Ring: Jamie Siminoff

Jamie Siminoff spent much of his twenties and thirties as a serial entrepreneur, launching three tech businesses you've probably never heard of. When he finally landed on a breakthrough idea, he didn't realize it at first; he was just trying to solve his own frustration of not being able to hear the doorbell while tinkering in his garage. His jerry-rigged solution evolved into Ring—a doorbell with a camera and microphone that connects to a smart-phone app. After a nail-biting appearance on Shark Tank and a nearly disastrous launch, Jamie was able to rebrand and grow the business, eventually selling to Amazon for roughly $1 billion. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.

• 0:45Guy Raz?

  But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes

• 1:30Guy Raz?

  based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt.

• 2:54Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together.

• 3:36Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale and people bring taste, judgment and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 4:21Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 5:06Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Hey, just a quick heads up before we start the show. There are a couple of swear words in this episode, so you may want to keep that in mind if you're listening with kids. Okay, on to the show.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  We start hearing, it's like the week before Christmas, people are contacting me and saying it's not working. And their video was coming through like an old TV tuner. Like, it was like all like lines through it, and just you couldn't see the picture. So, most of our units are now in the field with customers that not only do they not work, but we can't change that software on them. So they're basically bricks.

• 6:01Guy Raz?

  You cannot fix the ones that people have?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't rewrite the software on this chip. And so, this was like the end of the world. Like, this really was. Basically, the business is over.

• 6:18Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:30Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Jamie Siminoff figured out how to answer the door with his iPhone, and how that little side project grew into Ring, a business he sold for $1 billion.

• 6:49Guy Raz?

  From time to time, all of us have to do things we'd rather avoid, like go to a party we don't want to be at, or meet a friend of a friend of a friend who really wants to meet us. But I'm willing to bet that more often than not, when you do do those things, the outcome is actually better than you expected. And sometimes, it can be life-changing, as it was for Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring, the company that makes the famous video doorbell. Several years ago, Jamie was struggling to get Ring off the ground, and he wasn't feeling particularly confident. To the contrary, he was feeling

• 7:29Guy Raz?

  like a failure. And around this time, a friend of a friend who wanted to launch a business asked Jamie to lunch. The guy needed some advice, and Jamie very reluctantly went to that lunch. But if he hadn't, there's a pretty good chance we wouldn't be telling his story today. You'll hear about that lunch a little later in the show. But if you know the back-of-the-envelope account of Jamie Siminoff, you'll know that he invented the Ring doorbell in his garage in LA, and then seven years later, he sold his business to Amazon for $1 billion. But the path to getting there was actually really slow and really messy, full of bad business

• 8:13Guy Raz?

  ideas and some good ones that never got traction. And as far as the Ring doorbell goes, Jamie didn't invent it to put it on the market. It was a home improvement project. He invented it to help him hear the doorbell from the garage. Anyway, for now, what you need to know about Jamie is that he grew up in northern New Jersey, where, he admits, he kind of floundered at school. But where he thrived was at home, tinkering with stuff.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I would come home and go in the basement. You know, I had RC cars, which were like-

• 8:46Guy Raz?

  Radio control, yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I had all these like the Claude Buster and the Frog and the like-

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  Oh, the Frog. I remember the Frog. Yeah. Cause this was a time where you wouldn't just go to the store and get them all made. You had to buy the components for the radio control car and like you would go to a hobby shop or Radio Shack and put them together.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I, Chester Hobby, and I would go there and it was like a big thing to buy one. I mean, these things were like expensive.

• 9:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  And, uh, and they would break. Like, the greatest thing about them is that they broke every, almost every time you used them. And so I had to fabricate parts, fabricate tools, you know, and I wasn't like, you know, a kid saying, I'm gonna fabricate a tool. It's just like, my Frogger's broken and I wanna go play with Andrew down the street with his, like, I need to fix it. And so like, I just had to do this stuff and I learned, like, that's how I learned engineering. I mean, I learned electronics from it, you know, from the speed controllers, the servos. I learned gears and mechanical.

• 9:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  It's, it's probably looking back, like, the RC cars might have been one of the bigger influences in my life-

• 9:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Of that, yeah.

• 9:46Guy Raz?

  Well, we're going really, we're geeking out. We're getting really deep into-

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 9:49Guy Raz?

  Into hobbies. You're going to like servos, you're going to servo motors. I remember those things. Oh my God, alright. People are gonna be like, this is weird.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  But I think, I, I guess the point of though is like, it's like how things work, like-

• 10:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  The fundamentals of how things work, even in like, as, you know, things get more complicated, more computing, like, still the fundamentals are the same. And so when you learn the fundamentals, it's incredible how you can sort of go up the stack-

• 10:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And do more complex things.

• 10:13Guy Raz?

  So you were that kinda kid, right? Cause you, so it sounds like you were maybe not like a video game kid necessarily, or maybe a little bit?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, all I wanted to do is be in the basement just building stuff and I had like-

• 10:25Guy Raz?

  Just tinkering?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, like balsa wood, like pre 3D printers. You could make anything out of balsa wood. Like, you could just shape it. Oh.

• 10:34Guy Raz?

  Oh, man, I made a, I made a, a bridge with balsa wood, like with a little X-acto knife and cutting it at angles and then gluing them together or just pushing it, right?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in high school, I had this architecture class and in year three of it, you built the house that- That you had like, you like first did the architecture, you like did the whole plans and then you actually built a model of the house. And the model that I built, I remember I wanted it to have cedar shingles. And my teacher is like, you can't do it. It's gonna take too long. And I'm like, it has to have cedar shingles. And so I cut individually out balsa wood shingles and glued them onto this house. And I, I, I don't even know how many hours it took me. And I don't know

• 11:14Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  why I did this, but I literally, I did finish it.

• 11:17Guy Raz?

  Just for people listening who have no idea what we're talking about, it's sort of like taking a thousand garlic cloves and slicing them very, very thin.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:27Guy Raz?

  For hours and hours.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:29Guy Raz?

  So model cars, balsa wood, that was your thing. That was what you loved to do. And so you are not a great student, but a, you know, okay, student like what, Bs and Cs?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Bs and Cs. And then what happened, Land Rover did like a thing in my town, like they brought new cars to it. And my dad and I just went, it was like in the park. And this Land Rover Defender 90 was being brought into the US. And it was like, it was seeing that thing, I can still picture myself seeing the, like this, at this moment, like it's in my head right now. And I said to my dad, I'm like, man, I would do anything to have that car. My dad goes, get straight As. And I literally did. The first semester, I actually got one B. And I was devastated. And my dad said, I'll extend it. And then I got straight As the next semester. And it was my junior year, which ended up being super critical for college admission.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  And so it was this amazing thing where yes, it was a bribe, but it helped me so much in my life because it's helped me get into probably a better college. It like, it was a kind of an incredible thing.

• 12:35Guy Raz?

  So you got the car?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:36Guy Raz?

  With straight As?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:38Guy Raz?

  And you go off to college, you went to Babson College, which is kind of a, not a super well-known school, but mainly focused on business and entrepreneurship. How were you as a kid who was a tinkerer? How did you think, I want to like work in a business? Cause I don't know, were you selling stuff? And I mean, did you, were you kind of already doing businesses on the side before you got there?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I was. I was doing like lots of entrepreneurial things, but not realizing they were like entrepreneurial. So I was on the way to school. I was like, you know, that we lived in a place where there was horses. And so on the way to school, I'd like shovel people's horse stalls out on the way to school. I could make like a couple hundred bucks a week doing that. And every parent that was in business or did anything, I would talk like, it's kind of funny looking back, but like my friends would all be, you know, down on the couch playing games. And I'd be like with the dad, talking to them about business or time. Like I wanted to learn all this stuff. And the way I got to Babson was I used to drive this kid to school, who was like the wealthiest kid in the town or whatever. I remember being in his kitchen one morning and he was always late. And the dad came down, who I like really looked up to and always wanted to talk to him.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And he said to me, just kind of off the cuff, you know, he's making his coffee and said like, oh, where are you applying for colleges? And I gave him all these colleges that were like liberal arts, like, you know, just sort of general colleges. And I said Babson and Babson literally just been thrown into my list. And he goes, huh, Babson. He goes, you know what? Because the most interesting and successful people I know went there. And then he just goes back to doing his coffee, whatever. I drive to school, drop this kid off, go straight to the counselor's office. And I'm like, I'm going to Babson. How do I get in? What do I got to do?

• 14:09Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  That was it. I heard that from this guy and I was in.

• 14:12Guy Raz?

  All right. So you get to college in the mid 90s and you had this kind of background and tinkering and electronics background. I should be, you know, just this basement, kind of taking stuff apart. Were you still kind of doing things related to that when you got to college?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  So I was a little bit. When I got to college, I mean, I was, I sold electronics on the campus. So I had a company called Gadgetronics, you know, gadgets and electronics, TVs, stereos, all of that kind of stuff. So I was always hustling.

• 14:42Guy Raz?

  How were you getting, you were, you were like sourcing electronic components and selling them on campus?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  So I found there was a girl at school and her dad had a electronics store in Houston, Texas. And yeah, I was able to convince him to sell me stuff at a lower price. And so, yeah, it was basically like, I wasn't trying to think about business in the way of like, I'm going to try to create a career or some like company. I was always just hustling. You know, I was always like doing stuff. And thinking about like, where's there a need hustle? Where's there a need hustle? Um, a buddy and I in college, we put posters up all over the place, you know, for $15 an hour, we'll do anything. And so we'd pay kids $10 an hour and make the difference. This is Wellesley, Massachusetts, really nice town. The horrible things people would have you do for $15 an hour was pretty unbelievable.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  But, you know, we were, we were happy to make, you know, make a little spread and uh.

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  So, so you were like Task Rabbit before Task Rabbit?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:38Guy Raz?

  But, but it doesn't sound like it was like Build My IKEA Furniture. It sounds like it was, it was.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Oh, the, the best one ever. And, and we would obviously also sometimes want to make the $15 an hour. So we would just do the work ourselves as well. And so one of them was this huge hillside full of poison ivy. And they're like, can you just pull all this poison ivy out of this hillside? And we're like, hells yeah. Oh, I mean, that was like, for like three weeks.

