When Success Comes Knocking: How Ring Founder and Inventor Jamie Siminoff Slammed the Door on Setbacks

Michael Mendenhall: It's safe to say most of you, hopefully all of you, have a smart doorbell which records remote footage from your home. And some of these recordings are probably actually better than America's Funniest Home Videos. In fact, a new not to be missed show is going to launch on September 26th called Ring Nation. If you have not gone to YouTube and looked at some of what people have posted that they've captured from their doorbell, it is hysterical. So can you imagine basically what you're going to see in this show?

Jamie Siminoff created the world's first Wi-Fi video doorbell while working in a garage in 2011. And wow, I really do think there's something about garages when you think of HP, Apple, et cetera. So at a certain point, maybe we should all go in our garages and start working on something. He has since transformed this invention into Ring, a company whose mission is to provide a safer neighborhood and also a lot of great content apparently. So get ready for a really informative conversation that should be entertaining with Jamie who is a former TriNet customer.

We're very proud of what he did and what he did with us as well. And Stephanie Mehta, the CEO and Chief Content Officer of Mansueto Ventures. Previously, you should know, she was the deputy editor of Vanity Fair, held leadership roles in both Bloomberg Media and Fortune. Mansueto Ventures publishes Fast Company, so she's on the cusp of what is happening, and Inc. magazine, which is all about us and small, medium-sized businesses. So it's really my great pleasure to introduce not only the founder of Ring, but certainly now a media company and Stephanie Mehta. Jamie and Stephanie, come on out.

Stephanie Mehta: Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Jamie.

Jamie Siminoff: Morning.

Stephanie: Thank you, Michael, for that great introduction. Michael just referenced a television show that is coming up. I want to take us back to a different television show, Jamie. Many of you here may know that Jamie appeared on a television show called Shark Tank back in 2013. He was talking about a product called Doorbot, and it was the predecessor to Ring and the Sharks didn't get it. You left the show without an offer. And I want to take us back to that setback because that's the title of this session. What was that like to fail so publicly on national television and how did that embolden you for your next step?

Jamie: Well, I guess we're going to start out pretty negative, so okay. No, I was literally in my garage building this product that at the time, if you can go back and imagine when I would say to people, "I'm building a smart doorbell," I literally had friends laugh and say like, "No, seriously, what are you working on?" Because it just sounded like a joke. It turned out okay, but it did sound like a joke. And so I went on Shark Tank with Doorbot. They didn't get it, and I needed the money. I thought for sure Mark Cuban was going to give me an offer. And I'll never forget, driving back... I live in Los Angeles, and so they film in Los Angeles. So I had to drive back to the garage where the two other people were working with me, almost in tears.

It's funny, right now looking back, it's the public failure of it. At the time, what did I care? I was in a garage. The public failure, it didn't matter. It was really the idea that I didn't know what I was going to do, how to keep this thing going. I was out of money and I thought, “This is our big chance.” And with Shark Tank, you actually don't know when you're going to air. You don't know if you're going to air. So it wasn't like I at least had a guarantee of, “Okay, in two months, I'm going to be on TV. At least it'll give us some press or awareness.” So yeah, that was a tough setback.

And I think what got me through it was, and I do not recommend this to anyone, is I was already too far into it. Backing out was bankruptcy for me at that point. I mean literally if I had stopped the business and everything at that point, I had so many liabilities that had built up. I had ordered boards and chips and all this stuff that I'd personally signed for. I couldn't kind of stop. The train was already going. And so I didn't really have the option to stop, which looking back was good. At the time, I would say did not feel great.

Stephanie: Well, obviously the joke is on the Sharks because…

Jamie: Yes.

Stephanie: I think several of them have gone on to concede that this was the biggest miss ever on Shark Tank.

Jamie: Mark Cuban recently did some tweeting around that. He said it wasn't there. I was going to sort of join him in the tweeting fray. I decided not to, which is probably good.

Stephanie: Yeah, you don't want to get into a Twitter war ever.

Jamie: Yeah, he went through all the reasons why it wasn't a good business, except for the fact that it was the largest one to ever be on Shark Tank. But it wasn't good other than that.

