From Shark Tank Rejection to Selling Ring for $1B (with Jamie Siminoff)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
For seven years. You're in a dark tunnel and you
see zero life.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
The difference of sixty days was personally being bankruptcy selling
the company for one point one five billion dollars.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
You went on Shark Tank in twenty thirteen.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I literally drove there and I'm like, I'm going to
do my thing.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Mark Cuban's going to just be like Jamie, here's the money.
I just don't see the progression. And for that reason a.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Lot I left there like in shambles, sort of crying,
and I remember showing them the first door. Boy.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
One person like literally just laughing, say, that's the ugliest
thing I've ever seen. Ended up working out.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
So what was it like for you coming back from
that rejection?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
For me, like that running is that reset.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
You get back up and you just like put your
shoes on and you go back out and go for
another run the next day.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Did you have any regrets?

Speaker 4 (00:49):
Hi, guys, welcome back to Post Run High. It's your
host Kate Max, and today's conversation is with Ring founder
and technology entrepreneur, inventor and runner Jamie simmon Off. We'll
be right back after this short break. Jamie Simonov, Welcome

(01:11):
to post run high.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Thanks for having me, Kate.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
I'm so excited for you to be here. We just
ran three miles through West Hollywood. How are you feeling.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
I'm feeling great. I love a run. I love a
post high post run high too.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
I know, do you feel the high?

Speaker 1 (01:22):
I do?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
I Actually, you know if you run enough for sure.
And that's that's why, you know why I love to
run every day.

Speaker 4 (01:29):
Probably Jamie runs three to four miles a day. I
loved finding that out about you. I love knowing when
successful people enjoy running, and I feel like it's more
common than you'd think.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
I think it's common that successful people have something that
they have to do to get like the energy out
of this other stuff we do during the day, and
so running, I know, for me, running is that for
some people, it's like weightlifting. I mean, there's all different things,
but yeah, for me, like that, running is that reset
that I kind of need every day to sort of
stay like a human.

Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
And Jamie was telling me that he's been a runner
since high school.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
You did cross country, I did. We're similar in that way.
We're both from New Jersey, so shout out to Jersey cross.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Country Jersey strong.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, and Jersey cross country is hard, especially for the boys.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Jersey cross country.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
I mean you also have a lot of weather, Like
you know, it's like we're so lucky here in California.
I mean it rained the last couple of days, but
that's so rare here. But yeah, in Jersey, it's like
you're running through snow and sleet and rain, and just
like it is, it is pretty rough.

Speaker 4 (02:26):
I was going to say, cross country is the one
sport that even if it's snowing, the race is not
getting canceled.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
And I learned that the hard way in high school.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, the show must go on with cross country and
New Jersey.

Speaker 4 (02:36):
So you took running into your twenties, into your thirties,
like you have been a runner for life ever since,
kind of starting in high school.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah, and probably even like in middle school, I did lacrosse,
and I was terrible at lacrosse. But the one thing
I could do was like outrun. I mean, if you're
bad at something like I can just try hard. And
so like like running hustling was the way that I
was able to sort of be, you know, someone that
helped the tea without having like the stick handling skills
and the things that I just definitely was not born with.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Yeah, I was a lacrosse player too.

Speaker 4 (03:05):
Actually, my whole family was like lacrosse family in Jersey,
which is also very competitive.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, lacrosse in Jersey is like that's yeah, lacrosse.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
It's like it's like basketball in Indiana, like it it's
our thing.

Speaker 4 (03:16):
Yeah, So how many miles a week? Would say you're
running off? You're runing three to four miles a day?

Speaker 2 (03:21):
I probably, I probably average. I would say probably like
six to six and a half days a week. I mean,
if I'm traveling on a day or something happens, like
I can't obviously run, Yeah, but I don't do any
down days. So if I'm here all week, I will
run literally every day. I have a bit of a
funny schedule because, yeah, I go into the office around
eight o'clock, and I find that my brain around one

(03:42):
thirty two o'clock is just done, Like I've just I've
like maxed it out. Too many decisions, too many things
have happened, and I'm not as good. So I usually
leave the office around two, go for a run, and
then I'll work kind of like mixed into stuff with
family and dinner and stuff. But I'll basically work like
the night, a couple hours here and there, get on
the laptop or something, but I have to sort of

(04:05):
take a break mid day for a run.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:06):
I honestly feel like if you have the flexibility to
do that, I think running mid day is like the
best time to run. I've tried leaning into becoming more
of like a morning runner to get it.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Out of the way early, but sometimes it makes me
really tired.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
I can't.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
I just and I know people that get up at
like five am and workout and that's their thing for
the whole day.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
I can't do it.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
I actually like to wake up like on the phone,
doing work, getting things done, and then yeah, and then
I hit this just like this after it's not really
after lunch, but it is this like mid day kind
of ended day, like one two o'clock.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
I'm toasted.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
How would you say running has helped you in your career?

Speaker 2 (04:42):
I mean, running is a let It's allowed me to
I'd say, like max myself out in business. I think
you know the stress of building stuff, the the amount
of decisions that you have to make when you're an
entrepreneur and building a company. I mean ring went so
fast three million, thirty million, one set four eighty. So
that was like in a four year period when from

(05:03):
three million to four hundred and eighty million dollars in revenue.
You know, while that's happening, the decisions, the stress, all
these things, and running was the outlet that I could
sort of do to control to you know, try to
keep myself balanced and I also you know, and also
healthy through it. I mean, a lot of people, you know,
they turn to other things that are that are bad you.
You don't have the right habits, you start eating, you

(05:23):
know poorly. If you're a runner, You're not going to
eat poorly. You're not going to drink that much because
you know, if you drink too much, you're going to
like not want to run. So, like I think running
does keep you balance. It's been a great trick.

Speaker 4 (05:34):
Yeah, And I feel like running also is something that
teaches you a lot of discipline. And I've had a
lot of founders and CEOs come on the show and
say that they love hiring runners. How do you feel
about hiring runners to work for you?

Speaker 2 (05:47):
So we always had the metaphor that we use was
we want to hire marathoners. And what I meant by
that is not just runners, but I want someone to
me a marathon is the stupidest thing any human could
ever do. And when you think about it, I've done too,
you've done three. Yeah, so we're both pretty stupid. But
if you think about it, what a stupid thing. You
basically train for over half a year, so almost a

(06:09):
year you train for this thing, You go out in
the morning, at night, you're running alone, and then when
you do the actual thing, you finish like I don't know,
like I finished in the Boston Marathon, like twenty one
thousands place, and so here I worked all this time
to finish, you know, not even anywhere anyone could see it,
and I was so proud of myself. And so I think,
if you can find the people that are willing to

(06:30):
work hard and be proud of what they did, so
when you run a marathon, you're proud of what you accomplished.
And so if people can be proud of what they accomplished,
then they're so good in the team because they're not
trying to be the number one person, they're not trying
to get all the limelight. They're excited about what they're
adding to the team, and you put a team of
marathon ers together and you get Ring, you.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Get right exactly.

Speaker 4 (06:50):
And I also think the thing with running two is
like running is something and we talked about this on
the run, where consistency compounds, where it's not something you
have to be the most athletic to do, but if
you just put the time I'm in, you can get
better at it. And I think that that's a nice
analogy to Ring because you guys, you know, Ring wasn't
an overnight success it was at all. It was something
you guys built for a little over a decade, right,

(07:12):
and then eventually.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
It it hit.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
And I think that's when you really go through almost
every business, every successful even influencer. You know, it's like
you see the success and so you think that's when
it happened, and then you go back and you realize
like they started ten, fifteen, twenty, like it's been their
whole life that they're working up to this, and that
you're right.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
It's the same with running.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
It is like you just grind it out and it's
not you know, going for a run when it's raining
or you know it's it's hard. And so I think
being consistent and grinding it out. That mentality is exactly
what translates into business because not every day, you know,
building Ring, it wasn't glorious every day, like it wasn't accolades,
it wasn't we weren't sure we were going to make it.

(07:53):
And so I think that's where entrepreneurs and people saying, oh,
I want to be an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
It's like entrepreneur's tough. It's like it's tough up to.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Build a business, and so you want to find and
surround yourself with people that are gritty and willing to
stick it out.

Speaker 4 (08:05):
Yeah, when you say that, it's tough, and like it's
a lot of uncertainty in building a business, Like what
was the uncertainty that you guys were facing when you
were building Ring?

Speaker 3 (08:16):
And how did you mentally get through that?

Speaker 2 (08:18):
So you know, so we sold it in the end
for a billion dollars, And I think when you do
that and then people look at how long you're in it.
So let's say it was seven years, It's like, oh,
so I have to work seven years and make a
billion dollars.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
It's like, no, for seven years, you're in a dark tunnel.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
And you see zero light and you just keep like
every day, you keep pushing forward, pushing forward, but you
don't know it's ever going to work. And most of
the time, there was so many times we almost ace
the thing into the ground, even right before we sold.
And so what the hardest part is, like, how do
you keep going every day when you don't know that
the finish line actually exists?

Speaker 1 (08:53):
When you don't know that you're going to make it.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
I mean, you keep trying to push forward, but a
lot of times you don't even know if you're really
getting for it.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
You don't know if you're going to make it.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
And I think that's the toughest part about a business
is we usually do the study on a business looking
backwards when it already had its success, but when you're
in it, you don't know if it's going to be
another year or two years.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Like you don't know, you know.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
It's like a Hollywood actor, like they don't know when
they're going to blow up.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Once they blew up.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
It's like all I had to do was ten movies
and the eleventh works. Well, they didn't know even on
the tenth movie.

