S14E8: From a Shark Tank No to Billion-Dollar Exit with Ring Inventor, Jamie Siminoff

when I launched it, Instagram didn't exist, Nextdoor didn't exist, certainly didn't have TikTok. All of those kind of concepts around sharing like short-form video, fun snippet videos, like just didn't even exist. What happened is it turned out that all of these things got captured and people wanted to share them, and they just started making it sort of more of like a viral camera and not just sort of a, call it a security camera.

Welcome back to The Room Podcast Season 14. Hi, Mads.

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So excited to be here. So excited to be talking about everything that's going on in 2026 in tech.

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Thank you so much for being a part of the community and welcome to season 14 of The Room Podcast. Ripling is one of those tools I wish I had even earlier when I was building my startup, Pryve. If you're building a startup, every minute matters, but it's surprisingly easy to lose hours to onboarding paperwork, fixing payroll issues, or setting up laptops for new employees. We've ran into this constantly and it's not hard work, but it's constant and it adds up. That's where Ripling comes in. Ripling is a unified platform that lets startups run HR, payroll, IT, and finance in one system from day one. Rippling's startup stack replaces disconnected tools that don't sync now with a fully connected platform. It lets you get back to the real reason you started your company. Right now, venture-backed startups can get 6 months of Rippling's startup stack for free. Head to rippling.com/the-room and sign up today. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot com slash T-H-E-R-O-O-M to sign up for 6 months free today. Focus on what you're building. Leave the rest to Rippling. rippling.com/theroom.

Perkins Coie supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors, addressing their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Coie's interactive website, Startup Percolator offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and perkinscoie.com. Welcome back to The Room Podcast. Nearly 1 in 2 American homes now has a Rodeo doorbell. In the 13 years since Jamie Siminoff built the first one in his own garage, our collective understanding of security, the smart home, and the connected neighborhood has been permanently rewritten. Ring camera has been installed in tens of millions of homes and is widely considered Amazon's most culturally significant acquisition and second only in size to Whole Foods. Ring began as Wi-Fi camera jammed into a wooden box on a front door and became ultimately a mission to make neighborhoods safer. Jamie was no stranger to entrepreneurship. He had already built the world's first voice-to-text company, a product that was a bit ahead of its time. He went to pitch an early version of Ring on Shark Tank and walked away from a deal that he knew would bankrupt him. And ultimately early financing journeys for Ring. He went on to raise nearly $200 million in firms from Kleiner Perkins first round and True Ventures, but there was a risky moment in the Christmas of 2018 in which his whole balance sheet went to negative $70 million just days before Christmas. Ultimately, this was just 3 weeks before signing the $1.15 billion term sheet with Amazon on New Year's Eve. The most interesting chapter is perhaps the one that is still being written for Ring. The next competitive moat in AI may not be the model at all, but rather in the physical sensor networks that are feeding it. If the next frontier of AI requires grounding in the real world with physical spaces and behaviors, then who owns the edge device network may matter as much as who owns compute. Ring is arguably one of the most underappreciated datasets in the entire AI landscape, and it's why after a 2-year departure to build and sell another company, Jamie has returned to Ring as its leader, bringing founder urgency back to the product that has never Mattered. In this episode, we explore insights and themes such as when not to take venture capital, how privacy and community safety are not in tension when the system is designed correctly, and ultimately why the edge device network may be the most consequential battleground for AI yet. He also has recently released his debut book, Ding Dong. Let's open the door. Jamie, first off, thank you so much for joining us today in the room.

Thanks for having me.

We're delighted to have you here. We love to start at the beginning with our guests. So if you could tell us before we jump in too deep, where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

Yeah, so I grew up in Chester, New Jersey, which is like an hour west of New York City. So kind of like North New Jersey, a little bit out in the burbs. I'm an inventor. I just like to build stuff. And growing up in Chester, I had a basement and I could just go down there and just take things apart and build stuff and Luckily there wasn't terrible winters, so you like had nothing to do outside. If I grew up in Los Angeles, I'd probably just, I don't know, I'd be a surfer. But because I grew up in a place that like I couldn't really do anything in the winter, I'd just be downstairs building stuff and breaking stuff and even, you know, some explosives. I don't know what my parents were thinking letting me be down there doing this stuff, but like it worked out.

It worked out. Inventor extraordinaire you are. I love the tie-in to the weather. I guess in that vein of early identity, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

No, it's so easy looking back, like that I was an inventor. I mean, it's like spent all my time in the basement building stuff. I never even thought about engineering anything. I didn't really reflect on it in that way, like when I was in the moment. And so it took me a while. Like I, I look at some of these younger people that have done companies and I'm so jealous 'cause they seem to figure it out quicker than me. It took me forever. I'm like an old person because I just took me a long time to figure it out.