Stephanie: In retrospect, I mean obviously as you said, you needed the money, but if you think back to what you were willing to give up in terms of equity to get that money, knowing now how your story played out, was it a good thing that you ended up not taking a deal from one of the sharks?

Jamie: Well, I did end up still making money.

Stephanie: Yes.

Jamie: It would've been, I'd say, fine either way. I sold a lot of my company for lower evaluations than I sold the company at. But I think the other side of that is that's how the capital markets work. People are taking a lot of risk and I think the fact that Ring made... Richard Branson was an investor. I think it was the largest outside of Virgin investment that he ever had from a return side. The bad side is that some of it came out of my pocket in essence. The good side is I think we took the risk and we got the reward.

Stephanie: I want to come back a little bit to what you're seeing in the capital markets more broadly in just a minute, but let's stick with the setbacks for another moment or two.

Jamie: Great.

Stephanie: I want to talk a little bit about psychologically how you bounce back from setbacks because not only did we talk about the Shark Tank incident, but backstage we were talking with our host Burton and he said when he first met you, you had just received a delivery of motherboards from China and they were all wrong.

Jamie: Yep.

Stephanie: And that you and your team and Burton recalls, who were probably about 10 employees at the time, had to basically rebuild the product in the garage. How, as a founder, do you deal with the anxiety and stress of something like that?

Jamie: Yeah, I mean it's funny that Burton... I mean now looking back, I don't know what he was doing visiting us, but we were a TriNet customer doing it. We had just gotten the first Doorbots in from China and there was things that were wrong on them. And this is where it’s interesting. I think the number one question I get is, “What was your biggest failure?” I think the problem I have with it and I haven't been able to put it in words right yet, but if you decide what is failure, failure is an end. So that would've been my biggest... Those boards, it was a huge failure. It didn't work, but we somehow... And every time these things happened, it literally was a brick wall in front of you that you had no idea how to get around and you didn't know if you could get around it.

There wasn't a roadmap of how to get around it, but I would sort of look at it and say, “Okay, let me try every single option, variable, whatever to get around it.” And you'd figure out, “Oh, if you jump this wire to this wire, it actually works.” You're like, “Okay, so let's start soldering.” And so when Burton came in, there was 10 of us soldering boards and I was one of them. I was saying that I signed the back of the board now. Now looking back, it's like, “Oh, did you sign it for historical whatever?” No, I signed it so that when customer service would get a call, we knew who actually fixed the board. And so they all had initials on them. We never defined failure at Ring.

We also never defined success. So we never had KPIs of revenue. I never had a revenue target for the business. I had a target of the mission. The mission was to make neighborhoods safer. And so it would’ve been easy to say when we had a $100 million in sales, “Let's have a party, let's do whatever.” And it was like, “Well, have we made every neighborhood safer?” The answer is no. We still haven’t by the way. I still have not achieved my goal yet. And I think because of that, you don't... Sometimes goals and success is actually a ceiling. And because that we never hit a ceiling, so I think you think bigger.

Stephanie: Before Ring, you had founded two other companies. One was a company called PhoneTag, which is the world's first voicemail to text company and you sold that in 2009 and then you founded unsubscribe.com, which was a service that helps users clean up their inboxes, which is still a service I'm sure many people…

Jamie: Best product, worst business I've ever done, but keep going.

Stephanie: Talk a little bit about that. As I'm describing the product, I think everybody in this room is nodding their head, saying, “Yes, that's a great product.” Why didn't it work as a business?

Jamie: No one wanted to pay for it. So unsubscribe.com, the idea was that you have spam, which is sort of fixed. And then in your inbox, right now, after sitting here, my guess is you’re going to go through and you’re going to have two emails that matter and five that are from other things. And so most people just delete them. This idea was like, “How do you create this system to unsubscribe and do it and make it easier for you to clean up your inbox?” No one wanted to pay for it. The customer, like us, didn’t want to pay for it. Well, then there's only another side which would be the emailer. And so it became one of these things where the only way to make money, I had to sell the customer that I just cleaned their inbox to the person that wanted to market to them. So it just didn't align as a business.