• 16:00Guy Raz?

  For 15 bucks an hour?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the time, that seemed like a lot, you know, beer money wise, that was like, that was very good leverage on the dollar. So.

• 16:08Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So you graduate and I'm assuming you, you're like a lot of kids who graduate from Babson. You're thinking, all right, what am I gonna do? So what did you do?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  So I got contacted by like a friend of a friend and they were opening up a hot dog chain in Hoboken and wanted a business plan to raise money. And they, you know, kept asking like, would you do this? And I'm like, no, I don't, it wasn't really, and they're like, well, if you would, how much would it be? And I'm like, I don't know, $10,000.

• 16:37Guy Raz?

  To help write them a business plan?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:40Guy Raz?

  For their hot dog company?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:42Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I just said like $10,000. Like, I mean, I literally was like, you know, like a joke, like, sure, for $10,000, I'll come do this. And they said, yes. And I'm like, okay, done. Like, $10,000, I'll do anything. I had no idea what I was doing. And so I started doing this business plan, which I guess, I think it ended up being, I guess it was okay. And then I, from that, I got other business plan jobs. And so I started a company called Your First Step, which was a business plan company.

• 17:10Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  So I kind of started doing this thing and I just, every, because I didn't like doing it, I kept sort of raising my price and people kept paying. It was, it was during the dot com boom too. So people were, you know, a little bit had lost touch with reality.

• 17:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But how, how did people find out about you? I mean, you're, this is Hoboken, New Jersey. You do a business plan for a hot dog guy. And then how do you get your next client?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  So it's funny, just kind of like, and again, I didn't need to have the world know about me. I just needed to have the next job know about me. So it was, you know, and I was doing these every couple of months. So it wasn't like I was doing hundreds of business plans. I was just doing a few.

• 17:47Guy Raz?

  And by the way, this was the, this was the era before like a business plan today is got to be five slides and that's it. Like, that's what people want to see. This was like, kind of, this is like the clip art era.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Oh, the clip art, market studies. I mean, it really was, it was funny. You got a lot of points for how it looked. So I ended up figuring out that I could get a book binder, which was like a thing that would make it a hardcover book.

• 18:08Guy Raz?

  Oh, these were physical business plans, of course. This was not, this is not a digital business plan.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  So I realized if you made them into a physical book, like you just gave that to someone, they were like, wow, this is real, this is good. And everything inside of it was just crap. I mean, it was, how would I know what to do with a business plan? And again, looking back, if you needed a kid to write your business plan, it means you didn't understand your business. Like, it was, it just, it was bad.

• 18:32Guy Raz?

  And I think I read that, that around this time, like, this is like the late 90s, somebody actually asked you to, to work on like a random business plan in Bulgaria?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yes, and I, I went there and it was like January, February of 2000. And I think like for my type of brain, those places were like, they were like an empty canvas to an artist. Going to a place where there's so much that needs to be done, my brain wanted to explode. There was just so many businesses, so many things you could do because it was, things were just kind of coming out and people are, you know, there's just, everything was needed. Like, it was pretty exciting. So, um, so I go there, I do this business plan, and then I meet a guy who's doing voice over IP. And so that was like my first transition from, I'll say, from being like this service business to actually getting into a real business.

• 19:27Guy Raz?

  This is the early days of voiceover IP.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Super, super early.

• 19:31Guy Raz?

  Somebody is like, hey, I want to do voiceover IP and make that the new telecom of Bulgaria? Was that the idea?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  So what happened was is all like, there had never been the ability for a individual, like a not a sort of either a government entity or a giant telecom company to send a call from one place to another. You needed physical lines and like, I mean, it was like you literally had a boat like, you know, putting copper through the ocean. I mean, it was like real. And so what voiceover IP did is it allowed literally like two guys in an office to deploy these gateways and send a call from the US to Bulgaria. And so what you could do is you would get local phone lines. You would get a little apartment and you'd put this box in there and you'd send the call through the internet and then you'd dial it out locally.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And the your cost was the internet cost plus the local charge, which usually was basically free. So now a call to Bulgaria, instead of being 25 cents was the cost was, call it a penny. And so you would sell a phone card against that and you would, and this is what sort of opened up all telecom globally.

• 20:42Guy Raz?

  So you decided to stay in Bulgaria, I'm assuming, and like pursue this idea?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  So when I got into this, I ended up basically being a nomad because once I got a place started and going, I didn't really need to be there that much longer. And the partner was based in the US and he understood the technology and I was sort of the one who, I wouldn't even say I understood how to do this. I was just willing to like, I'll just go and I'll make this work. Like, I'll figure this out.

• 21:10Guy Raz?

  But, but as I understand it, from, from what I read, the business kind of goes into this like roller coaster mode. Like initially it did really well and you were able to expand to a bunch of countries. And then like the guy who you partnered with, who understood all the technology, like, I guess he got into some money trouble and took off and things kind of fell apart.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 21:31Guy Raz?

  So what happened? Were you able to salvage it?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically, my partner ends up this, he's gone. I have this network, but I didn't understand really how to run it. And across the street from my apartment in New York was a Barnes and Nobles. And I went over and I bought this Cisco how to voice over IP book, which was like 700 pages. And I read the entire book, cover to cover, to figure out how to program these gateways so that I could turn them back on, so that I could run this network. Because it was the only way to get out of this thing was to try to sort of make it work. There was people that I owed money to that said, you owe me money. And I said, listen, and this was a good lesson for the rest of my life, which was, I want to pay you, I'll work hard to pay you, but if you shut me down now, I'll never be able to pay you. So we just have to work this out together. And through doing that, two

• 22:18Speaker 01

  things happened. One is I got the business going, started up again, which was great. The second thing that happened was I actually understood, again, going back to the RC cars, I understood really how to fix them. At first, I didn't even understand what I was doing.

• 22:33Guy Raz?

  Right, okay.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  And then when the business collapsed, I literally had to learn the other side. I had to read the Cisco book and understand, I understood why voice over IP now. To me, before this voice over IP was just a protocol that was doing something that I was making money with. Now I understood why it was so powerful, how you could send calls, how you could do stuff. And so that really, then I became like a voice over IP technician, an engineer, an architect of networks. And so I started building this back up. And then another kid who went to Babson had been doing a phone card business that didn't have a network. I was a network without a phone card. He had the customer, I had the logistics. So it was like putting together the supplier and the distributor, putting that whole thing

• 23:18Speaker 01

  vertically integrating it. And so we both saw the benefit of that, put it together, and it was good.

• 23:24Guy Raz?

  How long did you do that?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  It was 2000, we merged in 2002, and then I think I sold out in 2005. So it was like three or four years with him that I sold my stakeout.

• 23:36Guy Raz?

  And you were, by the way, living in New York at the time?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  I was living in, no, I was living in California now. We moved to San Diego, the company, in 2002 or 2003. So that brought me to California, which I then met my wife, who was in LA, and so that kind of kept me here.

• 23:52Guy Raz?

  And we should say, you didn't do too badly on that sale. I think you walked away with about like a million dollars, right?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:00Guy Raz?

  By the way, were you, were you making money in, in all those years? Were you, were you being paid?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I took like a founder's salary, not a, I wasn't driving around like in fancy cars. I, I, I think at the time, so I, I think when I got the money from the sale, I maybe had like $5,000 in the bank or something. I was always sort of just, you know, scraping it by.

• 24:21Guy Raz?

  All right, but now you've got a nice chunk of cash. And was your idea to immediately do the next thing? Use that cash and start the next business?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  So it's like funny, when you say idea, it sounds like I was planning things out. For a long time, I think I was more like a snowball, just kind of flying down a hill, trying not to crash into something that was going to blow me up. So I, yeah, it wasn't as purposeful as like, oh, I'm now going to do the next company. I had already started playing around with voicemail to text at the time. And so I'll say I just moved my focus there because I didn't have anything else to do. So I just kind of moved the focus to that and kept, and really kind of doubled down on that business.

• 25:05Guy Raz?

  So tell me about it. How did that idea even come about?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  So, so it's, you know, the BlackBerry is out, people are, you know, clicking and stuff and-

• 25:13Guy Raz?

  This is like, what, 2005?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  2005, yeah, going into 2006.

• 25:17Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  And-

• 25:18Guy Raz?

  And you have this idea to transcribe voicemails. How did you come up with that idea?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  So I was with like a friend mentor, this guy Bill Wachtel, really successful lawyer in New York, uh, who was visiting LA. And we were just kind of, you know, we were going to go out to dinner and we were sitting around talking and his son was there. And it was like, you know, the dad's yelling about a voicemail message or something and he's sitting on his BlackBerry. And I kind of been thinking about this, but it's like, I just kind of blurted it out and said, what happens if you could read your voicemail? And he was like, that'd be great. I'm like, let's do it. He's like, let's do it. And so that was, that started the business. It was like one of those like, we'll just do it 50 50, done. Like, we're just going to do it. And he helped fund it and, uh, because I understood voice of IP and because I understood-

• 25:56Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  The telecom networks now. So again, like this is building on, I had some fundamental knowledge of how to route a call, how to build a voicemail server. So I literally built a voicemail server and we built this little system to be able to transcribe voicemail messages and then send them to his email.

• 26:12Guy Raz?

  And what was it called?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  It was originally called SimulScribe, simultaneous transcription. Again, like Gadgettronics, you're seeing probably a trend here. And then we renamed it to PhoneTag because we realized that SimulScribe was a terrible name. And, you know, it wasn't, wasn't going to be the biggest company in the world. It still exists today. It's an interesting service, but yeah, it wasn't, you know.

• 26:32Guy Raz?

  And who were your customers? How did you, who, who, who were you going to get to, to use the service?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  So the, the original idea was that we would go direct to consumer. And so we literally would just, you know, people, you could just go to PhoneTag and, and you could reroute your voicemail to us and pay us 10 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month. I can't even remember.

• 26:48Guy Raz?