There is a wisdom to learning over time, and you ultimately did become a founder. Of course, you built and sold PhoneTag, which was the the world's first voicemail-to-text company. Funny to hear the word voicemail. Could you tell us a little bit about that first founder journey for you and what you—

I think you're gonna ask me what is voicemail.

Well, I, we could start there.

Like, you're gonna like, yeah, like, which, but it's a great lesson of building an incredible product in a shrinking industry is not good. It's still like, there's, you know, billion whatever voicemails a day and all this stuff turned out, but like when it's shrinking like that, it's just hard to build value up. But the idea was that like when you got voicemail, this thing that recorded and then you had to listen to, which was incredibly annoying. Literally, you know, you, someone would call you, you'd have to like, you'd get a notification or whatever, you had to listen to it. It took forever. They would ramble on that you just could read it. And I had a, I got a BlackBerry and I'm like, why would I not want to read this? Why am I listening to this? And so we just created this product to do it. Some of the tech actually sort of made its way all the way to Apple. Wow.

That's incredible.

And I made nothing off of it. So that's like, that's even more incredible.

Well, sometimes that's Part of the game. Your second company was unsubscribe.com. Is that right?

Yeah.

What the heck is unsubscribe.com?

Great idea, terrible business. You're getting the trend, but we get all this email spam, takes out the bad stuff. And then what's left is still like 70% graymail, which is stuff that we've signed up for, even really didn't sign up for, but you can unsubscribe from. And the idea was that you just have a button to unsubscribe that over time we would make it more agentic. We didn't know that word at the time, but like you'd make it so that it would clean out all of this sort of gray mail so that you could just see your email and do work. Great concept, great feature. People love the product. Horrible business. Horrible business. No one would pay for it. No one.

I'm pretty sure I've, I've been a user and I think it's really saved me. So thank you. Any incredible founder journey, you often go through these like great idea, wrong time moments, and there's maybe multiple of them. And then you finally hit the great idea, great time moment. And for you, that is Ring. So let's dig into that a little bit. You started Ring because you literally couldn't hear your doorbell from your garage workshop. Seems like a pretty big problem. At what point did you realize this was not just a personal annoyance, but a big market? There's probably a lot of folks in their garages not answering their doors. And then I'd love to chat a little bit about the leap from just hearing your doorbell to actually making neighborhoods safer.

Yeah, I built this thing to like scratch my itch of I, I'm in the garage, I can't hear the doorbell, my phone didn't have signal. In the garage. It was a small house, but it just happened that the garage was like way like in the back and the thing in the front and the little doorbell thing didn't work to the garage. So I was like missing deliveries or someone came to visit, they couldn't get me. Looked at this thing that I just bought, iPhone, and I'm like, why wouldn't the doorbell go to the phone? I looked on Amazon, I looked basically for a doorbell that went to my phone. Nothing existed. So being a person in the garage, I started soldering some stuff up and cutting some stuff up and took a Wi-Fi camera and broke it open and made this thing and it's still not an aha moment yet. It was more just like scratching my own itch, get it set up. My, I put this thing on the front door that's like a contraption. It's built in a box and it looks horrible. And my wife, instead of kicking it off the front door, which like I was destroying the house with all sorts of other inventions, she said, wow, this makes me feel safer at home. Um, and that was the start of the aha moment of maybe this is something more than just a gadget. Maybe this actually is like doing something for people. And then when I started selling it, the response I got from other people was like, there was a burglary in my area and it was when people weren't home. And now when I'm out, I can answer the door. So they understood, like, not only could it do that, but they also understood it. That's when I started to say like, this is something bigger, created the mission of making neighborhoods safer. And that's what built what is Ring today, which is probably the largest home security company in the world. Came from not the doorbell, but from the, really it's like from my wife realizing that this made her feel safer at home and that the mission is what made the company the size it is, not the products.

Thank you for giving us a peek under the hood of just how a personal grievance had really catalyzed a broader opportunity here. So let's orient ourselves around the home security market at the time. Home security was dominated by legacy incumbents like ADT. I think fun fact, growing up, we did not have a security system whatsoever, but we had the little ADT thing that was like in our grass and we thought that was like preventative enough.

The fake ADT sign was actually an industry. I remember that. It was like a thing.

Well, I think your product definitely provided more value than a fake sign. Tell us a little bit more about your initial product and sort of the unlock that made what became Ring really an innovation in the home security space. Yeah.

