from near bankruptcy to a $1B deal in just 40 days

0:00 spk_0

Welcome to a new episode of Opening Bid Unfiltered. I’m Yahoo Finance executive editor, Brian Sazi. Like I always say, this podcast will make you a smarter investor, and if you do not get smarter after this one, you’re just like, you’re not getting it because you should get really, really smart after this. It’s a real treat to have uh Ring.Uh, inventor Jamie Simonoff in the Yahoo Finance house at our New York City headquarters. It’s good to see you, man. Thanks for having me. It feels you, you and I have never met. Uh, you’re also out with this, uh, this book, uh, Ding Dong, appropriately with the ring doorbell, uh, on, on the cover. Let’s make the

0:31 spk_1

appropriately named Ding

0:32 spk_0

Dong, right? Um, you and I have never met, but it feels like I know you. Like I’ve, you have to get that. Like I’ve seen you on Shark Tank, and I have, I think, 3 of these doorbells. I mean.What are you working on right now? I want to get into your career, but you came back to, you left Amazon, you came back to Amazon, like what are you working on?

0:54 spk_1

So, I mean, I, I, I did, I, I left for about a year and a half, and I came back, and what I’ve been working on is how AI can become what I call IA, which is an intelligent assistant.So, and applying that to Ring. So applying it to our cameras, all of our features, our neighborhoods. Um, I mean, we can go into it, but we’re returning one dog a day right now with a thing called Search Party. We just launched something called Fire Watch, which helps look for fire through the cameras when we have these events.He saw in Los Angeles, um, so it’s just like so many cool things, um, that we’re working on right now, and I, yeah, so I’m like, I’m kind of back and I just feel like I’m, I’m also back to like startup mode.

1:32 spk_0

I wasso excited to talk to you, you know, I, I don’t want to gloss over the, over Jamie’s career. I mean you created Ring out of your garage, right? When didyou create it?

1:40 spk_1

I did back in 2011, um, and yeah, I was, I was in the garage.Garage inventor literally working on other stuff, couldn’t hear the doorbell. I, I, I looked for a wife, I had an iPhone, I’m like, oh let me get a doorbell that goes to my iPhone. I mean, it was early days, nothing did it, so I’m like, oh let me build a doorbell that goes to my iPhone. And it turned out my wife said this makes me feel safer at home, people seem to love the idea. It was like when sort of pre-sale things like Kickstarter were starting to go up, so we kind of put it for pre-sale.And yeah, one thing led to another, and it’s now, I mean, it’s, it’s raining.

2:16 spk_0

I, uh, people should know too, like I grew up, uh, my grandmother was the first one in my house to get an alarm for her house, but you walked in.And you punch things into a wall, and that was your alarm system. Uh, you essentially created something that never even existed. Like, how did you know you were that you were ontosomething?

2:33 spk_1

So I, I, I realized we’re onto something, um, when, I mean, my wife was the first one who said this makes me feel safer at home. And, and what I, what I quickly understood is technology had changed, the company’s building security for resident like for residences and homes had not adjusted to it yet.And that by being able by having phones with us, we were now able to connect to our homes, so we needed the other side, you needed something to connect to, and by doing that, you delivered presence, and presence is basically likeSomeone comes into the house and says, hi, you know, I’m here to sell whatever. Like they might be looking to see if the house is empty, like a lot of these like knock knock burglaries and stuff. So now it’s like you answer, you say, you know, I’m in the back, sorry, I can’t come out, and they leave. And so delivering presents to neighborhoods was, was really important as a first step. Um, and I got kind of lucky, but I also, I mean, you know, I, I, once I started in this, I saw, um, these little pieces and sort of bread crumbs to lead us to what we’ve done today.

3:29 spk_0

Have youdefeated porch pirates? Is it over?

3:32 spk_1

Um, porch pirates, yeah, they’re, they’re a tough one. They’re like cockroaches. Um, you know, they don’t, they don’t seem to want to fully die, uh, but we keep combating it. I, I do, you know, with, with AI, I would not be surprised if in the next 123, with what we’re doing, that we’re able to really impact those things like porch piracy, because those are just, they’re really hard because you need someone to sort of watch the camera all the time, and, and you don’t want to have to always watch your camera all the time.And, and I, I do think we can take this AI to IA like being an intelligent assistant. Your intelligent assistant, if it was watching it, would know what to say, what to do, what package is yours, who’s coming up, and that’s what we’re getting to.

4:13 spk_0

In those early days when you were building Ring, um, I imagine perseverance was, was vital.