  It was a website that you would see. This is pre-apps.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. This is, yeah, exactly. This is pre-apps, mostly BlackBerry. And then we went to AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and tried to get them to add it as a service that they could add, which was a great, you know, lesson of if you're a small company trying to do deals with big companies, it's, it's almost guaranteed to be a kiss of death because they just take so much time and so much energy out of you. And it's so hard to get something to happen there. So it was a real slog of a business.

• 27:17Guy Raz?

  Right. All right. So you have this business. And then from what I understand, and I think anyone listening here could, could see the foreshadowing coming, Google Voice comes out with a free service to, um, to transcribe your calls for free. And if I'm you, I'm thinking, we're done. We're sunk.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, yeah, I think I thought even worse than that, but yes, no, it was, it was a tough day. And it's one of those funny things because on the outside I had to come out and be like, this doesn't matter. We can fight this. Like, we're bigger than this. And inside I'm like, we're so screwed. Like, we are done.

• 27:52Guy Raz?

  Do you remember when you found out about Google Voice?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I remember writing this blog post that I wrote that morning. I was, I like, it's like almost a movie where the person's just smashing the keys. They're just writing so fast.

• 28:02Guy Raz?

  What did you write in the blog post?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  I basically wrote that there's no way for you to do this with the way telecom networks work and that they will just end up having to lose money on this.

• 28:12Guy Raz?

  Google?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:13Guy Raz?

  But it sounds like this was like an angry screed because Google, of course, is going to crush you.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like the, it was, the writing was on the wall. I mean, it was like, you know, it was, it was, yeah.

• 28:22Guy Raz?

  Why would somebody pay you $10 a month when Google was offering it for free? Like, free is a better price than $10.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  It's better by $10. You can actually put a number on that.

• 28:33Guy Raz?

  So what did you do?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  I found this small public company called Ditech, which they were in the telecom business, selling services to carriers. So we ended up, we sold it. I mean, I was able to sell it for, to get the sort of investors their money back.

• 28:50Guy Raz?

  I read they bought it for $17 million, which to most of us, sounds like a ton of money, but it wasn't actually a ton of money.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  You gotta read between the lines. So like, I was, I mean, something I've always been sensitive to is like, the fiduciary responsibility to investors. And so I did get every dollar back to every investor.

• 29:08Guy Raz?

  So no one made money, no one really lost money?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, like, let's put, out of the 17, I got basically zero. So I got my, the money I had invested, I got back, which was amazing. And so then I came up with my next idea, you know, which is, it's like, almost, it's like going through it like this, it's almost like exhausting of like, yeah, and then I went on to the next one.

• 29:31Guy Raz?

  Well, but it sounds like that was kind of the plan. I mean, you sell a company, but you come up with things and it sounds like you're kind of restless, which I think many, if not all, the people who've been on the show are. And what's this new idea?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  So this was unsubscribe.com, you know, which is, spam had been solved, but spam meaning like emails that are like not legally sent, basically. So like, those, those have been like, sort of the filters for those have been really tuned to get all that out. The problem you now had was, like, it's legal email, but it's filling up 50% of your inbox. And so I got this idea of if you could automatically unsubscribe from things, you could clean out 50% of your inbox, you could give back time to employees or yourself and sort of make a service around it. It is still to this day, I think, one of the best products I've ever done and one of the worst businesses I've ever been part of. So like, the, the

• 30:27Speaker 01

  financial side of the business is as bad as it gets, and the product was just awesome.

• 30:31Guy Raz?

  So just to clarify, today on my Gmail, it's awesome. Google will say, hey, you're not reading this thing. Do you want to unsubscribe? And I just say, yep.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was that before that. So there wasn't that feature on Gmail. You basically get the button like you have now and there'd be like a little, it would show up. We'd actually insert the button through an extension in your browser.

• 30:51Guy Raz?

  So every time you got an email from somebody you didn't want, you just hit the unsubscribe button that you had on your browser. I got you.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 30:58Guy Raz?

  And what's your business model? Were you trying to sell it to companies?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like a per, the idea originally was like a per-seat fee. You know, if you take 50% of someone's email and clean it out, like the amount of time times X number of employees, like you can kind of figure out this return and it just, everyone agreed with that. They just didn't want to buy it. And so it just ended up being like a business that no one wanted to buy. Like, everyone loved it. They individually liked the idea. They just wouldn't buy it. And so I played out every which way I thought the business could go. Like, we could be this, we could do this. Like, and I couldn't figure out how to make the company bigger than like $30 million in revenue in the next like three to five years. So, you know, I'd raised 2 million of venture capital. And if the best you can do, like if just the whole world was behind us was like 30

• 31:46Speaker 01

  million in revenue. And that's when I realized like this is, this is just not going to end well.

• 31:50Guy Raz?

  It's, it's not going to be able to make enough money.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:53Guy Raz?

  So what did you do?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  So I, I fortunately, uh, through just meeting people and stuff, met someone who was in the identity space.

• 32:03Guy Raz?

  What's the identity space?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Like LifeLock, like that kind of like, identity, sorry, identity protection space.

• 32:08Guy Raz?

  I got you.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Called Trusted ID. And we had built a lot of tech around this and they thought it'd be a great additional thing to add to their customers. So if they could add this as like another feature, you know, we have this, this, you know, credit card this and, and unsubscribe. And so for them, it was like, we could just add this as another feature. It's great. And so I was able to, in essence, you know, dollar for dollar, again, like this is, you know, this is, if you're following the trend line here, this is not good. Build business up, sell it, get investors their exact dollars back. Like, this is not a, you know.

• 32:38Guy Raz?

  So you got an exit, but not, this is not like the, because a lot of times when people think of, they'll meet someone and they'll say, yeah, I sold my business. And a lot of people think, man, that person is like, you know. But actually, most of the time when people say, I sold my business, it doesn't really mean that they walked away with lots of cash.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. A lot of times there's people like me who are basically getting the money back to their investors, or even, you know, getting half the money back to their investors. You know, it's like, fortunately, in some ways, fortunately, I was able to get the full money back to investors both times.

• 33:10Guy Raz?

  So you are in your late 30s.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:13Guy Raz?

  You don't have a whole lot of money, but I'm assuming you're thinking, okay, I gotta figure out the next thing I'm gonna do, or I gotta get a job or something like that.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  So luckily on this one, I, I call it my entrepreneurial midlife crisis. I remember having this just like, You know, almost like this collapse of I keep doing these things that I invent something. I get excited, I get into it. And I almost look at it as like railroad tracks. Like, once you raise money for something, you turn a road into a railroad track. And what I mean by that is you can't turn. And so like unsubscribe, like I realized pretty quickly it was bad, but I'd raised two million dollars. So like, I'm on a railroad track now, which is gonna burn up time. Same thing with phone tag, like, you know, I, I, I wasn't passionate about voicemail. Like, I, I, I thought it'd be fun to do. And then all of a sudden, I'm in this thing where I'm like slogging every day.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  And so I kind of sat back and again, this is by far most important part of my life. And I realized that I was an inventor and not an entrepreneur. And by that, I mean entrepreneurs want to build a business. An inventor wants to literally invent a product or service to just get it out there.

• 34:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  And I decided from that, I'm just gonna go to my garage, hire a couple of kids. And we're just gonna build ahead of all these ideas that I've been writing down in my phone and the notes section. And I'm just gonna start to play with these and try to not get on a railroad track. Play with them long enough to see what actually becomes something and has the ability to become something meaningful. Uh, before going sort of too deep into it.

• 34:47Guy Raz?

  All right, so you say, I'm gonna go into my garage and hire a couple of kids. And like, when you say kids, like.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Like, out of college kids, like, like literally I, but employee number one, John Modestine, lived in Philadelphia, had never, we always joked, never got west of the Mississippi. I literally flew the kid out here and uh, he, I bought him a bicycle and he would ride from his apartment to my garage to work on this stuff.

• 35:11Guy Raz?

  And to, and what was your, what did you say to him? You said, hey, I don't really know what the next thing is. I just wanna tinker and I just want you to help me do that. Was that what you said?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Basically, I mean, I had, I had, so at that point, I had him working on a thing called Snap Garden, which Snap Garden was this idea of building modular thin tiles that would go on your patio and that you could grow food or grass on or whatever with a centralized watering system.

• 35:38Guy Raz?

  I love that idea. There would just be like rubber mats that you could just have sections of a garden on. I love that.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:45Guy Raz?

  I want that, especially now.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. You could have tomatoes and parsley and like you could, you know, you could have like mint and all the different things and on your sort of patio in your apartment. And my whole backyard was growing tables, trying to figure out how to grow on these, almost like a Saran Wrap. And I mean, none of it ever worked, by the way, but we were trying all this stuff and.

• 36:07Guy Raz?

  And these ideas were just like ideas that would come to you in the middle of the night and you'd write them down on a piece of paper like, because we all have crazy ideas, but you're like, I've got a bunch of these ideas.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:17Guy Raz?

  And this is the one where you thought, this has the most promise.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  This one, and we had like four or five, I had, I had a conference call idea called Pokety Poke that would call you when your conference call is about to start.

• 36:27Guy Raz?

  I love that.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  And dial you into the conference call. So Pokety Poke, we had POP, the Portable Power, which was a big battery that you could like sit on a table and charge all your phones.

• 36:40Guy Raz?

  So there was, there was different things and you just hired a couple of people and I'm just trying to understand, was your garage like full of like soldering irons and like a horse, like what are those called?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Saw horse.

• 36:52Guy Raz?

  Saw horse and like.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  It was, yes, that's exactly what it was.

• 36:55Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Mayhem, I guess. Like, we were just kind of like, I mean, there was ideas and then we were like, we're going to work on this. We're going to try to do this with Snap Garden. We're going to try to do this with, I mean, it was like, I mean, looking back again, like you're kind of exposing, like, I don't think I'm a great sort of operational manager because, yeah, I don't think we really had a plan for that.

• 37:13Guy Raz?

  All right. So you guys try Snap Garden and you just cannot get it to work.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:17Guy Raz?

