Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) Ring Founder Jamie Siminoff

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Check out Jaime's book: Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject To Everyone's Front Door Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Hey everybody. Greetings from Rainy Londontown. I am flying back right now as we speak. So I am going to give you this interview with the founder of Ring, telling the whole story of Ring and its development and the famous appearance on Shark Tank. Enjoy this. I will talk to you again tomorrow with a regular episode. Attackers don't need exploits when they use your allowed tools against you. That's why Threat Locker enforces default deny and execution, stopping unknown software scripts and ransomware the moment it tries to run. No signatures, no guesswork, just control. Threat Locker takes zero trust from theory to practice by blocking any unauthorized application or behavior from ever running in the first place. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to malware creation, so Threat Locker prevents AI-generated polymorphic and fileless attacks by shutting down unknown behavior automatically, even if it's never been seen in the wild.

Threat Locker gives you tight control without the noise, meaning fewer alerts and a cleaner, predictable, operational posture. Learn more at Threatlocker.com slash TechBrewride Home. That's Threatlocker.com slash TechBrew Ride Home. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Brew Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough, as always. We're going to do another History Hat episode today. We're talking to Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring, which everybody knows now. Some people might know the story of the most famous shark tank appearance of all time, but Jamie, thanks for coming on to talk. Thanks for having me, Brian.

This is going to be, I told you, this is your life sort of thing. So let's go all the way back. Okay. Oh, by the way, we're talking about Jamie's book also, Ding Dong, how Ring went from Shark Tank Reject to everyone's front door. in the book, you described yourself as sort of a MacGyver more than like a trained engineer. Yeah, for sure. I'm a tinker. Most of my stuff is self-taught. You know, I'm kind of a pre- YouTube generation, so I couldn't just go on and see videos of how to do everything in the world. So I just learned by,

you know, McGuire. I pulled things apart, put things together. And to the McGiver, example, I also built a lot of explosive devices that I probably should not have been doing. at my age in my basement as a kid. Right. So when we're saying we're going all the way back, you're tinkering as, like as young as I, literally as young as I can remember.

I was always just, I mean, and I think that a lot of it is just like who I am. I mean, I was always taking things apart, figuring things out. And just that's like my self-taught engineering. Is that as a kid what you wanted to be?

Were you like, I'm going to grow up and be an inventor? Yeah, this is like the nature versus nurture thing that's funny. You know, my brother, I'd say has like none of this. My parents even were not handy at all. So I would fix things around the house when I was, you know, five, six, seven years old. Like I was the person fixing things. I was the person taking them apart. So it was, uh, it just like was who I was. And to my parents credit, they just kind of let me, they would just like, you know,

even like I was like people, like family members with every time I go to someone's house, they'd like donate their toaster. Anything that was like stopped working. They're like, well, we know Jamie wants it. And so I would just get it. I'd put it in the basement and I'd just like rip parts off of it and try to put things together with it. And, you know, and again, you're a kid. You make a lot of contraptions.

Did you ever blow anything up? I blew a bunch of stuff up. Yeah, there was, you know, probably more things that I'd like to admit to. Yeah, I think I need tinker. It's like, I mean, it's probably where my parents maybe should have stepped in at some point. I'm lucky I have like, you know, 10 fingers, 10 toes. But, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you're tinkering. engineering explosives are kind of part of that and learning that. I think I, you know, I didn't

realize exactly how they worked until they did. So, you know. That's one way to learn, lose a finger, I suppose. Your dad tells you that you never want to be the guy. You want to be the guy behind the guy. Yeah. But again, that's, that wasn't in your nature. Yeah, I always wanted to, I always felt like I wanted to do stuff. Like, I wanted to be the person. I think it's more of even like the inventor wanting to, like, I want someone to point to something and say, like, he built that. And that's with Ring.