Speaker 4 (09:22):
That that was going to work, right, And I feel
like it kind of relates back to you, Like I
was listening to a bit of your story and how
you said, you know, you were always somebody that loved
inventing things. Right. You went into the garage, and you
loved building things with your hands. You loved growing up
working on cars.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
Right.

Speaker 4 (09:36):
I think what's interesting there too is it's like even
with Ring, you never probably knew that that was going
to be the product for you, that was the end
all be all right, because you could have discovered another
product along the way while developing Ring.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, I mean I and what really with Ring, Like
what became the difference for Ring versus everything else I
had worked on because I was kind of a serial entrepreneur.
Is we figured out or I figured out this mission
of making neighborhood safer.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
That all of the.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Way people were building home security at that time was
kind of based on old technology, on old thinking, and
that new technology had happened and no one had evolved
sort of residential neighborhood security, proactive security.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
So all of a sudden, now with the.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Phone, you could answer the door when you weren't here
and make it like you had presence at the home,
which would stop burglaries, and so all these things you
could do like no one had thought of. And with
Ring what made it so big is that we realized
that we could rebuild everything around home security. And that's
kind of been this now like lifelong mission of making

(10:38):
neighborhood safer, which we've gone and built, you know, floodlight
cameras and all these other things, not just the doorbell.

Speaker 4 (10:44):
Yeah, and my husband is a massive user of Ring.
I can't wait for you to check out his Ring
profile because he does. He has Airbnb properties and he
has Jeremy, how many Ring cameras you have, like twenty?

Speaker 3 (10:55):
I have one.

Speaker 4 (10:56):
I use it in my living room. I actually bought
three to set up all over my house. And Jeremy
was like, this is really creepy, Kate, you can only
have one. I'm only allowing you to have a Ring
camera in the living room.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
And I am, I am. I mean, we have lots
of it's fun. We have lots of customers.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
We call our customers neighbors that love the indoor cameras
for different things. I'm an outdoor camera ring person, so
in our house it's all outdoor.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
Yeah, throw that to me.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
I got to talk good catch.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
You can kind of scroll through there.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
We go look at that. Oh this is that's a
good ring, that's a great ring neighbor.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
I'm scared.

Speaker 4 (11:29):
We go. No, Jeremy is a massive ring ring customer.
When you were noodling on the idea of ring and
I want you to kind of tell us also the
story of how the idea came to you, when what
you were actually building at the time that you discovered
your first ring camera, But when you were noodling on
this idea and invented it and kind of looked into
the market, I'm sure to see like does this exist yet?

Speaker 3 (11:50):
Were you shocked to find out that it didn't?

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Well, that's the face. So I was in my garage.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
I was working on I think called staff Garden, a
thing called which was like a gardening system I think
called Pokedy Poke, which would call you for your conference call.
So I had all these other IY was like kind
of trying to incubate ideas in the garage.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
Couldn't hear the doorbell. I had just gotten an iPhone.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
And I literally was like, there must be a Wi
Fi door, but that goes to my iPhone.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
I can't hear the doorbell.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
And I looked online and there was nothing and I
was I wasn't even like shocked.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
It was more like, I'll just build it.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
And so I hacked up a camera with a Wi
Fi thing and like a little button put it on
the front door. And then my wife was the first one.
I was like, this is awesome. This makes me feel
safer at home, which was a surprise because it was
a kind of a gadget, not meant to be, not
meant to transform the home. And then everyone that would
stop by and this thing was super ugly and big

(12:44):
and like grotesque that I just built and hacked up
in my garage, and everyone's like, this thing's amazing, and
so all of a sudden it was this. So it
wasn't like an AHA moment, but it was like a
slow burn of AHAs where people kept saying it I
was using it, and then I and then it was
my wife's saying it makes her feel safer that I realized,
wait a second, like this is a different way of
doing home security.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
And that was.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
That's really what I'll say, Like the AHA was is
that it was towards like we can do security in
a totally different way with these devices.

Speaker 4 (13:14):
Yeah, because before that it was only the kind of
security devices that were super fancy had to be basically
wired in right that you'd.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Use as expensive wired in didn't really go to your phone.
I mean they're all built sort of pre phone. And
again I got kind of lucky that I started in
it with the phone, so I came like phone first.
And once you attached you know, people, we call it
always home, Like that's our tagline, like once you attach
people to their homes, like it actually just that itself
makes things safer. And then the other thing that we

(13:42):
did differently is I've always looked at it as like
what I call our customers neighbors, And we've always looked
at the neighborhood as our customer, not the actual physical home.
So like when we ran, I kept saying, like ring ring,
it was like it rings all over, but even like
the house next door to the ring, I look at
them as like our customer, as our neighbor, just as
much as the person who like sort of gave us

(14:03):
the transactional dollars for it, because we're there to secure
the whole neighborhood, like we you don't live in your home,
you live in your neighborhood. Like we went for a run,
like we want the whole neighborhood to be nice. We
don't want just like our home. And so what I
love with RING is like putting things together in a
way where each individual person can sort of buy and
control their cameras and their devices and their information, but

(14:25):
then together we can have a safer neighborhood and do
things in the neighborhood that are better.

Speaker 3 (14:29):
I love that perspective because it is so true, and
I'm sure there's been so many instances of crimes that
RING has helped solve, not for the homeowner, but for
the literally the neighborhood or the surrounding area.

Speaker 4 (14:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
I mean, like the first thing we found out when
we started putting rings out there and doing like little
studies of crime is that if a neighborhood had had
more than some percentage of rings, called like ten percent
or twenty percent of rings, burglars wanted to find an
empty like, they wanted to find an area where there
was homes that all of them were vacant, Like, they
didn't want anyone in the home circle around, So they
weren't going to like burglarize a house in the middle

(15:02):
if they thought there was people in both sides. They
wanted like an empty area of a neighborhood. And so
when they see they get a ring and someone say
oh hi, they realized they were on a camera.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Now they would leave the neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
And so we did like realize from that, and we
just keep doing stuff since then, Yeah, to try to
like help the neighbor Like we want to reduce crime
in neighborhoods, not just our customers' homes.

Speaker 4 (15:22):
When you say that you were a serial entrepreneur, what
were you doing before ring to make money?

Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, So, I mean I'd gotten fortunate.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
I did like a little telecom business with phone cards,
so I'd done like a few, but they were all
like very little businesses, you know, like I kind of
spun things up. I did a thing called phone tag
that was voicemailed text that was kind of mildly successful.
But they were all I'd say mildly successful and didn't
like take off good ideas.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
But they just.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
Didn't have that Like they were the doorbell without the mission.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
You know.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
It's like they were like a little pointed something. Because
again I was an inventor, so I kept inventing these things,
but you needed something bigger to build like a business
from and that's where Ring again having this mission to
make neighborhoods safer, that broadened this too, really and that
is like the mission to make neighborhood safer is what
led to Ring being the largest home security company in
the world. If I had said we're going to build

(16:17):
the best doorbells in the world, we'd be a probably
a small video doorbell maker competing with hundreds of others
and be a normal sort of business. That maybe would
have been like okay, but I probably would have been
looking for my next serial entrepreneur thing from there, right.

Speaker 4 (16:31):
And it seems like you tapped into as like an
inventor and somebody that was, you know, trying to build
the thing that was going to be it for you,
like you were interested in like from gardening to tapping
into conference phone calls like these are to ring cameras,
Like they're such different sectors that you were building. It's interesting,
Like it'd be funny just to be like a fly

(16:52):
inside your brain a little bit.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
It would be interesting and also torturing.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
It's but I think what's you know, what's really drives
me is I look, I find like fixing problems like
I love fixing problems, and I think, you know, a
real inventor to me, like, that's what an inventor does,
is like so that's the difference between an inventor and entrepreneur.
Like an entrepreneur is someone who's trying to build a business.
An inventor is someone who's literally just trying to fix problems.

(17:17):
They don't care about the financial sort of gain from
that problem, whether it's a big problem or a little problem.
What I got lucky and as an inventor, the thing
that makes you so happy is you want to you know,
what you want to affect. You want to sort of
have like, you know, make a difference in the world,
and so you have to do that by scale, and
so a business helps you with that. So with Ring,
what I got lucky with is that I'm able to

(17:38):
do it at scale and actually really like you know,
launch a new product like we did with the Dog
Search Party and instead of it being like an idea,
now it goes and we're returning a dog a day
to their homes.

Speaker 4 (17:49):
We talked about the Dog Search Party on our run,
but for people listening that haven't seen the run yet,
can you just re explain to US what the Dog
Search Party is.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
So there's millions of dogs that I go missing every
year in the US alone.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
It's crazy.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
And so it's families basically missing a family member, I mean,
like he goes missing. And until we launched this, the
best technology we had to look for a dog was
to get in your car, drive around and yell for it.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
And it's a family member.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
So we did is we created this thing where now
anyone can post and then ring neighbors at for free,
whether you're a ring customer or not, you're a picture
of your dog, if it's missing, where it's missing from,
we will look for it with AI to look for
literally that dog in that area where we think it
could be missing.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
And then if we find it.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
So if like let's say we find it on your
camera out here, it's to say, kay, like this dog
that's missing looks like this dog in front of your house.
And this is where the privacy thing is cool. You
can Okay, I don't like I'm a bad person, I
don't want to help with the dog in the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
That's fine.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
You can do that, Like we allow you to do
that and no one will ever know and your privacy
information is all fine, or you say like yes, I
want to contact my neighbor and say, like, hey, person
who lost their pet, Like I think your dog is
out in front of my home, let me help you.
And so with that, we're literally returning over one dog
per day to their family, which is like that's a
family reuniting family members every day, and so that's something

(19:07):
as an inventor, like it's like, who cares if that's
going to I think it will help us as a
business because I would assume people will support Ring hearing
this and want to have ring cameras and like, you know,
but who cares, Like it's so cool to be able
to do that and reunite people with like reunite kids
with their dog.

