Transcript of 678: Jamie Siminoff (Ring Doorbell Inventor) - Shark Tank Rejection, Selling to Amazon for $1 Billion, Surviving $3M to $480M Hypergrowth, Hiring Passionate People Over Experts, and Jeff Bezos's Leadership Lessons

Welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader. Com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader. Com. Now on to tonight's featured leader, Jamie Simenoff, is an entrepreneur, inventor, and the founder of the home security company, Ring. He's best known for appearing on Shark Tank, getting rejected, only to later sell his company to Amazon for over a billion dollars. During our conversation, we discuss why Jeff Bezos wrote the first book endorsement he's ever done and why he called Jamie, A real builder, scrappy, original, and unsatisfied with the status quo. So cool. Then Jamie talks about the exact hiring filter he uses. He calls it looking for marathon runners and why it's not about resumes or pedigree for him. Then we want deep on a CEO or senior leader having a frontline obsession. Jamie still has his email address on every ring doorbell you buy. It's crazy. He's always talking with customers and is constantly working on making things better. I love it, and I think you're going to love this conversation with Jamie Semenal. This episode is brought to you by Insight Global.

I love the leadership team and the people at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal. Com/learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal. Com/learningleader. I read that Jeff Bezos said, Jamie, quote, is a real builder, scrappy, original, and unsatisfied by the status quo. He's poured his missionary spirit into this book, and his story is a real-world primer on founder mentality. What did it mean to you to have Jeff Bezos say that about you?

It's pretty cool. I mean, I'd say there's some pretty cool things that have happened in my life and pretty amazing ones that I pinched myself. That one was definitely a pinch myself moment. I mean, I asked Jeff when I wrote the book, I said, I wrote a book on the story of Ring, and I said, Would you do something for the back cover and read it? I'd say a lot people you'd think like that would just do some can thing or have someone in their comms group come back to you and say, Here you go, which I still would have been, by the way, humbled by. But Jeff is Jeff, and he did it and read it and looked at it and wanted to have his own very curated quote that's from him. It was pretty incredible. I don't think he's ever done any other book back jacket like that. In a lot of ways, it was humbling and incredible.

We're skipping ahead and we'll get there. But I'm curious. I remember I had the founder of Whole Foods on, so he negotiated with Bezos and John Mackey. That was a fun conversation. What was the negotiation like? Because you eventually sold your company for over a billion dollars to Amazon. How involved was he? What were the conversations like? I'd love to go inside the process of that transaction.

Yeah. So for our transaction, which happened after Whole Foods, I think they learned that Jeff just loves entrepreneurs. And so I think they learned to keep Jeff out of the negotiations because he does it. I think he's like... I love entrepreneurs. I find it hard to negotiate hard with someone who you respect. That's pretty hard to do because it's like Jeff's a builder. He is an adventurer. So for ours, we worked with the CorpDem people, and it was a little bit more how you'd picture one of these deals going. That said, they were very... They understood we were a startup. They leaned in. These are never easy. I mean, you're selling a company for over a billion dollars. There's a lot of a lot of emotion on all sides that takes place.

So you could have kept going without them. Personally, it's probably really hard to pass up the money. Amazon is one of the biggest and best companies in the world, and of all time, it's their founder, right? As we're talking about, is also someone that I think is well respected by all and has built something incredible. Why say, Okay, yeah, I'm going to go join them or be a part of them or sell to them, as opposed to saying, No, guys, let's just keep doing this on our own?

Hardware companies take a lot of cash, so balance sheet matters. We grew, when we started revenue, 3 million, 30 million, 17480, which by the sounds like to anyone listening, that's amazing. What a great growth. But the problem is when you think about it, is how do you go from 170 to 480? Is you're buying hundreds of millions of dollars of products when you're selling less than that at that time. So you're basically always in some ways going out of business if sales growth slows because you're over-ordering in order to sell. And so we were in a position where we were going from 480 to over a billion. As great as that was when we were selling, it's like anything that happened in the market, we were toast. It's like on a motorcycle going 200 miles an hour. If a leaf falls down and hits me, I'm dead. And so at Amazon, we say, Hey, we need another billion dollars to order stuff for next year. We're growing. They're Okay, sure. What else do you want? And again, it's just because compared to their balance sheet, just the size of Ring compared to Amazon, it just was able to tuck in and fit in.

So from that side, I really wanted my mission to make neighborhoods safer. I wanted to keep doing that. I wanted to be the world's largest home security company. I wanted to have a huge impact, and I did not want to ace the thing into the ground, which was a very likely scenario if we kept going alone. Looking back, I think we probably would have been fine because, again, you can see how the capital markets were, you can see how the growth was. You can see everything now. But I'd say with the information we had at the time, it was a great decision. And I'd say what we did with the business has been great. The impact we've had has been incredible.

