Kickstarter was like, uh-oh. So they did like a moratorium. Like, we're not like, you can't go on here without a hardware product anymore.

And that's what you were making. You were making a bunch of hardware. Hardware products. We were like, uh-oh, like there's no place for this. So I saw it like firsthand as like the inventor in the garage. Like I just lost my distribution. And so then I, um, I basically was like, we should launch a Kickstarter for a product. We called it Christie Street, which was the street that Edison's lab was on in New Jersey.

were going to launch it we needed to put a product obviously like christy street needed a product to launch makes sense and so we end up uh like what product should we launch is actually i was doing it at a friend's conference in um paris called the web luik lemur and i'm talking to luik and i'm like which product should we do and i had like all this like a snap garden i had all these ideas and i get to the doorbell and he's like the doorbell And so he was like, that's the one.

And so I just was, at that point, I was just like, whatever. I honestly didn't care. So you thought that the crowdfunding site was almost the big product? Oh, the crowdfunding site was the business. In fact, I don't think people even know this. Charles River Ventures, I don't think we've ever, I mean, it's not like a, it's not crazy. It's like controversial.

But like, I actually raised money from Charles River Ventures for Christie Street. Oh, they were the seed check in that. Okay. And, uh, Sarger who's, uh, at Charles river is still a good friend. Yeah. I know. So he writes the first check in. I'm like, I go and pitch him on it. He's like, sure. Like, here's like, whatever, like a hundred and something thousand bucks, like a seed check.

And, um, Like pretty quickly, we launched that Christie Street at the low web was the doorbell. Yeah. And we launched it. And like all people want to talk about is the doorbell, not Christie Street. And we realized that Christie Street is like probably a terrible idea or just we weren't going to do well with it. And that the doorbell was like the thing.

And so I went to Sar and I'm like, hey, dude, I'm like, really sorry. Like this thing. And he's like, and Sar's like, this is like, we're like, I love great feces. So I was like, all right. Like, you know, it's like, like, all right. Like, you know, it's fine. Like do the doorbell. Like, but like, he meant like do the doorbell. Like, like, like, okay.

Like, like I, when I put money in, didn't work, like, it's fine. And I'm like, no, I'm going to like roll you into door bot, which was the name of it at the time. And so I was like, don't worry about it. I mean, he wasn't like flippant like that, but he was like, you know, he was like, like, it's fine. Like I said, we didn't invest in that.

Like, it's fine. And I'm like, no, I'm going to roll you in. So he actually became the first money into DoorBot, which that return on that investment was extremely good. Yeah. Looking back. So it was... Thankfully for him, even if you would have said no, I think he said some other pretty good ones too. Sar and CRV are both going to, he's going to be fine.

Anyone who's out there worried about Sar, he's okay. But he's also just like, he is like, it's nice when like people are just good. Like it's nice to see good people also make it. And he's like a good, good sort of founder backed like person who was like, no, I put money into this. Like I didn't like sort of, I don't, like that's not what I put money into.

Like, and so like I went out and tried to do it. Like it wasn't like we didn't try to do it. Um, and I was like, no, we're just going to roll your basis into, uh, into ring or what it's time at the time to robot, which did not look like it was that successful either. So, so how did that pre-sale go? It went like, I mean, it was like good enough to, it was actually, so it was almost like in a, it was like bad.

It was like, it, it sold enough that we had to build the product, but not that it didn't like do tens of millions. Like at that time you had, um, um, the hell's that thing called? It was tile. came out and Tile was this little like tracker thing, like Bluetooth, like tracker. You actually have one. They got acquired. Did they get acquired? They got acquired by Life360.

Yep. And so Tile, but like Tile looked like for a minute that they were going to be like a trillion dollar company. Yep. And they did like $20 million on. So like we're, so, so we weren't like, we weren't the, biggest out there um like we weren't and and there was a bunch of hardware companies raising money that were like the bell of the ball at that time there was this helmet for motorcycles that raised like 40 million bucks or something there was a lock company that raised a lot of money like there's a whole bunch of stuff like in san francisco that was like the like they and we were so we were kind of like a tier like a solid tier below that you basically were the

thing kickstarter did not want where we were you you wouldn't actually get the launch because you didn't You know, we were totally what Kickstarter was worried about. No, no, no. We were like, to be fair to Kickstarter, like they were not wrong. And so, yeah, so we basically sold enough. We're like, we have to build this thing shit. And so we like scraped together to build it.

And the first, listen, the first, the door bot was a tough, It worked, but just worked. I would say it was not a... Did it have a camera on it? Yeah. It was no motion detection. But it was a doorbell with a camera. If someone rang the doorbell, you'd talk to them through the thing, through the door bot, and they had a camera to your phone.

But it was like the Wi-Fi was super challenged. I mean, everything was tough on it. I mean, it was really like... It was just a... It worked, but I'll say it worked-ish. It definitely was not. But it was like a few people in a garage building a consumer electronics product. It turned out it was really hard. And were you kind of nervous that someone was not going to steal the idea because it was public? I wasn't nervous.

So when we put it out there, I wasn't nervous. I didn't think anything of it. We went on Shark Tank. Okay, that was pretty soon after this? Actually, it was Shark Tank was... So we launched the... The web was December of 2012. And then we went on Shark Tank in November of 2013. So over a year later.

What was that? So basically like a year later. Okay. And so did you, were you basically like still figuring things out? So we were, when we went on Shark Tank, we were two weeks away from shipping, starting to ship the product. Okay. This is when you recorded it or when it went live? Recorded it September 11th, which is a date you remember.

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Yeah. Of 2013. And then, so we went on November of 2013. So you were shipping like around Christmas. Yeah. Which ended up being from a... If you could be on Shark Tank, if you could have your 12-minute commercial on ABC, Shark Tank was the top-rated show. I think at the time, it was the number one-rated show that year. Oh, really? If you could pick your time, that was the time, and you were about to start shipping.

So how did you get on Shark Tank? Because that was probably a hard slot. So there was like 30,000 people applied the year I did. Yeah. They were saying they wanted... like a little bit more complex businesses on there. So they wanted stuff like, like a door bot, like something that was like a little bit more of like a tech and like product and like a little bit further along than like, I'd say like 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 like a little bit more of these like I'd say most mature-ish businesses or like a little bit.