I mean, what I am so proud of is you drive around almost any neighborhood, literally around the world. And you can see my products that, you know, came from my brain and a lot of help from a team, but that we resulted in putting there. And it's pretty cool, like that feeling of that. Before Ring, so as an adult,

you had a bunch of things. I'm going to list some of them, a bunch of products. Phone tag, unsubscribe, SnapGarden, even slow down A-hole to catch speeders. Give me, pick one of those and describe what one of those was. I mean, SnapGarden, which is still like one of my favorite things that never worked, was the idea that you'd have these modular tiles. So you go to like Target or, you know, Walmart and you'd, you know, buy these tiles that you'd put. out on your patio, you click them together and there'd be like a grass tile and a tomato tile and a broccoli tile and you basically click it all together and you could like grow a garden and

have like, and even just grass, like have an organic sort of patio. And then you had this water tile that you'd fill with water that would like keep it watered. We never got it working. It looked like we were like a pot farm at my house. My wife was not happy when we were trying to build this one because I was I was literally in the garage doing these inventions and you know she wanted to have people over and we had all these tables like outside with like growing stuff and I mean it it did not look it did definitely did not look like we were trying to do a tomato farm what of those was the furthest got the furthest um you know a lot of those died um you know we had this one that was um pokey-poke which would call you when your conference call started.

Like we kind of launched that. But my problem was for a long time, I was doing a lot of little things. And what I did realize, and thankfully at some point, you know, I realized this took me maybe a little bit longer in my career than some other people. But you just have to focus on one thing. Like you got to put all the wood behind like one project.

You got to really focus on it. And that was, you know, Ring is really the result of of just focusing on one thing and not having 50 things. When I was doing SnapGarden, I was also doing, I was doing 10 things at once every time. But is the idea there, it is the throw something against the wall and see what sticks, but also what gets traction.

So maybe at the time in your mind, you're thinking, I'm doing 10 things because I don't know which one will hit, and it's a numbers game. So the problem is at the time I was doing 10 things at once because I thought 10 things could make it. Ah. And it's like what, but I think that is,

I think where garages are great is they allow for the freedom of just kind of experimentation. And so we did, I did experiment in the garage and all the stuff. And then, yes, once we started to see ring going, but that was, it was still pretty early, but I had sort of had this epiphany at some point that, like, I have to focus on something. Like, we have to focus on one thing. And that is. I mean, it's very hard to see any successful entrepreneur on. the first big success not focusing. There's people that, because once you're made it, then you do

have some money that can help possibly do it, but there's still very few examples of people that have gone out and done multiple businesses and been successful. Elon's probably the one that has the, you know, has done it at a scale that's kind of unbelievable. But other than that, like, if you think about it, there's just not that many. There's a lot of people that have done a lot of different things after they've been successful. But like, there's very few that. that have been, have had major successes in multiple things. Right. Do you ever, have you ever done the counterfactual of how things would be different

if one of those others had taken off first before, right? You know, it's interesting because if one of them had taken off, I'd say all of them would have been smaller. Just like the scale, you know, growing things on people's patios. Like, I mean, there would have been, maybe a couple would have been nice businesses. But I do think about like this kind of idea of these like doors that, you know, you just something pushes you right versus left and the difference in your life of what that means and like sort of just what it means for everything and there's just so it is i mean it's it's there's

so many things that could have stopped us from doing this and that i'd be doing something else um you know just who knows i mean that's that's the weird thing of life so speaking of the garage uh ring was originally called doorbot and it be poorly named doorbot yes but it's solving a problem that that you have in the garage, which is that in the garage, you can't hear your own doorbell ring? Yeah, so I'm in the garage and I'm not focused on all these different things. And I literally can't hear the doorbell. I go out to get the cheap, you know, like these plastic doorbells that like have a wireless thing and you plug it into the thing.

It just didn't reach there for whatever reason. The signal was blocked. I just bought an iPhone. This is like really like right when the iPhone had come out, 2010, 2011. and I was just, oh, like, why wouldn't a doorbell go to your iPhone? There must be someone that makes one. Let me go online and look for it. Nothing exists.

And I'm in the garage. And so what do you do and nothing exists? You're in the garage. Like you get a soldering iron out and you start taking stuff apart like I had done since I was five years old. And I put together a video doorbell that would go to my phone. I want to hit this in a couple different ways. But first of all, the idea that this didn't exist.

Like, you thought that will surely... 99%. If you'd said, like, put what the bet down, I would have said 100% that's like, yeah, someone's making this. Do you think that what should be an obvious idea is the hardest to come up with

if you're not inspired personally in the sense that, like, you know, you're solving your own particular problem. And maybe that's why you can't, you can't product design your way to something like that. I think that is a good point. People say, like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur.

I'm like, oh, what do you want to work on? They're like, I want to have a business. And I'm like, what's a business? It's like, I want to solve a problem. And so I think solving a problem to your point, like that's what creates invention. That's what creates, by the way, it could create a business invention.