Speaker 4 (19:25):
I mean it's amazing, Yeah, and I feel like that
also will you know, switch quickly from dogs to missing
people to you know, so many different types of things
that you can solve through facials, and.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
That's where we can do so much.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
We have to be careful and this is each one
with the privacy and how we do like soasical because
you know, we want to make sure that people feel
comfortable and are comfortable and know that their camera their
data is there, so like we want to make sure
of that. But I think there are ways, like with
the Dog Search party, to invent where now we have
this invention where it works, we get notified and you
get to choose what to do with that. In the

(19:58):
brown shooting that just happened out in Rhode Island, we
have a thing called community alerts, and so the police
are able to do a community alert and they put
alert out saying hey, like in this neighborhood, we want
to get any video, you know, any video that you
have of sort of this stuff for this incident, and
people were able to post in and some of the
videos that were used came from that community alerts. And
so again like if they didn't respond, the police wouldn't

(20:20):
even know who they asked. So that your privacy is
one hundred percent you stay anonymous. But the community of
course wanted to help in something like that, and so
you know we can like help with that.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
So I think there's lots of ways that.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Again bring the community together when you need to, and
do it in a way that's privacy centric, and that's
like the that's the total invention, Like that's how we
can do it and then when you don't want to,
when you just want to stay on your own, it's
your data, like of course, like it's yours and you
can control it.

Speaker 4 (20:55):
It's amazing to hear everything that Ring has transferred warmed
into right and especially now with everything you guys are
doing with Amazon.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
But what was the initial idea?

Speaker 1 (21:06):
I mean, the initial idea was really just like I mean,
the initial idea.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Was I wasn't seeing packages like I was, you know,
like someoneould come to the door you had to sign
up our package.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
Like I literally wasn't notified.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
I couldn't you know, the doorbell wasn't working, And I'm like,
I have this phone with me.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
It'd be great if it was on my phone. And
so it was that simple.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
And then from there I realized it gave again the
first week that was presence, like giving me presence to
the home, you know, your home.

Speaker 1 (21:30):
You know.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
I saw this when I was in the fires in
the Palisades, Like why would I stay back and try
to like fight fire off my home? Is because like
your home is a lot more than just a thing,
Like it's like it's it's meaningful. And so I think
when you can attach your home, when technology can help
sort of stay connected to your home, we travel more.

(21:51):
I think it creates meaningful outcomes, whether it's with a crime, safety,
your kids coming home, like.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
All these things.

Speaker 4 (21:57):
Yeah, what would you say is your advice for people,
for other inventors and other entrepreneurs trying to build something.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
I think what I learned from Ring is like, try
to find something that benefits people that is infinite, meaning
like like like making neighborhoods safer. You're never probably going
to achieve that one hundred percent, Like it's a it's
an infinite goal, but it's tangible, so you can understand
like the steps to getting there. Like I know exactly
what I'm going to do over the next twelve months,

(22:26):
thirty six months, five years, Like I know with Ring
exactly what to keep doing to try to get closer
to that goal. But so it's very tangible, but it's
also infinite. And so I think, like the best thing
you can do business whatever is like find these missions,
you know, go to Mars. You know, it's super tangible,
but it's like a lot to get there, you know,

(22:47):
making neighborhoods safer.

Speaker 4 (22:49):
Figure out the problems that you're facing that could be
so simple, right, and maybe build for that right? And
I there's isn't didn't one of the Uber co founders
like he wanted to invent uber because he couldn't.

Speaker 3 (23:03):
Get any cars in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
That Scarrett like it's so simple.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, just and it was like you know here he
is at a bar and like it's like but same thing.
Like he had a phone and it's like, why can't
I just press a button on the phone, Like why
I have to call someone? And like great, Hi, I
mean can you imagine that we used to have to
call someone and tell them like our address and where
we were, and they would like call someone and like
tell you how long.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
It was going to be?

Speaker 2 (23:25):
And like we have this technology, we have this phone
and so And I think what you hit on is
also like simple. Too often we overthink things and feel
like unless it's complicated, it's not going to be good.
It's almost like we have to work harder to have
something be good. And if you look at the things
that have been successful, yes, like implementing them is hard.

(23:45):
I mean Uber was not easy on the back end,
but the concept is super easy. Ring is super easy.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
Door dash like go through these massive.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Companies that have happened, and if you really look at
like what's behind them, it's actually like very simple and
tangible and understandable, like what it is and anyone can
understand it.

Speaker 4 (24:04):
Do you feel like things also that seem complicated get
easier when you just do them. For example, like building
a company like Ring, which isn't just the security cam
you guys also have an app that connects to it, right,
Like is a very seamless experience from setting it up
to using it.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Well, I will say, like complicated is like a trigger
word for me. So when someone says to me, like
in anything like this is complicated, I'm like, no, it's not,
because I do think you can simplify. I mean it's
like first principles, like you can simplify everything, and you
got to keep doing that. I mean it's look at
Steve Jobs at the iPhone of like the number of
buttons that were on the phone before and after, Like

(24:42):
you just have to keep it's hard to it's actually simple,
is hard, like will I will admit that. But I
think when people think something's complicated, I think what a
lot of times they're trying to do is almost like
justify their own existence. And to me, most of the
stuff boils down to and again, look at like the
last ten years of massive trillion dollar companies or you

(25:03):
know both, you know, billion dollar plus companies.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
They're pretty simple concepts.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
Now, of course, you get into AI or something and
you're building algorithms like that's science.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
That's a little bit different.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
But if you look at like the businesses that have
come out that have really exploded, you I'm wearing ALO
right now.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
Like Alo is like I.

Speaker 3 (25:19):
Mean, I got to get you in Vory but fair
vor but.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Vora is the same thing. I mean, you know, it's
you know these these like.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
I'm sure it's there's complexity in like what you choose
and do, but like it's it's absolutely understandable what to
do and how to do it.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 4 (25:36):
It's like the concept of like building a car, right,
it seems really complicated, but if you just follow the instructions,
I'm sure it's not that bad.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
You can absolutely build anything if you And this is
also where AI and YouTube have allowed us to learn
things like we can now like if you want to
build anything, I mean I do it all the time.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
You know.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
AI is my back end for building stuff. So now
with product, where I used to have to like go
to a team of my engineers and say, hey, could
you look at this and distract them, I can now
like almost build the product to ninety something percent in
a digital way and then go to.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Them and say, hey, like, here's what I'm thinking. Does
this does this work? What do you think?

Speaker 3 (26:12):
What is your go to AI platform?

Speaker 1 (26:14):
You know? I kind of jump around to everything. I
use Amazon Q because that's one of our sort of
internal ones. Gemini Grock.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
I love chatchypt Claude for coding, I mean, and the
most interesting about AI. And I've never seen this in
my career. I would like to say I'm young, but
I'm not that young. Is the speed at which people
are leapfrogging each other is something I've never seen before.
Like someone's a leader, but only for like a few months,
and then it's literally like something else comes out and

(26:44):
it's twice as good as the other one, and then
something else come out It's like that's twice as good.
So I don't I'm actually not like wed to any
single one because I keep seeing them leapfrog and I
just want to I want to be on the best one.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
Because to me, AI is.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Just it's the it's the ability to have the smart
artest team in the world working for you, and so
I want the smartest team at any time.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
How do you feel like with RING, you guys are
starting to integrate AI.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
You know, the the AI stuff.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Just like with everything we do, we try to really humanize,
like what's the purpose of it? And so the Dog
Search Party. We have a thing called smart Video descriptions.
So now if you think about pre AI, we the
best in class way to manage your home was you
get a motion alert and you're like, oh, let me
check what that is. What we want with AI is

(27:31):
we want to check what that is for you and
then only tell you when we should tell you, like.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Only bother you by. And that doesn't mean it's a crime.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
It could be your kids coming home, it could be
your you know, an animal that you like to see
in the back. You know, it could be like wildlife,
and there's lots of other reasons, but we want to
boil it down so we're only telling you and it's
something that you actually want to see. Smart Video descriptions
is our one of our first sort of ways of
getting there and it's amazing, Like now in front of
my house. You know, I had turned I literally turned

(27:59):
off motion alerts on a lot of my cameras.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
I had so many.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Now I have it so that I get basically a
single alert for the whole house. I'll get the description,
so I'll say like, you know, the gardeners are here,
you know, gonna and then like that's it, and I'm like, great,
I know the gardeners a there.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
I don't even need to open the thing. I don't
need to see the video.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
So we're integrating it.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
Yeah, again in simple ways, but they do help the consent.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
And trying to I think where we can use AI
is like where can we help AI to assist people? Like,
how can we build AI in a way that is
like that's what a I should.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
Be working for us, making our lives easier.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
That's it. It's it to me, it's it's it's like anything.
It's like a dishwasher, you know, Like I didn't live
before dishwashers, but.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
I wouldn't want to. Like, I like the fact that
I can, like, you know, the hardest thing I have
to do is put the thing into the dishwasher, which
my wife will tell you sometimes I miss you know,
we all do. But but I mean the dishwasher, Like,
what an amazing thing. And I think, you know, to
that level, that's what a I should be doing for
us in all of these places. It's like it should
be watching our cameras and then telling us we need

(29:00):
to do something or asking us when we need to
do something, but taking that load down on us so
we can go and enjoy and do other things, give
us time back.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
So backing up a little bit, when you went on
Shark Tank in twenty thirteen, so you started your business
in twenty eleven?