It's crazy to think from an outsider's perspective, you're like, Oh, he's making whatever. They're doing 500 million bucks a year in revenue. Obviously, this dude's crushing it. He's probably being able to relax, enjoy life, go to work and work hard or whatever. But it sounds like that sounds amazingly stressful to have a company doing that much in revenue and yet could die at any moment.

Our growth was so fast that it's what killed us. It's such a weird rational thing because you're right. When you hear it, Oh, we did 500 million this year, people are like, Oh, that guy's rich. That company, they must be worth a fortune. And it's like, Yes. But again, the other side is if sales went down 20%, that's 100 million in sales on a company that just doesn't have the balance sheet. We just didn't have it. And so it was super scary. And at some point, I just got to the point where it's like, Do you want $1. 15 billion or to keep trying to go with this thing. In some ways, it's almost like Vegas, where you're putting your money on black, and you double, and you double, and you double. And at some point, you're like, I'll probably lose if I keep doubling.

I'm curious this balance of you are a scrappy inventor. You're a builder. That doesn't always mean you're going to be a good business person. In a lot of cases, they're not, right? It's like one or the other. They're the great musician, but they don't understand how to set up, so they have to hire other people. How is that for you being this scrappy inventor, this builder. And I don't know, it sounds like you know what you're talking about.

It's funny when you say it like that. So I think I am a great inventor, and I say it still humbly, but I have, I guess, a track record that's decent of inventing things that never existed that have done pretty I'm going to take that. And then I've done a lot of invention around how to build a company fast, how to allow it to scale fast, the invention on that. What's interesting is that if you're trying to follow this, there's a lot of people that made more money than me, and I'm fine. I'm not trying to complain, but because they're more business people, they would have looked at how to operate Ring from a more profitable... Because I was diluting myself with raising money, and there was ways to engineer it to make more money as me if I had looked at it in that way, but I didn't care. All I wanted to do was grow it fast, get product out there, build more product, invent more things. And so I see that there's business people, and I always say there's different types of entrepreneurs. I'm more of an inventor entrepreneur. There's entrepreneurs who are literally business entrepreneurs.

There's people that we've never heard of that have just crushed it because they're just maniacal business people. I am not a maniacal business person. I am maniacal on product, and that I bring invention into how we run the company.

I was reading that you're hiring people from Craigslist. You're trying to find people that maybe something's happened in their life, they're scrappy themselves, they're humble, they're going to work. Can you walk me through maybe earlier in your time what you looked for when hiring other than the table stakes of they got to be able to do X, right? But I'm talking about attributes of people as well as maybe how that's evolved, if it's evolved over time when it comes to hiring more people to work with your companies?

I still try to hire people just based on passion. Like you said, there is a table stakes. If you're there to do C plus programming, it turns out you need to know C plus programming. There are some things that are like, you have to be able to do the job. But for most jobs, I'd say, and especially with AI, by the way, AI has made it. So by the way, C plus programming, you don't need to know C plus programming. Just go to freaking cloud code. So I do think passionate people that care, that want to to succeed at whatever the mission is, those are the people you want to hire. So I always say, for me, it's marathoners. It's like someone who wants to run a marathon. Marathons are the dumbest thing that any human could ever do. Even if you win it, no one cares. I did the Boston Marathon twice. So stupid. 30,000, whatever people run it. I finished like 22,000s place, and I'm so proud of myself. My proudest moment is alone finishing the Boston Marathon in I'm in the 22,000s place, that I worked a year for training every day and spending hours doing it.

You want those people that whatever they're doing, they care about getting the mission done. If you can find those people, and especially with AI, democratizing all information, just fill your business with those people and you'll crush anything.

How did you and how do you find those people? What do you ask in the interview process? People are getting better at trying to fool others. So how do you make sure finding those people?

There's two ways to do it. One is, again, I just sit with them and talk to them. I don't have specific questions and all that stuff. I just want to listen to what are they saying? What are they saying in their lives? I tell them what our mission is. Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Do you want to work on making neighborhood safer? Because if you don't, you're going to be miserable here. You're going to hear it every day. You're going to be rolling your eyes. You don't have to care about that. Not everyone does. But if you do, great. You're going to love it. If you don't, you're going to hate it. It's always start with the mission. I hire fast and I fire faster. And I think the reality is I haven't figured out a way, and maybe it's my own failure, in interviewing to raise the percentage of finding the best people versus finding, to your point, the people that say, Oh, I'm super passionate. I love making the neighborhood safer. Oh, it's my life's mission. And then they come in and you tell they just hate it. And so if you hire fast and fire faster, I certainly don't like firing people.

I don't like the impact on their lives, on their families, but get them out quickly.

Have you found certain things that have increased your batting average? Maybe it's they've actually run marathons. Maybe it's they've had a rough upbringing or a great one.