And so to be fair to like everyone in home security, I accidentally tripped into home security exactly at the time when technology shifted to where you could rebuild all of it. Like, I'm not smart enough to have like plotted that out. If I went to Stanford, maybe I would have like actually done this on purpose. The fact is I didn't. I just like fell into it because as more smartphones got out there, it meant that you now had the A side and you just needed the B, which was the thing in the house. When ADT built their business, there was no such thing as the connection to the other side. So everything had to be on its own. And really what unlocked home security was allowing you to interact with it, to allow you to be part of it. Cameras, bandwidth also increased. When I launched Ring, the first, like, Ring product, one of the biggest feedbacks I got from my team kept being, we need to launch one without a camera because there's not enough bandwidth. Upload bandwidth is actually very constrained. There's not enough bandwidth to upload the video. And I was like, bandwidth is going to get better. Just don't worry about it. I didn't really know that. I just felt like it was going to. So that means the timing of everything I did was like right on. It was like by the time we got out, like bandwidth did get better. We had the chance, the opportunity to rebuild an entire industry around literally every home at just the right time. And so I got in at the right time. I had the right concept, which was making neighborhoods safer, which also made me think about it differently. I wasn't, I want to build a $100 million company. I wasn't. Like I want to get doorbells on houses. I, I wasn't in the camera business. I was in the making neighbors safer business, but also maybe invent around it. And I did it at a time when technology was literally shifting completely.

Before we get into timing today and how AI is continuing to evolve Ring and all of the incredible things you can now do, given the recent developments, I'd love to dig into how you continued to evolve the product roadmap. Based on how communities were organically using Ring. Tell us, what was like a surprising use case or way that folks were trying to use the product and how that ultimately evolved your roadmap?

There was a lot of surprising things. One of the most surprising was that when I launched it, there were no— Instagram didn't exist, Nextdoor didn't exist, certainly didn't have TikTok. All of those kinds of concepts around sharing like short-form video, fun snippet videos, like just didn't even exist. And right as we were getting going, you started to have those. And the idea that, like, if you go back, like, the idea that someone was going to share footage from their surveillance camera, from a video camera on their house, into a social network, like, the concept of that is not even, like, none of that even, like, and what happened is it turned out that, like, a camera, doorbell camera at your front door, your front door was so important for so many reasons, like, it captured the bear trying to get into the car. All of these things got captured and people wanted to share them. And so that was, I'd say, a surprising thing of all of these moments became, and they just started making it sort of more like a viral camera and not just sort of a, call it a security camera.

What year was this?

2013, we launched Doorbell. 2014, we launched Ring. So it's like probably 12, again, like 12 years ago, 13, somewhere to 12, 13 years ago.

To orient the listener, like Vine was sold in 2013. So that we were like really seeing like the extreme, like the America's Funniest Home Videos go onto the internet moment in time.

Like just starting, like just, yeah, it was like just all of that, like that, like string just started to get pulled.

Not only did you create a new category of product, you created a new category of entertainment as well.

So thank you for that. It's funny, like our, our customer created that. I think again, why things get big is because like you need it to be organic. Like you can't force that to happen. That's also like why it's luck because it's just hard. It's like hard. It's lightning in a bottle. That's kind of stuff doesn't happen.

Investors definitely noticed that there was some lightning in a bottle here. Ring attracted celebrity investors like Richard Branson, Shaquille O'Neal, and raised over $385 million from top firms like True Ventures, Felicis, First Round, CRV. I could go on.

Talk about dilution. Like you could go on. It's like, it goes on and on and on. It's like, I mean, Every one of them's like a mouth to feed. I had like 100 kids.

It's a good reframing around fundraising, actually.

Um, because it's like, everyone's like, ah, I raised from all these companies. Like, no, like, you're basically giving your equity away. What's going on? This is terrible. In the end, they were helpful, whatever. But like our list of— I raised from every investor at that time. If you had a VC firm, you invested in Ring. Like you had to, because I needed your money.

Going back to the very beginning of your fundraising journey, tell us who was the first person to say yes to investing in Ring?

I mean, for the first person was my brother. It is weighty. He made money, but he wasn't like the richest guy in the world. The money that he put in was like real. It was like $100 grand, which was like legit for him. Yeah. That weighed on me. No one really believed in it because people are like, oh, that's so nice your brother did. It's like, yeah, because I needed him to. I didn't want him to invest. Like, I needed him to invest in Ring. And so like, it was a lot of friends and family were the first people in, and that kind of helped. And that's why that list is so long because I climbed the ladder, but like an inch at a time. Like, I just kept scratching my way through venture capital. And if you look at that list, I laugh that everyone invested. It's like, if you have a list that big, for every one of those investors, I probably talked to 10 people that said no.