But technology doesn't solve a problem. Wanting to have a business doesn't solve a problem. Wanting to make money doesn't solve a problem. And so I agree. I think finding problems, finding these points of friction, and then taking like a first principle approach of like, okay, I just got a phone. Like, why wouldn't the thing go to my phone?

It's like, and it is, it was so obvious as looking back on, by the way, lots of great inventions that people did. At the time, it wasn't obvious to others. It was obvious to me. But it was so obvious to me. I thought someone else was building it. But it was amazing when I went out to raise money and do it. like people laughed.

I mean, I literally, it was like a polar trick. I would go to a, you know, like a little thing with my wife and we go to like with like neighbors or something. And they say, like, what are you working on? I'm like, oh, this doorbell. Oh, a doorbell. Like, no, seriously, what are you working on? I'm like, no, I'm seriously working on a doorbell. Like goes to your phone.

And they're like, oh, doorbell. That's hysterical. Like, you're so funny. Because no one could see it. I saw it. Also, you mentioned your wife there. So you, you, uh, jit up a question. quick prototype, right? And you know, paste it to your door. It's a terrible looking thing.

When your wife sees it, she says to you, this makes me feel safe. So when she understood what it did, you know, she said, we lived in a little house, right in like kind of like right on the street, you know, like, nice little place, but like right on, you know, kind of small little place. And people come up to the door, you know, knock and say, like, I want to sell this. She never like, you know, she didn't feel comfortable with that. And so with this, she's like, I can answer the door from a comfortable place. I, like, I love what this does. This makes me feel safer at home. If we're not here, I can answer the door and be like I'm home. And so that was the, you know, what really built ring was this mission to make neighborate safer. And it was my wife that

kind of, I'd say, sparked the first part of it that, wow, this is like, and that's when the focus happened. Like, because until then it was like a gadget on my front door for myself. That was the, that was, I'd say, like, really the first, like breadcrumbs or nuggets towards this, um, aha moment. That there's a bigger idea there that is not just a toy. A gadget doorbell. This is about home safety and security. Yeah. And then coupled with the fact that you realize no one else is doing that, is that's

where you're like, you know, put everything else aside. Let's go. Put everything else aside. We're going to make neighborhood safer. And then it was also, holy cow, no one is building home security the right way. like it was just like it literally it's like the in the matrix when they start seeing everything in code and they realize like it's like it's like a just completely different world than what they've been seeing I felt like the same thing it was all of a sudden unlocked there's 10 years of products we can build here like it's not just the doorbell

it's like it's everything like no one is building home security residential security based on where technology is gone and what we can do today and it was this idea of delivering presence and being always home and so that was the we the This is going to change the world. We need to do this. And we got to, like, move. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get

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with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Do you still have that original prototype somewhere? I do, yeah. On your mantle? Sadly, I think it's like in my office in like a closet behind a bunch of boxes

at this point. These things get moved around. You should put it on. a pedestal. I should, I know. So, famously, what eventually becomes ring is one of the most famous appearances on Shark Tank. You nearly turned down the opportunity to do Shark Tank? Well, I got, so I actually said I had lunch with a person in L.A. who said Shark Tank was looking for, like, more products of when I. told them what I was working on. He's like, you should just email this person at Shark Tank.

At the time I went on Shark Tank, I think they were having like 30,000 plus applications a year. So I didn't even like apply, not because I didn't want to get on the show, but just maybe the 30,000 and one application. Like it's like the chance of getting on was zero to me. So I just emailed the producer, said, here's what I'm working on. Here's my website. He actually called me and said, wow, this is amazing. Like this is the type of stuff we want on Shark Tank. Here apply. And so then then I applied to get on it. And yeah, it was, it was, I mean, it was an incredible, you know, the Shark Tank definitely was probably the credibility and awareness it gave us was literally like, it's like, it's like,

it's like having a Super Bowl commercial, I think, you know, for a startup. It's like, it's like, you're in a garage. And the next thing you know, you're on the show that, you know, America now sees your product and hears it. Like, it's like 12 minutes of, like, you get to explain what you're doing. It's, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. Where were you in the fundraising process at that point? So we had raised, so we, we were looking for 700,000 for 10% on Shark Tank, and we were trying to raise a million dollars. And we had raised basically 300,000. So I had like 300,000 of a million dollars raised. Um, but I was really struggling to raise the money. Like I, I, I went on, I was sure Mark Cuban. I'm like, I, again, I would have bet anything that Mark, Mark,

Mark Cuban was going to invest. I was like, I'm going to go on there. I'm going to show this thing. Mark Cuban's going to be like, Jamie, like, this is, you and I are in business together. I'm like, yes, Mark Cuban. And we're going. And Mark Cuban, I do my little pitch. And he's like, Jamie, this thing's too small for me.