Speaker 3 (29:24):
Am I getting that right?

Speaker 1 (29:25):
I started in twenty eleven?

Speaker 4 (29:26):
Okay, So from twenty eleven to then twenty thirteen, you
go on Shark Tank. A what was it like pitching
your business on live TV? And what was the state
of ring at the time?

Speaker 2 (29:36):
So it was actually called Doorbot at the time. It
was crazy, you know, the whole Shark Tank thing.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
I mean, I did.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
So I wrote a book called ding Dong, which I
feel like is the proper name for my book of me,
but which has like kind of and Shark Tank is
just so integrated because it is such a big part
of the story. But you know for me going on
at that point, going on Shark Tank, because it's funny
now people are like, oh, oh, you must be so
happy you never took money from them, and it's like

(30:03):
I was a nobody in a garage.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
I needed money At the time.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
I going on Shark Tank was like an amateur athlete
going to the Olympics.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
I thought it was the biggest thing ever. I mean
I was. I thought I had like peaked in my
career going on Shark Tank. I thought that was the
biggest thing I'll ever do. I mean, that was huge
to be on Shark Tank. So I was nervous. I
trained for it.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
I built the set in my backyard and I literally
had neighbors come over and ask me questions. I mean
I trained for that thing. Literally how Olympian would train
for like a swimming event.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
What was the hardest part.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
I think the.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
Hardest part is how they when you actually are doing
like the tank, like you do your little pitch, and
then they way they ask questions, They all just like
fire questions at you at.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
The same time.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
And so how you manage that because if you just
stop answering Mark Cuban, for example, and you just talked
to Barbara. Mark will just get like sort of like
he'll just be like, Okay, I'm done and he'll stop
asking questions, which that like turns to She's like, how
do you integrate? Like when Mark says something and Barbara
and it's like they're different, but you try to like
and again, this is what you train for. It's like
you integrated it. So it's like, oh, Barbara, like what

(31:11):
you said is kind of like what Mark was asking
and then like what Robert was saying, and so you
keep trying to like bring it in so everyone's involved.
Because you're not also guaranteed to get on air with
Shark Tank.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Unless the episode is good.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
It is TV, and so there's a percentage that it's
pretty high of people that go on do a taping
and actually don't go on air, which I like, I
needed the money and I also needed the credibility and
awareness of being on Shark Tank, right.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
Because you know, we talked about this on the run too.

Speaker 4 (31:39):
But it's like you did end up leaving Shark Tank,
not taking the offer that you got, But what were
your expectations going into the show, Like did you think
somebody was going to bite.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
I literally drove there and I'm like, I'm gonna do
my thing. Mark Cuban's going to just be like, Jamie,
here's the money. I'm gonna like walk off. And I
think like this, you know, entrepreneurs, inventors, entrepreneurs, we have
to have this reality distortion thing, like we have to
just like believe some of this stuff.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
And so like I did, like I truly just like believed.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
That Mark was going to just like whatever you want, Jamie,
like this is a great product, like I'm your partner,
and be like, oh my god, Mark Cuban like thank you,
like we're going to be best friends. And I finished
my thing, and Mark Cuban like almost immediately is like,
you know, Jamie, great, thanks Bob, I'm out, and I was,
oh no. And then from there, basically everyone else is out.

(32:28):
And then Kevin O'Leary, mister wonderful, kind of gave me
a deal. But it was a deal that like no
human could ever take, and so I had to pass
on that and I left there without money that I
truly needed at the time, and I left there like
in shambles. I was in tears when I left the
show driving and you know, it is almost sadly it's
like in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
I live in Los Angeles, so.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
I didn't have the like they I didn't have even
like the decency of being able to like spend a
night in a hotel room to like you know, cry alone.
Like I had to go back to like my family
immediately from this taping being you know, dejected from Shark.

Speaker 4 (33:02):
Tank, which is hard because it's, like you go on
that show you have it's it's hard when things don't
meet your expectations for anything in life, right, But on
top of that, you're doing it on such a public stage.
It's super vulnerable for you to be up there pitching
your business, your baby that you're working so hard on.
So what was it like for you coming back from
that rejection?

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Did it fuel you?

Speaker 1 (33:20):
I mean, it's like the running thing.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
You just you know, you get back up and you
just like put your shoes on and you go back
out and go for another run the next day, and
you need to keep going the other thing. And this
is not I I would this is definitely not advice.
I was too far into the business, like I had
put all my money in, so I couldn't stop. I think,
I think when I left Shark Tank. If for whatever reason,
if I somehow had some magic wand that said like

(33:42):
you can have all the money back you put in
and you're fine, and like no harm, no foul, like
you can just walk away, I probably would have walked
away from the business.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
At that time.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
It was so hard I needed. We were so down
in the hole in money. I just didn't see a
path out. And I think if the Shark Tank episode
had not aired when it did, which was in November
going into the holidays, we had just got our inventory
started coming in so we could sell it. I don't

(34:14):
think the company could have made it. It was just it
was we were too close to the edge.

Speaker 4 (34:17):
It's interesting that even though the Sharks didn't move forward
with the business, that just getting that publicity on air
was enough for consumers to see the product, see you
see your business, and say, wait, I actually want that.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah. I mean it ended up being and I definitely
did not do it for this.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
I really did it for the money at the time,
like I needed the money. I mean at the time,
if you had said you can choose getting the money
or being on air, I probably would have chose the money.
But being on air on Shark Tank at that time,
the credibility, the awareness, the ratings, I mean definitely, the
impact of it was at least a Super Bowl ad
for a company that was in a garage. I mean

(34:58):
it was unbelievable. I mean I remember going to a
retailer and having a meeting in like with a very
low level person at the retailer, in like the worst
little conference room that they put, like the vendor that
doesn't deserve to be their kind of conference room, Like
you know, like you are not the like you're struggling
at that time. And the CEO of that retailer heard

(35:20):
I was there and had watched Shark Tank. I was like, oh,
I want to meet that person, and it's like like no,
I was never going to meet that CEO of that
of that retailer ever, And because of Shark Tank, I
had like a kind of all of a sudden, like
this B level little bit of celebrity kind of something
that I could then leverage into like getting myself out there.
So not only did it help with actually selling product

(35:44):
to the consumer, but it also helped of getting myself
to be able to I realized I had opened some doors,
like Hi, I'm Jamie.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
I was on Shark Tank. Can I meet with you?
And at the time, again.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
Big show it was, you know, gave you just again
some edge, always any some edge, yes.

Speaker 4 (35:59):
Something, And I feel like it's hard because it's like
a little bit of a double edged sword where you're like, yeah,
like I didn't end up going forward with any of
the Sharks, but I was still on the show. You
might have seen me, and it did, you know, create
a little bit of momentum.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, And I would have thought that like not getting
a deal kind of would have killed me.

Speaker 1 (36:15):
But in the sort of world of Hollywood.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
And influencers and whatever that media, like just being on
it at that time was big enough that it gave
us that bump that we needed. It gave me, like
just again, a slight edge over everything else, Like if
there was if you know, a retailer had to look
at five different products coming in one of them is
also on Shark Tank.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
It was like maybe with them, just a little edge.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
And you know, pretty soon after Door bought skyrocketed then
he rebranded to Ring and one of your first investors
was Richard Branson.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
Yeah, how did you get in touch with Richard Branson?

Speaker 2 (36:51):
So I installed a ring, like one of the new
rings that had just come out on a guy's house.
So I kind of knew he's an investory type person.
And I was like, I was going everywhere I was
anyone I could get to install a ring on their
house or whatever to show them ring. And they the
guy in sallid it with went to the island to
Richard Branson's island like that next week and they're at

(37:13):
dinner and Richard Branson says, like, you know, eh, you know,
what are some interesting things you're seeing right now? And
I love doing Richard Branson. I'm terrible, but it's funny.
He thinks it's funny, I hope. And so the guy said,
oh my god, like you know, I literally this package
got delivered today and look like here's the video of

(37:33):
the person like and I was able to talk to
him and told him to put it around the side.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
And I lived in San Francisco. We got stolen, and.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
Richard's like, oh, I want to give it to my
friends for the holidays, and so can you put me
in touch? And so I literally get this email from
my buddy wes Chan and he said, like Richard wants
to buy rings for his friends.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
For the holidays.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
And at the time, we were really small and people
kept being like, oh, if I buy three.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
Rings, can I get a discount? And I'd be like,
oh my god, my life.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
You know, it's like I'm like trying to build this
this and it's like three rings that I'm like giving
like thirty dollars off, like this is what I'm doing
during the day. And I'm like, oh, Richard wants to
great like your friend Richard, like I can't wait to
get his holiday gifts done. And then I realised it
was Richard Branson. That was like holy shit, obviously, and
we started emailing back and forth and I said, well,
your friends are gonna be really happy because not only

(38:18):
is it really cool, but it also helps make their
neighborhood safer.