I mean, it's so meaningful to think back of who is the person who said and looked you in the eye, I think what you're doing is gonna be something big and I wanna invest in that and be there alongside you. How special that it was your brother. You really were going door to door, meeting a lot of different types of options that included Shark Tank, by the way. The DoorBot story is legendary. You turned down the man, the myth, Kevin O'Leary's offer in front of millions of viewers. Take us back into that room and in that moment in time for you.

I went on Shark Tank. I needed the money. So it's, it's always, you know, now it's like, oh, like, of course you didn't want their money. I'm like, oh, I know I needed their money. I thought Mark Cuban for sure was going to invest. I was like, Mark Cuban, tech company, like, I got this. Like, we're good. Mark was out within like 6 minutes or something of me pitching. He's just out. Because the whole time the producers are telling you, like, keep them talking, don't let them go out. Like, you want to make it go as long as you can. And Mark's like, out. And then at the end, yeah, Kevin O'Leary gives me this offer, which was a, it was just going to bankrupt the business. It was like royalties and all this stuff. Like we needed to build something bigger. I actually, in my little reptilian brain, like as I'm sitting there, like I was tempted to take it even though I knew it was like a terrible deal because I thought he'd actually do it. But I need the money. But then I'm like, we're just going to go broke. We really did need that money. It took us a while, even after Shark Tank aired to raise that rest of that money. Like, we, we worked on that. That was not easy.

We'll dive a little bit into kind of like the scaling journey of Ring, but just to leap ahead a little bit, you've described going from $70 million in debt to a $1 billion Amazon deal by an acquisition in 45 days. Founder journeys are never linear. We know this. High highs, low lows. Can you share what that period looked like behind the scenes and how you navigated what might have been the most dramatic financial swing in startup history.

I think it's even why I wrote the book is like, I needed to just put it down on paper, like for my own, like sanity, like therapy, like therapy, like, yeah, like talking about trauma. So I had a 7-year-old, we had a house, like a little house that we were like redoing, but we weren't redoing it in a way that you could like sell it. My money's in that, what I had that wasn't that much. All my sort of really like my money is in Ring at the time. I'm like 100% in. The company flips upside down to literally like negative $70 million in the bank. This is in going by. This is also, of course, going into Christmas. Mid to end of November. And I'm facing like solid, I'd say either personal bankruptcy or like real personal, like change of everything. As you saw, like you said, like we raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So the stack in front of me was high. So if we sold for $200 million, it was all going to go to the investors before me. I'm common, they're preferred. The business was doing well. It's just like, we just got pinched on a bunch of stuff. This, we had a lawsuit with ADT. That kind of pinched that. So just, it was like a bunch of things happened on basically the first week of December. I was, we were negative $70 million. I say no real clear way to get out of it, which I just kept working though. I did like just keep my head down and kept working to, I signed on New Year's Eve. So 3 weeks after that, I signed a $1.15 billion term sheet with Amazon to buy the company. So that was the 3 weeks. It's a very similar story to a lot of founders. It's not an uncommon story, but man, you don't want to live that. Like it is just, It's brutal.

And during so many of these acquisition processes, like you don't think it's going to go through until the money's hit the bank.

If you've ever been through a deal, you now know what the term pencils down means. When the other side put their pencils down, they're not going to work on the deal anymore. And so Amazon put pencils down for a week on our deal. Little known fact. And now, by the way, even worse, like worse than being negatives, like what's worse than being negative $70 million in the bank is Now being in a deal that all your investors know about that you just basically sold the company and then maybe it doesn't go through because I can tell you one thing they're not going to do is invest in your company at that valuation. If they think that's what you think it's worth to sell the whole thing, you ain't getting that valuation after that. And so like, yeah, light bulb, like, ooh.

Before we chat a little bit more about your journey to ScaleRing and all of the things that have happened between starting and selling the company, you mentioned having a multi-hundred million dollar pref stack. Even if you sold your company for $300 million, you as a founder would not get anything. A lot of founders don't quite get that, and they think they should just continue raising and that will yield success. What advice do you have for founders when considering raising venture capital, especially in terms of protecting potential outcomes for the founder?