And so they were looking for that. They had emailed some people in LA and one of the people said, like I was talking to them, they're like, oh, you should email this producer. They're looking for like stuff like yours. So I emailed the producer. And like an hour later, they're like, oh yeah, you should be on Shark Tank. And it ended up being way more complex than that, but that was like the initial sort of thing that got us on there.

And Shark Tank was, I mean, Shark Tank was probably one of the most critical things in getting us to survive because, again, you needed scale. We had all of these storebots coming in that I couldn't even pay for. And I go on Shark Tank and now we're basically selling them immediately, able to literally pay the factory to start shipping them to release them so that we can...

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so we can do it. And so like the Shark Tank thing was just critical in terms of timing and also like credibility, awareness, just kind of everything. It kind of like really let us go. But then what happened backstage at Shark Tank? Because it wasn't the smoothest. I mean, nothing in my whole thing has been smooth. But yeah, so we have, Shark Tank says you have to do a live demo.

And I'm like, yeah, of course we should do a live demo. Did the product work at that point? No. Okay. It was close. Ish. You know? So like, yeah, of course. So the producer, like, you know, Jamie, got to do a live demo. Of course. 100% we're going to do a live demo. But I think we should record something, blah, blah, and play that. They're like, no, we think we should do a live demo.

I'm like, 100% we're going to do a live demo. But why don't we like, I literally like, I kept trying to be like, like, but here's a better idea than a live demo. Like, which is not a live demo, which is something that we can put in a can and like just shoot it and throw it out there. So they forced me to do a live demo. So this was happening backstage or before? Well, so we're getting like the stages, they do like eight episodes a day, they film.

Oh, really? I didn't realize that. And they film them back to back. What you see in the, in the, when you, so when you see the episode on like TV, it's like each like vignette is filmed separately and they just like, they mix them up and it depends on how they come out, whatever. So it's like who films before you and after you, like when you're out there is like not necessarily gonna be on your episode.

So they're switching the sets very quickly. And so you have 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. We're setting this thing up. It's in front of a house. And Mark Dillon, who's my CTO and the tech guy, we had three or four or five door bots at all.

That's how many we had produced total. Not just with us. That was it. You brought the entire warehouse. We brought the entire set of door bots we had. So we bring them, we're testing them before we go out there. We're like in this little trailer and Sony lot and we're testing them. And there's like, I mean, they're working like, I mean, again, like it wasn't perfect, but like we could get them working.

So he goes out there and like, and Mark was like a fidgety, like kind of a nervous little fella anyways. Like one of those engineers was just like, he liked working at like late at night when no one was around. It was dark. Like he was like that kind of engineer. Great guy, but like a little bit nervous. And so I'm talking to the getting set up, like, okay, this is where you stand.

This is what you do. This is what you look at. This is the camera you're going to look at. Okay. And I'm like, keep seeing like over in the corner of my eye, like Mark. And he's like, every time I look over, there's like more sweat on him. To the point of like where like I look over and it looks like he just fell in a pool. Like I'm like, uh-oh.

So I'm just like, okay, Kate, one second. You know, just like very like, you know, quiet. Like one second, hold on a second. So I go over like, Mark,

everything okay? I'm like trying to like looking around like, you know, doing thumbs up. And Mark's like, no, they're not working. I'm like, okay, we'll get it. Get it fucking working, Mark. like very nice and calm. And Mark just looks at me, I'm like, get it working. And so then I had to go like start the shooting of this thing. Mark's behind the house.

Like if you look at the Shark Tank episode, like literally Mark's sitting behind there the entire time, like behind this house, there's nowhere for him to go. And he's like trying to get things working. I literally have to do, like I do my whole like song and dance. And at the end of it, I had to hit the door bot button and show the phone.

And that was live. Like it was like legit. It was either going to work or not work. And so I didn't know if it was going to work. And so I'm like out there, I hit the button. The thing comes up. It's like the best picture we ever had had on a door bot. comes up and i'm like oh like highest quality highest quality it was amazing i'm like oh my god like this thing freaking work i'm like holy like this is like it's i'm like oh and then we and so we smashed it it worked but it's like oh nice like the first like three he put up literally just were not work like they just weren't working so he keeps like installing new ones and i don't know like what the like what actually, I

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mean, I don't think any of us know what actually happened because we weren't smart enough to even know like what the product was doing at the time. Like we were just like almost, it was almost like luck when it worked. Yeah. And then didn't you get an offer, but you like turned it down?

Yeah. I mean, it was a Mr. Wonderful offer that was like, you know, kind of like, I would say like,

part of that is like part of the TV to make it like a good thing. So he gives me an offer. I mean, he, listen, he would have, he certainly would have done the offer if I had done it, but it was such a bad, like from a business side, it was like, it was just a revenue share. Doesn't he? A rev share with a thing. And it was a kill shot of like a, like a, you couldn't take that offer.

Like, yeah. but I've never met, but we didn't need it. But like, and then of course now everyone's like, well, you're so lucky you didn't take the money. Of course you didn't take the money. It's like, I'm like, I needed, like, I mean, I, we, we were out of money when I was on there. I mean, why'd you say no then if you, if you, I did it.

Cause it was like, it was, it was like a deal that just the business would, you couldn't have survived that. Like they just would never get ahead of it. So they went live a couple of weeks later. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then, which is fun. And again, another funny, just like funny story is like, so Shopify, this is 2013. So like Shopify is pretty, I mean, they're out there as a company, but they're like not huge.

Yeah. And so I called Toby, who's the CEO, founder of Shopify. Again, like it's not that big of a company. So calling him was like, I mean, now it's like a hundred billion dollar business or something. So like- They weren't public yet, were they? No, no, no. It was like, they're like a startup, like us. I mean, so like, he was probably a little bit ahead of us, but like, they weren't like, they weren't huge.

And so I basically said, like, I threatened his life. I'm like, you, like, we're going on Shark Tank. Like, we're, like, this thing cannot go down. And he's like, he's like, he's like, man, we have, it's actually on email. This is, we both laughed about it now, like recently, but it's like, he's like, we have millions of dollars of equipment.