The best is when someone's referred by someone because they usually feel guilty. Because we're very transparent. Here's what's going to be, here's what we're going to do, here's how we work. If you hate that, don't come here. And I think when someone's referred by their uncle, by their whatever, they don't want to let them down. And so I have found that referrals... One side, I don't like referrals because you don't want to make an organization that's like, Oh, you have to be the friend of Jamie to get in. But the other side is, I think there is a thing with referrals where they don't want to let you down, where someone who's just off the street, doesn't know anything, no connection, maybe just doesn't have that same level of care.

Where does this mission from yours come from?

So it's funny. We started, I invented this in my garage. I couldn't hear the doorbell. I'm working on other stuff. I just got an iPhone. I let me build a video doorbell. I just built it so I could hear the door. My wife says it makes her feel safer at home Again, the adventurer in me was like, realized when she said that, that the way people were doing home security up until that point was not looking at it from an efficacy side. They were looking at it from a marketing and getting a contract for the home side. I don't blame them. Technology had changed, all sorts of stuff had happened. But with having the phone, with being able to be connected to your home at any time, you needed a whole new set of things. And I realized these things can make neighborhoods safer. They could actually reduce crime in neighborhoods. My head exploded. And that is why Ring became so big. It's why it became probably the world's largest home security company, which I think it is today, because I didn't say, I'm going to build the best doorbell in the I'm going to build the best video doorbell.

I'm going to get patents. It was like, we're going to change the way home security is done with this new thing that just happened, which was basically the phone.

Now, I mean, I've got one. Everyone's got them. It's like, well, yeah, obviously you would have this. But it's just bizarre that not that long ago, and I think you even said on your Shark Tank pitch, the doorbell is one of the only things that had not been updated or whatever the language you use since forever ago.

Eighteen, whatever.

It's just crazy that now at the time, though, it obviously had never been done. You invented it, and now it's ubiquitous. We all have them. It's wild. And it seems because you are a tinkerer, you're a builder, you're an inventor, your wife said one statement to you, and all of a sudden it goes, Wait a second. This could be a thing. But it's one thing for your wife to say that and for you to have a little bit of an aha moment. It's another thing to actually create a full-blown company and create a product that It seems like a pain to build and then make it so that we all have them. I mean, what's the next step after your wife says that? How do you get this going? How do you create a company?

Once we had the mission, and Jeff said this in public, too, this idea of infinite truth. If you look at Amazon's core principles, they're infinite. Will customers always want lower price, more selection, and faster delivery. Yes, it doesn't matter. But if you deliver within an hour, they'll want it in 30 minutes. If you deliver in 30 minutes, they'll want it in 10 minutes. They'll always want faster. They always want lower price, and they're always going to want more selection. You can work on Amazon's customer offering of the e-commerce forever. Until you're delivering it, the instant you order it at zero dollars and 100% selection, you can go forever. When I found making Neighborhood safer, it's like that's an infinite thing to work on. As soon as you had that, that's what unlocked Ring from being another little business that I was on in tinkering to literally what is today probably the world's largest home security company. Because you are now working on something that had infinite possibility, infinite market. And then the hard part is when you have that, is now how do you bring that down into tactical, tangible, short term, like every day?

What do you do every day to work on that? Because you can also get overwhelmed by, and you see it, companies are like, Oh, we're working on solving all X. And we're trying to do it all at once. And so it is like, how do you eat an elephant? You cut it into very small bites. You eat it like one little bite at a time. You don't eat it all at once.

So it's called Doorbot, and you go on Shark Tank. What was the process like to get on the show? What were you thinking before? I just rewatched the pitch. But you're standing behind and you did the doorbell thing. What was it like leading up to it? Were you nervous? I would love to go inside how you were feeling.

Here I am in the garage. I'm basically failing. I mean, nothing's going right.

But you had started and sold two companies prior this.

Yeah, but for very little money.

Okay. So online, it looks like you've made millions. It sounds like you did not. No. Okay.

I wasn't broke, but I was definitely not... I was not rich. I was not... I should not have been in the garage just tinkering. I didn't have that money at all. I definitely did not. And so I'm working on this doorbot thing. It's eating cash because it's hardware. A guy says, Listen, I'd love to go to lunch with you and chat about my business. And so I'm driving to this lunch, and I'm literally thinking in my head, I'm like, Jamie, this is why you never make it because you're literally like, you can't focus. You're literally going out to lunch while you're basically you're burning to the ground your family in your garage. And so I go to lunch. It's a super nice guy, great business thing to talk the whole time. He's like, What are you working on? I'm like, I'm working on this doorbell. And by the way, when I would tell people about doorbell at the time, they would laugh. And they'd usually say, Come on, seriously, what are you working on? Because it was like, I'm working on a doorbell that goes to your phone. They're like, That's hysterical. It's like, That's the stupidest thing I've ever I mean, literally, that was the response.