Speaker 1 (38:21):
And Richard said, like, what do you mean.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
I said, oh well, and I was like obviously, like
a fisherman like hooking the fish, and I.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Said, oh, well, we just stopped this crime in which
happened just in the valley like like the day before.
We had these videos of it.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
So I sent it to Richard and He's liked, I'd
love to invest, and so I said, well, we're about
to close around, so you have to like hurry up.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
And so he sent his guy.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
This was on a Friday, and so that weekend his
investment guy came. Was not such stoked to be sent
to the doorbell company for the weekend, but he came
and loved it. And yeah, Richard invested and it was
an amazing like again, and that was we'd never spoke
openly about the mission outside of the internal company. So

(39:04):
when I hire people, we talked about the mission. But
the mission always felt like.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
You don't want to lose trust with someone.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
And so as you're like if you're like making doorbells
and you're a tiny little company, to say we're gonna
make neighborhood safer, it just doesn't sound believable. So I'd
always tell people we got to wait till we get bigger,
like we have to get some we have to get
some proof. We have to like show people what we're doing.
We can't just tell them. And when Richard invested, I
said to Richard, I said, like, listen, if you know,
and Richard believed it, and we had some stuff I

(39:32):
you know, if you basically help us get this message out,
like that's credible and so Richard wrote this blog post
when he invested of like you know, a doorbell that
can you know, make neighborhoods safer, like this is one
or something, and that really took us again a huge
like step up in our level because now people saw
like what it was really doing, and that again change

(39:52):
people's perspective on the product.

Speaker 4 (39:54):
Yeah, and it went from Richard Branson to Goldman Sachs
gave you guys a massive investment, to all these other
company Sequil O'Neil Shack.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Oh I love that.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Oh yeah, as the rapper, I mean it was it's
it is surreal, like it's like, you know, we're from Jersey,
I think everywhere, like just like it's like it's a
lot of the times it's just out of body, Like
you start even talking about it's like yeah, Richard Branson
and Golden Sacks and like all these things, it's like
I can't even it's it's unimaginable.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
It's unimaginable.

Speaker 4 (40:25):
But I do feel like growing up in Jersey, like
obviously your the level of success that you achieved is incredible,
and it's like, you know, so few people get to
the level that you got to. But I also do
feel like growing up in Jersey, there were a lot
of people that it, you know, didn't go to the
best schools or universities, that still made it in really
unique ways. And I remember, like I grew up with

(40:45):
somebody whose dad owned a bunch of parking garages in
New York and his family was really successful, you know,
or just anyways. I just feel like New Jersey, you
grew up with a little bit of grit.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
And I think grit is like that's that was Ring.
Like Ring didn't make it because we were like better, smarter.
We made it because we worked harder. We hired people
off a Craigslist, like we just fought hard. We had
a great concept, great mission, and we all just like
fought hard for it, like we but we weren't. We
didn't have some special technology. We didn't have patents protecting us.

(41:20):
We didn't have like people from some Ivy League school
that figured this out. I'm not from somebody, you know.
It's like we just we just fought hard. And I
think you're right, it's like that's Jersey. And I actually
believe because of AI democratizing information, I think grit is
going to be so much more important in the next five, ten, fifteen,
twenty years.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Like the companies that are going to come out sweat
equity much more.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Based on sweat equity and grit than they are on
sort of this like internal protective group of people that
are able to like kind of do it absolutely.

Speaker 4 (41:49):
And I think like, obviously you can, you know, be
really successful coming from an Ivy League school, but I
invest in people that put this back sweat equity in
every day. Yeah, and today we put a lot of
sweat into our video. And then now he sat downe

(42:13):
speaking of a grit. It must have felt so good
in twenty eighteen after you guys sold to Amazon to
get that call from the Shark Tank producer asking you
to come back as a guest shark.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
That was yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
I mean it like goals, Like people set goals, and
I think goals can be ceilings.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Like you could never set a goal when you went.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
On Shark Tank of you're going to be so successful
that you're going to be invited back on the show
as a shark, Like there's things that you could just
never imagine achieving. That's it was crazy, like it was
it was just I mean, here's something that I went
on as a contestant, and I thought it was like
the panultimate like I had just like, you know, completed
everything I need to do in my life. And then
I go back on and literally I'm a shark on

(42:50):
Shark Tank and it was it was insane and it
was that Yeah, again another like out of body surreal experience.

Speaker 4 (42:56):
Had you seen any of the Sharks over the course
of those years where you know, ring is skyrocketing, not
post being rejected.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
I ran into Damon in at Home Shopping Network. We
were both doing like episodes there. He was telling some stuff,
so I kind of a little bit but not really
and going back on and then you're in the green
room with them, it's like all of a sudden it
switched to like I'm kind of one of them. I'm
still friends with a lot of them and actually pretty close.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
I went to Robert Hirschefek's sixtieth birthday.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
With you know, and like, like I've actually become pretty
close friends with them, and they are it's a great show.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
They're like a family.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
But yeah, I mean to be able to have like
crossed over into that is Yeah, it's it's kind of amazing.

Speaker 4 (43:40):
Did you feel like you had a little bit of
an edge walking in where you were like, you know
what could have been Guys.

Speaker 1 (43:45):
It was such a weird day walking in there.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
I mean it was like it was like intimidating at
the same time as like, yeah, I felt like I
deserve to be there, but it's also just so.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
I mean it's like the last time.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
I was there, I was literally like I could feel
the PTSD of the emotions of needing to be there,
needing this, and it was like it was very like
this weird set of emotions of both sides of it.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, and then sitting there me it was it was
just it was just cool. I mean it was.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
It's some some things I don't think we have good
words for, and I don't think we have good words for,
like when you go from being like yeah, guy in garage,
kidd and garage to you know, going on Shark Tank
to building this thing, to impacting people's neighborhoods to them
being back on Shark Tank, Like all those things are
surreal and unreal.

Speaker 4 (44:32):
Yeah, it's wild what good ideas can snowball into. We've
interviewed a lot of founders. Obviously, selling a business is
a really emotional thing.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
That you go through.

Speaker 4 (44:39):
It's your baby and all of a sudden now it's
owned by another company. So what was it like for
you to sell ring? How did you know it was
the right time? Did you have any regrets?

Speaker 2 (44:49):
So I do go into it in the book a lot,
like there's a there's a crazy story like right before
we so we almost went out of business right before
we sold, which is so crazy because it's like true,
like we really like the difference of sixty days was
like personally being I don't know about bankrupt, but like
having no money to selling the company for one point
one five billion dollars like in sixty days.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
So it's pretty crazy. That was pretty wild.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
But I mean Amazon why I wanted to sell the
Amazon And I'm I sort of fortunate too, is you know,
it was a founder led company with Jeff and they
really have they still have let me. I mean it's
been almost eight years now and they've really let me.
Like I wasn't done with the business, but the business
needed to have a bigger like it needed we needed
like some support, like we just were growing so fast,

(45:33):
and so that's what happened. Like I was really you know, excited,
I was able to sort of do that like bring
it business from you know, it was kind of growing
fast and it was kind of on a crazy trajectory
and then you know, sell it to a company that
allows us support it and keep building it and it's
you know gone from there.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
What was the story? What was going on? How were
you guys almost bankrupt prior to selling?

Speaker 2 (45:52):
So we we were doing really well and the business
was growing fast fast. Growing hardware companies are using a
lot of cash. So going from that year like we sold,
So we sold in end of twenty seventeen. We did
four hundred and eighty million in twenty seventeen, we done
hundred and seventy million in the year before, which means
we were ordering hundreds of millions of dollars of parts

(46:13):
going into this like, so we didn't have the cash.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
So everything was like kind of upfronted.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
Because it was so much growth, we were hiring people
to go ahead of the growth customer service, Like when
you're growing that fast, you have to hire way ahead
of like the actual sales.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
So that's really tough on your cash.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
We got into a bit of a lawsuit with eighty
t which you know was partially my fault. Probably I
ended up hiring some people. They told me I shouldn't.
I told them I should They sued me. What is
eighty T it's the largest. It was the largest home
security coupty. They do alarms and stuff, so they probably
maybe the largest alarm.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
But they they sued us.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
They won an injunction against this alarm right while we
were raising money. It sort of while we're going to
the holidays. So like if you think about like the softest,
like the place where we're the most fragile any company
is right when you're going into the holidays because maximum amount.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Of product in the market, so but zero like cash.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
So like you're waiting for all the holiday cash to
come back because you got to sell it. So you've
bought all this inventory, put it out into the retailers
sort of everything sitting in warehouses, but the cash doesn't
come back. So it's like from a cash cycle, like
that's probably the bottom of your cash is them. We
were raising money at that time, so we thought we
were Okay, we get this injunction that goes away. Now
we're like negative seventy million dollars and the only way

(47:33):
to stay alive at that is not pay bills, so
we start now like not paying our manufacturers, like it
got really dark for like a it was a short
period but it was but and then we were able
to settle the lawsuit with at which was great and
literally like we settled it sold so within really from
from the injunction happening to selling the company, I think

(47:55):
was sixty days. So like the injunction happens, the company
basically goes negative seventy like there's no possible, like we're
dead to we settle the lawsuit and then sign the
term sheet for one point one five billion, and that
was like a sixty day period, so like I mean,
that's like I mean, and that's the and it's not
even that unique for I mean, the circumstances maybe are unique,

(48:15):
but like you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and
it's it's crazy, like you say, oh, you sold your
cover for two billion, Yeah, and we almost went out of.

Speaker 4 (48:22):
Business like three weeks before, because it's like wow, it
makes sense because also like companies that have physical products,
and Jeremy always talks to it about makes them always
like should I make an active We're a brand and
he's like no, because it's the cash flow is tough.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
And growth like people don't think about this because it
sounds good, like when you say a company went from
three million, thirty million one seventy four eighty, like it
does it, but it is good. I mean it's good
like to have sales, but if you can only sell
what you have, and you can only have what you've
bought probably six to nine to twelve months before, so
you're buying, Like if you're going from one hundred and

(48:59):
seventy eighty, you're buying four hundred and eighty million dollars
with a product when you did one seventy.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
How do you know what's going to grow like that?
I mean you can think it's going.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
To grow like that, you can kind of project out,
but if the growth stops, you now all of a
sudden have two hundred million dollars a product that you
didn't sell, Like, how do you survive that?