I'm out. I mean, like, immediately. So that was like, uh-oh. But I needed the money. I mean, it's funny because looking back now, a lot of people were like, oh, you're so lucky you didn't get the money. It's like, I really needed the money at the time. Well, wait, let's back up to that story.

You described like preparing for Shark Tank like the Olympics. Like you watched episodes, you tried to read the tells of the sharks. Oh, yeah. Were you, so you went on thinking you've prepared, but when you're there in front of the sharks, like you're saying, they didn't necessarily behave like you expect? But that was part of being prepared, you know? It's like, it's preparation is that I was, so the thing people don't know about Shark Tank or what I like that.

I mean, it's sort of out there, but not as well known is, you know, not everyone that goes on that tapes airs. And that's because, like, you know, it is TV. And so if you go on and it's boring or it's whatever, it's like too quick, like if they don't have enough tape to cut together, like it's just, they can't put it on the air. So you just don't get an episode. So I go on and they're telling me, like, you've got to get them talking.

I'm like doing this. Like you've got to like keep them engaged. Okay, great, great, great. And I did. I trained like I was an Olympian. I had the set set up in the back of my house. I had neighbors come over. I had hundreds of questions that they would ask me.

I watched literally up until that time every Shark Tank episode. I take notes on it. I prepared as much as any human could prepare for this. So when Mark was out, what could have happened if I had been less prepared is like cascading everyone else would have been out. And it would have been like such a short amount of time that I don't think they would even have the taped air. But because I was like trained for this and whatever, I was able to still engage.

I sort of got him reengaged and got that. And I just kind of kept it going. and made it, I'd say, what ended up being, you know, a good episode, but also, you know, had all the stuff and kept them engaged enough to then get on the air. I was still trying about it. I was also like, my goal was to get the money. So it wasn't like I was like sitting there saying, like, let me reengage them so that Mark Cubans in so I can get on air. I was like, I need to get these guys to get me so money. Let me like keep going. And so I was authentic about it. But it also, that ended up, you know, allowing me to get on, which, Again, the credibility and awareness from being on Shark Tank was, for a small startup was insane. So Kevin O'Leary offers you the $700,000 that you're looking for. Mr. Wonderful.

But you turn it down. Yeah, and his deals are, you know, I'm sure he was serious about it. But, I mean, I guess anyone would put in money into something if they had all the terms. It was one of those things. I mean, and for a hardware company, you need cash. You're always basically going out of business because you need cash. The last thing you can do is be writing checks to an investor. early on. No investor, like, you're not going to get an investor after that because they're not

going to want to come, yeah. So it was a very tough deal that we couldn't do. I did contemplate it in the moment because I needed the cash. I mean, it was almost like, well, maybe we just take it and see what happens. Like at least we, you know, it's like at least we'll live tomorrow, like, you know, to fight tomorrow. The next day, the tomorrow or the week after, did you have regrets and be like, maybe I made a mistake here? I would say I regretted it until it aired. And, then the momentum we got from that. Like, then we were like, oh, I'm like, okay. But yeah, I, even I didn't, because I didn't even know it would air.

You know, if we got a deal, I'd say the chance of airing was like 99% and not getting a deal is, I don't know, 50, 60% or something. So even that, just, yeah, like I had no idea. And so there was a lot of times, maybe we should just take in a bad deal. because, you know, listen, when you're facing the, you know, no, like zero success, I remember facing like this thing's just not going to work, any deals better. Like, might as well just take it. So as you mentioned, I think you get like $100,000 in orders the first day. Yeah.

