🔔 “Doorbell Disruptor” — Interview with Ring Founder Jamie Siminoff at our LA Live Show

0:01Jamie Siminoff. He disrupted the doorbell by inventing Ring, the video camera. Basic concept, a billion-dollar door-busting breakthrough idea. By linking a camera to Wi-Fi, he turned ding-dong into cha-ching. But 13 years ago, Jamie pitched the invention on Shark Tank. And the sharks didn't bite not even one bit. No, they didn't, Jack. Mr. Wonderful shut the door on Literally. But he turned I'm out into I'm ins because 3 million people saw that episode. And they were interested. And five years later, Amazon came knocking with a$1 billion acquisition offer. Also, literally. And now your mom, your neighbor, and your landlord just installed one in your home.

0:43But Jamie is the ultimate comeback story. And tonight he's going to tell us all of his big secrets. Because Jamie is the Duke of Ding Dongs, the Baron of the Buzzers, the patron saint of pork security. Bestie is the guest for tonight's live show is the coolest entrepreneur in L.A. Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring. And yeah, this episode is recorded on camera. Come on, Jamie. Jamie. Nice to meet you.

1:18We were going deep. We jumped in T-Boy style. We've listened to every interview we've done. We wanted to ask different things. But the first funny thing we noticed was on your LinkedIn, right, Jack? Yeah. Your job title. Yeah, your job title. What we saw was not CEO or founder, which everyone else who's a CEO or founder wants to put up. Everyone we've interviewed has that on their LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn title was Chief Inventor.

1:40Jamie Siminoff: Yeah. And it's actually always been Chief Inventor from when I started Ring. Wow. So I've always looked at myself more as an inventor. I've always like, to me, the business is something I need to have in order to invent. So it's like versus like where people actually just want to build businesses and then do other things. But yeah, I've always been like my invention's been my thing. Well, we know that from deep in your history because you are the ultimate garage tinkerer. I thought his LinkedIn title was going to be tinkerer. Ah, tinkerer would make good. Chief tinker. Yeah. Maybe we'll get a change tomorrow.

2:10We'll check our updates. Well, tinker bell. His product is kind of a bell. Anyway. Bring. Okay, dad joke of the night, number one. But Ring is actually your fifth company, Jamie. Okay, Jack, can you list off some of the other ones? Yeah, your first step, phone tag, unsubscribe.com, body mint. We actually could go on. There's one as a teenager you started that Jack and I just call, like, the puppy poo pickup service, which was very entrepreneurial.

2:37Jamie Siminoff: It was, yeah. We'd do anything for$15 an hour. And it turned out people would actually, like, people are awful. Like they would have us like, like they would, this was in college and they would have us do like awful things. It was like one family had us take all the poison ivy off their hill. And by the way, we were like, for beer money? Yeah, we'll do it. So we were wondering like the original indicator that someone was going to grow up and be an entrepreneur was like if they had a paper route. But what's the tell now? How do you know if someone's going to be an entrepreneur? Anything early signs?

3:09Jamie Siminoff: Vibe coding kids, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it really has changed though. I mean, I do still think, though, to the paper route, I do think grit is still going to be a part of entrepreneurs and success going forward. But it's definitely shifting. I mean, the AI, I'm seeing a friend of mine just sent this thing out today that a 15-year-old who's interning at his company's big, big hedge fund, vibe-coded this thing that basically blew out, like, the Harvard guys that are trying to build some stuff there. Wow. And he did it, like, in the afternoon. And it's, like, doing, like, some sort of model of IPO.

3:43Jamie Siminoff: it's like way over my head that's the modern paper route but I do think it really is changing it's going to just really change I mean like the business plan competition is now a business competition so it's just changing I think how young people are going to enter this sort of market well Jamie thank you so much for joining us tonight we're proud to have an Angelino on stage you're not born and raised here but you call yourself an Angelino I've been here for like 20 years I'm an Angelino Yeah, your first garage. Yeah, we read in Ding Dong, your book you published in December, that you hired your early team that ultimately got to ring on Craigslist.