So the product was great, business was bad. And I think sometimes that happens. Sometimes you get into these things and you just play them out and it just doesn't get there. PhoneTag, I hated voicemail. I don't know if anyone’s old enough to know what voicemail is, but people used to call you and leave this message on there with their voice. It was crazy. And so why wouldn’t you just read it as a text message? It just seemed to make sense. So I did that. But what it really was, if you look back, is I was a struggling entrepreneur. People called me a serial entrepreneur. I was more of a struggling entrepreneur which I kept seeing these things you could fix and I’d start them, but they're really features and not businesses and I couldn't figure out how to make the gap in that.

And the difference with Ring was very early on. We saw this mission of making neighborhoods safer, that’s the feature, the product, the doorbell... The doorbell, it’s one if people get. Even Ring’s revenue. It's a part of our business. It's not the business. And so the mission was, “Make neighborhoods safer.” And as soon as I had that, it was amazing how that, I’d say, allowed us to build a larger business, an impactful business. It was able to align us with our customers where we call our customers neighbors and the neighbors wanted to work with us. And so it became more of a movement and that alignment really is what broke out and became now something that’s special I guess.

Stephanie: And one of the other themes of PeopleForce this year is purpose. We're ostensibly here to talk about perseverance, but I know we're going to get to passion and purpose as well. In retrospect, do you think if you had started PhoneTag and Unsubscribe with a sense of purpose or try to develop a purpose before building out those businesses, either they would’ve succeeded or you would have not gone down the road of starting them if you realized there wasn’t a true purpose there?

Jamie: I think as long as the purpose was broad enough, because I think a lot of times the mission is so tactical... I think the best mission is one that is unachievable, but tangible. So if my mission was to solve voicemail, great, you’re solving something that literally is collapsing as you’re solving it. Ouch. Unsubscribe.com, I don't know. That was an interesting one because it still is an issue. We could not seem to get it there, but I would say that as we’re here to talk about the sort of setbacks and what got you through it, if you don't have a mission of something and I think financial... I don't believe people work for money.

I think in the short term, it’s necessary obviously, all those things. But I think what really drives us is purpose. I think humans are driven by something of value to do something more. And so, I do look at it as having this mission of making neighborhoods safer drove me through a lot of the bad times that I'd always say, “Worst case, we go out of business but at least we tried to do something that was good.” It felt like even if we did go out of business, at least we tried to do something good.

Stephanie: Yeah. There's a response to the poll I want to call out. “Does your organization prioritize financial goals over purpose-oriented goals?” And the numbers are changing a little bit here, but folks are saying it’s both, but with an emphasis on purpose over financial.

Jamie: It’s great.

Stephanie: And that rings true with your experience.

Jamie: Yeah. And again, because I think financial goals are an output, but they’re the effect, not the cause. And so if you’re building a business, if you’re an entrepreneur, I always say still to this day, I say, “If someone buys a Ring, we are being rewarded for them believing that we're going to make their home and their neighborhood safer.” It’s not a transaction, it’s not a sale. We're being rewarded for that. And so the sale is the output of all the work that we do as a company to build a product and a service and a brand that you feel that way about. And so I think if we did focus on, “We're going to sell another a $100 million,” there's leverage you can pull, but usually those are very short term and they kind of burn that other side out. And you see it with a lot of great companies. They'll shift over time to more financial. And at some point, that usually takes away too much from the purpose and customers don’t buy. We’re not just trying to buy a deal, we’re trying to buy something that has meaning to us.

Stephanie: A few moments ago, you described yourself in your early days as a struggling entrepreneur. You were somebody who was trying to solve problems but really struggling to find a business around it. Before you started Doorbot, did you ever consider getting a day job?

Jamie: I'm not sure if anyone would hire me. So that also helped. No, but in all seriousness, I kind of didn't.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Jamie: I think still...

Stephanie: You had a young family at the time.