I think one is if you're going to raise the money, go all in. If you're going to do it, go for it because as soon as you start, like, as soon as you break that seal, it's gone. You have like pref stacks are going, they actually click at percentages, which sound low, like, oh, it's 8%. Well, it turns out on $100 million, 8% over 7 years, it almost doubles the $100 million. Now your pref stock is $200 million. So you like all these things like you don't really think about because you're like, ah, but the other side is I do actually like venture capital because if you're going to try to build a billion dollar company, then fine, you're okay. Like you're above, you're way above it. I think where people get pinched is that they're trying to play like a conservative business, but then they take venture money and that's where you get really pinched. And I see it like, oh, I sold my company, they'll post it and I'll look at it. They raised like $145 million and they sold it for $170. I'm like, you got a job out of this. It's not like to put anyone down. It's more just like the reality is it's really freaking hard to compound that much value. And so if you're going to do it, you have to really do it. And. Yeah, I think a lot of times, like, people don't realize that. So a lot of businesses just shouldn't take venture capital because they don't have that compounding capability. And you should try to build it much scrappier and maybe a little bit slower, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't have that compounding ability.

No, and it's important for people to understand, especially because you were building at your core a hardware-first company that had a software layer, the actual cost needs of getting that product out the door and into the hands of customers. I can see some dismay on your face.

What they have learned, if you sell your sell your company for a billion dollars, it means that you've made $10 billion. People are like, oh, so you made $10 billion. Like, yes, you raise hundreds of millions of dollars. You sell your company for a billion dollars. Yes. You've now somehow made more money than the whole entire stack. Like hardware is heavy dilution. It is just a capitally inefficient. Now, luckily we had a software layer, but yeah, like most hardware companies should not raise venture. And that's been proven out because if you're just hardware, it's almost impossible to get ahead of that capital stack. With our software we did, but still, if you look at Ring as a return, I mean, what we built, the impact we had is a 10 out of 10, I think, in Silicon Valley history of like tech companies. I call it a 10 out of 10. If you truly had a return on investment, it's probably like a 6 out of 10. There are definitely companies that sold for less, that have done less impact, that made the investors and the founders way more money. This is not a complaint, it's just math, because they were just more capitally efficient.

What's interesting about the moment in time we're in right now, not to bring us too far into the future with 2026, because I'm loving what we're spending time on in 2018, mind you, is just like the history of venture capital actually is rooted in hardware. That's really what birthed this industry in the late '60s and early '70s. We've had these swings between being pro-hardware investments, pro-software investments. We're back, in my opinion, in a hardware-forward moment. People are excited to be investing in defense technology, are very intrigued by the evolution of how edge networks are allowing for better experiences in AI-native products that are either on the bodies of consumers or in spaces. So I'm curious from your now seasoned perspective of building in the intersection of hardware and software, how would you be thinking about this space as we're into this new era?

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AI is making hardware more efficient to build for sure. If you think about one of the costs we had in hardware is you have to have all these disciplines. You had to have people that understood firmware code and apps and backend, the teams you had to have to do that. With AI now, you're seeing like the coding and all this stuff getting so much more efficient. The QA is getting more efficient. So I think every part of hardware is getting more efficient, which means it's more capital efficient to build it. So I think that, and then also AI itself is just a brain and a brain without a body, it's incapable of doing things. And so a brain with eyes. Is able to see. A brain with eyes and ears is able to do this. A brain with eyes, ears, and a mouth, a nervous system, arms, legs. So I think hardware is the physical embodiment of AI if you look at it that way. And so you're going to see hardware become more important because if AI is important, which I certainly believe it is, then it's going to need appendages.

Talking about the appendages perspective, right? We think of the Ring as being a singular doorbell camera experience, but of course you've built a full suite of products. I actually have a secondary Ring product where it's like my monitoring device that like gets me in and out. I think it's called like Intercom or something. So how did you expand beyond like the initial product SKU and live into this holistic experience and Ring ecosystem that ultimately is the suite today?

I think it's like mission and customers. We call our customers neighbors, by the way, but having a mission to make neighborhoods safer, it broadens the scope of what you build. I'm not trying to just build doorbells. Like, I'm not like, oh, I'm the best doorbell builder in the world. I just build doorbells. Like, I'm— our mission is to build the best doorbell. No, like our mission is Making neighborhood safer, which put us into the Neighbors app and Search Party for Dogs and Firewatch and just all this crazy stuff that like you wouldn't think of if you were just trying to say like, I would just want to build a doorbell. And so that really has expanded our aperture. And so I think for companies, I think the best thing you can do is try to find the infinite truth in what you're building, like the area that you're in, because technology will change, but needs usually don't. A safer neighborhood. I think that in 100 years, people are still going to want a safer neighborhood. I am sure it's going to be with technology that we don't understand today.

I totally agree. The need for safer neighborhoods has never been more apparent, and appreciate that that's a missional component at the root of what you're building with Ring. You probably didn't know you were going to get product feedback on the call, but I just was triggered here. I recently bought my first apartment, and I had inherited a Ring system. But the former owners, of course, left the system. And so then I had to figure out, how to become a system user. It was interesting because the app itself, while very comprehensive, was not intuitive enough for me to figure out.