4:20 spk_1

Yeah, I mean, it’s, um, I would say, yeah, grit. I mean, hardware is a tough business. It’s very cash flow intensive. You know, any, if you grow, you’re going out of business because you need sort of more money to grow. If you shrink, you’re going out of business. No matter what you’re doing with hardware, you’re going out of business when you’re small. It’s a really, really tough business, ton of grit. Um, but we had this, we had a mission to make neighborhoods safer. I think that’s what it really is, you know, people always say like, what built ringing?Um, and they want to know like the thing we did, you know, was it the chip that you put in? Was it like, what, what’s like they want like some physical answer. And the truth is, we had this mission to make neighborhoods safer, which took it, had the team aligned on something that was greater than money, and, and, and, and greater than just sort of call it like financial success. It was aligned around making an impact. And when people are aligned on something like that, it’s amazing what you can accomplish, and we needed that because when you go to your team, you’re like, I’m not sure if we’re gonna make payroll next week.If they’re just there for money, they’re gonna say, well, then I’ll go to the company that has money. Instead, they’re like, don’t worry, we got this, like we can get this together. And you know, you put, put a group of people, uh, uh, you know, crazy scrappy people together like that, it’s amazing what you can

5:28 spk_0

accomplish. It’s infectious,right? Did you, did you ever, did you ever want to quit? Was there ever that like, I’m gonna quit tomorrow, I’m done with this crap?

5:36 spk_1

You, you know, I, I, I think to be fair, I would have quit a few different times. The problem was it’s like a poker hand. I was already all in.So I would have loved to have just walked away with my, you know, if I could have walked away with what I had into Ring, um, and I wasn’t super successful when I started it, but basically I put everything I had into it, um, without sort of personal bankruptcy. There’s many nights that I would have, yeah, I just, I would have pulled the ripcord and gotten out of it. I just couldn’t because if I walked away, I was going to basically go personally bankrupt. Um, it was the only way, the only way out was up, and so I just had to fight my way through it. I mean, the book, II wrote the book because it is like the stories I, you know, are just pretty crazy of how this thing happened, um, and how on the razor’s edge we got of like success or failure. What’s one crazy story that you remember?I mean, the craziest one is like we almost went bankrupt right before we sold it to Amazon in 2018, in 20, yeah, in 2017, 2018, and like the story is just crazy and and it ended up, you know, I, the, the difference of really like, like I’d say like either bankruptcy or certainly selling it for like no return to investors, you know, for like maybe it would still exist, but really like no one would have made money. From the difference of that in number of days to selling to signing the deal with Amazon was like less than 40 days. So I went from like,You know, what like, what am I gonna do personally to signing a deal for $1.15 billion with Amazon? That’s a pretty like big swing for, you know, for a couple weeks. Well, what did you do the next day after this deal was done?Um, you know, I, I, I just, I literally, for this is for 5 years I stayed there and I just grinded away and kept building Ring, and we just kept building and building and building it, and then finally I hit this point where I, I literally, I just was burnt out. And so in 2023, I said to Amazon, I’m like, listen, I, I got this into profitability, it’s aYou know, it’s probably one of the largest home security companies in the world. Like, you know, I feel, I feel like I did it. And so I’m gonna, I’m going to step back for a little bit and and try to chill out. Um, and that’s what I, that’s when I actually looked and I was like, holy cow, like look what we did.

7:38 spk_0

Was it harder to sell to Amazon or leave something that you created literally from your garage?

7:45 spk_1

Yeah, I think the leaving was the hardest, um, because I, I didn’t, it’s like I didn’t want to leave. I sort of, I just, I knew I was burnt out, like I knew I needed a reset. I’d been doing it for so long.Um, you know, it went from my garage to selling it for a billion dollars to Amazon to just like the, I mean, over 100 million cameras out there. I mean just like crazy stuff.

8:05 spk_0

I can’t believe it.I have multiple cameras,

8:08 spk_1

and so I just sort of like needed like to to take like a sabbatical and like a breath, um, but yeah, that was, that was super hard. It was super hard to leave, um, and it’s been, it’s been amazing to be back, especially with.AI really has allowed us to, it, it is, I, I feel like I’m back in the garage starting over again because there I, everything I look at, I’m like, I see that we can do this differently. I see we can like add this feature. I mean, it’s just, we are just ripping right now in building just amazing stuff.