Don't worry, like millions. Like, you know, it's like, it's like, like, like Shopify now has like literally like tens of billions. I mean, it's like so big. And so it is just so funny, like, looking back, I'm like, no, man, but there's so much traffic. If you go down, like, I'm going to, like, drive to Toronto and get you, you know? He's like, no, no, I have millions of dollars of equipment.

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And so these, like, two small startups and, like, Shopify did not go down. It was amazing. It was a very cool sort of thing. But it is just, you know, looking back, it's like how, like, you know, a long time ago, 13 years ago, so. But then I think, was that the Christmas that you like almost went bankrupt? Like what? So then we started, yeah.

So we started shipping, so we started shipping door bots. And they were like, again, like I said, it wasn't that they weren't, like they were working. Like they weren't like a, it wasn't like a, like it didn't work. It just was like, had a lot of challenges. And then we were going so fast. Like we're trying to get them in from the factory and we're like sending them out.

And like, I mean, we're literally sending them out from our, like our little, like we had this little place we rented in Santa Monica with a garage. And so we're like, you know, like taping boxes and shipping it out. And so we were way behind. People are like, I'm going to, everyone's like, I'm going to cancel my order if I don't get it for Christmas.

We're just like seeing that. So we're like, oh, like that would be bad. So you were having like delays and delays coming in and people like, if I don't get it for Christmas, I'm out. And so I'm like, oh, So, and I don't think it was that people actually wanted for Christmas. I think they just like, everyone was like, like that was kind of like their, like, you know, like their line in the sand.

So we've got a big shipment that was coming in for being produced. And we had a new engineer and he put like code to fix the camera to make it even better. Put it on there. Shipment comes in. And I mean, again, looking back, it's like so stupid. We don't test the product. Like we just like literally just, it comes in and we like send it out.

Like we're like, so behind the, like, we're just like ship it, ship it. So I started hearing, people were emailing me, my email's on the box, still is today. And they're saying, they're like, it's not working. And they're showing us pictures that are like, oh, this is different than before. So I started taking ones out of the boxes that are in the warehouse, like next to my desk, basically, and testing them.

I'm like, oh, this is like, something's really wrong here. 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 couldn't upgrade, you couldn't over the air upgrade it. So, cause it was not the way we had built it, which was a mistake, but just happened to be is that like that one chip was not like in the line to get like over the air upgrades.

And so we basically had shipped out like a thousand, maybe 10,000, I remember it was like thousands of cameras that were just broken, like they didn't work. And so that was, we figured this out Christmas Eve, So like all day Christmas Eve, the day before Christmas Eve, I'm literally trying to figure out like, is there any way to fix it? Is there some way we can OTA that chip? Is there some way we can like, whatever.

And we end up getting to that night. I'm out to dinner with my wife and my son, who is at the time like six or seven. and uh i'm like that was a fun run like this thing was interesting but like it's done like we're like because if they were all broken you couldn't we couldn't afford to replace all of them with a new unit like we just like the the re like just the process of buying new units sending them back out like we would we just didn't we didn't have we barely had any cash to even stay afloat, let alone to, like, change out, you know, 5,000 units or something.

Like, not even close. Had you raised any more money since that $100K? We had not raised at that point. We had raised, like, about a million dollars up to that point. And that's to your inventory problem, right? But that was, like, I mean, we were... we needed like five million more kind of thing like and but you're not raising money also saying like hey just fyi like i need money because we just like everything we sent out was broken and we need to like need your money to see like it's very hard to raise money on that also and so like we we're like this is this is really bad and um so i mean how did how'd you get through this so i'm driving home from dinner and i'd like i

was actually like calm in a weird way of like Kind of almost like it is what it is. At some point, you're just like, I can't fight it. We're just going to have to shut down. I was very sad, but I was kind of calm. And I called Mark, the sweaty engineer from Shark Tank. And I'm like, Mark, we had in the, we had been using a paid, like a, like a licensed thing in our, in our cloud for doing the video encoding, like a license, like a software.

And then we switched to a open source one because it was obviously a lot cheaper, like as we were sort of building stuff out. And, but the licensed one was always like better or just, but like the open source one worked fine. So who cares? So I said to Mark, I'm like, remember that like licensed one we used? He's like, yeah. I'm like, do you think somehow it could like figure, cause we didn't even know it was coming out of the camera.

It was like something was coming out, but like we couldn't, it like was showing up on the phone. It was just like junk. And so it wasn't even the actual camera feed. It was like the camera was sending like basically like a bunch of like bad bits and stuff. And so it was just like the encoder we had just like saw it and just like basically just crapped out.

And I'm like, do you think the paid one would like, in essence, like figure out what's going on and like basically be able to do this? He's like, I have no idea. It's going to take me like eight hours. And this was now he's in New York. I'm driving home from dinner. So it's probably like eight or nine at night. And so he's going to take me like eight hours to switch it over.

I was like, okay, like start, you know, might as well start the clock right now. And Mark's the kind of, I mean, Mark was the kind of guy I was like, I'm starting. Yeah. Like I knew he would do it. Yeah. And so he calls, he wakes me up at like 6am Christmas Eve. And he's like, it fucking works. It fucking works. He's screaming. And Mark was not, again, not as screaming, like, you know, but like, I start looking.

Not only does it work, it's like the best picture. It actually was like amazing picture. It was like great. And so that was like still our favorite Christmas at the Siminoff house. was the Christmas of 2013 because it like, that was like, not only did we fix it, but then, then you could like, we were actually doing good. Like they were selling.

So, so like, then you could go raise money, which is what we did.

And you could then like build the next product. And like, so like it allowed us to sort of like, but that, if that had happened, it would have been a kill shot. So then did you just like, send one email and raise a bunch of money like people do nowadays or like what was that like raising no i mean raising money was still a slog um i actually introduced to true venture sally to om malik um i don't know if you know um um oh yeah yeah i've actually met him he just passed away uh which is very sad yeah but like great guy and so i got introduced to him and i told him like i have this mission to make neighborhoods safer this is what i'm doing whatever and everyone you know kind

of thought i was crazy And Ohm was just this like... He was a classic, classic guy and was like, no, I think this is good. And he introduced me to his partners at True Ventures. And this guy, Adam Diagelli, who's like one of the... He was a... just brand new out of college like you're not even a partner he was just like a associate yeah kind of like like they gave it to him and adam ended up coming in being on the board is yeah he's done phenomenally well he's now a partner at true and he's but he was like great and so adam really had a passion for it and helped us raise our first that was like our first a round that we raised um and the true ventures was like the big

sort of like you know behind it um and then there's i mean there's like i'd say almost You could almost like of that vintage of VC, you could almost every single VC I think had some part of rank. I mean, we had like... Wasn't there like an email that got passed around to people where you like kind of told someone off or something? I forget exactly what happened.

