Jamie Siminoff
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The Peel with Turner Novak · From Nearly Bankrupt to $5B+ Revenue, with Ring Founder Jamie…
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Why Did Shaq Take Ring Equity Instead of a Fee?
Jamie Siminoff says Shaq took his Ring fee in equity instead of cash. At the end of 2015, Ring was spending heavily on TV, and Jamie started sketching a Super Bowl commercial he knew they could not afford. He asked an agent in Los Angeles how you hire a celebrity. Shaq's side said Shaq had already bought Ring for his house and wanted to meet. They set a time at the CES booth. Jamie told the team nothing, in case Shaq never showed. Yossi, his head of communications, a serious Lakers fan who was still at Amazon when they recorded this, saw Shaq walking up.
Jamie wanted Shaq because the fit was authentic to Shaq. Shaq had become a reserve officer in Los Angeles while he played for the Lakers,
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Why Did Jamie Siminoff Spend Ring's Last Million on TV Ads?
Jamie Siminoff spent about the last million dollars Ring had on TV because he thought a venture-backed company in their spot should go for a big outcome. His view is that de-risking would have been worse for everyone. A venture investor, he says, needs more than a 5 million dollar a year doorbell business that is barely making it. They had about a million dollars left, with competitors showing up.
In January 2015, at CES, at least 30 rival products launched. Ring had launched in October 2014. Revenue was heading toward about 500,000 to 600,000 dollars a month. A GoodRx founder, whose son played soccer with Jamie's son, had just tried TV and described results Jamie calls unbelievable. That S
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How Did Ring Survive Nearly Going Bankrupt?
Jamie Siminoff says Ring came to the verge of bankruptcy about four main times, and that a hardware business like theirs was nearly always that close. The cash went into inventory. Turner Novak describes it as taking all the money and buying inventory, so if the units did not sell, the company died. Jamie says that is exactly right.
He says the speed is what made the cash so thin. Growing slower would have left them less top-heavy, with profit coming in and more cash flow. Growing as fast as they were made cash flow upside down. If growth had fallen from about 300 percent to about 200 percent, he says that gap in cash flow would have killed the company. They stayed fully at that edge.
He c
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How Did Ring Fix Thousands of Broken Doorbells on Christmas Eve?
Jamie Siminoff says Ring found out on Christmas Eve that thousands of doorbells were broken. A new engineer had put junk code on a camera chip that could not be updated over the air. He remembers shipping a thousand, maybe 10,000, cameras that did not work. They were taping boxes in a garage they rented in Santa Monica, customers were saying they would cancel if a unit missed Christmas, and the batch went out untested.
They could not afford replacements. He says they barely had cash to stay afloat, let alone to swap something like 5,000 units. They had raised about a million dollars. Turner Novak puts the earlier round at about 100,000, and Jamie says they had not raised since. Driving home
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Why Did Jamie Siminoff Turn Down Shark Tank?
Jamie Siminoff turned down Shark Tank because the offer was a revenue share he called a kill shot. Mr. Wonderful made it. Jamie says Mr. Wonderful would have done the deal, and that part of the moment was shaped for television. From the business side, he says you could not take it. The company would not have survived those terms and would never have gotten ahead of them.
They were out of money when he was on the show. He says people now treat the refusal as obvious luck. His reason was the deal, not spare cash sitting at Ring. A revenue share like that, in his telling, was the kind of deal the business could not outrun. They went live a couple of weeks later.
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Did DoorBot Work on Shark Tank?
Jamie Siminoff says DoorBot did not really work when Shark Tank made them do a live demo. It was close. He kept offering to record the demo and play that instead. The producers said no. They film many segments in a day, the sets change fast, and the team had about 15 minutes to build its own set in front of a house.
They owned three, four, or five DoorBots in total and brought all of them. Mark Dillon, his CTO, tested them in a trailer on the Sony lot. Jamie says Mark was a nervous engineer who liked working late, and that by the time they were about to shoot, Mark looked like he had fallen in a pool. The units were not working. Mark stayed behind the fake house for the whole take, with now
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Why Was Shark Tank Critical for Ring?
Jamie Siminoff says Shark Tank was probably one of the most critical things in getting Ring to survive. Product was arriving that he could not pay for. Going on the show let them sell those units immediately and pay the factory so the factory would ship them. He also credits the timing, the credibility, and the awareness. He says it let them go.
About 30,000 people applied the year he did. The show wanted businesses a bit further along than someone baking at home. Someone in Los Angeles told him to email a producer who was looking for products like his. An hour later they said he should be on. He says the rest of getting on was more complicated than that first reply, but that email is what
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How Big Did Ring's Sales Get After Amazon Bought It?
Jamie Siminoff says Ring has done well over 10x the business since it has been at Amazon, with multiple billions of dollars of sales. He calls it a healthily profitable, still growing business that is still innovative and still has an impact.
He says that in 2017, staying independent would probably have meant raising about 300 million to reach profitability and an IPO, and he did not have the relationships to raise it. In his account, Amazon was what it took to invest the business back to profitability.
