How a $200 Doorbell Became a $4B Business

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Jamie created Ring Doorbell.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
You sold it for like a billion dollars, right?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:03)
1.15.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The part after his decimal point is worth more than our entire career so far. I want to brainstorm business ideas with you. I want to see how you think.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:12)
Is there a five or $10 billion company hiding in the bug space? Probably they're it.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
You said, I just don't know how to stop. And sometimes it's not smart and it costs me.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:21)
Yeah, you're going to make me cry, Sam? You're going to do this?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:34)
So, Shaan, listen, if you're like me, you woke up this morning, you rolled out of bed, you checked businessinsider.com, and you read this amazing article about Jamie. And it just says, I'm Jamie and I'm the CEO of Ring, and I have the world's worst morning routine. And it's a whole article about how he rolls out of bed, he scrolls his phone for about four hours.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:55)
Everything he says he shouldn't do, like immediately like all the wrong shit, like everything.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
That was the whole article about how Jamie has the world's worst routine.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:04)
Good PR strategy, right? Like they sit down with you and they're like, hey, we need to get some cool like tech billionaire weirdo stuff. What do you got? And you're like, nope, don't have anything. So they're like, okay, we're going to use that.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:14)
Yeah, I'm like the average guy from Missouri.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
Are you from Missouri?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:19)
I'm from New Jersey, but I tell people I'm from Missouri now. Because I have this farm in Missouri, and I've decided that there's no reason why you can't just be from Missouri.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:29)
Guess where I'm from, Jamie. Just look at me and guess.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:31)
Missouri.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:32)
I'm from Missouri.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:33)
Where?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:34)
St. Louis.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:35)
So my farm is in LaBelle, Missouri. So I'm from Missouri. You're from Missouri. You're more like a city folk, but we are two and a half hours north of St. Louis.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:46)
Dude, I love how he just out Missouri'd you, even though you were actually born and raised there. And he just actually was like, you're a city slicker, not a real true Missourian.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:55)
We don't like you folk.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:56)
This is like, you go into like Tony Soprano and be like, actually, Tony, it's brisketa.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:03)
So let me tee this up. All right. So I did a call with Jamie and it was super fun. Jamie created, if you've ever seen a doorbell that has a camera on it, this is the inventor. This is the man who did it. He created Ring Doorbell, grew it, sold it to Amazon for tons of money and I was like, hey, I want to have you on the podcast and brainstorm business ideas with you. I want to see how you think, how do you approach businesses and he's like, I believe, I don't know the exact quote, but it was something like ideas are like my drug of choice. He's like, I have this list on my phone of thousands of videos. Which one do you want? Yeah, exactly. So I want to do that. Sam, you saw the doc that he sent over, which gives us bullet point ideas. We don't know what he's going to say, but bullet point idea is where do you want to start?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:49)
Wait, can I ask a question before we get in? How much you sold it for like a billion dollars, right?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:54)
1.15. But I mean, if you want to, you can round down if you want to.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:58)
Okay. So we're talking to a guy who, you have a billion dollar company.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:02)
The part after his decimal point is worth more than our entire career so far.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:06)
I think you do have to point out, I did sell it for a billion when a billion was a lot of money.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:10)
Just back when a billion was cool?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:11)
Back when a billion was actually like, you could buy more than a cup of coffee with it.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:14)
Well, can we actually go to that story? Do you remember kind of where you were? I guess I'm always curious about two things. One, was there a good negotiation story or like a throw out a number story of like, how do you arrive at that 1.15 billion? And then like, how did that come about?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:29)
I mean, what was cool with Amazon is, from the, we had been working with them on stuff for years. So like, I actually went to Amazon and showed this guy, Nick Camorros, the ring before we launched Ring, because we had been talking to them. They were with Alexa and stuff, they were looking at, so they were trying to reach out to all the small IOT people at the time. There was a lot of little hardware things bubbling up. So I even like literally like brought them the first one and showed it to them. So we had been working together for a long time. We were very like aligned on like mission, what we're trying to do. They started to look at video, realizing like with Alexa, they had, you know, the kind of, they call it the ears in the home. And they started to see the eyes and saw what we were doing. We had this, you know, kind of like dating awkward, because we would talk all the time, we'd meet and Nick said, let me come down and let's have lunch, which was kind of not that abnormal. And we're sitting there and Nick's like, you know, we should kind of go to the next level here. And it was this like very funny, like dating conversation of like, you know, it's like where you don't want to just like jump out and be like, okay, let's do it. You know, it's like, and it's like, do what? You know, so it's like, we keep going back and forth, like, so you mean, and he's like, yeah. And I'm like, too. And like, we kept going back. And then he finally said, yeah, like it's time we should combine. And, you know, not a merger of equals, by the way, but that Amazon should buy you.