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Well, there was a group out of... Yeah, there was a group out of the East Coast. And they're like, oh, we're a bunch of founders and we're founder friendly and like all this stuff. And they were basically in. And then right at the last second, they backed out. Um, and they backed out because they said like, yeah, we think you have a great business, but like, we're worried that you're in Los Angeles and that if you try to raise like the next round, you won't be able to do it.

And so it was like a very, like, I feel like it was a very unfounder friendly. Classic East coast, early stage VC, honestly. Yeah. It was like, but it was like, but like to say you were like founder friendly and then do that, like, it was like, just say like you're a hedge fund jerk and like be like who you are. Yeah. Like, don't say you're founder friendly and then like write the like standard, like jerk finance person email.

Yeah. 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 they're like, oh, I didn't know we're all asshats because I use asshat as one of my examples of who they were.

And even some other even choicier words. And I was like, uh-oh. And, but it was, it's kind of, I mean, I, I think looking back, it was, you know, I was just, I was under so much stress. It's not like it's now it's kind of funny and it's a little bit of a badge of honor. I feel like doing it. I think at the time, like what a dumb thing, like, cause like why, you know, it's like, don't poke the bear.

It's like, there was no value in it, but I mean, it's kind of also like my personality, I guess. It's just like, you got it. I'm just like, yeah, you can't take the whatever out of the something. I don't know what I'm saying there. Yeah. I feel like if you've ever raised money before you kind of go through that where, You know, someone's like, oh, yeah, this is awesome.

I'm in. And then, I mean, that happened to me in 2022 when I was raising my second fund. I had like 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... Like I could have said more things than I said, but I was kind of like, whatever.

It is tough. I mean, it is emotional and it is like, people are like, it's just business. I guess not just business. I guess your life, like, like this was my life. And so, yeah, I was, I was, um, yeah, but it is that the email, um, has definitely aged well now that I actually, thank God I made it. So like, I'm okay now. Um, if I hadn't made it, it would have aged much more poorly.

Cause I, but, but it was like, yeah. So it's pretty funny. And so like what, yeah, I think you hired on people off Craigslist, right? When you were, you got a bunch of money in the bank, you were really ramping the team. How did that go? Because in 2026, hearing somebody say, I hired people off Craigslist, I'm like, what are you doing? So this is probably a couple of years ago.

Yeah, I think that like, I think that is something that's going to become again, how you build like successful businesses is like finding these, I'll call it like new to business business people so they're like they're like eager gritty want to work hard people that like you find that are like not necessarily getting the attention of the world like they're not the pedigree resume whatever and you know with ai i think that's democratizing intelligence so like you don't necessarily need someone who's gone to stanford to do your thing because i think like stanford is now in the cloud and you can like access it um what we found is like these big we found you know this this

guy i mean we hired the person in the shipping department. Like, and I mean, shipping department, like the person like putting a tape on the box. And he came to me and he said, Jamie, like, you know, the, you know, the, we don't have enough, whatever, you're not, you're not buying enough screwdrivers for the boxes or like to pack. And I'm like, dude, I don't fricking know.

I'm like, why don't you order them? And so, you know, it was like, I just said like, you figure it out. And then it was like, we weren't hiring, buying enough door bots, whatever. And I'm like, then you figure it out. Like, you know, it's like, I don't care. Like you go figure it out. He still runs all our procurement today for the entire business.

And so like, you know, so I think giving people again, like give people opportunity and find, you know, these, like these, these great nuggets of sort of like these diamonds in the rough. And I think businesses today, like this is like, if, if I was starting something new, if I was like looking at like transforming a business, like that's what I'd be looking for is like, how do you get these like new, like AI, you know, native thinkers that are like not the resume long-term sort of have like formed too many sort of like, you know, the blinders going back to where we said, like, you know, coming back in, like, I want these like fresh eyes that come in that can just, rip

through with, with what we have available to us today. So how do you, or what might one of those kind of undercover gems look like? Like if you're, if you're trying to figure out, cause what a lot of people do when they're hiring is real quick, look at the resume. Does it match something? Maybe I'll give them an interview. I'll ask them canned questions and then we'll make a decision.

It's like, how do you, how do you run one of those processes and what do you do? I've always tried to like, it's like, you know, our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Are you passionate about that? Let them talk also. Let them kind of go through it. I mean, obviously, as you get bigger and bigger in a company, you have to hire for more specific things.

But when you're smaller, it's like, you just want these sort of Swiss army knife type people that can do multiple things, believe in what you're doing. And now I'm also like, how do you use AI in your life? Yeah. If they're like, oh, I use it like I use basically Google. I search things. I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. But a lot of them are like, I built this app to reorder bathroom supplies for my family because we were arguing about that.

And you see what they did and you're like, oh, that's okay. You're in a world where you're realizing that you can just unlock anything. You can do anything. I want that unlocked brain, that person who just feels like there are no constraints anymore. They can do anything. And then passion for what you're doing. I think that still is an authenticity there.

It's not just... You don't 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. I'm not anti-capitalist.

But I do think that we sort of misunderstand when you hire someone that if you give them a bonus or whatever, All that does is reset the floor for them. It doesn't sort of, in six months, you're like now making whatever that is, even if it's double what you're making before. Well, that's your new floor. And now you want to do more than that.

So I think if you're driven by that, you're just going to want to have more. And if you're driven by like, I want to make neighborhoods safer and I'm excited about the products we're working on, then yes, making more money as you go and become more successful is good, but it's not like the main thing you're showing up for every day.