8:37 spk_0

I definitely want to get into the AI and what you’re focused on.During that, during that break period, and I think this could be a good lesson to other leaders, founders, CEOs, you name it, what did you do in that breath

8:47 spk_1

period? Well, I mean, like any, uh, you know, afflicted entrepreneur, I, I ended up building another little business. I sold it to this other company. We tried to sort of take that thing. So we, I, I was still doing stuff, but in a funny way, just doing something new was what I needed to refresh. Um, it also, and again, it did allow me toStep back, you know, when you’re inside of something, it’s really hard to see the impact. I mean, I know like it rang today, like, you know, we’re doing these things, I see the impact, but from the inside, you’re also dealing with all the problems, the issues, the what you have to, like, you know, you see everything. And so, when you step back and you have like, and you’re sort of disconnected, then you really see the good, the like what it really is. Um, and so I would say like,To any founder or to person in business, I mean, I am, I am 10 times the leader that I was, um, previously by stepping back and taking a breath, and re-looking at the field, if you will.And then readjusting for that. And it’s not just like what happened while I was gone. Like I look at decisions I made that even like 2017, before we sold 2018, like I’m correcting things now that I see like this wasn’t the, you know, this is, there’s better ways to do this that are that we can, you know, do even bigger things.

10:02 spk_0

Well, how are you different, Iguess, as a leader then?

10:04 spk_1

I think it’s like a clarity, you know, it’s just like a, it’s like a, like because again, when you getIt’s, it’s like a snowball, which is a good metaphor for being in New York City today, um, you know, you just get this like this haze stuff sort of just keeps building around you as you get in it longer and longer, and when you, when you get out, like you just blast all of that off of you, and now you just see like with full clarity. So I came in.I’d say just a much more clear thinking, um, like a reset, and, and I, and that’s why we’ve been just the speed at which we go now. I mean, we’re building product. It used to take us 18 to 24 months to turn a product from like, you know, concept, like when I said, oh, we want to build a floodlight camera, you know, OK, like it’s probably like almost 2 years to go from like that saying we want to do it to shipping it, which is actually not that bad.You know, we’re not doing stuff in 6 months. Now, a lot of that’s also with AI, but it’s a fresh perspective, and I, and, and, there’s a lot of companies that have, everyone has access to AI. I would say they’re certainly not all using it the way we are.

11:04 spk_0

Did you grow up as a tinker? I mean, were you, were you pulling apart video game consolemachines?

11:08 spk_1

I, I literally, from, I think as soon as my hands worked on a tool, I was able, I was taking stuff apart. I mean, I was in the basement.As a kid in New Jersey, just taking stuff apart always, and that’s how I learned engineering, which is, you know, I just, I didn’t have YouTube, so I had to sell I like

11:26 spk_0

therewas a point when there wasno YouTube. Yeah, I know,

11:28 spk_1

yeah, like you might not believe this. Like, I mean, for some of you younger listeners, like, you know, it’s like, but, but so I literally just took stuff apart and I learned how, you know, by breaking things, I just learned how things came together, uh, which ended up for, for my career was critical because building Ring.I’ve done a lot, like I’ve fixed a lot of stuff on the products that, you know, we have engineers, and, but when you have really prac like practical experience.I think is, is still miss is, is underrated. Um, and that’s why, you know, Ring is like definitely like not the Ivy League business. Like we are the, we are like a scrappy group and you’re an OG inventor. I am an OG inventor. I’m an OG inventor and like the team that we surrounded ourselves with are OGs like they are just like a scrappy group of people, you know, some of them hired off a Craigslist, you know, for, for our, oh yeah, and they’re still there 100%. And so, but I, that’s the, you know.And I, and I actually think with AI, I take the positive from AI. AI is democratizing information. So what’s left is like human ingenuity, human scrappiness, like hard freaking work. And so I’ll, I, I would say with AI.It’s gonna become 1000 times more important to just work your ass off, you know, like figure stuff out yourself, like that human ingenuity, because the, the reality is everyone now has an engineering team. Everyone has a legal team, everyone like, everyone has access to that.

12:51 spk_0

Uh, hang with us, Jamie, we’re gonna go off for a short break. We’ll be right back on opening B Unfiltered.All right. Welcome back to Opening bid Unfiltered. Having a fun chat here, uh, with someone whose career I really have admired. Uh, I have a lot of his products, uh, so I’m not surprised his interview came, uh, too light, and I’m really excited to have Jamie Simonoff here, the inventor of, uh, Ring. You have their products. He’s also the author of Ding Dong, uh, like I mentioned, top of the show, appropriately, uh, titled. I mean, it’s right up his, his alley. So you are now back, uh, you’re back at Amazon.That that 1st 90 days back at Amazon, what did, what did you do? How do you readjust to that corporate corporate