Speaker 1 (49:17):
And so it's very scary.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Versus if you grew slower, then the cash comes back
you order, it's kind of like you can stay more profitable.
So I probably looking back, you know, it's interesting, probably
I probably could have personally made more money and been
a like bigger company in a way if we actually
had gone slower. Now you don't obviously, like you can't

(49:40):
tell what's going on. You don't know, all of a sudden,
this industry is growing fast.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
We're worried if.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
We let sort of anyone, you know, if we sort
of take the gas off, we'll just be like, you know,
maybe it is a winner takes all market. It might
have been, so you don't know, but yeah, looking back,
it's like maybe if we just actually grown slower, it
would have been better because it would have used less cash.

Speaker 4 (49:57):
You know, we've interviewed a lot of founders on the show,
and a lot of them when we talk about selling
their businesses, a lot of people say that, you know,
one of the best things about selling was that they're
finally able to focus on the things that they love
about building a business. So what have you been able
to focus on an Amazon that you know gets you excited.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
Where you don't have to worry about And that's so true.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
Like if you're a real entrepreneur, like you're not necessarily
in it for the money. I mean, you obviously want
to make some success, Like I think that's that's fair,
but yeah, you want to like build stuff and so
selling to Amazon instead of spending my time going bankrupt
and trying to raise money and trying to figure out
the finances. Like all of that sort of was taken
care of, and now I could focus on inventions and

(50:39):
product And we've come out with more products since we
sold to Amazon by like one hundred x, the things
like the dog Search party, all those things, is like,
those are the things I can focus on, Like, now
I can focus on the one we're coming out with
right now, which is Firewatch. So now with the fires
and the palisades, you know that I experienced. I was
in there, and I'm able to invent something and actually
build it and put it out instead of just focusing

(51:02):
on how we finance our business. And yeah, it has
allowed us allowed me to focus on inventing ninety percent
of my time and ten percent is in like sort
of other stuff, whereas probably before I sold that, I
was ninety percent other stuff working on that and ten
percent invention.

Speaker 4 (51:18):
Yeah, it must feel so good to finally be able
to just be creative.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
It feels great, Like it is.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
It is great, and especially a company like Amazon that
allows like sort of celebrates founders, they've done it now
with Audible and IMDb, and you see like all these
companies Zappos, you know, with you know, sadly Tony Shape
passed away, but like you know, Tony was there till
the end and able to still sort of run Zappos
and run it in the way he wanted to. And
so Amazon's been an incredible place for entrepreneurs to go

(51:48):
to take their businesses to that next level.

Speaker 4 (51:50):
You know, we touch on the Palisades during our run,
and guys, for a little bit of context, when Jamie
and I were trying to figure out where we should
do our run.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
He was like, well, would you want to do the
run in the Palisades with me?

Speaker 4 (51:59):
Because this is where I live and I actually do
a run every day through the fire zones. And I
was like, oh, like, you know as much I and
you know, we we it would be an awesome video.
Of course, to see you're still invited to do it
if we want to do it, I do think we
have to do it at some point.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
I'm happy to take you.

Speaker 4 (52:14):
Because I want to see you know we talked about
on the run, but I want to see the fire
line that you guys kind of where you were protecting
the neighborhood. But for you know, just for our listeners
that haven't seen the run, can you talk a little
bit about your you know, fire run that you do
and kind of what happened in.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Your Yes, I live in the Palisades. Fire burned in
the back of our house. We came back into like
as the fires happening, we went back in and I
ended up like I basically walked in the back of
the properties on fire and it was kind of crazy,
and helped put it out. A bunch of neighbors came
back and helped, and so we kind of held the
fire line on our neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
We're fortunate that our neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Was on like i'll say, kind of a farther side
of the fire, so it wasn't in like the first
wave of just getting hit. And then also we had
water still at our house, so our house was like
on the other side of the Palisades, and you heard
a lot about like there's an area that didn't have
any water and so so, yes, we kind of did that.
And so I've been in the fire zone. We live

(53:13):
back there, so it's like from the back of my
house back is the fire. And now that things are
like kind of cleaned up, and it's kind of you know,
kind of starting to grow back. I mean, it's still
a you can see there's just houses are gone. But
I go on my run that I used to do,
and so I have all these loops that I do
through the woods there's great trails, and then also through

(53:33):
some of the town and so it's it's it's kind
of I mean, it's weird because I run through this
area and where there was houses and now there's actually
a bunch of coyotes that live in there, which they
don't seem.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
To bother me.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
So it's not that, but it's like it is a
eerie almost like like a movie or like a TV
show of like apocalypse. Like you're running through this area
and there's like a couple of houses that are still standing.
There's a couple of houses being built, but like hundreds
of you know, lots that are just sort of cleared
and just have like grass growing on them. And the
sidewalks are kind of broken now and the streets are

(54:06):
kind of like broken from just all this stuff and
coyotes there, and it's just like it is like post
apocalypse kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (54:13):
Is it's sad.

Speaker 4 (54:14):
And you said your son seventeen and Oliver that you raised,
that grew up in the Palisades. And I have friends
that grew up in the Palisades and you know, not
only did their childhood homes burn down, but it's like
the neighborhood restaurants, they would go to, this elementary schools.

Speaker 3 (54:27):
It's crazy.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
It was a community, I mean, the whole, like the
and you know, I think nine schools burned. I mean,
like it was the the homes. I mean, it was
I think terrible. I'm you know, my home did not
burn down, but like I think most people I've talked
to agree that, like the schools and the town burning
down like that was also like just because it was
a town, kids were.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
In it and like my son grew up in it,
and it's just like it really is terrible.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
I think it will come back, you know, I do
believe in the resilience of people. And it's been amazing
like watching you know, kind of start to come back.
But it's gonna take a long time because it's just
just to shear how large scale that is.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
I mean it's I think seven thousand homes or something.

Speaker 4 (55:09):
What has it been like being there since the fire
is like is it did you guys get out for
a little bit?

Speaker 1 (55:14):
So we got out.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
We didn't have power for a month, so we were
basically out of the house until the power came back.
We were one of the first people back. I think
we just like felt like we had to go back,
Like it was kind of like a like, we're going
to do it. So we've been back now since a
month after the fire. You know, it's from our house
if we drive because we're on the edge, if we

(55:35):
drive sort of towards the Santa Monica side, so if
we drive like north, like we don't see any fire.
So what's nice like for my son and for like
we can kind of go in and out without being
in it. But when we go through the fire zone,
and when I really like spend time in the fire zone,
like I drove someone around the other day and kind
of showed them like the whole palisades, Like I don't
sleep that night, Like it is still for me when

(55:57):
I really go into it, and when I like I
kind of run through it and it's like it doesn't
but like when I really think about it, I still
can't imagine that it happened. Like it's such a it's
so massive and devastating that it's like something like my
brain can't get around.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
And so yeah, like.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
When I really go up there, if I took you
up there and like really showed you the whole thing,
like I, it does like I can feel it like
affect me.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
Oh yeah, because it's just it's just like it just shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
It just doesn't like rationally like that like a city
burning down just doesn't make sense, Like it just doesn't
like to.

Speaker 4 (56:29):
And and I mean, we weren't in the Palisades. We
were in Running and we were in the house that
we're currently filming this in. But even I mean, and
this was a completely different situation. But we you know,
during the Palisades fires, there were fires kind of all
over the city, and we talked about the you know,
the fires, the app that you guys are creating and
then the watch Judy app and how you guys are integrating.
But when we were here and Runy and I remember

(56:50):
we were sitting at our kitchen table, which is just
to the left of us, and we started smelling the smoke.

Speaker 3 (56:55):
It's amost like a bonfire.

Speaker 4 (56:56):
When this is happening, and we kind of walk outside
and look up and it looked like a volcano had erupted.
It was the scary and I mean, I'm from New Jersey.
I'm not used to like earthquakes or like wildfires. It's
just not something that happens in those areas. And to
see it was surreal, like it I it was out
of a horror movie.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
It's surreal. It's a horror movie.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
But you were in it, which is crazy in it,
and I.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Think, yeah, But the thing that I saw that was
in it is that like the if it's information like
what I saw is that like a lot of it's
very hard, especially as these fires get bigger to understand
like where it is they spread like I saw how
like you know, like it would blow and you'd see
these embers go forever and then they'd like start a
fire many houses down, like in a bush or something.

Speaker 1 (57:42):
So the fire was like jumping.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
And that's what with this fire watch that we are
are launching now are launched with with Watch Duty, is
that now all the ring customers. We had ten thousand
cameras in the Palate just in the Palisades area, and
so allowing people to turn those cameras on feed that
into Watch duty during the natural disaster, during the fire,

(58:04):
so that they can get accurate information of, oh, the
fire jumped in, it's now over here, but it's not
over here, because it's just as important to know where
it's not.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
Than where it is. You know.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
If we can more accurately do that, hopefully we can
better deploy the resources we have and then need less
resources to stop the fire, which means that there's other
fires happening like all this stuff, because it just becomes
like everyone's kind of you know, it's the fog of war.
Everyone's running around. It's like we're really hoping that, you know,
ring can be one part now of helping to solve

(58:35):
these fires by making it more efficient in how we
use the resources during them.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Yeah, it's necessary.

Speaker 4 (58:40):
And yeah, even because with Watch Shooty when we were here,
it was things weren't being updated in real time, and
like the running fire ended up being okay. They were
able to get it under control before it reached any
of the houses. But I think the scariest thing about
it was we smelted immediately because it was coming straight
onto our street. If it had reached the houses, it
would have come in this direction. The scariest thing about
it was you were driving out. We were able to

(59:01):
get out. We alerted our neighbors because we had had
like a neighborhood kind of meeting, and Jeremy again was
like the captain and my husband was the captain in
this situation. I was a disastrous So you don't want
to be with me in an emergency situation. But he
was great alerting the neighbors, getting everybody out of their
house houses, especially the elderly people that.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
Live on our block.

