Jamie Siminoff is returning to Ring, the company he founded, with a renewed focus on its mission to “make neighborhoods safer.” Talk to The edge before the release of his new book Ding DongSiminoff says he thinks the new wave of AI could finally help him realize this vision.
“When I left, I felt like Ring had gotten to a point where innovation was linear,” he says. But new features like Search Party, an AI-powered tool that can search your neighbors’ Ring camera footage for lost dogs, are the type of innovations he always dreamed of but couldn’t execute. “Now, thanks to AI, we can,” he says.
Although research suggests that Today Video doorbells don’t do much to prevent crime, Siminoff estimates that with enough cameras and with AI, Ring could eliminate most of it. Not all crimes – “you will never stop crime one hundred percent… there are crimes that are impossible to stop,” he concedes – but almost.
“I think in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology – not too crazy – and with AI, we can get closer to zero crime. Get a lot closer to the mission than I ever imagined,” he says. “By the way, I don’t think it’s 10 years. It’s 12 to 24 months…maybe even a year.”
This ambitious, if troubling, vision will bring her company back under the scrutiny it began to move away from when her successor, now predecessor, Liz Hamren, renounced the company’s relationship with law enforcement. Siminoff brings them back and adds new ones through its community request tool that lets local police ask Ring users for their video footage.
Siminoff dismisses the controversy surrounding the tool. “I deeply believe that we have a world in which technology can make you safer while keeping your privacy under your control. I think the two can coexist,” he says. “When you look at these citation controversies, the sad thing is, they’re just misinformation. They’re not controversies. Police anonymously asking people for their video…is not a controversy,” he says.
Privacy advocates and civil rights groups strongly disagree, citing concerns about both privacy and the creation of a private surveillance network.
“I was the wrecker”
Surprisingly, Ring didn’t start out as a security product. The story of how Siminoff invented the Ring video doorbell is a famous part of smart home history.
The idea came to the serial inventor while he was working in his garage and frustrated at missing package deliveries to his front door. It was 2011 and he had just bought an iPhone. He thought, “Why can’t he alert me somehow?” » This is how DoorBot was born. It took several years, a very public rejection on Shark tankand a 4-hour drive to Las Vegas before smart home security company Ring became a reality.
In Ding Dong, which is available for pre-order today on Amazon and launches November 10, Siminoff shares how the startup became the Kleenex of smart doorbells, eventually branching out into home security cameras and a home security system.
“…bullshit is the best thing for a book. Luckily, I’ve done a lot of bullshit.”
Co-written by Andrew Postman, the book is billed as “both an entrepreneurship manual and a personal journey,” with a strong focus on what Siminoff sees as the key to Ring’s success, this mission to “make neighborhoods safe.”
I haven’t read it yet, but Siminoff tells me it covers the creation of Ring up until 2018, when they signed on the dotted line with Amazon. That means it doesn’t touch on Siminoff’s time at Amazon, but he says it touches on Ring’s law enforcement partnerships, although “most of it” happened after Amazon’s acquisition. “The emotional arc seems to have ended in the sale to Amazon,” he says. “Once we got there, it was hard to say we were stressed about money; it just didn’t fit with the entrepreneurial story. »
For Siminoff, writing this book was a humbling experience. “Looking back, it turns out I wasn’t always right. I probably went too crazy with some things. But I can tell you that bullshit is the best thing for a book. Luckily, I did a lot of stupid things.”
One example he shares is how he handled a phone call with an ADT executive in 2017, when the security company was suing Ring, alleging it stole trade secrets. Siminoff remembers giving the guy “some attitude” and being proud of him for standing his ground.
“Looking back, I say to myself: What the hell was I doing? All I had to do was say, “Let me come over there, we’ll sit down, we’ll figure it out.” » I can almost guarantee that if I had done that, everything would have gone well. Instead, Siminoff believes his attitude pushed ADT “to a place they maybe didn’t want to go.” The fallout almost sank Ring.
The litigation continued, with a judge issuing an injunction on sales of Ring’s home alarm system, which has not yet been launched. The move scared off investors, and Siminoff says it killed a funding round that could have taken the company public and also derailed a potential sale to Amazon.
“It created a series of events that almost bankrupted us,” he says. “I went from ‘the world is my oyster,’ with $10 million on the table and Amazon looking, to blowing up Series E to the moment Amazon withdrew its offer. On the same day, at the same time, both collapsed because of me. Because I was a fucking idiot.”
Miraculously, ADT came back saying it was interested in exploring a settlement. Ring ended up paying ADT $25 million, launched its alarm system, and Amazon came back to the table by buying Ring for $1 billion in 2018. [of writing the book] made me understand that I was the demolitionist. My same energy and passion that created the business also created… that.”
ADT’s problems weren’t the only disaster the startup faced. Siminoff remembers the first time the young company almost went bankrupt. It was late 2013 and they were preparing to ship the first large order: 3,000 DoorBots. “It’s right before Christmas, and every customer email says, ‘Bring it to me for Christmas or cancel my order,'” he says. “I had to ship them; I didn’t have the money to reimburse anyone.”
“When you have to survive, it turns out that you become very creative”
But there was a problem: the video streams were erratic. “I had hired my first real engineer to fix it, and he thinks he did it,” Siminoff says. They send the fix to the factory, the factory sends the product and ships them to customers. Without testing them. Reports of errors and non-working DoorBots quickly followed.
“It’s Christmas Eve. We take one out of the box and set it up, and there are all these green lines on the video feed,” he says. “We’re taking another one out and putting it in. Green lines. Damn.” The “fix” hadn’t worked, and neither had any of the DoorBots. “I remember sitting at the table with my wife and my son, who was about 7, and I was almost calm. I knew it was over.”
A last-minute Hail Mary – and then CTO Mark Dillon spent all night changing DoorBot’s server from the free server they were using to a paid platform – somehow fixed the problem. “He calls me at 6 a.m. on Christmas Eve saying, ‘Holy shit. It works!'”
Siminoff says they never discovered exactly what worked or how it worked. “We were so new to cameras and everything else that we didn’t even know what had changed.” Reflecting on the incident ten years later, he believes that their colossal mistake was actually the reason the company survived. “If we had checked them, it would have forced us to leave until after the holidays, which could have put us out of business.” And without the pressure of having to find a solution, they may have dragged on for months without shipping the product.
“Most startups talk about how they’re dead in the water and the only way to survive is a miracle,” he says. “When you have to survive, you show great creativity.”
Ding Dong! The Untold Story of How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door is available for pre-order now on Amazon and will be released on November 10 in paperback, hardcover, e-book and audiobook.