Yeah, that's right. You want to make sure you can take care of yourself. I mean, having money is great. Yeah, like in your family. I appreciate that people need it, that they should grow with it. But if it's what you're sort of doing the job for, you're usually never satisfied. And usually not your best when you're like, Unless you're literally at a hedge fund.

The job is making money. The job is making money. That's great. You're good at making money because that's what you do every day. And that is the KPI. But at Ring, the KPI is making neighbors 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. So both things happen.

And that's great. How did you think about building the brand? Because I know you were...

You were kind of the face of it in some sense of like, you're on Shark Tank. People say, oh, that's the ring guy, the doorbell guy. How did you think through just building that intentionally over time? I think 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, they become their own thing.

thing and they like sort of lose that need but i it wasn't that i was the best person to be part of a brand i think brands like you know a doorbell itself like that we made was pcb boards and plastic it turns out people don't 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 you're accessible i think it that's how like the brand becomes something over time it's also how you become a better brand as you're also listening you're out there you're like adapting to that so i think in every way i mean ring today is become or

is definitely i think it's easy you're just one of the big brands of the last century of the last decade not century decade maybe maybe century but definitely definitely like the last decade is like 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 like me, but like a person being attached to it so that it wasn't just selling, you know, PCB boards and VGA or, you know, HD camera, whatever feature thing that was out there.

And again, like a part of that was my email. I really emails on every box. Well, even I think the name too, Ring, and having that domain, like ring.com. 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.

And just all of that stuff matters. And so I think, yeah, building a brand is... basically impossible, which is why they're so, I mean, like you don't see them get built. Yeah. And it is lots of little things, but certainly it's very hard to find. And there's always, again, always examples of this stuff. But I'd say most brands, if you look back, it's usually they were built with authenticity at their core.

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Like there was, there was authenticity, people, humans, things, it mattered. There was reasons why they made decisions, products. They didn't just sort of like put stuff out there. Yeah. How did you get ring.com? Yeah.

So the name came, Upfront Ventures was one of our investors and one of their partners, Himay. I was in a thing pitching them, telling them what we're doing, an update. And I said, we're looking for a new name. This is when we were DoorBot. Because doorbot was just like a terrible name. Yeah, talking about like human and like the personality.

It was like a robot. When we branded it, I was like literally building a thing for my house in my garage. It was a doorbot. Door robot's funny. But as a brand, it was like a terrible brand. And so I said, we need a new brand. And so I made it like you keep saying rings of security and ring of this. And I kept using the word ring.

I didn't actually hear myself. He said, why don't you just call it Ring? And I was like, eh. And my first, it was not like, oh, epiphany, like Ring. It was like, hmm, I don't know. I'm like, would Ring actually be a good brand? I'm like, maybe. And so then I think he looked or I looked and it was like ring.com was available, meaning there wasn't a company.

It was for sale. What was the price tag? It was like over a million, I think was the initial offer from them was over a million. Okay. We ended up getting it. I had $187,000 in the bank when I was negotiating for the domain. I ended up agreeing to a million dollars. And then at the day of closing, I said, listen, the board decided that we couldn't do it.

Now, the board was just me at the time. Was this right before Shark Tank? Yeah. This was after Shark Tank. So you went on Shark Tank as DoorBot? DoorBot, yeah. Okay. Yeah, this was after Shark Tank. Was this after Christmas? This was basically four months after Shark Tank. Okay. As we were trying. This was before True Ventures came in. But right around that time.

Yep. And we're in this process of about to raise money. We're going to need to rebrand. We realized DoorBot was going to be a bad brand. And so I... I told the guy, which was true, the board did say I couldn't buy it for a million dollars. And so, we had it for $750,000. We had an agreement. And I said, the board said we couldn't. I was the board.

It was a small board. I said, but they did allow me to do 175,000 today and we'll do a million dollars total paid out over two years. So I actually raised the price but lowered the upfront. And the guy was like, basically like F you. Yelled at me a bunch. And then right before he hung up the phone, he said, fine, wire the 175. Oh, and he did it.

So it turned out it was a good way to, I mean, it was like, I don't know if it was the most upfront negotiation, but yeah, it was like, I mean, I just didn't have the money. I mean, I obviously thought we were going to raise the money. We just weren't raising the money. Like I didn't have it. So you had 12K in the bank after this, essentially.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, so then true ventures was coming in and I had to then tell them two things. Well, I basically had to like admit that I bought this domain name, which I had not told them yet. Um, cause I didn't want them to know I bought a million dollar domain name when they're like putting in a couple million dollars in the company, obviously like, you know, a major part of it's going out to the domain name.

And so I had to tell them before they wired, which was like, that was a little bit difficult. Had you already signed all the docs? We had signed the docs. Okay. And so they were like about to wire. And then I kept sort of being like, they had all our stuff, but like VCs are actually kind of like surprisingly lazy on digging through like the finances of these companies.

I think because they know they're so messed up that they don't even care. You almost like just don't want to know. Yeah, exactly. So like, and I'm like, you know, like, oh, the wire's coming on, you know, Monday or Tuesday. And I'm like, okay, like, any chance you could come like Monday? And they're like, I think we can do Monday. I'm like, okay, great.

Just cause like, you know, like I have the, our finance person's in the office on Monday. And so it'd be easier to accept. I'm like, literally just like talking, you know, whatever. They're like, okay, well, Tuesday's when payroll got pulled. We didn't have enough for payroll. You wouldn't have missed payroll? Wouldn't have missed payroll.

Which is illegal, right? Like, technically, if you miss payroll, like, that's... Well, yeah. As long as the... Because sometimes the employees can agree and stuff like that. It's not good, I'd say. Missing payroll is bad. We actually never missed a payroll. We'd certainly... I had to bridge the business a few times. And we were starting to get big enough where, like, I couldn't, like...

I mean, like, when your payroll's, like, if it's, you know, $25,000, like, I mean, not that I was, like... I didn't have, like, a lot of money, but I had, like, enough to, like... get like scraped 25 000 from like my brother or whatever like you scrape it together quickly when it's like that's like a hundred grand you're like i can't just like scrape that together by asking people and so yeah so luckily true uh wired in payroll happened domain name kept going launched ring in uh october of 2014.