$100,000 in orders the first day it airs. And so you get this momentum and this traction. Well, it's actually just to like pause on that. So we go on. And mentally, I think this is how anyone would think about it. This is how I thought about it. It's like all of the money would come in the first, like, day, basically. Because, I don't know, someone watches it,

they're going to either order it or not order it. Like, that's how I was thinking about it. So we get $100,000 of orders. It actually, as much as it was a lot of money, it wasn't that much. I'm like, oh, my God, like, all of this work for 100, like, 100,000 of revenue, like, you know, orders. I'm like, this was, this is bad. Like, we need, you know, like, we're a hard.

hardware company. We need to do like millions of dollars. This is really tough. But then the next day it was like 100,000. And the next day, it's like 100,000. It just literally kept coming. In fact, I think even the second or third day was more, I think Monday, I think it aired on Friday and Monday, I think, was our biggest day because people may be back at work and they did it from their desk. I don't know. But it was wild to sort of watch that sort of, and then it just kind of, it definitely came down a little bit after that, but it actually stayed pretty high. Like it never, it never went, we never went back down to our pre-Shark Tank sales. Um, the Christmas of 2013, so you're, you're not out of the woods yet in

terms of, no, never, we never, we never, we're never out of the woods. Um, you discover that every single doorbell that you had shipped for a period of time, uh, is not, um, we never, we never, we never, we never, we never, we're never, functional. So yeah, so the first batch of doorbells we get in, right after we're on Shark Tank, we get our first batch in. And, you know, we go through them and, you know, we're shipping them out. And that was like a thousand or something. And, you know, they were kind of fine. And then we did some adjustments to it. We sent it to the factory. We got these next ones in. It's right before our Christmas. And people are emailing us who bought and saying, if you like, basically, if you don't get it to me for Christmas for the holidays, just like, refund my money. So we're facing like death if we don't

get these out. So they come in and we have literally like a day to turn around like thousands, like 5,000, I remember 10, whatever it was of these products to get to people. So basically they don't refund. So we send them all out. And I'm getting emails like a day or two later, you know, hey, I got the thing. It's not working. And I just, you know, I'm thinking like, oh, just try this, try that. But then it just, you know, it's like all of a sudden everyone's saying it's not working. And we look and we realize like they're literally not working. So I go in the box of like we still have some there. I pull them out. We start setting them up, which, you know, looking back, we probably should have done, you know, we got them in. And they're not working.

Like, they're broken. So we realized that this one engineer had sent this code that he didn't check correctly, and they're literally broken. And we go through, I, yeah, this is like the morning. I go through every, I try, like, you know, can we do this? Can we do this? Like, everything's No, I'm just like system. I'm like systemically going to do like every single possible thing. And there's nothing, like nothing is going to fix these things. Like they are just broken. You can't update the code on this chip.

Like they're bricks. And by the way, like the cost to build new ones, send these out. I mean, like over a million dollars. And we did not have that money. And so I go to dinner with the family that night. My son is like probably at this time. Like he's probably six or seven. so my wife and I go out to dinner with my son

and just I'm actually like calm I'm like telling my wife I'm like yeah it's over like you know it was like it was it was a good run and she's like well you know maybe we can mortgage the house and I'm like Harry like you know it's like first of all it's not enough but I'm like

I like it's like wow we are so deep already it's like you know I'm not sure if that even works and so which is amazing like talk about like the village you surround it you know it takes a village to sort of do these things Like, have a wife that says, you know, mortgage the house when you're, like, saying, hey, I messed up the business. Like, that's a pretty good support system.

Well, then you had other investors at that point. Like Chris Freilich. Yeah, yeah. We had some, who I know. Chris Freelich of first round had bought some for friends and family that year. Like, well, he, for the holidays, he bought, because he invested, he bought doorbots. And Chris loves gadgets, by the way. Chris loves gadgets that work.

It turns out Chris likes less gadgets that don't work. And Chris is pinging me saying, what are we going to do? And I'm like, Chris, I don't know what we're going to do. He's like, well, we have to refund these people. I said, Chris, we don't have any money. Like, you know, like, basically the money you gave me, I've already like, I've torched it. So, like, there's no money left to do this. So there was some tough conversations going on that day when we realized what had happened.

Because, yeah, it was like, it was, everything was sort of, you know, cascading. and this is Christmas Eve. This isn't like this is Christmas Eve Eve, but like we are like right at Christmas. And I don't know what to say. I mean like Chris Freleck, he's a great person, great supporter, and he's right. Like we have to do this, but I didn't even know how you do this. And what do we do? I'm going to raise money to return.

Like you go to a VC and you say, can you give me a million dollars so that I can refund customers? This is what I'm saying. Yes. Like you're done. Yeah. Which is why I said to my wife, like, I think we're just done. Like, I don't, I don't, what got you out of that? So, we're driving home from dinner.