Jamie: I did, yeah. But it’s funny, that was never an avenue. It was certainly, I was going through things and trying to figure stuff out and inventing things, but I’ve just always been a builder, and again, I think this is an important thing for entrepreneurs is entrepreneurs is a huge word, that covers... We were talking about Inc. Magazine. The variations of entrepreneurs, I've met so many people that are successful and some of them worked at a job because they were scared to leave. Then they got fired and then they started their business. And then I’ve met the ones that are like, “I would never work anywhere. I don't care. I have all this risk.”

I was sort of in between where I didn’t work somewhere at the same time, I was always scared and trying to figure it out. So I was a frustrated, struggling entrepreneur. But I did feel like... I don't know, I've just always been a builder. And I think builders, sometimes it’s tough to work in a business, especially as a younger employee because usually they don’t just hand the keys over to you and say, “Go build.” They kind of tell you what to do, which is what happens.

Stephanie: Since you mentioned Inc., I look back at a piece you did with the magazine not too long ago and you said to the writer that the years 2015 to 2017, which was well after the Shark Tank appearance, were perhaps your toughest. Why were those years so tough and how did you overcome the setbacks from that period?

Jamie: I mean, I'd say that was the years we grew the most, percentage-wise grew the most and growth…

Stephanie: I think it was already Ring by then.

Jamie: Yeah, it was already Ring. So we became Ring in 2014. 2015 was our first year as Ring. I mean it’s funny, today people come up to me and say, “Hey, I heard X, Y, Z launched a doorbell or whatever and what is it like to have competition now?” And it’s like you forget. I’ve had competition at every stage. So we had competition coming in, we had cash flow issues. Growing fast, especially in a hardware business, it breaks physics because you can only sell what you bought nine months earlier that you have to pay for. It's basically, it’s cash and you’re... So it was just a really tough time because basically whatever we sold that month, I was ordering five X more for six to nine months ahead.

If it didn't grow, then I was going to have this overhang of all of this product. And so it was just a really tough thing bringing people in, trying to build a team. It was legit mayhem. I mean now you look at it as fun. Backwards, it’s like, “Well, it was such a fun time.” It was not fun... I guess, I don't know, maybe it was fun, but I mean it was hard. I mean it was stressful and there’s a lot of nights, I literally would be in my bed, three in the morning, awake and thinking to myself, “What the hell are you doing? You're going to destroy your family.” It was really hard because you’re teetering on the verge from the outside to, “Dude, you're doing so well. How cool!” And whatever. And on the inside, it’s the world’s coming to an end.

Stephanie: Yeah. The one thing you didn’t have to worry about during that period of time was the back office part of the people.

Jamie: And that’s what I always talk about. Figure out what you do and the things that you don’t do. Find the best thing. Like office furniture, we didn't build our own chairs. We bought them. Payroll, TriNet. I mean from when Burton came and we were going out of business trying to solder our boards, we literally, all the way through ‘til we got purchased by Amazon, had them doing our HR and backend. I never had to think about it. And so that’s one of the tricks of scaling was to get rid of all the things... I don't want to say it didn’t matter to me. People are super important, but there are people that knew how to do that part of our business. There are people that know how to do office chairs so finding the best partners is super important.

I think where sometimes entrepreneurs go wrong is they find partners to do the things that actually are critical to their business, building the IP and the intellectual property. And that’s an issue because then you’re not building anything. If everything’s outsourced and everything is sort of partners, then you’re not building anything. So figure out what your team is supposed to focus on where you’re building something that’s proprietary and unique and you're inventing the future and then everything else, get TriNet. Get whatever. Get a good office chair business. I think people stand though now, so you don't need office chairs.

Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. When you were scaling the business, back-office people is different than culture people, right?

Jamie: Yep.

Stephanie: How did you continue to communicate the values of the business, communicate the mission, make sure the purpose was front and center, especially at a time when, for better or for worse, the transactional stuff was front and center? You were trying to figure out cash flow. You were trying to figure out how to meet demand. How do you make sure that people don’t lose sight of that mission even at a time when you’re scaling fast. You’re adding new people and the focus day-to-day does really seem to be on the financial?