And so he's like, Oh, that's so cool. Have you thought about going on Shark Tank? Still a big show, but at the time, it was the biggest... I think it was the biggest show. I think it was the biggest show on TV at that time or the top five or something. It was crazy. 30 plus thousand people were applying a year to be on the show. So I'm like, No, I didn't apply. I sent in my one of 30,000 application, which I should have, by the way. I just was down on my luck talking. And he's like, Oh, the one of the producers is asking, they're trying to get bigger products and stuff like this. Here's his email. So I email the producer first and I'm like, Hey, it's Jamie. Here's my website. Kind of like, meh. And I start driving home from the lunch. The guy calls me. He's like, This is great. You got to be in Shark Tank. And I'm like, Holy shit. It's just like, insane. So that was my getting to Shark Tank, which then I still had to do a million things to actually get on the show from there.

I thought at that point that I was just like, Oh, my God, I'm on. But it turned out there There's still a million things to do. And then we go on Shark Tank, it's like to your point of the taping. And if you rewatch the episode, which you did. So they said, you have these producers and they have your pitch and you got to do all this. They're like, You need to do a live demo of your product. I'm like, Yeah. Because I'm not telling them that it's really not working very well. Of course, I did not disclose that, that this thing is super challenged and barely working, if at all. It didn't seem like the right thing to tell them. They're like, Yeah, you have to do a live demo. I'm like, Okay, yeah, let's do a live demo where we just tape it beforehand and then we show it because it's just like, you don't want to have all the things happening. They're like, No. I'm like, Well, let's do a live demo beforehand because we could tape it because there's interference. I mean, I tried everything. They're like, No. We do a live demo on the show and it wasn't working.

The engineer I had was literally dying trying to set this thing up. They're breaking the ones. We only had four in the whole world doorbots that had been produced by hand. So I go to ring the doorbell. If you look at my face when I turn around, because I look up, it's actually the live feed that's on there. And you see this face. It looks like I'm excited. I'm actually like, I can't believe that the picture came up. It worked. I'm flabbergasted.

I was like, I just watched it. I was like, This was really impressive. It's a live demo.

In fact, that picture quality from Doorbot never was, is that good again ever? That was the best. If you could ask for the genie for one wish, it was like, just make that one goddamn doorbell push work on Shark Tank, please. Just make that one work. I don't care if anything else works in my life. Just make that one thing work.

And it worked. You even held up Mr. Wonderful's face right in front of it.

It was like, going crazy. I went for it.

Oh, my gosh. Okay. And so they're all saying, no, no, no, no offers. Mr. Wonderful is the last. I watched it. It's a family show for us, right? Mr. Wonderful is like, Hey, let's do some royalty garbage that he tries to do with everybody else. And you stand firm and you ultimately walk away without a deal. How are you feeling in that moment?

I cried in my car on the way home. I really did go in there being like, Mark's going to give me the money. We needed money. I needed money. I wasn't trying to- Just get Mark in. I needed money. I mean, now people are like, Oh, it's so great. You didn't get a deal. I knew it was going to be a billion dollars. So why take a deal? But at the time, I needed money badly, and Mark was out immediately. And then the Mr. Wonderful deal, just you can't... I was just telling you how bad hardware is on cash flow. If immediately you're giving cash flow out. There's no way it would have worked. I left it. I was devastated.

Doesn't he know that, though? Why offer a stupid deal like that? On certain things, it can work, but not like yours, where there's all that cost.

First of all, you offer it It's like someone's willing to give you a crazy good deal on a business, you take it. I think that's the first thing. The second thing is the way the show format works. If you don't have that negotiation at the end, it's likely you won't air. And so a And a lot of what he's doing is actually he's probably the most friendly to the entrepreneur because by us having that negotiation, it creates the bookend from the intro to the end. And if he hadn't done that deal, I might not have ever got on air. A lot of people Well, no, there's a lot of people that go on Shark Tank to tape don't actually go on air because it's just like a boring episode. It's just like I get on there and pitch and nothing happens and I leave. No one wants to watch that.

Got you. So you leave, you're crying in your car I literally cried. Devastated. But something changes. What happened to go from that to where we don't have any money, I genuinely need money, to a billion dollars?

The good news is at that point, I was too far into it, so I couldn't back out of the business. If I had at that moment just went back to the garage and said, I'm done, I would have basically been personally bankrupt because I had already ordered too many products and I owed too much money already. So It was a boiling the frog thing. I didn't realize I was that deep in, but it was like, 30,000 for this. You're like, okay, great, we'll sell these. And then all of a sudden you realize if you don't sell them, I was in a bad place financially from that side if the business didn't to continue. So I couldn't stop. I didn't have the right to stop. So people always say, oh, people think I'm tough. That's so tough that you kept going. It's like, no, I actually had to keep going. It's actually the opposite of tough. I was like a chicken shit. I just couldn't stop. And so I kept going. And then when Shark Tank did air, it gave us a huge boost of sales. That gave us a cash injection, which then we were able to hire some more people to build Ring.

Then we were able to raise some money around that. And so that There still was a lot of hard things along the way, but I'd say the airing of Shark Tank would start the clock on if you wanted to plot success, that's when it started, because from that moment on, we had momentum that we could keep trading on.