4:24We did. Can you take us into the garage about like, that says a lot.

4:28Jamie Siminoff: What was going on? And it was like, there's still our, the guy who runs all of our supply chain came off of Craigslist. What's funny is this guy, Dave Savage, and he came in. And we were shipping product out. And I needed someone to put the tape on the box and the sticker. And Dave came into my, I'd say my office, but it was more like just where I had my computer. And said, we don't have enough. We're not ordering enough whatever. It was like the chargers or something. And I'm like, damn it, man. Why don't you order them? And so from that day forward, Dave's been ordering everything. But now he's running like a multi-billion dollar P &L.

5:03And so what were you guys doing in the garage?

5:06Jamie Siminoff: so I started I think called Edison Junior I mean I had this like run of these failure companies kind of like it's so funny people are like name like oh you were a serial entrepreneur it's like no I just couldn't find anything that worked you know so it's like yeah it's really great so I was like kind of doing all these things and they were like very little success but they were like you know kind of one to the next and I went into the garage and I was trying to invent stuff and build stuff I had a thing called Snap Garden a modular gardening system I had a thing called Pokety Poke which would call you when a conference call started so you wouldn't miss the conference call.

5:38Jamie Siminoff: So I was like just playing around all this stuff, couldn't hear the doorbell, just got an iPhone, looked online for a Wi-Fi doorbell, didn't exist, and so I soldered one together. Now, when hardware and tech gadgets come out, they tend to be launched by multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies. Can anybody with a soldering arm, some tools, some know-how, and like, how the heck did You create a hardware tech product that was connected to the internet. What if you don't even know what a Phillips head is? I mean, you probably shouldn't be. The truth is, like, doing... Jack had to teach me how to spell soldering earlier.

6:13Jamie Siminoff: Hardware's maybe getting a little bit easier, again, with AI, maybe a little bit. But, like, hardware, it's almost physically impossible to do a hardware startup, I think. Like, it's just, to your point, like, the scale that you need to do it as a startup is, like, it's very, very close to impossible. So you have to be a little bit insane or just not understand what you're getting into. I would say I have both. Is it impossible today or was it also impossible back then when you did it? Financially, it's just such a big lift to build a product, ship a product, especially if it's a connected product.

6:52Jamie Siminoff: There's just so many different pieces that you have to do. The cash flow up front, all this stuff. And, you know, pre-sale sites have made it a little bit easier, like the Kickstarter kind of thing. But it's still like, you know, a million dollars in hardware is nothing. Like you can go through a million dollars in like a second in hardware. Well, speaking of a million, we thought it was fascinating that you purchased at this early stage the domain ring.com. You spent a million dollars on it, which was one of the most valuable pieces of digital real estate out there. One of the biggest spends ever for a website donate.

7:26Four letters and then.com. There's not that many of those. No. So we were wondering, first, was it worth it? And second, does that still matter today?

7:36Jamie Siminoff: Interesting about today, I'd say looking back for Ring, it was worth it. Because we were competing with the biggest nest. We were competing with Google, Amazon. We were competing with the big guys. Having the four-letter clean, it gave us this credibility immediately. And so I think it was worth it, but it was an insane, again, like it was an insane thing to do. I had, I mean, I ended up doing it on installments. I had. You didn't even pay for it at first. I had$187 ,000 in the bank when I bought it. The first payment was$175 ,000. And I didn't tell the VCs that were putting money in that I was doing it because I was like, they're going to kill me.

8:19Jamie Siminoff: So, I mean, it was just like, I mean, there's so many things I begged for forgiveness on building this business. But that's hardware, though. Literally, it's a shell game. I mean, you are kind of taking money from here, putting it here. You're constantly doing this because unlike software, you just don't have, there's no leverage. You just don't have that financial leverage you have on a software business. And in an AI world where you're asking a chatbot, do you think the domains still matter like they did? It's so interesting. I don't know. This is where maybe my son would say I'm an unk. I might be an unk on this one.