  It's you and two like recent college student graduates.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:22Guy Raz?

  And just kind of trying to figure out what to come up with.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, nothing had been working. And the one big pain point I had, which was a personal pain point, was every time a package was delivered or someone was at the front door to visit, because now people are coming to my office, quote unquote, which is, again, my garage. I called it our two-car office, I call it. My phone didn't get signal in the garage, and the doorbells, those wireless ones, wouldn't reach to the garage. Just like they wouldn't go through all the walls or whatever. And the garage was like a little separate unit, like going to a back alley. And I couldn't hear it. So I didn't know when someone was at the front door. And, you know, that was the greatest position to put myself in, looking back, because that's what sort of started it all.

• 38:09Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how a random lunch meeting with a friend of a friend that Jamie reluctantly takes ends up leading to the luckiest break he could ever ask for. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 38:34Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's around 2011, and Jamie Siminoff is madly tinkering in the garage, trying to come up with a brilliant new idea for a business. And in the meantime, he's trying to solve a problem just for himself, which is, how can he hear his doorbell if he's all the way in the garage? And he thinks maybe he can rig up something with Wi-Fi.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Actually, it's funny, because I looked for a Wi-Fi doorbell. So I didn't, it wasn't a immediate, I'm going to invent a Wi-Fi doorbell. It's, let me buy a Wi-Fi doorbell. And so I searched for one.

• 39:10Guy Raz?

  There were chime doorbells, right? Just a chime, a wireless chime.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the problem was, none of those would reach to my garage.

• 39:18Guy Raz?

  Oh, you couldn't hear it?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that was like the greatest thing ever. Because if one of those reached to my garage, I'd probably be still trying to build gardening things for people's porches.

• 39:28Guy Raz?

  So you wanted something that went to your, that made a chime sound on your phone?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Correct. And then I thought, like, I mean, you have the, so now, like, now I'm starting to invent. You know, it's like I have the phone. Wifi cameras were starting to come out. So it's like, why not have a camera that, you know, you could talk then also that would go to your phone? So it's like, oh, now this is like, I'll take the intercom and I'll take the doorbell concept. And the fact that I have this phone with me that's on wifi and I'll put it all together. And that was, I started building this gigantic thing that I was trying to strap on my front door.

• 40:03Guy Raz?

  All right, here's a question. At that time, video door, like, like a video intercom existed. They were expensive, but it existed. You could have installed that, right?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  So a wireless version did not exist. I mean, you're talking like expensive, meaning like probably installing a, like a video intercom. You know, that was like a states have that. And so like, it's probably like, you know, thousands of dollars.

• 40:30Guy Raz?

  This is not a consumer product.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Correct. And so there was nothing like for me to have to do this. And I just, like, anything when you're naive, which naive is such a great thing sometimes. I just was like, I'll just build it. And so I just like sat down at the bench and got the soldering iron out and started to like break things open and put them together.

• 40:50Guy Raz?

  What, what, what were you building? A camera in a compartment, like, like plastic casing that you would just?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we had a 3D printer. We had, I took a wifi camera, like an off the shelf wifi camera, off the shelf button. I was just like hacking stuff up to just try to build this. And again, it's, the funniest part is going back to that time. I had raised a little bit of money for, it was called Edison Jr. Was the lab, like my garage lab, I called it Edison Jr.

• 41:19Guy Raz?

  You raised money and, and oh, the idea was anyone who, who put equity into Edison Jr. Would get something back if Edison Jr. Came up with something.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:27Guy Raz?

  And just, just so, so you could get a wifi camera at the time and it was relatively not that complicated to get that image on your phone. And so you kind of created a doorbell with this camera that would send a signal.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  To the internet and then back to my phone, yeah.

• 41:45Guy Raz?

  Okay, and how long did it take you to come up with this?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So I started playing around in 2011, like, you know, like, literally just like hacking around with it. And it was basically like 2012, I had like a real working model. And when I say real working model, I mean, still very, very rough, but like something that actually you could like see it work and kind of get an idea of what this was like.

• 42:06Guy Raz?

  I want to kind of push back a little bit because I cannot believe that you did not think that this was going to be the product that you guys were working on. You're telling me that no part of you thought that?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't like I hated it and thought it was something stupid. I just, I think I was so myop-- because it was fixing my problem. And so the funny thing was, as I'm building this doorbell, because the doorbell is for my home, not for Edison Jr. in terms of my thinking at this time, that I'm fixing a problem for me. I wasn't actually, it wasn't one of my ideas on a piece of paper. And so I did it on nights and weekends because I didn't want to take time as a fiduciary away from the work I was supposed to be doing in the garage for Edison Jr. So it's just, that's like how little I sort of thought of the idea at the time.

• 42:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and what's totally crazy to me is that I think around the same time, you came up with like yet another idea, which was, I think it was to like launch a crowdsourcing website? Like your own version of Kickstarter?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so at the time you have Kickstarter and Indiegogo was just kind of getting going. And Kickstarter was the big one on this pre-buy, you know, crowdsourced kind of thing. And Kickstarter kicked off all the hardware people at this point, so this is 2012.

• 43:30Guy Raz?

  They wouldn't let you Kickstarter a hardware product? It had to be like?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they like did like all these restrictions. And so there was some things they let you do, but basically a product like this could, would not have fit into their terms of service. But they, we, so again, as I'm in this inventor lab. I said, oh, wow, here's an opportunity. We should launch a Kickstarter for hardware. And I called it Christie Street, which is, so here we are, the lab's called Edison Jr. that we, you know, did. Christie Street is the street that Edison's lab was on in New Jersey. And I thought Christie Street was going to be the big thing. You know, it's a platform and it's a marketplace and this whole, you know, it could be huge. And, and so I convinced a friend of mine who has, he had a conference in Paris called Le Web.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  And I convinced him to let me launch Christie Street at Le Web, which was like a huge thing for me to be able to get like that kind of an audience for Christie Street.

• 44:24Guy Raz?

  This is like the tech crunch of Europe?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yes, basically.

• 44:27Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:28Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  And so on the call with him and I'm like, we're going to launch this thing. And here's some ideas I have of products to put on. We needed, obviously, like to launch a, to launch a platform like this, you need to have a, something on it, like that people can go to. And so I, we had a bunch of ideas, Snap Guard and all these things. And I went through the list with him and like I'd thrown on the list, the doorbell. And he's a French guy. He's like, you know, he's like, absolutely the doorbell is like the, that is the thing people will love. And I'm like, really? He's like, yeah, he's like, you have to do the doorbell. And I'm like, okay, I'll do the doorbell.

• 44:56Guy Raz?

  Oh, you were going to launch Christie Street, announce it and then say, oh, and by the way, we've got Snap Guard in and we want your, you know? But he was saying, no, the doorbell, that's the thing that you want to get funded.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:12Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're, so you're invited to this conference in Paris. And when was the conference?

• 45:16Speaker 01

  December of 2012.

• 45:19Guy Raz?

  And how many people were in the audience?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  It was like, I think it's like over a thousand. It was like a big conference.

• 45:24Guy Raz?

  So you stand in front of a thousand people and you present Christie Street?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Correct. And everything was broken the night before on the site and nothing worked and the credit card thing, I mean, it was like, like any normal thing. Like it was just like everything was a mess in like behind the scenes. And then we launched it, like actually worked.

• 45:41Guy Raz?

  But the launch was Christie Street. It was not the doorbell or was it, was the doorbell?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Well, it was Christie Street and oh, like our first, the first thing on Christie Street is Doorbot, this wifi doorbell. So we definitely needed something that, for people to go to the marketplace. And so that was like the first thing. So we threw our own product on as the first product.

• 46:00Guy Raz?

  Got it. And you decided to call it Doorbot?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yes, when you're three guys in a garage, you call something doorbell. And my wife, when I was building this thing and putting it on and showing her, she said to me, it's the best thing you've ever invented.

• 46:14Guy Raz?

  Wow, this is Erin, your wife Erin.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, my wife Erin. And so Erin said, like, it's the best thing you've ever invented. And at the time, I really did, I didn't like her saying that because I almost felt like it was, it put down the other things I was doing.

• 46:27Guy Raz?

  You're thinking, I'm the guy who invented unsubscribe, Erin.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and voicemail the text.

• 46:32Guy Raz?

  You're, and Erin at the time was working in Hollywood, right? She was working in the entertainment industry.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Still, still, yeah, she's, she's a, which was again, very fortunate. She, you know, part of how we lived was, you know, or I would say part of, how we lived was on her salary. Yeah. So she definitely was, she was keeping us going.

• 46:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  But, and she said, because it makes me feel safer at home. It makes me feel like we have gates. So if you now fast forward back to, we're pre-selling. Part of why I didn't want to put it out there and didn't think it was that big is I didn't think other people would have the same, I didn't think they'd understand how it would make them feel. And so I thought it would be very hard to market that to say, hey, this is going to make you feel safer in your home, not just be a gadget. And when we started pre-selling it, I remember there was this one woman, and she said, I bought it because the neighbor's house was robbed and they rang the doorbell. And if someone rings the doorbell now, I can answer it and I could act like I'm home. And I was like, so if there was an aha moment in this whole thing,

• 47:31Speaker 01

  it was that where I was like, oh my, holy shit. The customers understand why this is important to them. That, that was when I was like, we can do this. Like that, that was really the, wow, they get it.

• 47:45Guy Raz?

  We'll, we'll come back to this idea of the mission because I have to imagine that most people who saw the doorbot concept thought, that's so cool. I want that. Like they weren't thinking. Security or what? It was just cool, like a video doorbell on your phone.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I call them gadget collectors. The issue is, and I think why a lot of companies have this sort of false positive where they look like they're going to be huge companies early on because their growth is just astronomical. And then all of a sudden, they just go to zero. Because you can't live on gadget collectors. You need to do something more meaningful than that. Because long term, the gadget collector market is just not that big.

• 48:25Guy Raz?

  By the way, how much money were you trying to raise for Doorbot on Christie Street?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  I think we put $250,000 or $200,000. It was a pretty like, I mean, for the time, it was like a pretty big ask.