13:34 spk_1

life? So I went for just like macro, uh, first principle thinking. So, so where has the world changed since I left? Uh, AI. How does AI how are we going to benefit our customers with AI? We need to see more. Like we now have this sort of super intelligence in the cloud, and so we need to see more. So I would say, I said we need to increase the number of pixels that are out there.Um, so 4K cameras. So we’re gonna have a, we need a full line of 4K cameras, 2K cameras, we need to increase, whereas before, it was really the human eye, like, you know, if you’re a customer, um, we call our customers neighbors, but if you’re like one of our neighbors, you know, it’s like kind of what you could see is fine, but now with AI, the more pixels you get, the deeper it can see, the more analytics, the better it can sort of tell you stuff. So that was like, that was one. The second one was literally just AI.We need to lead in every way, and we have a mission to make neighborhoods safer. We need to um start figuring out how to use AI in the neighborhood to benefit the neighborhood. So, one of the first things we launch is Dog Search Party. Um, now, you know, if your dog is missing, it’s gonna be like, Jamie.You know, this dog that was posted, that’s that that is missing, looks like this dog in front of your house. Do you want to contact your neighbor? Hell yeah, of course. And by the way, if you say no, I mean you’re just a bad person, but you, but the cool thing is actually it it to be serious, like, you can say no, no one knows you said no.And your privacy is fine. But if you want to enter into the neighborhood, which any good person is gonna do, they, they, they say yes, and then they, you know, they talk to their neighbor like your dog is here, and, and they return it with one dog per day, over one dog per day is being reunited with their family, like literally today, like every day, and that’s, and that’s what we’re doing. So like that’s a feature thatI was like, we need to do these things because we have over 100 million cameras out there, and we need to help our neighbors leverage them for good. Uh, we launched a thing called Fire Watch, the LA fires that everyone saw, I mean these big sort of events, um.You know, one of the problems is the firemen don’t know where the things are jumping. So fire jumps like a quarter of a mile, 0.5 mile, like literally can jump like these huge lines, start somewhere else, and so it’s very hard for them to understand where to fight the fire outside of like the core core, like what they can see burning. And then those things become big fires, which then makes it harder for resources. We had 6 over 10,000 cameras.In the Palisades area, um, which is where I live, uh, in Los Angeles at the time of the fire. We absolutely could have helped to make a real-time map for them to, to, to use the resources better. If we can use the resources better, maybe we had enough resources there to help slow. I don’t think we would have stopped them, I certainly would have like, you know, it’s not like there would have been no fire, but maybe we could have helped stop some of these other.Little areas from burning and other houses from burning and families from being affected.

16:22 spk_0

What’s the, what’s the next big unlock for Ring? I mean, I look at the doorbell, game changing product. It’s hardware, but it sounds like software is thenext frontier.

16:32 spk_1

I, I, yeah, I think the software, it’s all about the stuff we’re doing, you know, with the, again, the search party, the fire watch, and we also launched an app store. And I think the other thing, you know, pre-AI.Like your camera gave you, I would say, like if you, you know, if you bought your camera for $100 I think we gave you like $100 of value for it, like, like, like we gave you as much value as you could based on the technology and where it was. Now, there’s other things you wanna know, like, why, why is the camera seeing the lawn go brown and not telling you.That like your lawn’s dying. It kind of blow

17:08 spk_0

my mind because I need my camera, it’s facing my lawn.

17:12 spk_1

I, we did, we didn’t set this

17:13 spk_0

up. Wait, is that, is actually, is that feature out? Like is it coming out this summer? So,

17:16 spk_1

so what we did is Ring, and this is where I think companies make a mistake. Like Ring is focused on making neighborhoods safer. We’re focused on building the products. Like we, we have, you have to focus, in my opinion, you have to focus to be successful and to deliver the best for your customers and, you know, our neighbors.But things like this, the long tail of things is gonna be super important, but it’s like the iPhone. Apple didn’t build every game, every app, every whatever, they built a few core things, right? Like around their core, and then there’s, I don’t know, a million apps. I don’t even know what it is on the iPhone. I think, you know, we’re going in the same direction, so now you can add from a third party.Uh, you know, a grassing, I bet no one’s built it. Go build it. Someone should build this. Like

17:57 spk_0

if my car is parked out front, I need to know if the tire needs air.

18:01 spk_1

All these, so, so, and all these are these long tail things like, you know, uh, that, that someone else and with again with AI.You know, a, you know, literally as someone in high school, you know, a kid in high school could probably build this, focus on it, build a really cool app, throw it in the App Store again, just like, just like on the iPhone, um, and then get picked up and, you know, make some money with it, whatever, charge a little bit, you know, so, so I, I, we, we announced this app store at CES this year in January, so we just announced it, and I think we’re gonna see thousands or tens of thousands of these types of use cases that are gonna benefit people andAgain, some people are gonna want to see the lawn thing, some people aren’t. So like that’s where an app store is great, is it allows you to really customize and get now get the most value out of that sort of what thecamera’s capturing.