8:53I actually don't, I don't, I don't think they do as much.

8:57Jamie Siminoff: I think, I think probably between the way we discover on social media, the way we discover with AI today, apps, kind of all of those things, it's probably less important today. Now a quick word from our sponsor. Bureau premium non-alcoholic beer. All right, yeah, he's a little behind the scenes here. Before our New York City live show back in April, Jack and I went sober for two weeks. True story. Couldn't risk getting sick. I didn't want to be groggy. I couldn't afford a hangover. It was New York, baby. Okay, but Jack, celebrating the wins is what we do. And so for our live shows, we crack open something special.

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11:35Tell it to me like I'm a five-year-old. You created a camera that sent the feed to the Wi-Fi, which then sent the feed to your phone. The Wi-Fi? Yeah.

11:47Jamie Siminoff: Was that an unk move? I'm not the worst unk. Keep going. I said I was being a five-year-old. You meant World Wide Web, I think, Jay. A five-year-old would know more. Anyway, keep going. Five-year-olds are pretty sophisticated these days. Sorry, sorry. I'll continue. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

12:13I'm going to bring you back to a tough time now. So 2013, season five, episode nine, Shark Tank goes terribly. How did you prepare for that Shark Tank episode? And then what happened?

12:27Jamie Siminoff: So I did treat Shark Tank as I was like, you know, to me, entrepreneur, inventors, like, you know, that's like my identity. And so if I was a swimmer going to the Olympics, however, you would train for the Olympics as like that amateur swimmer, amateur athlete going to like the biggest thing of your life. that's how I trained for Shark Tank so I built the set in the back of my house I had this little house in the Palisades put the set up I had hundreds of questions I invited my neighbors over I watched every episode I trained for it and I think part of it and what's so crazy is because I never believed I could do this but I actually tried to do this without believing it but I was like I am going to win Shark Tank wow and and I am now the like we are by far the largest company ever to appear on Shark Tank and so it is crazy that that actually did happen because I didn't in my soul I didn't believe it I tried everything I could to win to be like the best the whatever but I actually like I never believed I could actually get there so but but I but I went on I thought for sure Mark Cuban I'm like he's just gonna be like you know Jamie whatever it is like Mark Cuban accent you know like I'm a tech person and I get this and like I'm all in and it was I mean you get up there they cut the episode so you don't see exactly the timeline I get up there I do my speech and he's like Jamie you know I can't see how this is bigger than like a 20 million dollar company I'm out I'm just like and the whole time they're telling you like keep them talking make sure they don't go out and like Mark Cuban's now out I'm just like oh no and luckily I then kept him talking because otherwise you don't even get to air it was being on Shark Tank at that time like Shark Tank is still a big show but back then it was the biggest show I think it was actually the highest ratings of like that year or whatever so you got an offer though from Mr.

14:25Wonderful and the terms were just awful can you read him off to us he wanted everything including a cut of the allowance of your unborn future children And the naming rights to your unborn children. Yeah, your naming rights. I would have given them that. I actually would have.

14:39Jamie Siminoff: Honestly, naming rights are fine. Those are free. A little wonderful. Naming rights are free. Put it on the jersey. So how much time did you have to stand there before you had to say yes or no? It's fairly-ish real time. They cut it down, but that interaction is pretty tight, pretty close. But I did, in my head, I needed the money. I really did need the money at the time. we needed that money. I mean, I was like negative in the bank. And so I did need the money. And again, I went on there to win, but I also, I was like, part of that was to get an investor and to keep going. And so I walked off of there without it.