Turner Novak said the year before the sale was about 480 million, and Jamie agreed. Turner called the later size about 4.8 billion and said he would put five in the episode title because it
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Why Did Jamie Siminoff Go Back to Ring?
Jamie Siminoff went back to Ring because AI made him want a second at-bat. He stayed five years after selling the company to Amazon, then left in 2023. The business was very profitable. He felt it had won the Super Bowl and that growth from there would be more linear, so he would hand it over and do something else.
AI changed that. He says his brain started firing on what else the foundation of Ring could do, and from the outside he was not seeing the innovation he wanted in the industry he had built, including at Ring. He names the mission as making neighborhoods safer, and he says the speed of new features is what pulled him back. He calls it a credit to Amazon that they let him return.
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How Did Jamie Siminoff Learn From Dyson?
Jamie Siminoff learned from James Dyson without copying him and without ever meeting him. Dyson does not know he was the mentor Siminoff used. Copying usually does not work well. Siminoff looked at what Dyson did to build a brand people love for what it is, then asked what translates into his own voice, into the work, and into what stays authentic.
People often think mentorship means meeting the mentor. Studying a company can do the same job. Siminoff found patterns in what Dyson did. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. He has heard the advice not to meet your hero, because a meeting can leave you hating them afterward. He would still like to meet James Dyson and thinks Dyson
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How Much Did DoorBot Pay for Ring.com?
Jamie Siminoff paid a million dollars for ring.com over two years, with 175,000 wired the same day, while he had 187,000 dollars in the bank and the company was still DoorBot.
DoorBot was the name he used while building the first unit in his garage. It sounded like a robot and made a weak brand. In an update to Upfront Ventures he kept talking about rings of security, and a partner told him to call it Ring. The domain was for sale with no company on it. He thinks the seller's first offer was over a million dollars, and he agreed to a million. On closing day he said the board would not allow that purchase. The board was only him. An agreement was already in place at 750,000 dollars. He offer
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Why Did Investors Back Out of Jamie Siminoff's Round?
Jamie Siminoff says an East Coast group of early-stage investors backed out of his round at the last second. They had called themselves founder friendly and were basically in. They said the business was great, then worried he was in Los Angeles and would not be able to raise the next round. In his view, they should have admitted they were a hedge fund instead of writing the standard finance-person email.
He called them out in an email that used the word asshat, and some choicer words, and the email got passed around. At dinner, one of his investors said they did not know they were all asshats. His reaction was uh-oh. He was under so much stress. Looking back, the email is funny and a little
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Why Did Jamie Siminoff Start Christie Street?
Jamie Siminoff started Christie Street, a crowdfunding site, because Kickstarter had stopped taking hardware, and the doorbell was only the product used to launch that site.
He was in his garage and could not hear the doorbell, so he built a fix. Kickstarter was becoming popular, then hardware projects showed up and none of them shipped, so Kickstarter put on a moratorium and he lost his distribution. He decided to launch his own Kickstarter and named it Christie Street, after the street Edison's lab was on in New Jersey.
Christie Street needed a product. At a friend's conference in Paris he went through ideas, a snap garden among them, and the doorbell was the one picked. He did not care
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What Is the Ring App Store?
Jamie Siminoff wants Ring to notice a missed visit the way a person would, and Ring launched an app store so other groups can build specialized home apps Ring will not build itself.
Gardeners who usually come on Tuesday at 11 a.m. still have not arrived at 4 p.m., it is not a holiday, and there are no email receipts. Instead of another weekly alert that the gardeners are here, the note says it is four o'clock and they did not show up, then asks whether to call them or ping them. He is unsure the product will reach the next step, and he still pictures the assistant calling and reporting they will be there tomorrow. Owning a home is the greatest thing you can have and probably the biggest inv
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Why Does 4.869 Billion Sound More Real Than 5 Billion?
Turner Novak says 4.869 billion sounds more real than 5 billion because a figure that is not a round number gets treated as real, while 5 billion gets a shrug. Never round anything off.
Say 4.869 billion and people react as if the number must be real. Say 5 billion and people just say yeah. The psychology of getting people to click on content and watch it never ends, and you can never win it. He spent time with Mr. Beast, and the sophistication in the craft is something else. Click craft is not the area he thinks about all day, but sitting with someone who thinks about it all day is incredible.
Specialize in work you are actually good at. People who only kind of do a craft are never succes
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Why Did Ring Call Engineers Builders?
Jamie Siminoff made builder the official title for Ring engineering so people feel free to work across firmware, mobile, and backend. AI lets a firmware engineer ship a feature and integrate it, and the old specialty title was getting in the way.
Firmware used to be a real specialty around chips. Ring needed that person to stay there and not also do apps and backend. A title still changes how coworkers react. Say you are a backend engineer and pitch an idea for the app, and people answer that you do not know what you are talking about. Call the same person a builder and they feel more empowered to cross areas, come up with a feature idea even from firmware, mock it up, and build the thing a