Jamie: I think this is where I think people have a good sense of I guess the business term would be BS. And so if I just said, “Oh, our mission is to make neighborhoods safer,” and then, “Okay, what are we doing here? How are we ordering this?” I mean it’s like you’d see through it. I really did, I still to this day, I live, I breathe... Every meeting, everything we did, I’d say, “Well, how does that affect the mission?” Someone would come up with a product idea, I’d say, “How does that affect the mission?” And so, from the top down, it seeps through the company. And so the fact that I lived it, then the team that was always around me... And we’re very flat, that’s not just the leaders.

Just the people I was interacting with, customer service, whatever, they felt it. If it’s real, then everyone lives it. And I would sit in interview after interview and I’d say, “Listen, at Ring, we’re here to make neighborhoods safer.” And if you listen to that in your head and you think to yourself, which is totally fair, “That’s too whatever for me. Really? I thought we're here to sell doorbells,” don't work here. Totally fine. But here we actually do believe in this. Another thing I did is I put my email in every box.

And I think the authenticity of that and for the team seeing, I think, across the company that no one was better than the customer and that everyone lived that and everyone was there to do it, and I’d say, “I'm here because if someone’s having a problem, we’re not making neighborhoods safer.” And so that is the most important email I can get next. To me, leadership is in some ways simple, which is like it’s honesty, it’s trust, and so you can’t make something up and then get people to follow and believe in it. You have to be honest and true. And if you do that, in some ways it’s kind of been very easy.

Stephanie: Yeah. You talked a little bit about the relationship you have with employees. Now that you are a successful founder, you meet lots of entrepreneurs, you probably talk to a lot of people seeking investment from you. What makes your BS detector go off? When do you get a sense that someone isn’t really being authentic about their mission?

Jamie: Yeah, the longer you talk to them obviously, it’s sort of the better you get the picture. I think what I always try to look for is, “What’s the crazy thing you did that you don't think is crazy?” Because missionary founders do things, they’re short term, they're making decisions that usually don’t look like great business decisions short term because they’re making it from the long term because they care about the business. I mean, I actually was on Shark Tank as a Shark afterwards which was kind of amazing. And this woman went on there, Lucinda, and she’s from Missouri and has a meat business. And she was saying she’s there for the family farmer and this whole thing. It felt real. I said, “I’d do the investment," but then I kind of got into the due diligence and it turned out Lucinda’s crazy.

And she’s crazy about saving the family farm and she’s so missionary and the company has grown 20X since I’ve invested in it. And it’s an amazing sort of thing to be part of and it’s exciting, but she’s legit. She loves what she does and the mission of it and she'll make bad business decisions in the short term for the long term. And to me as an investor, you make money on the long term, not the short term. Getting sales jumped up by 10% if it’s taking away from the ethics or the morals or the long-term thing the business stands for, that’s not good.

Stephanie: Shifting gears a little bit, people in the audience and watching us on the stream, if you regularly read PitchBook's newsletter or Term Sheet or any of the outlets that cover venture investing in particular, but private equity and capital markets more broadly, you sense that there’s a retrenchment going on. You sense that the big institutional money is starting to reign things in a little bit. What are you seeing in the marketplace? Do you get a sense that it’s going to be harder for entrepreneurs to get financing?

Jamie: I think it’s going to be harder to get financing at the prices that your friends got a year ago. The problem is entrepreneurs have reset their expectations that a $100 million business is what a million-dollar business was 10 years ago. It’s kind of like everyone had a $100 million business or a billion-dollar business all of a sudden. And it turns out they’re hard to build still. If someone invests and says it’s worth a hundred million, to actually make that value, it’s hard. And so I think what we’re seeing is a repricing in the market. I think it’s very healthy, and I think as entrepreneurs, we want this. I don't wish anyone to have a lower price company. I’m not trying to be negative. At the same time, we want a healthy ecosystem where investors are making big money on successes because remember, there’s a lot of things that don’t work out.