I also read that you were naive at times, and sometimes that can be really, really helpful. How was being naive helpful to you?

What's a superpower? I mean, everything that you try to do... I mean, great inventions are things that people say can't happen because if people said they could happen, then they'd already be out there. So if you look at James Dyson and some of these amazing inventors, Eli on. I mean, people said the electric car couldn't work. You can go back and there's all this stuff about how it can't have enough this and you won't have enough capacity. You have to be smart enough to not put yourself into too bad of a situation. But Naevan I'm not going to have to say, I think I can do this. I don't even know that I can't. And so people said, you couldn't build a battery operated camera at this time to go on Wi-Fi. I didn't know. I never built anything. So what did I know? So we just went out and tried to put some parts together that seemed like they would work together.

It's funny. My first sales job after I got done playing football after college, Jamie is a sales rep, and it was 2008. And people were like, Dude, oh, my God, that had to be the worst thing ever. Terrible market, all this stuff. When I was like, I honestly didn't even realize it. I didn't watch the news. I didn't do anything. I was just going to work out in the gym, do my sales job, hang out with my buddies. I didn't even realize that there was anything going on. I'm glad it was just a complete meathead idiot, but sometimes that can be really good for you.

I think a lot of times it is because we get so wrapped up and the GDP is going to be down 1% off of whatever and the stock market is crashing. Oh, my God. But the reality is the markets are still huge. The consumer is still huge. People build more businesses usually when things are down than when they're up. And so you're right. I think it's a hard thing to tell someone because you don't want to give somebody advice to be like, be stupid. It's not good advice. But the other side is if you try to do everything right, it usually doesn't work. And there is something about naive is part of that. And again, especially breakout big things usually come from people that were like, and you'll see it, everyone says, you can't do this.

And part of it, too, is if you are thinking and analyzing the whole world, that's time you're not doing the thing. You're not working, you're not inventing, you're not building, you're not making the calls. And so sometimes it can Knowing too much or trying to know too much gets in the way of actually doing the work. And I think that's a key takeaway for anybody. If you're sitting there building all these plans and thinking about stuff and all, it's like, when are you actually doing the work? Because that's ultimately what's going to build Ring. And speaking of Ring, the guy who owned Ring. Com, I believe, wanted to sell it to you for two million bucks, right? Two million bucks. And you're like, well, two million bucks, are you out of your mind? Can you tell me the story of how you were able to get Ring. Com?

Might even be more. He wanted to sell it for a lot of money. I ended up getting it down to 750,000. And the day I'm supposed to pay him, I have 178,000 in the bank. So You got to start to figure out that math. I call them up and I'm like, Hey, listen, my board said we can't do the deal. Which is true because I didn't have a board, but it was me. It wasn't completely untruthful. Deal. So my board said, I can't do the deal. But they did approve me to do 175,000 today and a total of 1 million for the purchase. I'm increasing now the price and paid over two years. And so the guy F-bombs and just... I mean, the guy thinks he's getting $750,000 that day. And I basically tell him the day of the wire. Just not happy, hangs up the phone, calls me back. He's like, Fine. And then I'm like, Okay. Because I'm like, I'm like, Listen, we'll give them a 175. And if we can't afford the domain, it's because the business went out anyway. So I don't need the domain for a bankrupt business. And if a business works, We'll buy it.

And so it ended up working out for us. I guess for him, it worked out because he got 250,000 more than he thought he was going to. But it certainly wasn't my best from a negotiation side, I would say. It wasn't my most moral negotiation.

But you gave him all the money you had. Isn't that a very scary moment?

It was a terrifying moment. I had a venture capital investment from TruVentures coming in, and that's why I was timing it. But I didn't tell TruVentures. I didn't tell them that I was buying a domain because I was worried that... So they were giving us 5 million, I think. And I was worried if I told them that basically 20% was going to a domain name, they'd kill me. I'm trying to keep everyone happy without blowing the thing up. And so then TruVentures delays their wire a week or two. But they're just like, Yeah, we have this going on. I'm like, Oh, sure. It's okay. And they're like, Oh, we want to do this. Why? I'm like, Can we maybe do Monday? Because Tuesday was payroll. And so I'm like, Can we maybe do Monday, though, whenever? They're like, Sure. Okay. I'm like, Great. And so they wire the money on that Monday. And Tuesday, we make payroll. But that was definitely like, I was like, We're not making payroll. We're not making payroll.

Dude, I cannot. I don't know if I could live that. I mean, that's why you're whatever you done what you done. But I also read you did struggle to sleep, mainly because you're working so much. But I would imagine that would hurt sleep, too.

Stress was like... There are different types of entrepreneurs. I met lots of different types. There are people that can do that. And They can literally sleep like a baby. They don't even care. I internalize this stuff, and it just destroys me. I wasn't sleeping. I was super stressed. I wasn't doing it out of a chest pump, I'm tough whatever. It was more like survival and doing things to survive, but it was affecting me terribly. I mean, it was really bad.