15:18Jamie Siminoff: And I just knew I couldn't accept his deal. You can't have, a company that's already losing money and needs cash to give more money away, that did not seem like a good idea. But that's the plot twist part. And that's what's so amazing here is that lack of deal turned into like an eight minute ad for you on TV. 12. 12 minutes. No, it is like November. So this Shark Tank at the time, the ratings were insane. And this was basically like a Super Bowl commercial for a startup. I mean, it was like, I literally was a guy in a garage in the Palisades and I drove to the Sony lot and I get a Super Bowl commercial, you know, showing my product, credibility, awareness.

16:00Jamie Siminoff: and then I used every bit of that. I used it. Every email I sent was like, Jamie, who appeared on Shark Tank. That's coming from me. I didn't care. I'm like, I am going to make this sort of C-level celebrity thing work. We were wondering then because this airs in November. It's right before the holiday season. So amazing but stressful probably. Everybody goes to the Google. and searches for your ring and orders it for Christmas. So your four previous businesses stalled, as you mentioned. What was the clearest sign that this business had product market fit? Well, kumbaya in the product. You know, it was not an aha.

16:45Jamie Siminoff: So I created the doorbell. I started kind of playing with it at the house. And then the Kickstarters and all these things were coming out and the pre-sale sites. We actually launched a pre-sale site. and to launch a pre-sale site to compete with Kickstarter. That was the idea. And you have to put a product on it. And so a friend of mine, this guy, Loic Lemure, we were speaking at his conference in Paris, and I gave him all these products I was working on, and he said, Zdorbel. Put on Zdorbel. And literally, I'm like, you think? You think, Loic? He's like, yeah. And so that was, so even then, it was so many of these weird sort of things that just led to like one thing led to the next to the next even after that like we started selling them it was like maybe it's something um the the the biggest aha the biggest product market fit though to your question to try to answer your question um people started buying we knew that it could be this security device that it could deliver presence and actually like help people with security in their house because by being home people aren't like these knock knock burglaries all this stuff but we thought it would be very hard to market that to like tell people that and And we started, when people were pre-buying it, they were saying, this is going to help me because now I can say I'm home and someone not.

17:58Jamie Siminoff: So they actually saw what the product did. And that was when we started to be like, oh, other people see it too. And so maybe there is something here. The other element that Jack and I found fascinating is that you were kind of early on the celeb equity trend. Like early on, Shaq invested and got involved. Richard Branson invested and got involved. Can you tell us the story how Richard reached out to you? Like, what was that like? Did you reach out to him, or how does that go down? So I hooked, I was like, I was literally just like putting doorbells on people's houses. With those really tiny screwdrivers.

18:33Yeah, I'm like, ee, ee.

18:33Jamie Siminoff: I mean, like literally what I was doing. And a guy that I had just done it for in San Francisco goes to the island and is there. And Richard's like, you know, what kind of nice things are you seeing? Whatever, you know, he's like asking this stuff. And he shows them, he's like, Richard, I literally told the UPS person where to go from the beach this morning. check out this video so he shows him the video from his newly installed ring and richard's like oh i'd like to give that to my friends for the holidays so he emails me cold like you know hi it's it's richard i'd like to but at this point by the way like really small and people are emailing me like if i buy three can i get 30 off and you're like sure and at that time you're just like you know it's like fml like what like what did i do in my life like what mistake did i make that I'm selling doorbells three at a time.

19:18Jamie Siminoff: This is what I've become. I'm a doorbell salesman, literally. And so my first thing is, then I look and I'm like, oh, no, this is Richard. The one Richard. Sir Richard, actually. Sir Richard. And so we start going back and forth. It's a Friday. And we had just solved our first crime, where we had someone who got caught on a ring in real time. They arrested him. So it was our first real making neighborhoods safer moment. And so I said to him, not only are your friends going to like it as a gadget, but it also makes their house safer because we just did. I sent him the link and then Richard sent back, can I invest?

19:54Jamie Siminoff: Wow. And that was pretty cool. Do you think it's critical for startups today to have a celebrity investor? I don't. Celebrities, you have to put the work in to have a celebrity work for you. Like celebrities are not magic bullets. I think like anything, if you do it just like Shark Tank, like I leverage Shark Tank. I leveraged Richard Branson. I leveraged Shaq. But I had to work to do it. Just having them in, you've seen it. There's tons of these startups that have had celebrities and just die. And so I think you have to work it. They have to also be on brand, authentic to your mission. Our mission was to make neighborhoods safer.