• 48:40Guy Raz?

  And did you raise $250,000?

• 48:42Speaker 01

  We did.

• 48:43Guy Raz?

  And was that enough money to hire? Because I imagine you and the two, the two college guys you hired did not have the technical know-how to actually build this, or am I wrong, did you?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  No, it turns out you're right, we did not. Again, looking back, I don't understand how we ever got a product out. You know, we were so underfunded. I mean, $250,000 at the time sounded like a lot of money.

• 49:06Guy Raz?

  It's not going to go that far.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  The reality was, yeah, it wasn't even like, it was like a rounding error is so small.

• 49:12Guy Raz?

  Right, because hardware, we had the same conversation with James Park at Fitbit. He raised $400,000 thinking that that would make Fitbit, only to realize that wasn't even going to get them like the plastic band for the Fitbit.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  And that was the, the problem was like, it was so easy to get into trying to build this. Kind of like, all of a sudden, I was all in. Like, I didn't, I didn't realize that I was doing it, but all of a sudden, I realized like, I had all of my money. Like, all of a sudden, like, everything was in this thing in some way. It just kept eating up cash, but it was like little chunks here and there, $10,000, $10,000, you know, just, and...

• 49:49Guy Raz?

  I mean, because there's a bunch of problems to solve. It's like, okay, how do we make this? And then how do we source the materials? And then how do we get this manufactured at scale? And I think the first and most important one is to make something that works, right?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to make matters even worse, we decided, because my house didn't have a working doorbell on it. So we decided that we were going to make a battery operated one, so it could go on any home.

• 50:14Guy Raz?

  So, so you wanted to make a wireless Wi-Fi, battery operated doorbell with a camera?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:23Guy Raz?

  And working out of your garage still?

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Working out of the garage, yeah. And but you're hiring consultants to do something, you know, is it because we had, like you said, I mean, we really did have like very little

• 50:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  expertise in the things that we would need.

• 50:37Guy Raz?

  And you would need consultants who had expertise to come on, and I'm sure their hourly rate was high. And what was the, what was like the biggest challenge that you sort of faced in this first year trying to, trying to solve?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Well, it'd have been amazing if there was one that stuck out, you know, it was like everything was, it was, you know, if you were a skier, it's like everything you looked at was a cliff. Like, there was just no easy part of the run. Doing audio like this was hard. The video was very hard. We, I'd never had been to China to find a manufacturer. I had to go find someone to do that. It used apps, you know, you had to have a big backend video processing system. Like, there was, each one of those in itself was a company that would have been hard to do. And so it was, we took on a task that was, I'd say, as, as close to impossible as you can get, I think.

• 51:28Guy Raz?

  Did you bring in, I mean, was there a moment where you would bring in a consultant who was a specialist in one area that you needed solved? And you said, this is what we need. And the consultant said, that's impossible. You just, it's not possible to do.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Well, when did we bring in? That, that was like, you'd talk to someone who would say that, and you'd just like hang up and then call the next one. Like, you just kind of, you just kind of kept calling people.

• 51:47Guy Raz?

  Was that the standard answer that you would get?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Pretty much, yeah. I mean, most people were highly to fairly negative about the product ever working. And there was people that like staked their reputation on saying like, they will never be able to get this thing to work at scale.

• 52:02Guy Raz?

  So $250,000, you must have burned through that pretty fast, the money you raised from the, from the crowdsourcing.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like, yeah. I mean, it was, it was like gone in a flash.

• 52:12Guy Raz?

  So I have to imagine you needed outside investors to help you out.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  So we did. So I, I put, I kicked some money in that I had and sort of got, again, a little over my sort of head in it. And then we raised, it was started raising money in 2013.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Uh, we raised a million dollars, which was one of the most difficult raises of money I've ever had to do in my life.

• 52:35Guy Raz?

  Why was it so difficult? What were investors?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it was just a lot of things. I mean, one is it was very hard to see that a wifi doorbell was meaningful in any way. How is this gonna do something that's enough to pay back a venture capitalist? Uh, hardware is hard, you know? Are you able to build this thing? I couldn't show him a working prototype because I didn't have one. The, the deck was fairly stacked against us. I think the only way I raised the money was just by hustle in terms of like, I think I just wore people down and, and at this point, I really didn't have a, I didn't really have the option to not fight because I was so into this that if it ended, I was gonna be in like, serious trouble financially myself. So I was really like going and hustling and just doing it and executing.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  On the other side though, I like at home, you know, when no one was looking like, yeah, I was like crying inside like I, I, I, I really thought I like destroyed everything for this.

• 53:30Guy Raz?

  All right. So 2013, something else happens that year, which a lot of people listening may know or may not know, but, but you got on Shark Tank.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:39Guy Raz?

  How did that happen?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  So I, I have a friend of a friend who's trying to start some sort of startup business and said, could you go out to lunch with my buddy? Uh, he's trying to start this business and would love to sort of get some feedback from you. And I'll never forget, I remember driving to this lunch being like, here I am, a guy who's going bankrupt in his garage for a doorbell and I'm gonna give him this rich, like he's, his family's very, very well known and I'm gonna give him advice. I should be focused and I'm like thinking to myself, this is why Jamie, you always lose because you can't focus. Like this is why. It's like, I remember almost like yelling at myself on the way to this lunch. And I get to the lunch and the guy's super nice and talking the whole time and like all about his business. And literally like we're just done and he said like, what are you working on?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  I said, oh, this doorbell thing. And he said, you should go on Shark Tank. And here I am thinking, it must be nice to be like wealthy because that's how you think like, oh, you should go on Shark Tank.

• 54:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  I'm like, no shit, I should go on Shark Tank.

• 54:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Like, how do I get on Shark Tank? And he said, oh, a producer contacted another friend of mine. They're looking for things more like your stuff, like a product, like something more electronic, like a little more complex this season. I'll send you the email. You can email the person. Now, he didn't even know the person. I blind emailed that person from the table saying like, hey, here's my company, getdoorbell.com, would love to go on Shark Tank. And I'm driving back from the lunch. The producer calls me and said, this is the greatest thing. We gotta have you on Shark Tank.

• 55:08Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  And I was like, yeah. Now, from that call though, now it's like the fear of, I don't want to be someone who becomes a joke. Like, and so I took Shark Tank as seriously as any execution of any piece of our business. I built the set in my backyard.

• 55:26Guy Raz?

  You have to build a set for like, cause you like wheel out, you wield out.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:31Guy Raz?

  Okay, a set where you show.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. The funny thing is they tell you, they're like, oh, we think this is what would look cool. And I'm like, great, you just, you know, tell me and you can build it kind of thing. Like you're a show like, and they're like, no, you build it. And I'm, oh, okay.

• 55:43Guy Raz?

  So you had to build out your own display?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:47Guy Raz?

  And what did you build the set out of? Just like plywood?

• 55:50Speaker 01

  So, so we're in Los Angeles, luckily. How do you build a set? Well, it turns out like you just ask someone because everyone builds sets here. Cause that's what they do in Los Angeles. And so Dr. Wood, who is a set builder, came over and built a set.

• 56:05Guy Raz?

  Describe what it looks like.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  It's just like, it's a fake front of a home to put the, the doorbell on. Just to have it sort of sit there, you know, so they had something in the picture to make it look nice.

• 56:15Guy Raz?

  And, and was that, how much did that cost you?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Eight thousand dollars.

• 56:18Guy Raz?

  Cause you really wanted to impress him.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I really did. I took Shark Tank seriously. Like, I mean, and when I mean seriously, I I had three hundred questions that I thought that they would do. I watched every single Shark Tank episode multiple times that had been on to that point.

• 56:34Guy Raz?

  Why was it so important to you to to go on Shark Tank, though?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Was it? Because at the time, the ratings on Shark Tank were massive. I mean, it's still a big show, but it was a massive show at the time. So, look at it as a twelve-minute commercial on ABC for your company. How much would, what's the value of that for a guy in a garage is infinite? It is, it's priceless. And so, I wanted to be the best Shark Tank person of all time, which I really took it seriously. I mean, I trained and I had neighbors over-

• 57:06Guy Raz?

  Your job became Shark Tank, not-

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:09Guy Raz?

  You, you must have been so nervous.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  I, it, it, like, nervous doesn't even descri-, I mean, I had been, and here's the worst part. The producers forced us to do a live demo of the product. And I kept being like, hey, yeah, we'll do a live demo. I'll tape it, and then we'll run the tape. And they're like, no, live demo. I'm like, yeah, I'll just, and like-

• 57:28Guy Raz?

  They wanted to see it work.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  They wanted to see it work live. It had to be live. This is September of two thousand thirteen, so we hadn't even shipped them yet. So, we had four door bots, which I think were the only four that existed in the world at that time. We brought all four. And the, you have a very quick transition between the last person goes, you get on, you have like ten minutes to set up. And so, we're setting up, I'm with the producers, I'm talking, they're talking to me about all this, like, here, I, we want you to do this, and set up for this, and do all these things. And Mark is behind the house.

• 57:57Guy Raz?

  This is your engineer, Mark?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:59Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Scurrying back and forth. And literally, you can see his shirt. Every time he scurries back, he's like, more sweat is on it. And so, it's like, at this point, he almost looks like a swimming pool, like he had jumped into. So, I go over there, I'm like, Mark, um, what's going on? You know, I'm trying, I'm trying to be calm, because they're all looking at me. And he's like, it's not working. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's gonna work, Mark. You get it working. And he just looks at me, I'm like, you're gonna get it working. And so, it turned out like, the first three, for whatever reason, didn't work. The fourth one ends up working, and then, but, but like, working just for the, before we start.

• 58:32Guy Raz?

  And you're nervous.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Oh, dying.

• 58:35Guy Raz?

  Dying, nervous, but you, you gotta be positive and, uh, right?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:40Guy Raz?

  Charismatic.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Who's there?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  It's Jamie. Here to pitch?