How did that affect you in your personal life?

My son was three when I started, so he was at that point, probably six years old something. I just have one kid. So we actually were very transparent at home, which helped. I just talked openly. When my son was six, he knew where the business was. He would be literally like a kindergarten teacher would say to us, I hear the business isn't going well. I'm like, Yeah, But we were just open. It was just a very open adult conversation always, which I think helped on that because it wasn't like I was trying to hide anything from them. But it also takes a village. Having my wife and son supporting me the whole way. But Yeah, it was still pretty tough. I mean, it was definitely stressful.

What is your messaging around work-life integration, work-life balance, not killing yourself along the way with stress and not sleeping and trying to stay healthy, but also trying to build something extraordinary? How do you think about all of that now? What advice do you give to others?

I just integrated my work and life and family together. So my son, the first doorbot that came off the line in China, my son came with me. So we just integrated did the work-life together. And so it wasn't a balance. It was just integrated. And I think everyone's different. But for me, that was the best way to do it. So we spent a ton of time together. My son has been to 40 countries, and he's almost been to every state. I mean, I literally I'd bring him to every meeting. I didn't care. We were going to meet with Home Depot. Oliver was there when he was seven, six, five. Wow. And then people would say, it's funny, people would be like, how do you bring your kid to a meeting? And I said, who do you think they're going to remember more? The guy that brought his six-year-old to a meeting or just some idiot with another product. It's so amazing. We're always scared to be different. But I can guarantee you, if someone brings their kid to a meeting with me right now, I will remember that meeting over the 3,000 meetings I'm going to have this month.

What a life for him. He's been in some crazy rooms, I bet, and heard some amazing stories. How old is he now?

He's 17 now. Jeez.

What's it like for him? Because now he's an adult, basically. I I mean, God.

It's pretty funny. It's funny. It's like he doesn't... Maybe because he saw all this stuff, he just loves basketball, wants to work in sports. It's not like he's trying to follow in the footsteps and be an inventor and stuff. He's happy, he wants to do sports stuff, which is great. I think everyone should... Again, to the thing, people should follow their passion. You should do what you want to do. That's the best way to do it.

I've gotten all sides of this. I'm glad you brought this Some say that's what you should do. And other people say that's insane advice that billionaires give after they become a billionaire because it's easier to say, what you need to do is go earn a living. You need to get good at something, and then you'll become passionate about it afterwards. How do you feel about that? Passion and work and doing the thing that you're passionate about, what's your overall thoughts on it?

I think it's a fair argument that someone becomes wealthy and then says, Oh, go do what you love. It is hard to see anyone, though, that's achieved anything of greatness in the world that didn't do what they love. Loved. And so I think the other side of it is there are times when I was a bellhop in valet parking cars, that wasn't my passion. I did that in high school and college. I did it to make money. There are times when you have to work your ass I have to make money. I've done sales. But I think when you start the career of what you want to try to do and you're going to set out to do something, do something you care about versus... I think the worst thing is when people do entrepreneurship and they're trying to do something to make money because if they fail... If you fail trying to make money, that really sucks. If you fail trying to do something you love, at least you try to do something you love. I always just say, if Ring fails, we try to make neighborhoods safer. We worked on something noble. If it fails because we just tried to make a buck, that's not fun.

You talk about sales. I also think you're a much more effective sales professional when you are deeply passionate about the mission and about the product that you've created because of that mission You can feel it in your voice. I have since the second we connected on Zoom, you can feel that this is oooses out of the person versus someone who's just like, all right, I got to make some money, so I got to sell. I think that's a real thing. And it's certainly aspirational, I hope for most people, if you want to become excellent at anything, there's got to be that care, love, and passion behind it.

If you look back at almost any brand, the original, and again, over time, they are like, lose this and it doesn't matter, but usually very authentic when they start. Yeah. Nike was extremely... Phil Knight is an authentic person. Nike might now just be more of just a big brand that produces shoes, whatever. I actually still like it, but at the beginning, these brands have usually true authenticity to them that goes deep. Ring is a big brand, but it's because it was so authentic. It is authentic. We care about what we do. We just launched this dog search party thing that was my Super Bowl commercial yesterday, which was cool. But it's like, how do you invent something like that? Why do you do it? Because you care. That's authenticity, which then drives also the brand.

So as the company grows and you're adding more and more people, there are odds that some of those people are taking it as a job to earn a living, and they'll work hard, but they don't care like you do or like some of the earlier people do. That's just natural as a company grows in size. So how do you maintain this culture of authenticity and care and get after it as you grow and scale?