And I, I, I literally, I'm like, you know, we had, so the problem was how the video, the video was like coming in. It was just like, like, like, pixels. Like, just random pixels on the screen. And we had changed from having a more expensive, like, in the cloud, we had this thing processing the video that was like a more expensive piece of code that we actually, like, had to buy. And then we had an open source one.

And we had changed the open source one, which is, make sense, like it just was free. And so we just changed that over like, you know, whatever, months ago before this. And I call Mark Dillon, who's my engineer. He's in New York, so I'm in L.A., so it's probably like, you know, 10 p.m. or 10.30 or something. And I said to Mark, hey, do you think, like, the one we actually pay for in the, like, do you think you could actually understand what this, like, we're just sending these random pixels, like, maybe it could put it together? Like, I don't know. It's like a better piece of software. Like, maybe could like somehow decode it better. And Mark said, I don't know, it'll take me like 12 hours to,

you know, get this, whatever, you know, eight hours to get this fixed up. And I said, okay, you know, like, meant like, like, okay, like start now. You know, it's great. Like, you call me in the morning. And so Mark, to his credit, Mark starts right then, gets it all up. I get a call like 6 a.m. Christmas Eve. Mark's screaming, like, it works. It works. And it not only did it work, it was like the best picture that, like, the door bought. Like, it, it was, it was a, it was like better. It was like, it was amazing. And so, you know, that was as, I mean, it's probably as close to business death, business death as I've ever become, as I've ever come to. And, but yeah, and it is like, you know, it's like pressure makes diamonds. You know, it's how you react during

these times of pressure. You've got to just keep going. Until that actually, like, until they lock the front door on you, you got to just keep trying. Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, A Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th.

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anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design with our magic AI tool things. You can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks for presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. I'm going to yada yad over some of the history here. to ask you a few entrepreneurial questions. The first of which being, I'm not saying y'all invented the idea of subscription

with a hardware product, but you were one of the first pioneers in terms of making this work. How did you think of that in terms of pricing, in terms of how do you present the value proposition to users and things like that? Yeah, so I mean, I think value is a great way to think about it. I think a lot of companies want to have a subscription.

I do believe we've always delivered value for it. We realized quickly that there's a lot of cloud-based parts of ring, and that cost basically, you know, is a variable. Like, it's going to, you know, be monthly. And so you can't build that into the hardware costs. And we wanted to deliver more and more features, always. And so the subscription made sense for us, which is like we can now, like, we want you to be a customer for life.

We want to be like part of the, the, we call them neighbors. We want this sort of so. So I think the subscription really came from not a want of trying to build the biggest company in the world, not of trying to be the most profitable company in the world, but of a way to deliver the best value to customers and, again, what we call our neighbors. And because of that, I think it's why it's been so successful is that people, you know, I'd say like no one loves a subscription. I think people do love their ring and are willing to, you know, reward us by giving us, you know, their money because we give them value back.

Ring obviously eventually gets acquired by Amazon again. I'm yachting over a bunch of stuff. Yeah. There's plenty more stories about. Read the book. But one of the classic reasons entrepreneurs give for why they accept an acquisition is that, well, the acquirer can, allow us to do something that we're not going to be able to do on our own or allow us to do it faster. I believe Ring is now, at least by users, the largest home security company in America. I think maybe the world, but yeah.

First of all, what does you learn by your time working inside of Amazon that you're like, oh my God, they really have made us better? Answer that one, and then I got to follow up. I would say, I mean, there's a lot of things. I mean, Amazon's a great company. There's a lot of things I've learned there. I think the thing, if there's one thing I would take out to, like, highlight, and there's a lot of things is the way that they do meetings with what they call the doc. So, like, you do a document. Like, there's no PowerPoint. When you sit in a meeting, and it is kind of the first couple of times you do it, you're like, what is going on? Why is no one talking? Because everybody's reading. They're reading. And it's like weird. It's like you walk in and just people are reading. And it's so weird. And you want to, like, talk to people. people and like, hey, what's going on? But you know, this is part of it. You sit down and you have this doc and you read, you teach yourself what the meeting is about. So with PowerPoint, someone's teaching you what they want you to know. With a doc, you are able to like ingest the data. You're able to look up like on your phone, you know, or your computer, you know, look deeper on something.