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Come in.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  So I get out there, I do my pitch thing, and the end of the pitch is the live demo. And I go over there, and I have the phone in my hand, and I press the Doorbot button, and I'm just waiting. And it's like the longest, you know, three seconds or whatever it took to go in my life.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Hey, good-looking Doorbot guy. Hey, Mark. It's your good friend, Mr. Wonderful.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  And the thing, all of a sudden, it comes up, and the picture comes up. It's probably still the best picture we ever got out of a Doorbot in the history of Doorbot. It looked beautiful. And literally, I'm just like, oh, my God, it worked. It's like, it worked. And it's like, and just, you know, made it happen.

• 59:32Guy Raz?

  Now, two of the Sharks, Mark and Lori, I think, were like, mm, I don't get this thing. And all the Sharks passed, except for Kevin O'Leary. I think the deal that Kevin O'Leary offered you, if I'm not mistaken, was he would give you a $700,000 loan. I want a 10% royalty, and I get 5% of the company's equity today. Oh, my God, that is a horrible offer. I mean, that is an outrageous offer from Kevin O'Leary.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I literally was contemplating, because we needed the money.

• 1:00:07Guy Raz?

  You were desperate. You needed the cash.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Respectfully, Mr. Wonderful, we're gonna decline.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Go kick some ass, Jamie.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Good luck, Jamie. Good luck, Sharks.

• 1:00:24Guy Raz?

  But you did not take the deal.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:26Guy Raz?

  Were you like, this was a disaster? Or were you thinking, you know, there's a silver lining here?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  So you don't know when... So this is now, September of 2013, we filmed. There's no way to know when it'll air. It'll air between now, basically between the show starts on TV, which is like, I think, October or something, and like, May. I knew we weren't gonna make it to May at this point.

• 1:00:47Guy Raz?

  You knew the business wasn't gonna make it till May.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, not where we were sitting. I was thinking, I just blew a month of focus on this thing that now didn't work out, and we are in a worse place than we were before.

• 1:00:59Guy Raz?

  When did it air?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  It aired November of 2013, which, you know, think about like as a consumer electronics product to air right before Christmas, when you're just about to start shipping and you're just about to have all these units come in that you haven't figured out how to sell. You couldn't write, it was like, it was like a Cinderella story. I mean, you can't write the script better than that.

• 1:01:19Guy Raz?

  So how many, I mean, you still were about to send the orders to the people who bought it from the crowdsourcing platform.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:01:27Guy Raz?

  How many orders did the, did the publicity from Shark Tank generate?

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  It was just, it was crazy. It was actually, it didn't come in all at once, though. It was funny, like the, the first night we did, you know, it was a hundred something thousand, whatever it was, it was a lot.

• 1:01:40Guy Raz?

  A hundred thousand orders?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Dollars, dollars.

• 1:01:42Guy Raz?

  A hundred thousand dollars, okay, yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  And so it was a lot, but it wasn't like crazy. And so then the next day, I'm like, oh, wow, that was good, but it wasn't as good as I had hoped. And then the next day was like another couple hundred thousand dollars. And the next day was like a hundred thousand dollars. And the next day was like a hundred thousand dollars because people were TiVoing or, you know, watching on demand. And so it ended up being this tale of this thing was just so long. And so we got, in the end, it was millions of dollars of sales from being on Shark Tank. And then we ended up, started in December, we started shipping them out.

• 1:02:13Guy Raz?

  And, and by the way, these were being made in China?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, at the time, yeah.

• 1:02:17Guy Raz?

  How did you find a factory to agree to make this? I mean, you guys were skating on thin ice financially. I mean, there was a good chance that you would not be able to pay your, your creditors.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, we, um, we found a factory to agree to do it through like, you know, just friend of a friend calling, doing, you know, hook and crook and just everything you could. And, uh, we were prepaying for the devices, so they would never take a risk on us. And it was the other problem is I had to order too many devices. I had to order, my first order was 20,000 devices, which was a lot then, because otherwise they wouldn't even do it.

• 1:02:59Guy Raz?

  And so when they went out to customers, were people happy with them?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  So interesting story. So we get them in and you know, the first ones, you know, we're doing some stuff with and they're coming, they're kind of trickling in. This is like November of thirteen and we're, we had this one programmer that we hired and he came up with, hey, we can make the video better if we change these variables. And so he was testing that. And so he sent off to the factory, a new build of the software to go on the next round of door bots to make them better. And we were so behind on shipping and this is getting into the holidays and you like, we were worried people were gonna, you know, ask for refunds. So we took this huge shipment. So, you know, thousands and thousands of door bots. And we just turned them around. We just put them in boxes and we just shipped them out that day.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And this is getting right into Christmas and we start hearing, it's like the week before Christmas, people are contacting me and saying, it's not working. It was certainly a challenged device that had a lot of like technical issues, but not working was like, it wasn't not working. And so I talked to them. And I was looking at it and their video was coming through like, like an old TV like tuner, like, like it was like all like lines through it and just you couldn't see the picture. And so I'm like, okay, let's look at it. This is now Christmas Eve Eve, so the day before Christmas Eve. And we're sitting with the engineer person and we realized that when he was testing his software, it wasn't actually writing on to the unit. So he thought he was changing stuff. He actually wasn't.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  So he ended up sending software to the factory that was basically just like garble. So we now had basically the large, like most of our units are now in the field with customers that not only do they not work, but we can't change that software on them. So they're basically bricks.

• 1:04:51Guy Raz?

  You cannot fix the ones that people have?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  So it turned out, and we learned this on Christmas Eve Eve, that you can't rewrite the software on this chip. It just doesn't, like the chip only takes it once at the factory and then it never allows it to be rewritten again.

• 1:05:06Guy Raz?

  You cannot update it wirelessly or anything?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Zero, like not even physically, like, so they were literally bricks, like, and so this was like the end of the world, like this really was. And, you know, so when something real happens, I'm almost like a pilot. I go through my checklist. Like, I actually go super calm. And so I literally like go to the calmest place like probably in my life, get everyone together, and I'm just going through the checklist like, can it do this? Can it do this? Can it do this? And like, every answer is no. So I go home and I'm like, it's amazing because like, basically, the business is over. But I'm calm. And I talked to Erin and I said, I said, yeah, like, the, you know, like, it's, it's done. And she's like, it's not done, you know, like, and Erin's always been amazing, like, you know, like, we'll make it through it.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  I'm like, no, it's done. Like, we sent out everything with software that doesn't work.

• 1:05:54Guy Raz?

  By the way, how many did you send out?

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  I think it was like, it was over 5,000.

• 1:05:58Guy Raz?

  So the shipping alone, just to bring them back, would have been devastating.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  And by the way, we would have really had to like, the, if you go through the pilot checklist, you'd have to throw them out, make another batch of this amount, which, by the way, we couldn't make. We didn't have the parts. We didn't have the money, and send those back out to people or refund them all their money, which I didn't have that either. And so, um, I like, I'll, I'll never forget it. Like, my wife, um, she said, well, why don't we just mortgage the house? And it was like, it's like, because it's fucking, it's like you're heading into like, the worst storm ever in a boat, you know? It's like, you're going to sink. And she's like, let's mortgage the house. Let's go into the storm. And it's like, you can't, like, there's no, like, we're done.

• 1:06:43Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Jamie came up with a desperate, last-minute idea to fix those doorbots, and how the real work of Ring was just beginning. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 1:07:10Guy Raz?

  And one more thing before we get back into the story. Just want to mention that in this part of the show, you'll hear me talking with Jamie about the possible unintended consequences of Ring and Ring's mission to make neighborhoods safer. And just a heads up that we did this interview back in late April. So if you're wondering why my questions don't mention anything about the mass demonstrations we've been seeing around the US and the world, that's the reason. Okay, back to the show.

• 1:07:38Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's 2013 and Jamie's sent thousands of non-working doorbots to thousands of customers. And his company has no money to issue refunds. And one more thing, it's two days before Christmas.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  So yeah, like that was, that was Christmas Eve. And so we go out to dinner and it's like, it's like as upset as I am, I can't like, there's nothing to do. I yelling is not going to help. So I'm just kind of like calm. And we're at dinner and all of a sudden I'm like, you know what? We changed the backend server a couple of weeks ago to a cheaper one because for processing the video in the cloud. And it was just cheaper because we only needed to do one thing. And the other server used to do like a million things and it was expensive. And I'm like, I wonder if that other server would actually be able to process whatever the hell we're sending, uh, just because it just has like better sort of capabilities to it.

• 1:08:38Guy Raz?

  This is while you're at dinner, what you're eating, it's just like racking your brain.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I call Mark and I said, who is like our engineer and kind of like my, my engineering partner in this. And I said, Mark, um, what do you think? And he's like, hey, listen, it's worth a try.

• 1:08:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  And so to do this took a while though, like you couldn't just like, oh, I flipped the switch. Yeah, it works. And so Mark works all night long and like 6:30 AM, I get a call on my cell phone. You know, it's ringing, it's Mark. I pick it up and he's like, dude, you won't believe this. It literally works. And it's, and it's the best picture we've ever had. I'm like, no way.

• 1:09:15Guy Raz?

  It was just swapping out a better server?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Yep. It literally worked. And I mean, like that was, uh, yeah, that was, and so like,

• 1:09:23Guy Raz?

  Oh my God.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  I still say it's the best Christmas we've ever had as a family.

• 1:09:27Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's, it's amazing, right? I mean, what happens? Do you, do you send a blast out to the customers and say, okay, now retry it?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was like, hey, if you, if you might've had an issue, we made some updates and you should be fine now. Like, you know, like, like just if it was just yours that you had an issue on, because maybe someone had a problem, like try this.

• 1:09:46Guy Raz?

  Even though everybody did.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  And everyone's like, hey, it works. It's great. Like, thank you so much. Okay, sure. You know, of course it works. Like, why wouldn't it? Like Merry Christmas.

• 1:09:54Guy Raz?

  Oh my God. But I have to imagine at this point, you're like, we are never going to put ourselves in a situation where we cannot update the chip ever again.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  That, yeah, no, that was definitely a tenant that we realized. And again, we just didn't realize we had even built it like that because we were so naive and young and trying and hacking this thing together. We literally just kind of didn't understand that's what we were doing.