Speaker 4 (59:17):
But as we were driving out and kind of missing,
I'm sure all the traffic and the you know, gridlock
traffic that occurred as soon as people realized Runnian was
on fire. Watch Study hadn't even updated yet that Runian
was on fire.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
You know.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
So this is and watch the so for like people
that are not in fire areas probably know what watch
Shooty is, but like watch Shooty is this app. It's
a non for profit and what they do is they
take all the information from like radio calls and nine
to one calls and they basically try to help put
this map together. That's as real time as you can,
but again as real time as you can, because like

(59:50):
the datea they're getting is like literally they're like listening
to radio calls and listening to all this stuff and
trying to like, but it is the best. If you
went to the command center in the fires and these
big fires, they actually I watched Duty up like it
is the So what you're saying is like.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
Not actually that updated.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
That's like the best information currently that we have, which
is why if we can feed information then from AI
and from RING into it, then we can create hopefully
a much more real time and accurate like to the
millimeter fire app, you know, fire map, and then you
know exactly where it is again and it's like for
people to evacuate, they know where it is, and for
deploying resources, we know where it is. And that's you know,

(01:00:26):
I certainly I hope another fire does not happen. I
think they will based on what we're seeing and and
I hope that with technology, whether it's RING fired, Watch Duty,
other things that people are building, I do hope we're
able to mitigate so that in you know, three five,
ten years, a fire like what happened in the Palisades

(01:00:48):
just doesn't have that impact because it's not even like
the money, it's just the like the impact to children
and communities and like that's just it's just it's I mean,
people died, like it's it's it's terrible.

Speaker 4 (01:01:00):
I had somebody say this to me the other day
when we were doing an interview, and it was that
this concept of you know, obviously you're a serial entrepreneur
or somebody that's always loved inventing things, building things, But
if you can think back to your childhood and some
of the interests that you had when you were younger,
you know, do you feel like this idea for ring

(01:01:21):
was maybe always there based on the interest that you've
always had.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
I think the tinker in me was always there. I
was always like remote control cars and building stuff in
my basement, Like I was always tinkering.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
And then I so I like that part was there,
and then the other.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Part was like I always was helping people, like I
always have liked helping people. I was a volunteer fireman
as a kid, Like I remember, like you know, I
wasn't even that big, Like we're like sticking up for
kids who are like getting bullied.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
I got bullied.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
But like then like I always like I think I've
had a lot of I always have had a lot
of empathy, and so I think like when you take
empathy and invention, like Ring is the ultimate company because
making neighborhoods safer is the empathy part, and then how
you do it as the inventor. And so yeah, I
do think that like looking back, it was all there,
it wasn't as obvious. I wish it was because I
would have like maybe started when I was twenty instead

(01:02:09):
of you know, way later. But yeah, I do think
Ring like fits sort of my superpowers.

Speaker 4 (01:02:15):
And you know, even we were talking about the town
in Missouri that you've helped kind of redevelop by building
a bar and building a coffee shop and even in Nantucket,
like building a coffee shop in Nantucket.

Speaker 3 (01:02:24):
Like it's so you are somebody that likes helping people.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
Yeah, that's like I like to you know, if I
see a problem, it's like I want to fix it.
And so again I put like my inventor brain and
my you know, it's like if you can take like
sort of a little bit of capital invention and then
like I think it's like empathy of like you know,
I want to help, you know, it's amazing, like what
you can do the problem is it also like I
end up doing too much and like I'm like I

(01:02:48):
sort of go for my skis, like I sometimes a lot,
like I have too much going on.

Speaker 4 (01:02:51):
Well, you said this earlier, and you also said it
on the Bethany Frankel podcast from four years ago that
I listened to yesterday, But it is that you don't
like setting goals because you believe that they create ceilings.

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
So can you break that down for us?

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
So I think, like if you look at ring, like
making neighborhoods safer is not a it's not an achievable goal.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
It's a mission that's not achievable. It's infinite.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Like, so I love setting things that are infinite for
like my team, for myself. So that you because I
think when you do like sales goals, if I had
told my head of sales, let's sell, you know, our
first year fifty million dollars of ring, he he would
have gotten to fifty million dollars and then like we
did it. Instead we sold like we did like one

(01:03:34):
hundred million. We did way more than anyone could have
thought of because we didn't have a sales goal. We
had a making neighborhood safer goal and when they you know,
when Don Hicks, this guy that you know basically created
our entire sales thing, he called me be like we
just closed whatever, and I'm like, okay, great, can you close?

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
And I'd be like the next one?

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
You know, it's like where's if you had a goal,
our goal probably would have been to close like one
retailer this year, and instead it's like, once we closed one,
I'm like, why don't you close five more? And then
was five and Mike, why don't close ten more? And
so I do think we cap ourselves out by trying
to set too many goals before we know even what
we can do.

Speaker 1 (01:04:10):
And so it's not that you don't have like a
north star. I think set the north star, but make it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Something that's unachievable, because you will think bigger, You'll go bigger,
like it's it's no one could have ever imagined Ring
getting to where it is, And so if we.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Had set goals, it would have been the wrong goals.

Speaker 4 (01:04:24):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
How do you view luck and entrepreneurship?

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
I view luck, I mean I look view luck as
lottery tickets. And so if you bought every single lottery
ticket like the powerball is just one point seven billion
or something, so if you bought every combination, you'd win
one hundred percent. And so each lottery ticket I think
you get by working called an hour. So for every
hour you work, you get another lottery ticket, which means
that someone who works one hour, you know, like the

(01:04:49):
person who like has an idea, works one hour and
sells it for billion dollars happens because they get one
lottery ticket.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
It turns out like one lottery ticket could win.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
But on average us, like normal people need more lottery
tickets to win, like to be more likely to win.
And so for Ring, certainly we weren't guaranteed to have
the exit, but we worked so hard we had so
many lottery tickets. I think we had luck on our side,
and so luck's never guaranteed.

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
But I do think the harder you work, the more
you work.

Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
The more you do, I think it's more likely that
you're going to get a lottery ticket that pays off, right, Because.

Speaker 4 (01:05:22):
I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs and successful people
talk about having blind faith, but I think blind faith
needs to be met with.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
Hard work, right, Yeah, And I think you have to
have a bit of blind faith, because you can't sort
of say, like you know, one hundred percent, I'm going
to make a billion. I'm going to do this, be
the largest home scarity covery of the world and then
make a billion dollars to do all.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
That stuff, like you have to like have to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
You have to have a little bit of you'd be
a little crazy, like you have to have this reality distortion.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
And so you do need to work hard. You do
need blind faith, and you do need luck.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
Because there are things, I mean, look at like how
COVID affected businesses plus end minus, Like some businesses got
affected in a positive way, some a negati like you
couldn't no one knew it was coming, and so that's
just like it's it's lucky for some businesses and not
like in I mean being careful with how like obviously
it affected humans' lives, but there are businesses that did
that it actually benefited how their business.

Speaker 1 (01:06:13):
Was set up.

Speaker 3 (01:06:14):
Did COVID benefit ring?

Speaker 1 (01:06:16):
You know, in the end, it was interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
We thought I thought sales were just going to go
to like I mean everyone's like we sell a product
for home security, You're now in your home. So I'm
like this thing's going to zero. Like I thought sales
were going to go literally to zero. It turned out
that when people were in their home, they got kind
of bored and they wanted to It was like a
time to trick your home out, like I'm gonna put
cameras up, I'm gonna do this, like you know, And

(01:06:38):
we got a lot of deliveries started like door dash
and so they wanted to see the door dash person coming.
So it actually, I wouldn't say it like benefited, but
it didn't harm it in the way we thought.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
It was going to right.

Speaker 4 (01:06:48):
And also consumer shopping was like people were spending because
you were stuck in your home, so you started like
consumer shopping and like like girls, remember when we bought
all that tied I Yeah, so you're wfe's name is
Erin Erin so. Erin is a movie producer. She is
or director.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
She's a producer, okay.

Speaker 4 (01:07:06):
Movie producer, and she's behind Alvin and the Chipmunks, fall
in Our Stars.

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
Yeah, she's done some incredible movies. Her People We Meet
on Vacation is out right now on Netflix, So give
it a give it of you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
It's actually a great, great movie.

Speaker 4 (01:07:22):
So cool that you guys are both so successful in
your own right in completely different industries.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
Which is interesting because it is like totally I mean,
like you like Hollywood and what we like, what I
do and what she does, Like there's no overlap, Like
we don't know any of the same people. We don't
work with the same people. I mean, the only thing
that maybe is that they both need money to do.
But like, other than that, like there's really no commonality.
It's been which is in some ways is fun because
we don't have the like we're not competing with each

(01:07:49):
other in any way, which I think could be tough.
I think depending on relationships, I think it can work
sometimes where people work in the same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:07:56):
I think sometimes it could be pretty hard.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
But it has been amazing kind of watching her, you know,
become so successful in what she's doing and makes such
a big impact and kind of being able to do
stuff on my side.