20:33Richard Branson, total missionary.

20:35Jamie Siminoff: Shaq, literally, is a cop. Shaq's a cop? Shaq's a cop, yeah. Reserve officer. Sorry, Grandpa.

20:46Shaquille O 'Neal. Oh, yeah. He doesn't know who Shaquille O 'Neal is. Why are you on his side? It's very convincing. It's very convincing.

20:55Jamie Siminoff: We should do a pod.

21:01Let's talk about your wedding. 2018, Amazon gets married to Ring for over a billion dollars. Yes, 1.15.

21:09Jamie Siminoff: Wow. Actually, that was when a billion dollars was a lot of money. So I feel like SpaceX is 1 ,750 rings. That is some context. Well, I think maybe Elon needs to lock up. My rock is not so big. He may need to lock up the rockets, so there may be an opportunity there. So how does Ring fit into Amazon's bigger strategy? So people wrote all this stuff about how it's going to be the packages, and they look at all this very tactical things. Jeff was still there at the time and has this idea of infinite truths. And an infinite truth is like something that's just, like for e-commerce, the way they look at it is people are always going to want better price, more selection, faster delivery.

21:59Jamie Siminoff: Those are just infinite truths. Like when you get something in 30 minutes, you're going to want it in 20 minutes. Like you're always going to want these things faster, more selection, and price. We were making neighborhoods safer. It's an infinite truth. No matter where technology goes, someone is going to, you would think, they're probably going to be living in some sort of neighborhood structure, and they're going to want it to be safer. And so Ring will supply that. And so Jeff actually looked at it as another large infinite truth, not as tactical to packages and delivery and all this stuff.

22:30Jamie Siminoff: And it was funny because all these articles would come out, and we'd read them and laugh, telling us why Amazon bought Ring. And I'd be like, Jeff, look at this. Look at how smart you are. So there was never, like, he just thought it was a great product? It was really about the mission of making neighborhoods safer and that being an infinite truth. That, like, something that you could, no matter, again, not, like, that the technology didn't matter. Like, the doorbell might, you know, the doorbell might not exist in 10 years, but we could still be making neighborhoods safer. And maybe it's through an app or through drones or whatever that thing is.

23:03Jamie Siminoff: It doesn't matter. We'll just keep adjusting. Well, let's look at Amazon's draft picks here. Like, Jack and I whipped them up on the whiteboard the other day. Like, acquisitions by Amazon. IMDb, Zappos, Twitch, Zoox, PillPack. It's a very fun category. PillPack, Wondery, Audible, One Medical, Whole Foods, Ring. You've now been with Amazon eight years. I know. Is there a founder acquisition, like, Slack channel that you and those nine other people are on? I can't believe Jeff said that. Yeah. Jazzy, come on. No, I don't think there is. We do talk. We do talk. But do they treat you differently? Like you've clearly been so committed.

23:39Jamie Siminoff: Yeah, I think, you know, Amazon's a pretty still, like for a large company and like definitely, like a large company's a large company. But as large companies go, I think they're still the most entrepreneurial, like founder forward, startups leaning business. Like, and so for me, it's still fun to be there. I still love Ring. I love what we do. And I did, I actually did leave like year five. I kind of like, I mean, I just like, This thing was just a rocket ship that I was building and just got burnt out. And finally, after year five, I was like, okay, I got it profitable. I delivered on what I said I would do.