Like, I'm going to search what this thing means. Okay, now I write a note. And so you get to like teach yourself fully about the, what's going to happen in that meeting. That's like 15 minutes. And then you discuss for, say, the 45 minutes of an hour-long meeting. It's so efficient that whenever I go to a meeting that doesn't have a doc that has PowerPoint and someone's teaching, I almost can't sit there for it. The second part of this would be if you are an entrepreneur, any entrepreneurs listening, what is the thing that you tell entrepreneurs now about getting acquired that you didn't know? and possibly you should warn them that you might not like this or you should prepare for this.

I mean, it's hard to sell. I don't think there's a single entrepreneur that's honest that would say, like, I sold great. Like, that's just like perfect. Like, I don't care. I just sold it. But if they did, then honestly, they're not my type of entrepreneur because they don't care about the company. Like, if you're just selling and saying, like, I cashed out and I left and whatever, like, that's not my, that's not my jam. I care about my business.

I care about what we're doing. I care about my customers. And so I think with that, like, it's always going to be hard to give over the keys to someone else. I think Amazon has proven this. They've been pretty amazing. There's a lot of entrepreneurs

that go back to like, you know, the audible and that stayed. And, you know, Tony Shea from Zappos was there, you know, until sadly, until, you know, till the end for him. But, like, he was still there and still doing what he did. because Amazon lets you kind of do it.

So I'd say nothing's perfect. Like I'd be a lie to say it's perfect, but I'd say Amazon's incredible that it lets entrepreneurs still like, not only like achieve what they want to do in their business, but really like accelerated. I mean, Ring on every KPI accelerated what we were trying to accomplish for our mission post-acquisition. Ring has always incorporated essentially AI from almost day one.

But in this modern era, of the AI explosion and everybody's trying out various AI hardware and things like that. How are you thinking differently about hardware now with this generation? Yeah, and so you're, we kind of had what, like, maybe you call AI. It really, I mean, it wasn't. It was more like code and algorithms that were like sort of hard coded. But yeah, we always have sort of had these ideas around it. I would say that now I feel like I'm back in the garage again because AI is unlocking

everything. It's like everything's new again. everything's new. I mean, one, you know, and we're built everywhere. I mean, one great example, we did a thing called dog search party, which allows you to, so right now it's like, you know, Brian, this dog that's missing in the neighborhood looks like this dog that's in front of your camera. Would you like to contact your neighbor? And literally over one dog per day is now being reunited with their family through this AI system of dog search party. And so I do think I'm really proud of not only the AI we're using, but I'm also proud of how, I think Ring is showing some of the

first examples of really how AI can work in a neighborhood with people, with your family to make a, like a, you know, if your dog gets reunited, that's a better life. That's a better neighborhood. Is that the Super Bowl ad is going to be about this? So yeah, I am, I mean, it's very cool. You know, there's some cool moments we've had, you know, along the way. And so I, we have a Super Bowl ad. it showcases dog search party. And I'm proud because it's, it's, it's an ad. But again, it's, it's showing why you should reward us to become part of our neighborhood and become part of our team at ring, not saying like, you know, buy, buy, camera, cheap, you know,

like, it's like, this is like how we can make together a better world is what our Super Bowl ad is and showing with how, you know, if we all come together with this, that we can return and, you know, reunite dogs and reunite families and all this kind of stuff. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Ring is also donating to shelters as well. Yeah, so what we learned so far with search, so search probably launched in November, we're turning over, reuniting over one dog per day, what we realize is that the shelters, when dogs, you know, if a dog is found and goes to a shelter, there's really no centralized check-in process for this that's efficient.

And so your dog, you could be looking for your dog and it's in some shelter. It's very hard to connect the dots and find it. So now what we're doing is we're donating, and it looks like it's going to be, you know, we've sort of said that we think we'll be about a million dollars to do it. We want every shelter to have a ring system where the dog comes in. And basically we're just going to watch every dog come in. And if that dog is being looked for on our AI, we can then flag it automatically. And so we can actually make the check-in process now where now you can get, get, so now when you put

in something into our search party system. Not only is it looking through it through the neighborhood, it's also going to look for it in places like shelters. There's plenty more stories in this book because I was telling Jamie offline that sort of this is a warts and all book. My favorite kind of like, it's almost like a tell-all. There's zero Fs to give it. In fact, it's a lot of Fs in the book.

The book is Ding Dong, How Ring went from Shark Tank Reject to everyone's front door. I highly recommend it. It's the best business book I've read in a while. Oh, thank you. Jamie, thanks for coming on to talk to us about it. Thanks for having me. Today's lesson is on the Arco Rewards app. Try to stay with me.

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