Speaker 4 (01:08:08):
And she must have been so excited when the project
you were working on in the garage finally turned into something.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
I'd gone from being a serial entrepreneur and like doing
some stuff and people thought I was like semi respectable
to all of a sudden, I'm like in my garage
and building things and hacking on this stuff, and you know, people,
I kind of thought that I lost my mind. My
wife was at the time was starting to become successful
in Hollywood doing her thing, which allowed me to go
into the garage. She wasn't making like a ton of money,

(01:08:35):
but it was enough to like have some salary coming in,
which was which was super great. Like I could have
done it without her, but definitely, like she would tell people, Oh, yeah,
he's up there building this, you know, pokety poke it's
a conference call thing, and they're like, what, pok pook so,
and then I remember showing them the first door boy,
and I remember this one person like literally just laughing, say,
that's the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (01:08:57):
Yeah. I ended up working out.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
So it's fine, but yeah, it is funny when you're
doing this stuff. It's also something I found like if
you're an entrepreneur, if you're an inventor, a lot of
times the things that if you tell people about and
they're like, that's awesome, you should totally do that, that's
almost a bad like indicator, like the it's almost better
when someone's like, I don't get it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:17):
That's terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
Like I don't know, I'm not sure, like it's there's
something because a real invention, something that's going to change
the world is probably something.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
People don't see and understand at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
Like I'm gonna do uh, I'm gonna do food delivery
and we're gonna do it really big, and it's like
food delivery, Like that's not a good business, you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:35):
Know, it's like door dash, you know, it's like it's
good's okay. So I think it's a lot of times,
like it's.

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
Not that easy to see what will be like the
next big thing. And when you say to someone like
this is what I'm working on, and they're like, it's
a lot of times when I'm talking about an idea,
and so it's just like I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:50):
I'm like, oh no, it's not going to work then,
But that's so interesting obviously.

Speaker 4 (01:09:54):
Like it's interesting though, because it's like we're solving these simple,
simple problems, but people don't see it at.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Like uber Like and again, if uber was so obvious,
then everyone would have copied it immediately. Like if ring
was so obvious, then everyone would have copied it immediately,
like door Dash. I mean, like look at just all
these companies that have occurred over the last few years
that again that you could have copied. I mean i'd
say like maybe open Ai and chatchypt and stuff like
a little bit more science y. But if you look

(01:10:23):
at like a lot of products that have come out
that someone just could have copied like immediately, and they
just didn't because no one saw it, like it took
time to see it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
How did it affect your mental when you started seeing
companies copy what you were doing?

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
So I am like a Barbelle of fear and execution,
and so that just drives my fear. And so I
had this fear that we were going to get that
someone else was going to take this market that was
kind of mine and I was figuring out and I
was building, and so I went that drove me to
do Like It's probably why we grew so fast is
I was like unwilling to like take the gas off,

(01:10:58):
like I would see and we had competitors at every
every single year, every single turn, people were coming out
with stuff, but we kept the gas on.

Speaker 4 (01:11:06):
What would you tell yourself fourteen years ago, I'd like
want to give myself a big hug and just be
like it's going to be okay because there were so
many nights.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
I mean I literally remember like waking up and trying
not to wake my wife up, like sort of crying
in bed, like because I'm like I have ruined everything,
Like this thing is not going to work, like I
put all our money into it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
It's a freaking doorbell, Like what did I do?

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
And it's like that's those just like those times and
just I just I in some ways, I'm glad I
didn't know because I worked harder because of that. I
invented harder, I like pushed things. But I do like
it would have been nice if someone just tapped me
on the shoulder be like go back to sleep, like
it's going to be okay, just keep working and yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:11:49):
But at the same time, it's like you can never
have that mentality because then you wouldn't have tried as hard.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
But then that's the thing, is like if I had
known that, like I don't think you could have tried
as hard, Like you can't like it. It's like, you
you know, pressure makes diamonds, and so like we had
a lot of pressure, so we made a big diamond.
She was the most exciting when we moved out of
the garage into an office because she said that the
bathroom smelled like a men's gym, and she said, like,
we need to get out of the house. We had

(01:12:13):
a really small house at the time. We got up
to I think ten people at the house, like every day,
even my son's room, Like we started putting a desk
in his room, so people were working in his room
like he would go to preschool and like literally there's
like people working in his room. I mean, we just
just again, it just grew so fast and we just
took everything over as we were going. So I think, yeah,
but no, she's she's certainly very proud of Ring and

(01:12:33):
what we were able to do as it like, because
it really is like a family, you know, it is
the family that made that.

Speaker 4 (01:12:38):
I mean, oh yeah, I mean, I know you mentioned
before we started running that you guys had just wrapped
filtering your super Bowl commercial. As somebody in the movie industry,
she must think it's so cool that her husband's doing
super Bowl commercials.

Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
She kind of shakes her head at that one.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
She's like, I mean, but the super Bowl commercial, and
you know, you all have to see it. It's a
really I'm really proud of what we were able to
do for Superwl commercial. We always do all of our
stuff in house, so are you in it? Concepting, creative
is all in house.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
I won't I won't reveal.

Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
I give us anything.

Speaker 1 (01:13:09):
I will say it's going to be It's going to
be great.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
I think it brings the emotion of what we can
do it ring and how we can bring neighborhoods together.
And I think it's a really positive It's obviously a
commercial for a company, so like there's definitely like that,
but I also think it has a really positive message
and I'm super proud of.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
What we're gonna be able to put out there.

Speaker 4 (01:13:27):
Any celeb sightings in the commercial, not gonna.

Speaker 3 (01:13:33):
Is shocked an appearance in the.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
No celebs in our commercial, so it's it's all homegrown
on this one. We've had celebs in the past, so
it's not that we wouldn't do it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
But at what point in the Super Bowl is it
going to play?

Speaker 1 (01:13:45):
I think I want to say, I think it's third quarter.
I gotta look.

Speaker 3 (01:13:49):
Yeah, it's a good placement, right it is.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
We got a good place, we got a good we
got a good play. We bought it really early.

Speaker 4 (01:13:54):
Okay, what's the best placement in the Super for Super
Bowl commercials?

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
Is it right before halftime?

Speaker 1 (01:13:59):
So there's also of like game theory on this. Obviously
it's expensive.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
I think it really has to with how the game's going,
because like if the if it's tied, people are coming
on to watch it. If it's like a blowout, the
third quarter could be terrible. I think it's a little
bit of a crap shoot. I think you just I mean,
you want to be a sort of somewhere in like
probably second or third quarter, right, might might guess maybe
first quarter, fourth quarters is dangerous because if it's if
it's a blowout, people are gonna.

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
Stop watching it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
Possibly, but you know, people do watch it now for
the commercials, So.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
I think, by the way, I really only want.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
So I think, like actually, like that might be keeping
people on there. So I don't I don't even know that,
but and I do think this year is going to
be I think this year's gonna be crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
These AI companies with all the money that's out there.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
In the past, we've seen that these sort of things
have grown, like you know, these industries have grown or
they have a lot of money. Super Bowl becomes like
a big thing for that, So I would not be
surprised if we see some crazy commercials, crazy celebs, Like
I think there could be some incredible money put into
the super Bowl.

Speaker 4 (01:14:58):
I cannot wait to see what people do or Super
Bowl ads. The year that Taylor Swift is the halftime show,
and I'm very excited for Bad Bunny, do not get
me wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:15:05):
But the year that it's Taylor Swift right.

Speaker 4 (01:15:08):
Next level that ring ads or half check it's Gonnaugh,
it'll be big.

Speaker 3 (01:15:13):
Yeah, it'll be big.

Speaker 4 (01:15:14):
Let's give one final piece of advice to our listeners
that you just want everybody to hear that's maybe starting
out in their career building something.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
I think the best thing is like work on something
that matters to you, that you think will matter to
the world. Because money, in the end, like salary all
this stuff, no matter how much you make, you're always
gonna want more. And so the one thing that can
be fulfilling is doing something that's going to make the
world better and that you feel that you care about
enough to go to like wake up every morning and

(01:15:43):
go put your time into.

Speaker 4 (01:15:45):
What are some final things that we can shout out
that you guys are working on that you're excited about it,
maybe in your personal life.

Speaker 2 (01:15:50):
I mean, I shout out to I did do a book,
Ding Dong, pretty excited about that.

Speaker 3 (01:15:55):
I'm excited to read it. Based on some of the teasers.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
We got, it's it's pretty good.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
It's a self dene bricading story of how we built
this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
So it's pretty good. Grit.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
You know, you'll you'll like it. It's a good Jersey book.
And so I'm super proud about that. Super proud of
the stuff we're doing in neighborhoods. You know, firewatch that
we just launched the dog finding stuff like all like
you know, dog Search Party, all those things. Like I'm
really excited about like what we're gonna be able to
do and over the next year, especially with AI, how
we're gonna be able to roll stuff out that's really

(01:16:23):
going to help people to be safer in their neighborhoods,
work together in their neighborhoods in a safer and better way,
and sort of hopefully elevate our neighborhoods because if we
do that, like you know, kids growing up in safer
neighborhoods have better outcomes. Like there's so many great follow
on things that happen when we do this.

Speaker 4 (01:16:39):
Well, Jamie, thank you so much for being on Post
Run High with me. Thank you for running with us today.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:16:44):
It's been an honor. You know. I want to do
one final question. Who do you challenge to do a
run and post run chat with me?

Speaker 1 (01:16:52):
Next? I'm going to challenge Robert hirshebek Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:16:55):
Rob, It's on.

Speaker 4 (01:17:01):
Thank you guys so much for listening to today's conversation
with Jamie Simonov.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Speaker 4 (01:17:08):
If you guys are enjoying listening to Post Run High,
please be sure to follow this podcast wherever you listen
and share this episode with a friend who might enjoy it.
I'll see you guys next week on Post Run High.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From Shark Tank Rejection to Selling Ring for $1B (with Jamie Siminoff)