So probably since you've done that, we just launched a transfer your home. Like, we just launched that. The problem with this whole thing has been is that there's a huge privacy hole that you open up. If someone could like take over your Ring, it's a problem. On your side, you're looking at it like, like people are always like, why can't I just do this? Because it's really hard. And a lot of times the old owners don't respond. So it becomes a like a bit of a— my email's on every box, by the way. So I get lots of these complaints and it's one of the higher complaints I get is around this because it's frustrating to people. But the one thing we have to do is make sure that you're safe and secure in privacy. And it's a hard one, but we did just do this feature where if you look like you can actually now transfer your house, when you sell it, you can like, I'm now transferring to Madison McIlwain, basically give you an email and everything transfers in once.

Well, that's actually amazing to know. That was not even the feature request I was coming in with. It was more actually to praise the experience I had using ChatGPT GPT to use images to actually help me back into the product that I had because I didn't understand the intercom product. And I was able to use chat with photos to work my way into like how to unlock it. Ultimately, I did have to call a customer service representative to do so.

And like, looking for the intercom right now, like the funniest thing is I am in the office of the guy, the person who works with me who actually runs that product. It's just funny that you say that because I'm actually in, I'm in his office right now, Kaushik, who helped build that product. So there you go.

Truly, like, of course, at the end of the day, like, you're servicing this end user. I would put myself in that bucket as the neighbors. We also on this season are having the Nextdoor CEO on, which is kind of an interesting dovetail for us of kind of the end-to-end.

Nirav is a, is a great founder. It's just really cool what they've built there. So.

We couldn't agree more. And how have you guys thought about interfacing with the broader ecosystem beyond just the suite of tools that you have with Ring? And where do you see existing into that future of neighborhood security for, for you all?

There's like a foundation that we've built around this idea that your video is yours. So like from a neighborhood side, I look at a neighborhood as it's all these like nodes of people that have control over their residence, but that when something happens, people want to come together. It's like we build the system so that when something, when a dog is lost, you know, we'll say like, this dog that's lost in your neighborhood looks like this dog on your camera. Do you want to call your neighbor? Now, if you say no, you're anonymous. If you say no, or you don't do anything. Nothing happens. If you say yes, then you're just calling your neighbor, just like you called off the tag if you found a dog in the street. So now you get to find your missing dog, which by the way, over 1 dog per day is being reunited with Search Party for Dogs with Ring today. We have a thing with fire. So I was— sadly, I live in Pacific Palisades, and so I was there for the fire. And we had over 10,000 cameras in the Palisades. We were not able to have people decide to help us, to help the fire department to do that.

We couldn't do that.

Like a Ring customer couldn't press a button to say, I want to help. Like, I have this camera, do you want to see if there's fire in front of my house? Like we couldn't do that. So we created a thing called Firewatch. So now, if hopefully it never happens to anyone, but like if there's a big fire event in your area, through WatchDuty, we get the sort of the call. We put out to all of our neighbors and say, do you want to help? And if they say yes, then we look through AI and we actually help build a fire map. Real time off of the data that's happening. And the big, because the big problem in fires is it jumps. And so the problem is the fire department doesn't know where it jumped to until it, like, you can see it versus like when it's just smoking and smoldering in like a bush. And so now you can get the alert of that and put it out with your foot versus having to put it out with 50 fire trucks when it's a full fire. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it is like the reality is in a fire, do you want to help your neighbors and yourself? Like I, I say yes. I think most people do.

I'm so bullish on hardware-software partnerships that predict things that are happening in real time in the real world to make this type of real impact. So that's an incredible use case. And thank you for sharing that. Of course, also having been impacted by fires, not necessarily in LA, but over the years living in California and Seattle, it's so needed. So thank you for that. And we're excited to talk a bit more about how joining Amazon actually supercharged the mission and goals of Ring. But congratulations on your book, Ding Dong, which was released in November of last year. Book writing is quite the feat. What prompted you to get excited about telling your story in this way? And what's an anecdote that maybe didn't make it in the book?

I definitely didn't know how hard it is to write a book. This is my problem with everything is like building the Intercom product. I had no idea how hard that was. I could go through with you how hard that, that product was so hard to build. If I knew how hard it was built, we never would've built the Intercom, but I just got into it. So I started building it and then once you're like, yeah, I gotta keep going. So the book, I just thought it was an interesting story for people. I thought people should see it's now such a positive success story that I also thought they should see the other side of it, which is that it like almost wasn't a success and that the blemishes and the things that we did that were wrong. And so I just felt like it was like a story I wanted to tell. I didn't realize how hard it is to write a good book. To me, it's a product. Like, I love, I'm an inventor. Like, I love building things. And so once I did it, I'm like, I want to have the best book in the world. I'm proud of it. Like, I think it is a good product, but it was way, way more work than I thought. It was like a lot of all-nighters because I actually have a day job. I was like up in the kitchen. My wife would She'd wake up at 3 in the morning, be like, "What are you—" I'm like, "Yeah, I'm writing the book." And she's like, "Oh my God." Like, you know, it's like, you gotta stop with this thing.