24:15Jamie Siminoff: I left. I was miserable. And I went back about a year and a half later. Wow. Yeah. So let's talk about the future. You've described the next era for Ring as the intelligent assistant for the entire home. What does that mean? well for like for ring we want to be like i would i really want to deliver and i think this is like ai is that ai is going to mimic the physical like the physical person that would have been there so like a security guard so like you should every home should have a security guard that has worked at your house for 20 years knows everything about like how you live what you want to see what you want to do all of those things and so for for like specifically for what we're doing in so many years and maybe it's months, years, but with AI, I want it to feel like you have that level of a full human that really knows your home, your family, and how you live.

25:09The butlerfication trend.

25:11Jamie Siminoff: Sort of the butlerfication, but again, for us, we'd lean more around the neighborhood and your home security, which doesn't have to be just hard security. If there was a bear that walked down your street, your security guy would be like, dude, you've got to see this. Entertaining. But they would know what you care about. And so I think that's what we like. We want to have that personalization there. We're working on it. So kind of like Alfred and Batman. Yes. If you will. Is it just for the outside of the home or also inside? We're mostly outside. We do have some inside. We launched without shipping a drone, which is our indoor camera idea.

25:48Jamie Siminoff: And so we'll see if that comes back up again. Well, thinking ahead on that future, one thing from the recent past is the Super Bowl commercial, which brought up a lot of really interesting questions. It did. Yeah, showing a lost dog getting found, what then led to getting some roasting on social media around mass surveillance. So we were wondering, as a leader, when those comments, which are the content, start coming in, how do you react and how do you respond to that? I mean, yeah, we did a Super Bowl commercial. We have a thing called Search Party, which if your dog goes missing, which happens to like over a million dogs a year in the U.S.

26:27Jamie Siminoff: go missing. You post a picture. We look for it through the cameras. If we find it, we're like, you know, Jamie, this dog that's missing in the neighborhood picture looks like this dog in front of your house. Do you want to contact your neighbor? If you say no, you know, it's questionable who you are. But your privacy is protected. If you say yes, it's just like calling the number on a dog tag and talking to your neighbor and saying, I think your dog is in front of our house. We're reuniting over one dog per day. It's amazing. Do a 30-second ad on the Super Bowl. And 30 seconds is like, it's hard to, like what I just described, to say all of that stuff with privacy for it.

27:07It's like the end of the whatever commercial.

27:10Jamie Siminoff: It's like, this might cause burning and itching. So we didn't have all this time. So we kind of rushed through it. And it definitely created this other thing of like mass surveillance and people being worried we're using it for that which that misinformation that happened i say is like that's my fault of a misunderstanding like that's like i'm listen like buck stops here like i did not explain it well enough and so i went out and did like my as they call it the apology tour um but really it was like it was like a you know trying to get people to understand what we're doing because i think we are we actually like and this is something that I'm seeing across the board is we're getting very extreme in our views.

27:52Jamie Siminoff: Like they have to be like one side or the other side. Consumers are getting extreme. Us. Yeah. People, humans. And so we just can't like imagine that the middle exists. Like a dog search party, it's either like, like it has to be like this one side of like ultra privacy. You can't have it. Or this other side that's like this bad thing. And it's like, actually like, no, you can have the middle. Like you can be asked the question, like, do you want to do this? And if you say no, your, your privacy is maintained. And if you say yes, then you can like enter into the conversation at that time. And so we've built a lot of stuff like that, but I think it is hard right now in the sort of like the heat of the algorithms to get some of these messages out there.

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30:42You should share the quote that you love, Jack, from Brian Chesky of Airbnb. So Brian Chesky says that technology is neither good nor bad. It's how you use it. His example, nuclear, it can light up a city or destroy a city. So to extend the Lord of the Rings analogy. Yeah, as you being Lord of the Rings. What efforts are you taking to ensure that -

31:04Jamie Siminoff: I actually told that joke to Jeff when they were doing Lord of the Rings. You're kidding me, you're trying. Well, Amazon did Lord of the Rings. Yeah. And it was like, he laughs at everything I say. And it was like the one where he looked at me and he's just like, you're stupid. He's like, you're just, it's just no, like you're stupid. I was like, ooh, that's tough. I'm sorry. It's all good. I love a Lord of the Rings tangent. So what are you doing to ensure that ring owners are on the side of Frodo, not Sauron? Are there any nudges you're making or behavior that you'll intervene when you see? I mean, I think we build everything where it's that same idea as the dog search party, where your information is your information.