So basically less than a year after being on Shark Tank, we went, completely rebuilt the whole thing. And then once, and Ring really like, it just hit. You could feel it like from, I mean, definitely, I would say in it, maybe not as successful, kind of like, when you're in these things, it's hard to see how successful they are. But looking back now, Like I would say it definitely, the brand, everything really hit from like day one.

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You can kind of see how it just kind of kept going. Massive struggle all the way through, but it really like, that's when the momentum really started. How many times would you say you were at that kind of like verge of bankruptcy, if you want to call it that? I think there's like four main ones. But I would say like, we were kind of like, kind of always on the verge of bankruptcy because you're a hardware business.

Yeah, because you were just taking all the money and just buying inventory. And if you didn't sell it, you died. That's exactly right. If the sales had slowed down and because of a lot, if we had been growing slower, you would have been less top heavy because you would have the profit coming in. You'd have more cash flow, whatever. Because you're growing so fast, your cash flow is so upside down.

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That if it went from growing at 300% to 200%, the difference of that from a cash flow, you would have been dead. So yeah, we were basically always fully at the edge of this thing. It was definitely the shuttle with the tiles falling off as we're coming through the atmosphere. And we kind of just barely made it through without blowing up. And I know you're talking about the board earlier, the board, you know, your discussions with the board.

I know there's a couple times where, especially on the marketing side, I think one,

you want to spend a million bucks on TV ads, which like, that's a pretty big commitment. How did that conversation go? And why were you like so just like gung-ho on buying a bunch of TV ads? Yeah, I mean, one of my mental models was with Ring, and I think it's a good one for a V, if you're VC backed, if you're taking venture capital money, and you're doing what Ring was doing, I think that 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 that's bad for everyone because a venture capitalist needs a big outcome. They don't need you to build a $5 million a year doorbell business that's barely making it. And so we had kind of like a million dollars left at the time. We were growing, but we weren't shooting up.

I felt, you asked earlier, did you feel like someone else was going to copy you and take it? I could feel the pressure of competition coming in. What was the competition at the time? uh at that so the point that i wanted to do commercials we had just so that was in 2015. in january 2015 at ces there was at least 30 people that launched uh call it competitive product to ring so they were like at zero they were at zero we had launched remember we had launched so we had kind of door bought we had all the stuff but we had only launched ring october of 2014.

so we had luckily from the press or whatever, we kind of had like established ourselves as this, but we were not like established. I mean, we weren't, you know, we weren't doing crazy sales. Were you doing a million a month yet in revenue? No, we were probably probably going into 500, 600,000 a month or something. So we were like, maybe like a, But in consumer electronics, doing less than...

Doing $100 million a year in consumer electronics would be a small... So we were... The market, I'd say, was still very open in 15. So if I would have had a company and I'm like, fuck, I'm going to spend $10 million on TV ads. I could have probably crushed you. You would have crushed us. So your thinking was, I just need to get out there.

Someone's got to, like, someone's going to take it. And I would say, like, our office was in Santa Monica. And I said, like, in Santa Monica, if we go out of business, I want the hole to be so deep that it can never be filled. Like, I don't want to just, like, a lot of these, like, VC-backed companies will, like, over 20 years go out of business.

And they just, like, kind of, like, they, like, squeak out of business. I wanted to, like, be, like, a sort of, like, a, you know, massive explosion if we were going to go out of business. I wanted to, like, blow a hole in the ground. And so I'm like, we have like a million dollars left. We're selling. So like, we're not like, we're not just ripping through cash.

So we're selling some products. And so I'm like, if it's like a million dollars, I'm like, I want to jump to the next level. And I'm like, I think we should... And a friend, this company, GoodRx, had just launched. It was at soccer with my son, with the son of one of the founders of GoodRx is there. We're talking. And again, we're both super small companies.

Like this is not, you know. And he's telling me, oh yeah, we just went on doing TV. And like, this is the results we're having. And it's like, unbelievable. I'm like, so I tell my wife, I'm like, like at the end of the soccer game, like I'm going to the office. we're going to do TV. And she's just like, I don't even know what you're talking about.

I'm like, I'll see you later. And that was like a Saturday. Like I came home, like, you know, like I didn't like come home. I'm like, I'm like figuring out how to do TV. And so I go to the board and I'm like, I want to basically spend, you know, we're going to blow a million dollars on TV. So why are TV ads so good? Because a lot of tech people would say they're unmeasurable and like, you know, just you don't know where the money's going.

So why was it such a good idea? I, well, I mean, I could see what GoodRacks was doing. I wanted to do, I did feel also that like to this competition thing and seeing what, you know, one of the companies that I tried to sort of mimic was Dyson. Um, if you look at how James Dyson, again, go back to a, like Dyson, Dyson, James Dyson, how he did his ads and the authenticity.

And you go back to when he started Dyson, he's no longer on the ads. And so people don't see it. But for a long time, it was like James Dyson was like on our TV being like, you know, I spent, you know, 300 years trying to build this, you know, thing. And he like, and so, um, I'm like, we need to be the James Dyson, the Dyson of home security in our own sort of voice.

And so I felt like TV was the way to do it. I'm seeing this company having success with it. And I'm like, we should just drop the hammer and let's get this. And we had a board meeting and, you know, there's definitely a bunch, like the board overall, I'd say it was like, if you think that's good, let's do it. There was one person who was like, Like that's, you're insane.

You know, your size, you can't do, like you can't do TV. Like this goes to your Silicon Valley question of like, which I always think Silicon Valley is funny. Like it's a place that like, you're supposed to be like the most creative, yet they have so many rules. You know, it's like, oh, you can't do TV until you're a hundred million. He said, until you're doing a hundred million in sales, you can't do TV.

And I was like, I can do whatever I want. And so, um, so we, but we did TV and it is actually very hard and it is hard to measure. And it's also, it usually is like a rubber band where like you pull and pull and pull and pull and pull and nothing happens. And you're like, oh my God, this isn't working. And then all of a sudden the back sort of shoots, shoots forward.

So it did for like the first couple of weeks. It was like sales were basically the same. And you're like, oh, like this isn't good. We had this like Google tracker, like this Google sheet that we were doing. We're like tracking the sales and like putting it in and putting how much we spent every day. And it's like, oh, this is like, and then all of a sudden, Like the sales just start just like, now you can see them climbing.