Probably incredibly cathartic. And having sold a company this past year, I'm just like trying to remember, what did we do the last 4 years? It's almost like the M&A process trauma blocks the goodness of the story. So, I think that's incredibly cool that you did that.

I also wanna give an homage to the people that helped me, like my wife, my son, like the team, all that stuff washes away.

We'll, we'll link the Amazon link to Ding Dong, um, along with that.

I appreciate that.

And so let's talk a little bit more about the acquisition and now like the second life of Ring at Amazon. So the acquisition went through in 2018. We talked a little bit about how large it was and how awesome that was. I think folks don't realize that it was actually Amazon's second largest acquisition behind Whole Foods. Super cool. Jeff Bezos reportedly valued Ring for its market share and not its technology necessarily. What made Amazon feel like the next right chapter for the company versus continuing to scale independently?

We talked about like the hardware and the need of the balance sheet kind of thing. And that balance sheet came for me from just like diluting the company. And so I, I like felt like I could build it into $2 billion, $3 billion, whatever, keep doing it. But I keep also in essence diluting myself in the process and the risk, the risk of dilution is not just like the actual dilution, it's that you don't raise the next round. Because if you didn't do that, you're out of business. And we had just gone through a time, we almost crashed the thing into the ground. And I felt like with Amazon, Jeff was still there at the time, how they treated other founders. I wanted Ring to succeed. I wanted Ring to be something that in the long-term future existed more than just like me trying to maximize every last sort of penny out of it. And I felt like the best decision at that time for me and the team and for the mission was to go to Amazon. And looking back, I like, I was right. Every KPI, no matter what you look at, a lot of team members are still here that, that started it with us and are very happy and been successful here. The business has been successful. What we've been able to ship to our neighbors is more. Just, I'd say like on every KPI, we've done better at being at Amazon. Now, looking back with where the capital markets were, everything else, could we have done it without Amazon? Maybe now looking back, probably. But people will be like, oh, do you wish you didn't sell? I'm like, if you knew everything, like if I had a crystal ball, maybe, but like you didn't. But I do think the one thing I see now that you didn't know at the time was we had truly had escape velocity when we sold. When you're in the moment, you don't know if you have escape velocity. You only know that afterwards. But looking back now, I'd say like 100% Ring had crossed over at that time. It's been a great thing for both Amazon and myself and the team.

This is not just your only stint at Amazon. Like many founders that sell their businesses, you're maybe not at the acquiring company for forever. You left Amazon in May 2023, immediately sold a stealth startup called Honest Day's Work to Latch, became their CEO, rebranded it as Door.co, but then you returned to Amazon in April of 2025. I have ADD.

I probably suffer from that and multiple other things, but definitely ADD is one of them. I stayed for 5 years. So 2023 was 5 years after the acquisition, which was like pretty good amount of time. I definitely got burnt out by that point. I had been doing it for so long and the growth just was like where I took that to. I never, when I sold to Amazon, we kept growing at like triple digit percentages. It was insane. I kept the gas on. And so I just got burnt out and needed to do something else. AI comes out right at that same time. And I'm just looking at AI and saying, wow, Ring AI, it killed me. Like, it was like, I can't believe I'm not at Ring to basically see what to put AI into, what we can do, making neighborhoods safer, like unlocking all this stuff. And for me, it's not AI, it's IA. It's an intelligent assistant. Like, we always wanted to have an intelligent assistant. That's like the Firewatch is an intelligent assistant. Finding your dog, intelligent assistant, helping in the neighborhood, intelligent assistant, telling you when you should watch or not watch something. Like AI really is the unlock of that. And so I was fortunate that Amazon, you know, and we were able to come to a resolution. They were willing to let me back, which I appreciated. And I think it's been going hard and I've been back basically for a year now. I feel like we're doing a pretty good job. So, but I'm biased, you know.

So you're back in startup mode. The world is changing from under our feet super quickly. A once in a generation opportunity to be building right now. Let's talk a little a little bit about your Super Bowl ad, Search Party, finding missing dogs. As a former dog owner whose dog would constantly just escape from the backyard, I wish we had this feature back in the day. Search Party went massively viral, but also drew some criticism around surveillance. How do you balance pushing AI or IA innovation forward while navigating the real privacy anxieties people have as we start to adopt this technology or as you've put it, maybe how do we not balance it at all?