• 1:10:18Guy Raz?

  I mean, I'm assuming now 2014, you enter 2014, like, good to go, right? You got the lifeline, you got the money, and now it sounds like you're in great shape.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  So again, the living in fear thing. So I mean, from a, definitely, we are in better shape than we were before, that's for sure. Like, we had orders coming in, money coming in. But we have this other problem now, which is everyone just saw this product. And we were like a ragtag group building this thing with a ragtag product. And now my fear is, I am going to be a bartender in five years. And someone's going to say to me, oh, have you ever done whatever? I'm going to say, oh, I actually was the one who invented the video doorbell. And they're going to say, no way, that's Frank Jones or Jenny whatever, and she's a billionaire. And I'm going to be like, I know, I invented it. They took the idea and actually did it right. And so that was like my...

• 1:11:13Guy Raz?

  That was your fear?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:15Guy Raz?

  Because you had shown the proof of concept on Shark Tank. And clearly, there was interest. And clearly, if an enterprising company, like an alarm system company, or somebody saw this, somebody in their business development team, or whatever, product development team was like, hey, look at this thing, we should do something like this.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, we're gonna, we're gonna copy this, we're gonna build this. We have hundreds of engineers, we have...

• 1:11:40Guy Raz?

  Endless resources, yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Yes, like, literally, really, my fear, like, I really felt that in my bones, that I was going to be the person who invented this and didn't actually make it with it. And so between Christmas and New Year's, I get everyone together. And I said, we've shown what's going to be out there. And if we don't rebuild everything, like, the name, the backend, the product, if we don't really sort of show what this thing can really do, and we don't, and it's not us doing that, and we don't launch it by next year's holidays, so by the holidays of 2014, someone else is going to take this slot, and we're done. And I called the effort, I called it F5, which stood for effing five star reviews,

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  meaning that like you needed a true 360 five star reviewed product, which meant the customer service had to be five star, the brand had to be five star, the packaging had to be five star, the product had to be, like, everything about it had to be five star.

• 1:12:41Guy Raz?

  And how did you, by the way, how did the name Ring come about? Because you're Doorbot in 2014.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  So I go to one of our investors with this F5 thing, who had already invested in Doorbot. And I said, listen, here's what we're thinking. Here's F5. I just want to like pass this by you because I'm going to need to raise some money. So I just want to do like an early look. Just sit with me and let me pitch it. So I pitched the whole thing and the last slide was, I need a new name. And every slide before that I'd said, the ring of security around your home, the ring of this, the ring, like, literally, I kept saying Ring. I didn't kind of realize it, but I kept saying it. And so literally he just blurts out and said, just call it Ring. You keep saying Ring. I was like, eh, maybe. And I kept thinking about it. And then he emails me that night and he said, the domain name is for sale. And I had always wanted to have a company with a four letter domain name.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Like, I'm not a person who likes vanity, but man, did I want a four letter domain company? Like eBay, you know, or half.com or like, you know, Nest or like, there's so many, ah. And so when he said that, I'm like, I need to buy this domain and change the company to Ring.

• 1:13:47Guy Raz?

  And presumably, and also I should mention, by this point, you have an office. You're out of your garage, you're working out, you're working out of a space in Santa Monica.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we were like now 40 engineers or something. So we were like, we were going for it.

• 1:14:02Guy Raz?

  And so, and this is really your year, right? Like that Christmas, the Christmas sales for that year, the fall of 2014. I'm like, this is really when you want to kind of push this out. So. As you were pivoting from doorbot to Ring, did you like completely reinvent it? Did you make it better that year?

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Everything was from scratch. So new Wi-Fi, new camera module, motion detection we put on it that never had been there before. We did infrared night vision, two-way, bidirectional talk. So it was more like a phone conversation than push-to-talk. I mean, it was just like, we literally, like, everything was redesigned on that. Everything was redesigned on the brand. You know, we literally Ring. So just every piece of the business, from like soup to nuts, was redesigned and rebuilt from scratch between January of 14 and October.

• 1:14:54Guy Raz?

  And things like, like, design, right? Like, design was going to be important. Like, one of the things that happens when you get a Ring, and I think, and I don't know if you introduced it as early as 2014, was it came with a screwdriver, a little screwdriver and like a leveller.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:12Guy Raz?

  Because a lot of people just, you know, don't have. Was that?

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my thing was always that I don't, if someone has to drive to a hardware store when they get something, it's just such a bummer. It like just bums you out. And so I want everything in there. In fact, the first Rings that shipped had a canvas toolkit in them. And it rolled out and every single thing was in the canvas toolkit. And so it was like this beautiful, like, I mean, way too expensive and we couldn't keep doing it. But, but it was like this beautiful canvas toolkit. It was amazing.

• 1:15:40Guy Raz?

  How did you do in 2014? How were sales?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  2014 was, I think, 3 million in sales. It was, it ended up working out that the tail of Shark Tank sort of credibility and awareness got us through selling the doorbots without having to do much marketing and allowed us to sort of focus on then getting Ring up and running. And so my job mid-2014 was to go raise money because that we needed and sort of get us to launch sort of, let's call it, into 15.

• 1:16:11Guy Raz?

  And how was that when you went back to raise money? Was it a little bit easier?

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  No, no. I basically went to these venture capitalists and I talked about the mission. You know, we're going to make neighborhoods safer. We're going to do this. And so like, most of them just, I mean, they literally, they didn't even say no, they just didn't even talk. Like, they were just like, threw us out. Like, it wasn't even like, I wish it was like a no. It was almost like, like, not even a chance. And there was one venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that was just like, super missionary focused. And I didn't really even realize how missionary focused they were. And when I said that, it just like, kind of sparked the partner there. And they were so intrigued by that, that they basically invested. But I'll never forget, like, being in that VC meeting when I said, you know, we need, you know, 4.7 million and the partner on the other side said, um,

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  you know, there's no way you're getting that out with 4.7 million dollars more. You're going to need a lot, a lot more. And I said, you want to bet? And he said, yeah. I said, well, great. Give me 4.7 million dollars. I'll show you can get it out. Like, I think he was literally like, okay, you know what? For that much, like, I gotta take the bet. And so it was, uh, we were, we were tight. We, we, we launched Ring in October of 2014, like, you know, basically October 1st, 2014. And we were $0 in the bank account the day we launched.

• 1:17:21Guy Raz?

  And, and how much was the cost of a, of the Ring doorbell at that point? Was it 200 bucks?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  The Ring, yeah, at that point it was 200. It was like 199, I think, still, yeah.

• 1:17:29Guy Raz?

  And, and that, and through sales in 2015, I can't imagine you were profitable, even at a $200 price point.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  So we were not. So, uh, the Rings were very expensive, the first ones that came in. Most of the ones that we sold, we were losing some money on. So, yeah, it was a tough, we kind of were, I had felt, you know, at this point, like, we were all in. Like, I've always said to the team, I'd rather be a giant hole in the ground. So I always, I look at like, Santa Monica is where our office is. So I always say like, I'd rather there be a giant hole in Santa Monica, than to kind of whimper our way out of business. Like, so if we're going to go for it, let's go for it.

• 1:18:08Guy Raz?

  So there's a quote of yours that I read. Basically, you said, "There were nights when I would wake up at 3 a.m. and tears, bawling. How are we going to make it to tomorrow?" You've got traction, you're selling product, you've got investors on board, it's 2015, there's more visibility, the product's getting better, and you're still panicking about its survival?

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I still panic today. I think the...I just always was worried. There's so many things to worry about in business, including what you don't know. And so I am always kind of panicked. Fear drives me. And now, I'd say it's a digestible fear. Back then, it was really, I had everything in this thing. And if it went away, maybe now, at this point, I would not have gone literally bankrupt. But it just, such a giant thing that I had built would have been wiped out. I'd have nothing. And I could keep seeing how we could go to nothing. I just was, I was terrified. I mean, competitors, terrified of what I didn't know.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  What was the person going to build that was going to wipe us out that I couldn't see? Terrified of ourselves. I always say, the thing that I believe puts companies out of business is yourself. It's us not providing to the customer in a way, and not building that relationship that's going to... So you've got to keep pushing things. And I said, "If we keep going the way we're going, I think we're going to get trampled. We need to take this thing to the next level."

• 1:19:35Guy Raz?

  You thought you would get trampled by some big technology company. You'd been trampled before. Google trampled your voice transcription service. They unsubscribe. I mean, you knew what it meant to get eaten alive by a bigger, better-resourced company.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  I certainly knew what trampling felt like. And I also, I had this concept, and it actually comes from my mentor, who I've never met and who has no idea that I exist, James Dyson.

• 1:20:03Guy Raz?

  He's been on the show, it's an amazing story.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I always thought, in the future, we're going to keep getting competition, because that's the way of life, and that's fine. I need it to be that when someone sees Ring, they... Know that it stands for something else, that it's about neighborhood safety. And we always said, we have to be rewarded with the purchase of our neighbor, which is what we call our customers. And so the way that Dyson did that was they put James Dyson in commercials and he talked to you and said how he was an inventor.

• 1:20:35Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  That's kind of where a lot of our stuff came from. It's like, let me just go out there and tell people what we're doing and the message. And let's get it out there so that we can build this brand, because that's defensible long term. Like, when you build a Dyson, anything they come out with, you know, is designed better than everyone else's and has been thought through better. And that's what we had to be for neighborhood security was my feeling. And I think we've actually maybe now achieved that.

• 1:21:04Guy Raz?

  I'm wondering, what were alarm companies thinking? What were they thinking? I mean, Ring was getting traction in 2014, 2015, 2016. Why didn't they? What do you think? Like, why didn't they just copy this idea and make it?

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  I mean, so it's interesting. I went to one of the big security companies and talked to the CEOs. And I think they just, they were in sort of a different business than we were, I think, which was, I was in a business of trying to invent around this mission of making neighborhoods safer and really innovate around that. And they were in the business of trying to capture customers, like reduce shrinkage, like very like MBA type talk. Like, you need to have like, you know, what's your ROI? What's your this? Like, they were running a business?