One is you have to be realistic that, yes, as you get bigger, not every single person in the company is going to wake up eating their making neighborhood safer cereal. I get it. That's just the reality. I think leadership, though, is that from my side, if I truly am authentic with it, it does usually trickle down. So that keeps it, I think, having a founder that's there that keeps that energy and authenticity to It matters. Having other people around us helps. I do think also you have to, as a company gets bigger, just be willing to be accepting that, yes, it's going to be slightly less... It can't be perfect because if you try to keep it to perfect, you're going to die. That said, I think you can also do a lot of things to keep it much better than just letting it go to just a big corporate board.

There is a difference between being an adventer and being a CEO of a company, especially a company that gets bigger. There's more and more people involved. There's a lot of elements of management, leadership, vision, public speaking, I mean, a million things that go on with being a CEO. How did you get good? You're a world-class inventor, one of the best of our generation, right? But how did you get good at being a leader? How did you get good at being a CEO and running a business?

I think this is where people overthink what it is to be a CEO. A A good CEO, a good leader is someone who's leading. It's like first principle thinking. How do you lead Ring? You lead it by leading it. You lead it by going out and installing devices. You lead it by caring. You lead it by continuing to invent. You lead it by being transparent with people and honest. Everyone knows at Ring that I will work harder than they will. And so that's leadership. I think people have come down to leadership as a process and it's a, How do you do this? And, How many emails do you send a week? But everyone knows they're coming from some group that's writing the emails. I think authenticity with AI is going to get way more important as a leader. Just be authentic. I think people want to follow someone that is authentic and cares and wants to do it. For me, I'm not a good CEO. I am a great leader because I'll charge over the hill when the bullets are coming any day.

It feels to me like you still have and maybe have never not had a frontline Line Obsession. The guy who started on the front lines, and even as the company has grown, has stayed on the front lines. You know the business inside and out. You're authentic. I mean, we didn't have a comms team before this meeting. You can just show up and talk because you're on the front lines, you understand what's actually going on.

Yeah. My email is still on every box. The letter j@ring. Com is my email. It's on every box, has been from the beginning. And when you're on the front lines, everyone else respects. When customer service knows that if someone emails me, I'm going to respond, they don't feel like they're doing a lesser job because they're not. They're doing the most important job, as am I. We're all there for the customer.

Do you get bombarded with emails?

Not really. People are pretty respectful. I mean, I'd say every once in a while, there's always these edge things that happen where someone's just, sadly, just not respectful with it and stuff. I would say most people, but we mess things up. And so I don't care if someone's unhappy, they can email me. If they're unhappy, we mess something up, we'll fix it. So overall, I'd say I don't get a ton because we're pretty good overall. And by the way, the reason I don't get a ton is because our customer service knows if at a scale of over 100 million cameras in the field, our customer service knows, if they do something egregiously bad and someone emails me, I'm on it. I'm going to call them. They know it. They know it. And so everybody, I'd say, works at a level that they know that I'm And so it does keep everyone, I'd say everyone on their toes a little more.

I'm fascinated by that element. I emailed you and I think you responded in less than an hour about doing this podcast. And I thought, wow. But it's funny. I'm curious to get your take on this, but maybe it's different now that you're more powerful person. But I feel like some of the busiest people that have the craziest jobs and that you think are literally building the things that are changing the world respond so fast. And this has happened to me over the past 11 years. They're such fast responders. It blows my mind.

It's a weird thing where I've found that the people that are the most successful, you can almost tell who's successful by how fast they respond.

Yes.

And it was just so flip flop of what it should be. A successful person should respond to you in a month. Yeah. Yeah, you're totally right.

This is a commonality I've seen over the past 11 years that blows my mind. It's better for me now with a show that has shown to give others a good platform. So I get it. It's more common now, but it's still, even over a decade, people who I would think, oh, no way. And then 15 minutes later, they're like, sure, dude, let's do it. How about tomorrow? I mean, it's wild to me how often that happens.

When you're running at the highest levels, you're actually very efficient. And there's something about it, but it's 100 % right. And I even find it when I look at investing in people, I'll get a founder. I'm sorry, I'm so I didn't get back to you or something. And it doesn't mean that they won't be successful, but it is a warning sign because when the most successful people get back to me in five seconds, it's like there's something wrong here.

I've been studying a lot, Jamie, recently great teams, specifically the DNA of great teams, whether it's sports, business, any team. I would love to hear your frontline obsessed version of what are some of the attributes or dynamics or the DNA of excellent teams?

I think the DNA is that people know what they're doing on the field. But I think the best company runs the same as the best sports team. Seattle yesterday, that team ran freaking great. And they ran great because the quarterback didn't think he was a kicker, and the kicker didn't think he was a linebacker. And the kicker trusts the linebacker is going to do his job. He's not like when they're about to hike it off as the kicker and go back to the guy, Hey, Hey, listen, are you going to block that guy over there? I just want to make sure we should have a meeting about this. So I think there is an autonomy that happens where everyone knows a play. The play is set so you know what that is. And so I think people know a ring. The play is making the neighbor safer. We know where we're going, but we don't have to all meet and talk about each other's jobs. Jason Matura, who runs my technology, Jason and I talk all the time, but we don't have meetings. I don't even have a standing meeting with the team in any cadence because we meet when we need to meet.