Certainly the anxiety is real. The anxiety around just all this stuff, as I think the speed at which technology is changing is also the same speed at which anxiety is increasing. So I think like the two things, they're actually like both the same chart. And I think we have to respect that. And so for me, I was sad to see some of the stuff on Search Party for dogs, because it is a a good product that helps find dogs where there's nothing actually that exists today. And it does it in a privacy-centric way. So it actually does exactly what it should do. And it actually, and you also are able to maintain your privacy. That misinformation around it made me sad because it's like, that just is like hard to see as an inventor and someone trying to do things that are good and whatever. But it's also on me as the, this is where like the CEO side it's on me. If there's misinformation, it's a misunderstanding, and that's up to me to go out there and to tell people what that is. And if there's anxiety, it's up to me to understand how to navigate that and to make sure that people are able to embrace something that's net good without having that anxiety, because they understand what it is. And so I would say like it was a failure on my part to properly understand what was happening in the market and how things would be viewed. And then it was hopefully a, something that I've done now on the good side, which is like now explaining it and getting it out there and having people understand how good it can be. And I think we have hopefully now understand it's a positive, not the negative that they thought from things that they heard that weren't actually correct.

I think a lot of people speculate and come up with these conspiracy theories online, but then when you talk to someone whose dog has gone missing and they're in that high stress moment of like, like, how do we recover this member of our family? That's where the actual value and impact is.

And I think the thing that we've gotten away from just as humans is that two things can exist at the same time. Like you can have people in a neighborhood come together and you can have privacy and security, like, you know, personal privacy and security. So you can have the, like, those two things can coexist. And I think it's become like one or the other. And like, we have to be in one camp or the other camp. And it's Like, no, like on Search Party for Dogs, if it says, Jamie, this dog looks like this dog. If I don't do anything, no one knows. I don't think that, I think that reflects poorly on me, but that's something I have to deal with myself. But it's certainly like I, my privacy, I can maintain my privacy while still being part of the community and looking for a dog. I do think that's something like, it's like that I'm seeing is like trying to have people understand that two things can coexist. Like we can invent ways to use technology and still have benefits from a human side and not take away things that we feel are core inalienable rights, which I agree what do you do with, like, you, you shouldn't have your privacy taken away because of technology. Like, I totally agree with that, but I think you can also use technology for good.

These are the questions that we all need to be asking as innovators, as these things are changing so rapidly under our feet and how we're gonna continue to live into a world that is both respectful of the individuals who are our literal neighbors alongside a deeper penetration of surveillance-forward software that is just around to make our streets safer, also to get us from point A to point B. And perhaps to help us live a healthier life with wearables. And so as we continue to create these datasets and create these deeper access to decisions that we can be making, of course the power becomes a bit imbalanced at times from an individual versus a collective when stewarded by incredible leaders like yourself for the better of our country and for our world.

And I think it's where like scrutiny is fine because it does keep everyone on their toes. We don't want this stuff. Stuff being built in a way that's not good. And so I think it's okay to have the scrutiny. I think I just want to make sure we stick to the facts in it, because I think when you go off of that, then you stop using technology where it can be good. To your point, if someone's lost their dog and we can build a system like this, like, you should have it out there. It's net good. We're reuniting families every day with their— like you said, it's a loved one. Like, my dog, if my dog was missing, I'd freaking die.

And of course, Spring has been more recently helping out with crimes as well and other sorts of more broad or more nefarious actions that we want to solve. We want to solve these issues. Yeah, it's a really interesting intersection of which you live in.

And for that, I think we need to, again, just balance. If you want to help, we should help you to get there to help. And if you feel like for whatever reason you don't want to take part in this, you should also— that should also be your choice. Your video, your choice.

We're coming up on the 250th anniversary of America. So nice way to end this conversation on a true American ideal. And to close us out, we have our hero question, which is something we ask all of our guests on our podcast. And that is, who is a woman in your life, Jamie, that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

I don't just say it because I want to go home tonight and not be yelled at, but my wife certainly has been incredible. It does take a village to build these things, and I think people don't appreciate how what we do with our families, like how much that impacts them and how strong they have to be through all of this stuff. So I'll give it to my wife, Erin. Shout out, Erin.

Jamie, thank you so much for making the time today on a Friday during so much change happening in the world and so much innovation at the forefront of what you're building with Ring and the Ring Suite. We're so delighted to get to share this story and really appreciate you making the time to join us in The Room today. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter. At theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode, an inspirational guest, Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

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