And you think it was the TV ads? At that point, it was all we were doing. I mean, we were doing some, I mean, like little other, but like you could definitely, you could see it like materially doing it. You could see like the brand awareness coming up. Like you started to see it all start to come up. And then of course, instead of me being like, okay, let's just stay at that spend.

I'm like, okay, double the TV spend, triple the TV spend. And then we went from like, yeah, like 500,000 a month or whatever in January to like a million a month. We started raising our B round in like, call it like end of spring, early summer of 15. Yeah.

I'll never forget. So 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. It was a million a month and growing. And our projection was to be like, we're going to try to get to like 20 million, like basically 2 million a month by like the end of the year. And we ended up, by the time we closed the round in the end of July, it was the end of July, early August, we had already doubled.

We already went from a million to two million a month by that time. So during the round closing, we doubled our... Our revenue was going so fast at that point that we couldn't even track it ourselves. Our projections were off. So it was wild. And obviously that round was like, people were like, okay, I'm glad I invested. Because we basically priced it off of...

numbers that were just like i mean it's very rare you close around and the company's like surprise like we're doing twice as big as we thought we were like you know like they're like no way um i mean a lot of times what you see is they time the fundraise at the optimal time to price and we just were like we actually just just it was like out of control i mean yeah the bad part was like the the costs were out of control a little bit too because we were just like when you again you're growing that fast like customer service like You're just hiring people.

You're just trying to get ahead of these systems because systems are breaking daily. Like a $10 million run rate company, a $20 million run rate company are like almost two different companies. And then we went from there to like $3 million a month, $4 million a month. I mean, so it just

kept compounding. What's the hardest part to get right? Or what was like the biggest thing that would break at that point? I think the hardest part is that nothing, it's like people think that fixing something means it's 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 a 100.

All of that happened in 12 months. And so you finally get customer service, you get the person in there and it's good and the systems and you have the location in Scottsdale now because it's more scalable and whatever. And you're like, you turn around to like fix the next thing. And you already suddenly realize customer service is broken again because it's like, it's now doubled again.

And like, there's no space. And the fire department came and told us that we couldn't like have all these people here. So now like this is before like homework was, you know, like remote work was easy. And so like, so it's just, the problem was like, you didn't even get to fix things because by like, you'd fix something and then it would break again because you just were scaling so fast.

And it is, that you're jumping through too many gates too quickly. You're going company size-wise, the people that are able to do these things, very few of them can scale from zero to, and there are, but there's Dave Savage who runs our procurement, the person who is doing the boxes. still with us today. Like there are definitely people that are able to scale all the way through.

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But I see a lot of them like did not have that same ability. Like they just like, you know, it just, it sort of escaped their capability at that time or whatever it was. But maybe it was us too. Like it's not, it's not indictment on them, but whatever, whatever the reason, like they weren't able to like keep handle of that area finance. I mean, like doing, you know, a person who's used to doing finance for a $20 million a year business, probably not the same person for a hundred million dollar a year business that's growing fast.

again, like less than 12 months. And I know you did some really good athlete, celebrity kind of 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? So Shaq, again, go back to authenticity, right? Like Shaq was his celebrity.

So like, that's good. But why did we want Shaq? Because Shaq was a police officer, Oh, was he? Exactly. Yeah. So Shaq was a cop. He became a reserve officer in Los Angeles while he was at the Lakers. 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 like, for us, that was really like a great thing. Yeah. How we got them was I started thinking about at the end of 15, we're spending all this money on TV. I'm like, we should do a Super Bowl commercial. Now, that's crazy because there's no way we could have afforded it, but it just made me... I started doing the exercise of it, and I asked an agent in LA, how do you hire celebrities to do commercials? I literally didn't...

I mean, I kind of knew you had to pay them, but I didn't know who you talked to. It was like, whatever. And they said, that's what I do. Like, I'm a, I'm an agent. Like, that's what I do. And so I was like, great. I'm like talking about what we're doing. And like, they kind of ring was starting to get out there and Shaq's people were there.

You know, they do these calls with agents and they were talking about stuff. And Shaq said, you know, I would like to get in touch with the ring company. I just bought their stuff for my house. They're better security. And the guy's like, I just insane. Like, I just talked to them. They want to do stuff. And so they put us, so the guy calls me, the agent is like, Shaq would like to meet you.

And I'm like, oh, okay. Thank you. I'm happy to meet Shaq. I'm like a kid from New Jersey. I'm like, yeah, sure. I'm happy to meet Shaq. And so we ended up meeting at CES. He comes to our booth at CES, which was crazy. Was this a planned, like scheduled meeting or he just walked up? They said like, he's going to come to your booth at whatever, like noon on Thursday.

I didn't tell anyone. Cause I'm like, there's no way Shaq's showing up. So I'm like, I don't want to, if I tell the whole team that like Shaq's showing up to our booth and he doesn't show up, I'm going to look like an idiot. So I don't tell anyone. At the time, my head of comms, this girl Yossi, is still with Amazon. And she was the biggest Lakers fan in the world.

And so all of a sudden, Shaq's walking down. She goes, oh my God, Shaq. And I'm like, yeah. And he's coming here for a meeting. no way i'm like yeah so that was fun i'll never forget her face but um so shaq came we started talking i told him about like we care about neighborhoods and neighborhood security and this is what we're doing and shaq's like i want to work with you and so i'm like oh okay it's like i want to work with you you know mr o'neill you know and as i said to him um well i don't know how this like do i what do we pay or and he just like it puts his fingers in his ears and this guy is like i mean he's jack's very large We're in this little tiny room that

can barely fit Shaq and me because it's like in our booth. And he's just going, la, la, la, I do not talk about money. And the person with him is like, yeah, well, you'll talk to me. Shaq likes to only do things that he cares about. And so that's, I think, again, why is Shaq such a great brand? And what he's done is because he stayed authentic.

And so then we ended up working together. He said he'll take his fee in equity. um which ended up being great for for him which is which is great because he was a huge benefit and shaq would became a great spokesperson with us um really helped us again part of building that authentic brand so it it did work you like facetime him during board meetings i think Oh, we'd have, yeah.

