Why Ring CEO isn't sweating Apple's rumored smart lock

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Brian Sozzi (0:30)

Is it hard to say no to the team? You have these amazing engineers who are always thinking of something new. How do you keep them disciplined? Hey, this is why I founded this company. I mean, I appreciate your ideas, but we're not going there.

Jamie Siminoff (0:40)

Having a North Star that you're focused on keeps people from just going sort of wild and saying, why don't we build a tablet? Why don't we build whatever? Just something completely different. But it does come up, and I usually just like, I kind of ask them back, how does that make a neighbor safer?

Sometimes it's so interesting, someone will come up with like something and they're like, we should build this thing. And I did all this work and I'm like, here's 10 companies building that. Like why should we build that?

Brian Sozzi (1:07)

All right, welcome to a new episode of Power Players. I'm psyched to bring back in Jamie Siminoff. He is the founder of Ring, and I've not seen him for a while. Last time I saw him, you were actually, you were walking, working on something like Spotlight. You lost dogs outside.

Jamie Siminoff (1:21)

Yeah, search party for dogs. We've found hundreds of dogs since I was with you talking about it.

Brian Sozzi (1:26)

How is that? How is that project going?

Jamie Siminoff (1:27)

It's been great. I mean, it's certainly got a little bit of, some people got a little bit, you know, like a misunderstanding with it. So we had some work to do to make sure that everyone understood how it worked, that your privacy is safe. But it's been finding pets and dogs and returning loved ones to families. And that's all that matters.

Brian Sozzi (1:49)

That's AI for good, man.

Jamie Siminoff (1:51)

It is completely technology for good. And I think that's what we need to start seeing. But I do, I'm very positive on the technology we're building, that it is for good.

But I think sometimes we forget about that and the way we report it and some of the little statements people put out kind of don't necessarily help us in getting to there.

Brian Sozzi (2:07)

Like AI is going to end humanity. I still can't even put two and two together. I don't even know how that happens.

Jamie Siminoff (2:12)

That probably wasn't the best way to present the product, right? Yeah.

Brian Sozzi (2:17)

Talk to us about this, because I'm a smart gadget, super fan. I love all this stuff. I try to be an early adopter. I can't keep up anymore, but this is your new baby.

Jamie Siminoff (2:27)

Yeah. And so the Smart Lock has been, to us, like peanut butter and jelly from the beginning. When I first sold DoorBots, which were the precursor to Ring, we offered DoorBot with a thing called Locketron, which was like, that was in 2012, one of the first Smart Locks out there. We've never come out with a Smart Lock until now, because we just didn't have the innovation that I felt like warranted us putting, I don't want to just slap my brand onto the side of things. I don't think you earn trust with your customers when you do that. So for me, if we're going to come out with a product that has to be innovative, maybe a small innovation or one thing, but the problem with a Smart Lock is when the power goes out, it becomes a dumb lock. You have to get in your house, you have to go through a window. We've heard stories of people going through dog doors, and all this stuff. And of course it always happens at 1 a.m. on the coldest night.

It hits you every time. And it's our fault because mostly we knew the lock was going to lose power, we're just procrastinators like me. I always forget to charge something until it's dead. And so with this, yeah, you just literally go on and you just spin the dial, and it literally, it's like, I mean.

SPEAKER_2 (3:29)

It's like a fidget spinner.

Brian Sozzi (3:31)