31:45Jamie Siminoff: Your camera, your house is private. But when something happens, like we have this thing called Firewatch. So for us in Los Angeles, I live in the Palisades, the garage that I built right at Burndown. Oh, sorry. And it burned into the back. We had moved from that house to kind of across the other side of the Palisades, and it burned in the back of our house. I actually stayed and helped in the fire with my neighbors. And so we saw through that that part of the problem in the fires were that the firemen did not know where to go. They were at the command center. They didn't know where the fire was.

32:20Jamie Siminoff: It was skipping like a quarter of a mile at a time. We had 10 ,000 cameras plus in the Palisades. So we knew where the fire was on the ring cameras. Like the individual homeowners that had Ring knew where the fire was. So now we have this thing called Firewatch. So when a fire like this happens, we alert everyone and we say, do you want to enter your camera into Firewatch? So now again, if you don't, that's fine. Like you don't have to. But I can tell you in the Palisades, everyone wanted to help. And so now you say like, yeah, I want to enter this thing in. And now with AI, we look for a smoke, ember, fire.

32:54Jamie Siminoff: We feed it into watch duty, which then goes into the command centers. And now they can supply better data to the first responders to say, like, it just jumped over here. Like, let's go put that out before it becomes a big fire. So I think the idea is we build things like that where every single time, though, you are asked and it's like your choice to join in. And what we have found is people and moments of, like, when a crime happens, when a fire is going on, when a dog is missing, people do want to come together. And so that is, I think we can build better neighborhoods and sort of better social fabric because people do want to help out.

33:29Jamie Siminoff: The other side, they also want their privacy, and they deserve their privacy. And I think, again, both of those things can be maintained, and we can live in both of those worlds at the same time. Oh, by giving these options. Yes. You're saying, yeah. You know, you're building all of these things. It's just incredible the pace of the launches. Like ABLE, Jack and I always say, always be launching everything. But funny, we asked the Poppy founders of the Prebiotic Soda, when we interviewed them in Austin a few months ago. Another Shark Tank. Yes, another great Shark Tank success story. Who became a shark just like you.

33:58After, maybe after. We asked about work-life balance. And Allison said, doesn't exist if you're a founder. And so, Jack, if you want to be a successful founder, you have to sacrifice work-life balance. Do you agree?

34:09Jamie Siminoff: Yeah. Well, I think it's like what is work and what is life? And so I brought my son with me everywhere when he was not in school. So he's now 17. he's out in the audience somewhere i don't even know where he is but little wonderful right yeah little wonderful that's funny that's actually funny but he traveled with so but like he traveled with me so like work-life balance like i don't know like he came to but when he was five and we the first doorbots were coming off the line i brought him with me to the factory which so funny because so many people are like you can't bring a five-year-old to china and i'm like why like why can't you bring a five-year-old to china and by the way i brought a five-year-old to china it was great yeah we had a blast experience for we had so i do think like the work-life balance thing you know if you're doing something you love i you know i was lucky my family was like sort of all in my wife was like a huge supporter i think that helps it's like your is your village like if you're gonna do this stuff it is to their point i think it's super hard and so you do need to have like the village has to be with you but if it is it's kind of like all the same so then when you're making decisions like that like even taking your son or when you're gonna launch something like Like, Jack and I are always curious, like, how much of it is, like, guts versus graphs, metrics versus magic, like, information versus intuition?

35:21How do you make the decision?