I mean, Shaq's a big FaceTimer, so he would like, you'd FaceTime him or he'd FaceTime you. It was like, there's, yeah. I mean, I still talk to him a little bit, like not as much just because we were, when we were working together, obviously you'd talk to someone a lot more. And it'd be funny because I'd be somewhere and like, you know, we were growing the business.

I wasn't like, I wasn't that big of a thing. And I'd be somewhere and like Shaq would be FaceTiming me. Of course I'd be like, oh, like look who it is. You know, it's like Shaq. You're like, holy shit. Shaq's just FaceTiming. Shaq's just FaceTiming, you know, he'd be like telling me stuff. Did you end up doing a commercial with him? Oh, many.

Oh, really? Many. Okay. And even like my, the, my favorite one is I did when my son was probably eight or nine or something and we did shack and go seek. So we had this, we had this We had this thing where Oliver, like Ring was so easy, a kid could use it. Yeah. And so we had Oliver, like my son, basically like, you know, like on the phone being like, you know, with the camera and being like, Shaq, I see you.

Yeah. And he was like, you know, like jumping up and jumping down. And then it was like, it was like a really fun, that was one of my favorites. So that was cool. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so you sold the company to Amazon. What was that like to selling? Because you were continuing to just scale and you obviously like, again, you needed money.

You realize you... 300 million bucks. How did that conversation kind of come about and happen? I mean, it was a, it was a definitely a crazy time for the business. Um, we've been working, I mean, I'd say like the one thing, and this is like everything in life is like, it's like be longterm. Like we were working with Amazon. We've been talking to them for years.

We've been like, you're probably a big seller on the platform. I'm assuming. seller, but also we were working with Alexa. And for the right, good intentions. We weren't just talking to them to sell the company or to have a relationship. We weren't 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. Don't just be transactional. This is the missionary versus mercenary. And so know at some point amazon then was like we should you know this is a part of like the home and what we're doing and like we see that jamie like with the mission to make neighborhood safer and so they ended up finally saying like yeah let's uh let's you know we want to do this and they came to me and at that point i was i was definitely ready um i said i was ready to sell uh just just because i was just like it was so i i had I really, I was ready to sell a meeting.

I still wanted to, I wanted to be at the business. Like I wasn't ready to sell, like to get rid of it. But I was like, I needed, I needed like a partner to come in. Like that's what, I really need like someone to come in and help me because I actually did want to stay. I just couldn't take the like emotional ride. And like, it was just killing me.

So it was like the point where, and I knew Amazon, if you look at like other founders that had sold companies to Amazon that had stayed like Audible and like, you know, like Zappos and Tony Hsieh. And so I was like, you know, I'm going to like, they'll let me sort of do what I want to do. Yeah, I feel like you were kind of, from what I know, you were kind of, like, nervous the whole way of, like, this could just blow up at any time.

Like, I don't want to lose people's money. That was, yeah. I mean, that was definitely a way to... I mean, it does weigh on you at some point. And, like, 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. Like when we were doing, you know, that year when we did the B round with Richard Branson, like, yeah, like, you know, if things had changed then, if the growth had slowed, you would have been like off by like, call it even like $10 million, which is like not like nothing, but like you can get Richard Branson to give you another 10 million if the business is

good. Like I could have called Richard and said, listen, we're off by this, but like, here's what's going on. Like, you know, can you help us? Like might've cost us a little bit of equity, but like you could have, like it was, I think there's a lot of people that make that phone call to True Ventures probably, you know, like you could have like raised that money.

When you're doing 480 million, and you're going to a billion, if you're off by a couple hundred million, like Richard's like, he's not like, he's like, I can't wire you a couple hundred million. True Ventures is like, I can't. So in a weird way, the bigger it got, like the riskier it got because there was just less people that could like bail us out of these, like a small mistake became a much bigger blemish.

Do you have any founders or CEOs or maybe like people from history that you've gotten a lot of inspiration from or that you've learned a lot from? You know, just like the company grew so fast and became a different business, there was people at like different stages that I really like when I was... When I was about to ship a product, this guy Jim Hyman helped me because he does safes in Los Angeles.

He makes safes. Locking safes. Locking safes to put your jewelry in or whatever. Under the Honeywell brand. He helped me with how do you insure a product? How do you get it here? How do you pay tariffs? I don't know how to do anything. I really didn't know how to do anything. Um, but then all of a sudden, like our business was doing more than Jim's was.

And so like, then it like, it was like, I mean, still a great friend, but like from a mentor side, it was like, you know, I kind of jumped it. Um, there's people, uh, sky Dayton, who's the founder of earth link. Internet connectivity? Was it Dial-Up back in the day? Dial-Up back in the day. He was like one of the founders of Dial-Up. Is it still around? No, I mean, he sold it when he was like, he found it when he was like 16 or something.

But he's like a great like investor and local sort of LA tech person and still a mentor today. He's one of those people who kind of like, I'd say like grew with me the whole way and really helped me. I think we had that as a kid. We all had AOL and Earthlink were the two big ones. We would move every year and my mom would sign up for a new free for six months internet.

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That was the trick for getting internet. We definitely had Earthlink at one. I see different people at different times. Even James Dyson doesn't know it, but he was my mentor that I used. I think you can also do that. In some ways, it's funny because people think that it's meet the mentor. Also, you can look at a company. I think it's The trick is you don't copy.

Copying usually doesn't work well. But I looked at what did Dyson do to build this brand that people love for what it is. And then I'm like, I want to build a brand like that for my area. And so what translates and how do I translate it to my voice, to what we do, to what's authentic to us? But I definitely saw a lot of patterns in what they did.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And so... I've also heard that like, don't meet your hero. So maybe like get inspiration from them, learn from them, but like you meet them and you kind of hate them after or something like that. I think that is definitely a, I mean, I still, I would like to meet James Ice and I think he's probably awesome, but yeah, but yeah, never have.

So he's like a superhero right now. Interesting. Okay, well, cool. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It was great. And thank you for listening. Thanks again to this episode's sponsors, Flex, Monaco, Amplitude, and Numeral. If you enjoyed this, please like, comment, subscribe, and share it with a friend who's almost gone bankrupt a couple times.

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