We talk about what we need to talk about. But why do I need to? If these are the best people in the world, why do we need to get together every week?

Do you not have a lot of meetings?

I have a lot of meetings on things that need to get done.

Say more. What do you mean by that?

The best day for me is a product's having an issue that we're going into production and we need to fix something. That's a meeting. Not standing meetings of, we're doing the budget meeting and we're doing this meeting.

How many direct reports do you have?

I couldn't even tell you. I mean, not a ton.

You don't have reoccurring one-on-ones or anything?

No, zero.

Man.

I talk to people like- All the time. To your point of responding. I talk to people that work with me, and I don't care if you're skip level. I don't even know what that shit means. I talk to people all day long, all night long, Sunday. We're talking about things, but it's event-based. We have to get the sales up on this. We have to get where there's issues, where there's whatever we work on it. And I trust that people... If you're not doing your job, we fire you. That's how it works. That's the reality.

I just think reoccurring meetings should be absolutely eliminated from the world. I hate them. I don't have any...

If I could get rid of the button that allows for them, I would nuke it.

Yes, man.

It's not first principle thinking. There's no way every single Monday at 9: 00 AM, you have something important to talk about. The world can't exist like that. There are times where you should meet, but it should be based on when you need to do something, not some cadence. And they do. They just become like, and they just stack and stack and stack. I don't. Have the best quarterback, have the best kicker, have the best coach. Let them work together, let them practice together, have the plays. But you don't need to get together every day to talk about how are we feeling.

Jamie, one more question. This is a little bit maybe adjacent to what we've been talking about. And maybe it's personal, maybe it's professional, maybe it's both. So let's say we're meeting or I'm seeing what's happening with you one year from today, exactly a year from today. And it's called the champagne question. And you've got a bottle of champagne. I don't know if you drink that or not, with your wife, your son, he's 17, 18 at that point. You guys are celebrating. What are you celebrating?

Probably something on the charitable side of things.

What?

We do a lot of work in South Central LA. Probably something more on that. We do a lot of work with the police, the LAPD. We also do a lot of stuff. We have a house in Missouri at this farm, and we do a lot of stuff out there with people. So probably celebrating something... Again, I think the best thing you can do is service to others. And so it's probably something where we somehow help someone do something. And it wouldn't be like the champagne thing is like, we wouldn't be clicking it. We're not that family. We're like, oh, we did it again. We sold the business. Like, yeah, like cigars and stuff. But it would be celebrating that we were able do something good with our brains and minds and whatever that helps someone.

More service oriented. Yeah, I read 75 acre farm in Missouri. Are you there a lot? What do you do there?

I love it. I'm there all the time. It became a passion project. I invested in a business out there called Moink. Actually, when I was on Shark Tank, I went there, fell in love with the place, I'm part of the town now. I love the people. The town had definitely been certainly impacted by opioids and by industrial farming and all the things, by the way, that are impacting these towns. These towns are all over the US, small little town. We started to work there with the townspeople and fix the streets and the sidewalks and put a little coffee shop. Everyone's come together, and it's a really cool place. I love going there and bringing people there. It's been fun.

Love it, man. Well, I really appreciate you being here and all the work you do. You're making my home safer, my neighborhood safer. So thank you so much for that, man. I'd love to continue our dialog as we both progress, man.

Absolutely. Thanks, Brian.

It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, rian@learningleader. Com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Jamie Simunoff. A few takeaways from my notes. Frontline Obsession. I love that Jamie still has this email address on every ring doorbell. Also, by the way, he's a very fast responder, which we found to be a commonality among leaders who sustain excellence over time. Back to frontline obsession. The moment you stop touching the actual work is when you lose the feel for what's really happening. Distance from the front line is distance from the truth I think CEOs and senior leaders should be obsessed with being on the front lines. Then the next one got me tuned up during the conversation. No no occurring meetings on the calendar, no standing Monday morning meetings. That doesn't mean you shouldn't meet with people, but only meet when you need to get something done, when you need to actually have a meeting. Other than that, there should be no standing meetings on your calendar. If you disagree, please email me.

I'd be happy to talk about that. Then the next part of that was pretty cool. Why Jeff Bezos wrote the first book endorsement he's ever done and why he called Jamie, A real builder, scrappy, original, and unsatisfied with the status quo. What a cool It was it was neat to have that part of the conversation with Jamie. You could tell it meant a lot to him. Then I liked his hiring filter. He calls it looking for marathon runners. Also, he hires fast, but then fires fast if he realizes he makes a mistake, and I think that's something we all could get better at. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message, telling a friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Jamie Simunoff. I think he'll help you become a more effective because you continue to do that, and you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to the show, rate it five stars. Hopefully, write a thoughtful review. By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. For that, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.