• 1:21:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  And I was running an innovation lab around making neighborhoods safer. And so I'll say we got kind of lucky because, yeah, I mean, trust me, if one of the, if someone that big had come out with something much earlier, could they have unseated us? Probably.

• 1:22:05Guy Raz?

  So I want to ask you about something that is controversial, a controversial part of your growth, which has been partnering up with law enforcement agencies. And I can understand how a lot of people, especially, you know, privacy advocates, get freaked out. Because when someone passes by your house, right? You get filmed. If someone rings your doorbell, you get filmed. So let me, I mean, just want to ask you about the law enforcement part, right? When you, when you decide to partner with law enforcement agencies, did a part of you ever think? Hey, you know, this like this could be troubling, right? Like, there could be things like racial profiling and and other things that you might not have thought through.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  So the term, I mean, there's been a lot of press around this.

• 1:22:55Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  And and so, you know, we missionary company make neighborhoods safer. And so I'm an inventor. I go out there and I look at like, what what services? What what products can I build to make neighborhoods safer? That's my goal. And I looked at a current thing that was happening in the the world where when something happens in a neighborhood, a crime happens in a neighborhood, a police officer has to go door to door if, you know, to to ask for video, ask what's going on. It's very time intensive on their part. It's also very nerve wracking to the person who is on the other side of that. Some police officers literally on the other side of your door. You open it up and they ask you, you know, hey, um, you know, do you have this? Do you have this?

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  And so that's that's not, you know, for both sides, it's not good. And I said, I can build a better system for this. For the neighbors, what's better is we have a system where police, you know, law enforcement or also fire departments now use it can ask for information. You know, it basically goes out as an alert and you can respond to that alert. And if you respond, then obviously they'll get your video that you're, you know, saying, yes, I want to give you this of this time. They don't have access after that. They don't have access before that. And if you say no, they don't actually see that you said no. So you don't have that. If you didn't want to give a police officer video who's standing in front of you in your door, that's a very uncomfortable situation. We actually made it better.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  So we actually made it more privacy centric, which goes to our, you know, privacy, security and control are sort of the foundational elements. We always say it ring. And so I think we've actually invented a system that's way better. Each person owns their data and that's so important to us. So it's the idea that every single person owns their data. And then when something happens, you can come together. You can make that choice to share at that point. You have the, again, security, privacy and control are foundational to every, literally everything we do.

• 1:24:54Guy Raz?

  So you have no access to my video stream at all?

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely not.

• 1:24:58Guy Raz?

  There's no, there must be, they must be stored somewhere, though.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  They're stored, but we, I mean, we for sure on purpose do not have access to those because, I mean, yeah, no, it's your, your data and we want your security, privacy and control to be there.

• 1:25:13Guy Raz?

  I guess, Jamie, the thing that I'm sort of hoping to crunch on, right, is the idea of unintended consequences. Like, there's no question that, that the benefits of Ring are huge. Like, the benefits of Airbnb are huge. I've been able to stay in places all over the world, but it's also like affected property values in places like particularly San Francisco and New York or London where there are just empty homes. Ring is an amazing product, but there are also things about it that, let's be honest, are going to be beyond your control. And so I just kind of think that it's important that everyone, inventors, technology people, just, just acknowledge that possibility.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  I think, I think these are important discussions that should be had and constantly had. Just like I said, like, I always live in fear. Like, I always wake up every morning thinking something could have taken us out, like, whatever that is. Like, we should always be looking at this, always scrutinizing ourselves, always taking the scrutiny that comes and looking at it and making sure that, you know, we build features and products that truly make people's lives better. So that's, it has been powerful and we've seen the anecdotes of that of even like lost pets and, you know, a person who goes missing and, you know, in the neighborhood. We had an elderly person who went missing in their neighborhood. You know, they were like Alzheimer's or something like that. And so we were able, using the neighbor's app, they were able to sort of, people were able to track down

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  and find this person. So I think there's just a lot of great things. It's not just about, when I say like safer neighbors, I don't mean just, you know, crime safety. Like, there's lots of things. I think that's something we should do every day, and I agree. Every person who is in a leadership position, government, companies, whatever that is, if you have the ability to do something that's large, you need to continually scrutinize and think and discuss and look at this to make sure that the unintended consequences aren't happening.

• 1:27:14Guy Raz?

  All right, so in 2016, Amazon makes a strategic investment in Ring. And then about a year later, I guess somebody sort of signaled to you that maybe they were interested in acquiring you?

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  So, we're working with them, we're doing all sorts of projects with them, all this stuff, we just kind of keep the relationship going and it was good, but I always laughed with them and said, "If there's any company I'm going to sell to, it's you." And I had meant it, not trying to bait them, but in a real way of, Amazon was the only large company that I saw or felt when they bought companies truly brought it to the next level. You know, with Audible and IMDb and Zappos and Twitch, they've just kept founders and just done, I really have felt they've done such a great job. And so I always joke with them about that. And so Nick Camoros, who's one of their head of corp dev people, said, "Hey, I'm going

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  to be in LA, let's have some lunch." And it's like, "Sure." And it was not that out of line because we had been doing a lot of stuff with them. And I go to lunch with him and he says to me, "I think it's time we go to the next level." And it was like this weird dating thing where it's like, "So are you saying you want to go out?" Because I didn't want to jump in and be like, "Yes, we're going to, you know, let's do it." And so it ended up being like this awkward couple of minutes of back and forth to make sure that he was saying, "Yes, we want to buy you," and so that I could then say, "Yes, I'd want to sell to you." And that was in September, October of 17.

• 1:28:50Guy Raz?

  They offered $1 billion for Ring, which, I mean, that was a huge return for your investors and all those people who put money into Edison Labs. A lot of people got rich off that acquisition, I have to imagine.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, we distributed a lot of money.

• 1:29:09Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Guy Raz?

  When that deal came through, a lot of the articles about it were, "He went on Shark Tank, no one invested, they were all dummies." That was basically the story, that all these Shark Tank people could have made all this money off of Ring. I mean, I'm sure you saw those articles. Did a part of you think that, too?

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  I mean, Shark Tank, Shark Tank's a TV show. And I think it's an amazing TV show that does, I think, great things for kids to inspire them to build and do things. But it is a TV show. It does have to entertain. To be fair to the investors, they get up to an hour with someone that they've never met before. And they had done so much for us that, yeah, I didn't have any bad feelings about it. I am really proud to have built the largest company ever to appear on Shark Tank. I mean, that's something that certainly I really do get a lot of pride out of that. And then I was invited and I went back on for a few shows as a shark. And so I was the first person ever to be on the show as an entrepreneur and then go as a shark.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  And again, that was like really, we have a thing in our culture where we don't celebrate at Ring. It's like one of our cultural bullet points.

• 1:30:23Guy Raz?

  You don't celebrate victories or wins?

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Because there's always something next that we have to do, which is fine, because I like the idea that we'll always just keep progressing and doing better. And so to that point, even with Shark Tank, it may be hard not to celebrate the fact that happening personally was pretty interesting.

• 1:30:41Guy Raz?

  All right. So you now are an Amazon employee, basically. It's like Zappos, right? You have your own company, but you're part of Amazon.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:52Guy Raz?

  And you have all this support and Amazon resources and their distribution system. And it's one of the biggest companies in the world. Now, do you feel like you can kind of take a breath and say, all right, we're not going to get crushed because we're with Amazon? It's like being on the Chicago Bulls in the 90s.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  So it's been a really interesting, I mean, I've always said that money didn't drive me. I always have said that. But I think until you have money, it's hard to be sure that that's the case. I am just as passionate and angry when something doesn't happen that's right. My email's still on every box. I still respond to them. I'm still just as upset when we do something that's not as good as we should. So all of that's the same. The difference, though, is now... Before if Ring, if something really had happened to the company, I would lose everything and truly like impact my family's life. At this point, that's off the table. And so it is, I do, it's amazing.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Every day I'm still almost like I, it's the, I feel the same. Like, I don't even feel like we sold it. I feel like it's just, we're there to keep, you know, fighting the fight and doing what we're doing. And it's like, and I love that.

• 1:32:03Guy Raz?

  You are in your early 40s?

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Yep, 43.

• 1:32:07Guy Raz?

  Your hero, James Dyson, when he was your age, was broke. He'd done the Ball Barrow and a bunch of other things. And he put all of his money into building the Dyson vacuum cleaner. And then within two years after he launched it, it was the best selling vacuum cleaner in Britain. And we know the story. He's now one of the wealthiest people in the UK and the world. Do you think that, you know, your story and what happened with this, the ring and chart thing, everything? Do you think it has more to do with just your intelligence and your skill? Or do you think that luck was a bigger factor in everything that's happened to you?

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  So the thing I always say about luck, I think it is, it's the lottery. And so you get sort of lottery tickets for how, you know, it's like how good your idea is, how good your team is and how hard you work. And so you take those like factors. And I think how hard you work and your team are probably even bigger factors than the idea. But you still need to have something that actually would work. And so you take those three things together and you get for each sort of hour of production or work, you get a lottery ticket. And so just like the lottery, if you, unless you own every ticket, you're not guaranteed to win. Because I've seen people that have, are smarter than me, better than me, better idea than me fail because of things like luck, like things not going their way. And I've seen, again, the opposite of that.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  And so we have been fortunate to have been, have lots of lucky breaks in our direction. But we also continued to work to get more tickets so that we could win the lottery.

• 1:33:37Guy Raz?

  That's Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring. Since the pandemic began, Ring has donated hundreds of its products to hospitals across the US so that health workers can communicate with their patients remotely. By the way, remember when Jamie said his email address is still on every box? He's not joking, it is. And if you agree with me that SnapGarden, those floor tiles that grow tomatoes and cucumbers, is a product that the world really needs right now, send them an email. Tell them I sent you.

• 1:34:14Guy Raz?

  And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to tweet at us, it's at HowIBuiltThis or at Guy Raz. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Candace Lim, Derrick Gales, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.