18:49 spk_0

I think about this, this lawn feature and I immediately think, this is great for my landscaper, this is good for the economy. What are some of your concerns though on how fast AI is moving?

18:58 spk_1

I mean, certainly AI is the fastest, I mean, you know, um, in my career, I haven’t seen anything like this. I don’t think anyone has.Um, you know, it’s something where you say the best in class is this while we’re literally sitting here, and 20 minutes later someone launches something that’s like 10x better. It’s like, I’ve never seen the leapfrogging that’s happening in it, and it’s unbelievable to watch it. Um, I do, I do, I’m very, uh, positive. I I’m someone who I think maybe is an entrepreneur, like I always look at sort of the bright side of things.I think it’s going to deliver, it’s democratizing information. I think it’s going to allow people to really truly unlock their full potential. Um, I’m, I’m actually very like overall like globally positive on what it’s going to do, and I’m seeing it ring what we’re doing with it again, like returning a dog, like that is AI.That’s doing that, reuniting that dog with a family, um, hopefully, you know, fighting the next fire with AI, and I think that’s, that’s what we have to do also as an industry, if I’m, if I’d say I’m including myself in sort of somewhere in this industry, is we have to show people what it’s doing.Like the problem is when we talk about AI, AI, AI, and it doesn’t do anything for you, yeah, you’re probably gonna be scared of it or not like it. Um, but if you start to see that, you know, your dog comes back home or you’re safer in a fire, or like, you know, you feel safer in your home or your, you know, your landscaping is better, like you’ll start to be like, oh, I, I get this.

20:26 spk_0

Isthere one more big invention to be had in the home?

20:31 spk_1

Uh, there’s millions of big inventions to still be had. I think, you know, I, I, if there’s anything history has told us is that we can never sort of imagine the next thing, you know, there’s always something that’s

20:42 spk_0

humanoids like folding laundry and stuff. Are you a big humanoid guy?

20:45 spk_1

You know, the humanoid thing is interesting because if you could make a humanoid at a low enough, like the world is built for humanoids, like we built like the entire planet for like the human, basically like model. And so the, the big unlock with humanoids is that they can use anything, like they can jump into a car and then to a bulldozer, and then on a bike, like they can kind of, if you really truly have a humanoid, it can just sort of fit all the things we’ve built over the lastYeah, hundreds of years, um, in the planet. So, no, it’s certainly like that’s above my pay grade. I’m like a doorbell. I like to make doorbells. I make floodlight cameras. I do, you know, door and window sensors. I

21:22 spk_0

make you have door

21:23 spk_1

and window

21:23 spk_0

sensors. Oh yeah,

21:24 spk_1

we have a whole full, we have the full alarm at Home Depot.

21:26 spk_0

Like, where, where can I find these?

21:27 spk_1

Home Depot, online, you know, Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, Ring.com.

21:32 spk_0

Uh, all right, I have to let Jamie go, but I did want to get one more question to him. Um, I just, I, fortunately, I don’t have a ton of time to do these. Um, what’s your best advice to the next generation of inventors that areinspired by your story?

21:45 spk_1

Yeah, I think it’s work on something that matters.You know, I, I, it’s so easy to get with AI and all this stuff to get like wrapped around the technology, and get into the technology and not into what it does for people. Focus on what you can do that like matters also to you. Like, I love making this, like making neighborhoods safer, making them better. Like, I get up in the morning, I’m jazzed, and so it is hard. The chances are you’re gonna go out of business, that you’re not gonna make it. And so if you’re just going for money and you’re trying to take a technology and make money off of it.It’s, it’s like I said, it’s too easy, you’ll just give up. But if you’re doing something that you care about, and that’s better for the world, you inspire people, you inspire your team, you inspire your customers, it’s just like a better way to do it, I think. Uh,

22:28 spk_0

you’re getting a photo or, or a video of my perfect lawn this summer.

22:32 spk_1

I, I am excited to have, there’s gonna be.Someone out there’s writing the app. Write the app. Ring app store. It’s coming. Uh,

22:39 spk_0

Jamie, thank you so much and congrats on the book. It’s awesome. I appreciate it. That’s it for the latest episode of Opening Bid Unfiltered. Uh, continue to hit me with all that love on all the social media, uh, platforms, and be sure to watch this episode, especially on Amazon Music, because why not? We’ll talk to you soon.