From Nearly Bankrupt to $5B+ Revenue, with Ring Founder Jamie Siminoff

Turner Novak (0:03)

Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie Siminoff (0:04)

Thanks for having me.

Turner Novak (0:05)

Yeah, thanks for doing this. So you sold your company to Amazon, you left and then you came back. Like that doesn't happen that often. So what happened?

Jamie Siminoff (0:17)

I mean, a few things happened. I sold, I did stay for five years. So it wasn't my guy.

Turner Novak (0:21)

So I didn't just like- That's actually very long, yeah.

Jamie Siminoff (0:23)

It's long, so I didn't just like peace out, sell it and go.

I mean, I'm almost in some ways jealous of the founders that can do that. Like, it's just not in me. Like, I mean, I love what I built. You're repping it. But I love it like almost in a human way, not in just like a business way. Like, I really do like think what we built there and I do love it. So I did after five years, I built it like multi, you know, like we really like crushed it. I got very profitable. So I felt like I left it like, I felt like you kind of like I just won the Super Bowl and I'm like, I'm going to retire now. Like I did it. This is a good time to go out, go out on top, give it like handed over. It sort of felt like it had more linear growth going from there. You know, like when I left in 2023, like that's how I saw it was like, okay, it'll still grow but like more in a linear fashion. So like give it to the professionals that take over. I'll go do something else. Then AI hits and I'm just basically like, holy shit. Like there's so much more to do with this sort of the foundation of what we built. And there's so many exciting things we can do. And I just like my brain was just like firing off. And on the outside, I just I would say I wasn't seeing the innovation overall in the industry that I had basically built including Ring. And, you know, was fortunate that Amazon was, you know, I think it's incredible I'd say on how it reflects on them to allow me to come back.

You know, you can make your own decision on me coming back of like how that reflects on me. But like I did want to come back and sort of have my second at bat with it to see what we could do. And it is like I say AI as the overall was what made me want to bring back you just because of the speed of development, the features we could do like, like, you know, and our mission has always been around making neighborhood safer. So like what we could do just around that in general.

Turner Novak (2:17)

Were you like the like texting the team at like 1 a.m. like, hey, you guys got to try this thing, check this out.

Jamie Siminoff (2:22)

So I actually tried to and I think it was maybe healthy.

These are like, they're like relationships. So it's like, you know, when you leave you. And I tried to like leave the team alone when I left. Like I didn't try it because I think it's easy to sort of be like this, like agitator on the sideline. And so I did try to like, I basically went back to the heads of Amazon and said, this is what I want to do. I tried not to like sort of infiltrate the ring team and sort of do that. So I did try to do that. And then which was, I'll say kind of funny because when I came back, like no one actually knew like the day I announced it when I was like, I literally came in the office and I'm like, I'm back. It was almost like a TV show, like walking down the Shark Tank thing or something again. Like it was kind of like interesting because like no, like literally no one knew I was coming. It was like, that was like the announcement was like when I was there. And so I was like, I'm back.

And it's been, I mean, it has been, like if you look at the KPIs of what we've done since then, it's been pretty cool. I mean, we've just like, you know, multi-x everything like on like what we've gotten, like new products, invention, features, just impact, like just the business overall. I just feel like we've just done like a pretty proud overall of what we've done. I mean, there's always more to do, but.

Turner Novak (3:43)