Ring
Ring Chief Inventor Jamie Siminoff
- Amazon acquired smart doorbell startup Ring one year ago as of April 12 for a reported $1 billion.
- Ring founder Jamie Siminoff discusses how his company fits into Amazon more broadly in an interview with Business Insider.
- Siminoff says he's often tapped to sit in on meetings for projects and upcoming products, including the development of Alexa Guard, Amazon's home security feature for its Echo smart speakers.
- In general, though, he says that Ring is still running exactly as before - but with the added bonus that he has access to the company's vast resources whenever it needs anything. "I almost feel like I'm kind of like brought into the Amazon shopping mall," he says.
Jamie Siminoff has built his career on founding startups and inking deals with large companies.
Unsubscribe Inc., a company he co-founded in 2010 that made a tool for easily un-registering from email lists, sold to TrustedID in 2011. Before that, in 2009, Siminoff struck a partnership with Ditech Networks that gave the firm exclusive rights to sell his speech-to-text voicemail subscription service to other companies. Ditech Networks has, in turn, since been acquired by speech recognition software maker Nuance.
But Siminoff's biggest exit wouldn't come until nearly a decade later when he would sell Ring, the home security startup he founded in 2013 - famously, after he got rejected on Shark Tank- to Amazon for a reported $1 billion in 2018. Ring, which initially gained attention with its line of video doorbells and has since expanded to other security products, will officially have been part of the
For Siminoff, the experience isn't all that different from his startup days.
"We're this huge company with hundreds of thousands of team members, and yet [Amazon] still has nimbleness," Siminoff said of his experience with Amazon after a year. "It's just got a very entrepreneurial foundation to it."
Making a splash at Amazon
Siminoff still considers himself Chief Inventor at Ring, a title he's long preferred over Chief Executive Officer, and says much of his time is spent running the company he built.
But that doesn't mean he hasn't had an impact on Amazon's broader product portfolio. Siminoff reports to Dave Limp, Amazon's senior vice president of services and devices, and says he's frequently sought out for his input on projects.
"[At Amazon] they are inventing and looking at a lot of different things all the time in different areas," he said. "So I'll be brought into a call or a session where they're going to look at XYZ product in a totally new category."
What exactly those products and categories are, Siminoff cannot say. But he did contribute to Alexa Guard, the feature Amazon announced in 2018 that makes it possible for Amazon's digital helper to send alerts about the sound of breaking glass and activity from smoke detectors. Alexa Guard can also integrate with security systems from Ring and third parties like ADT.
"I definitely had a lot of insight and amazing meetings and things that were going on with [Alexa Guard] before it was launched that were very fun to help [with] and sort of be part of the team," he says. "And that was really more of an Alexa thing, which Alexa to me was always this amazing product that I used. Now I get to see and maybe even shape some pieces around the edge of it."
Siminoff was also able to leverage his expertise when it came to the company's acquisition of Wi-Fi mesh networking startup Eero. That deal valued Eero at $97 million in a fire sale, according to documents obtained by Business Insider.
"We were involved a little bit as a division of Amazon that relies heavily on great Wi-Fi," Siminoff said. "Eero had always been the best in class that we had been able to use and recommend to our customers...I wouldn't say at all [that] we did the deal... But I do think we were certainly a part of it because we are a product that requires great Wi-Fi connectivity. We use a lot of bandwidth so we were certainly very sensitive to Wi-Fi networks."
'They're not telling us what to do'
Ring, for the most part, is run exactly how it was before becoming part of Amazon, he says. Siminoff even says "you almost kind of forget" that Ring is now owned by one of the most valuable companies in the world. That is, until it's time to break out the checkbook.
"I almost feel like I'm kind of like brought into the Amazon shopping mall," Siminoff said. "It's like I was given a credit card and it's like, 'Go to whichever stores you need and buy whatever you need for yourself.' They're not telling us what to do, we get to ask."
It's not just financial support that Ring has benefited from over the past year. Being part of such a large company also means Ring has the advantage of working with Amazon's security team and being held to the company's security standards. That's critical as ever for a company like Ring that creates devices capable of recording video and audio.
In February, for example, researchers discovered a vulnerability Ring had patched that could have let intrudersinject fake images into the Ring Video Doorbell's video feed, or snoop on its recordings.
"One thing with security that's important for everyone to understand is that the world continues to change and evolve," Siminoff said. "There's no such thing as something that's secure and stays secure forever. You're going to need to have that continued watching over it."
Behind the curtain
Siminoff's team also has the benefit of being able to learn about Amazon's product development process, and applying those insights to their own projects. Ring also has access to the resources of Lab126, Amazon's San Francisco-based outfit responsible for developing its consumer electronics gadgets like the Echo, which they can consult when facing issues. If Ring is having difficulties with the Wi-Fi antenna on a product, for example, they can contact Lab126 for guidance.
"The next thing you know, you have a team that's immediate that can step in," he said.
Today, Siminoff is in a position many startup founders would likely hope to find themselves in. He's still running the company he founded more than six years ago with the support of an industry giant like Amazon. But he wasn't always in such a favorable situation. When he presented his idea for a smart doorbell on the ABC reality show Shark Tank in 2013 - then called DoorBot- each judge passed on his idea. To Siminoff, that kind of struggle and rejection is necessary for achieving success.
"It should be really hard and it should be something that you have to fight for, and it should be something that is a lot of risk," he said. "Because if you actually make it, the rewards outweigh the work that you put in."