35:23Jamie Siminoff: I think it's a – so my email is on every box. And that gives me an incredible feed that then creates my gut. Like, I have these, like, incredible feeds that come in of raw data. And then – so I think my gut is very good because of that. I don't – I definitely – I don't look at surveys. I don't I don't like to look at I'd say like a lot of the typical things that people build products off of okay I definitely we try to always build a product that solves a problem and not a product looking for a market so like I'm very careful not to try to like get on the next trend and if the next trend was to make neighborhoods safer and it's something it's fine I'll do that but but I do try to like look at like you know even fire watches like there's no we don't even we don't sell it like it's just like something that we and we think if we from the day we started it, it's always been that if we can make your neighborhood safer and you believe that Ring makes your neighborhood safer, you will reward us by purchasing our products.

36:19Jamie Siminoff: And so I don't have to sell you our products. If I keep, if I keep doing that, if I keep launching these things and keep doing this and prove to you that we are a company that can do that, you will reward us. And so I've, I've tried to, and you know, we're the largest home security company in the world today, well over a hundred million cameras out in the market. So I think like we have been rewarded. So I think it has, it has definitely worked to do that. So you changed the doorbell forever. If you could reimagine another product, if you had unlimited time, an everyday object. What would it be?

36:47Our audience is looking for ideas.

36:51Jamie Siminoff: You know, I still think the thermostat is the craziest thing in the world. Really? Like even the Nest one? Well, you have to choose auto, heat, cool. It's like, why doesn't my house just stay at the temperature it's supposed to be at? Like we have AI. We have all these pills that can solve things, all this stuff. But my house, I have to move the thing back and forth. There's change what it's in. Yeah, yeah. And when they try to do their smart override, it's not smart. Stop overriding. No, I'm cold or hot. Something's wrong. The sun hits it, and it goes crazy. It's got to know this. Come on. Thermostat 2.0.

37:31All right, well, Jamie, it's been wonderful to have you with us. But before we let you go, we did have some rapid fire questions for you and a question we always ask our guests at the end. Okay. So what is the best brand in business? Ring. That isn't ring, Jamie. Come on. Come on. By the way, for everyone listening, Jamie is wearing ring socks. So we will accept that answer. Thank you. He has the ring logo on his socks. Okay. What's the best book you've ever read? And it can't be written by Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy.

38:00Jamie Siminoff: it's the it's the walt disney biography by i think it's like neil gobbler g-a-b-l-e-r it's like it's like it's like a 48 hour audiobook it's i don't even know how big the actual book is but it's got to be huge and i think walt disney is one of the most fascinating stories of someone who just got was a product engineer basically built you know entrepreneur always hated what he was doing always frustrated yeah like kind of that consummate like just that fighter well like you we did a whole episode on Disneyland. First day was a total failure. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like that Shark Tank experience he had.

38:36Totally.

38:36Jamie Siminoff: And so, yeah, he's, yeah. Disney's first day was a paper boy. Yeah. Good point, Jack. Yeah. Paper. Okay, best business leader out there. Best business leader out there today. Huh. Who's the best out there right now? I am, I would say Dario from Anthropic has been incredibly impressive with how he's been, I mean, what he has taken there and what he's gotten is unbelievable, I think. Best inventor in history? Best inventor in history? I mean, I love James Dyson. I would say that's not the best inventor. I mean, you have to go to like, you know, there's bigger inventors in that. Than a vacuum. Yeah, but I love, from a consumer electronics side, I think I love James Dyson.

39:25Jamie Siminoff: But I think that's not, I'm not going to go like, that's not the best inventor in history. Okay, best restaurant here in lovely Los Angeles? Cinque Terre in Venice. Nice. We're staying like right near that. Oh, Cinque Terre is amazing. It's like the best Italian ever. And if you could be a four-letter stock ticker symbol, but you can't say ring, and you can't say ding, and you can't say dong, I mean...

40:00Jamie Siminoff: yeah no I just would be all zeros I don't know you just took away everything in my bag of tricks like I mean ring ding dong it's like I got I got nothing oh Jamie thank you for being with us thank you so much the takeaway from you for our audience and everyone and all the Yetis and besties listening stay gritty thank you so much thank you Jamie

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