So if we as entrepreneurs are still going to attract money, we need to have the people that have money wanting to put it into this category. And when you’re investing at too high of evaluation, there’s not enough spread for the risk. And I think that’s what we saw. So as an entrepreneur, I think if you go out and you have a fair valuation for your business, I actually think it’s as good right now to raise money or even maybe better than it’s ever been. And the truth is, I do think people focus too much on that valuation. If you’re just going to bootstrap, that’s great, but if you’re going to raise any money, it doesn’t really matter that much what you own. It’s kind of like it’s either going to kind of work and you’ll probably be okay or it’s not going to work and you’re not going to be okay. But whether you own 5% of something that doesn't work or 10% or 20%, in the end, it kind of washes out.

Stephanie: And do you have advice for entrepreneurs about what they should be looking for in an investor? I mean, it’s not quite the buyer’s market it was a couple of years ago, but if you've got a good idea, you can probably still be a little choosy.

Jamie: So at different times, you can be more choosy. Sometimes you do need to literally just get money because you have to do it. And I respect people that sometimes say, “I didn't love this investor, but...” And I’m like, “If you need the money, I respect it.” If you are a bit in the driver’s seat, definitely look for someone who is truly, again, missionary to what you’re trying to do. Because what you don’t want to do is sit in that board meeting or sit in that meeting with the investor that says, “Hey, how can we pump sales up real quick right now in that short term?” You don't want that short-term thinking, you want the long-term thinking. At Ring, we had one round. We were actually always kind of begging for money and we got very lucky.

Our investors were super missionary focused with us. But there was one round I did where I kind of had the driver’s seat and I broke the presentation into three PowerPoints. The first PowerPoint was the mission, the second one was the product and the third one was the financials. But each one ended as if it could end. It’s as if I was done. So I did the first one, I do the mission and there were literally investors that were like, “Thank you, but that’s ridiculous. Obviously, your business is not working.” And I'm like, “That's correct, it is not working," and I walked out. And then there were ones that were like, “Wow, that’s really interesting. I now see why the doorbell is not... You could do this.” And I'm like, “Let me show you the product.” I’d show them the product roadmap and three, four years out, “Whoa, that's super exciting. This must be...” And then I’d show them the financials and they were like, “Holy heck, that’s really a good business." So I went...

Stephanie: Thank you for censoring yourself, by the way.

Jamie: Yeah, holy heck.

Stephanie: Family audience.

Jamie: I think we can say heck. I usually drop some terrible... I’m usually bleeped but anyway. I'm trying. So it was so funny. And then a partner two years later said, “When you pitch us, what happened? Why didn't you tell us the business?” I said, “Well, actually I did, but you shit the...” Ah, see?

Stephanie: I baited you. I’m sorry.

Jamie: “You did not like the mission and so I was out of there.” And it was just a very funny thing of... And again, I really was trying to align myself with capital that above all else would care about us making neighborhoods safer because we were going to make decisions that we’re going to invest in things that didn’t look, on the face of it, maybe as good but were for that mission. And in the end, if you look at the overall, that’s what built Ring into being, I think, the most special and I believe the largest home security company in the world today.

Stephanie: What can entrepreneurs learn from Amazon now that you have a front row seat? I mean, I think books have been written about Amazon’s approach. When you talk about doing things for the long term versus the short term, I think that Jeff Bezos brilliantly laid out in his very first letter to investors that, “We are going to make decisions for the long term that may not necessarily benefit the stock in the short term,” which was an incredibly bold thing to do. Obviously, the company’s a behemoth now. Do you recognize shades of the entrepreneurial Amazon and what things do you think have you learned and what things can entrepreneurs still learn from Amazon?

Jamie: Yeah. And obviously it’s a very large company today, so nothing that large is perfect. If I said it was, you can’t... As you grow... I think it's over one point something million employees now, which is amazing. But if you look at it, it still actually holds a lot of those things. And I'd say the biggest trick... And if you really want to understand Amazon, read the Leadership Principles. So they’re published, the culture doc, the Leadership Principles, I think there’s 12 of them now. When you talk in Amazon, when you’re in a meeting, invent and simplify, think big, these are all the leadership principles. They’ll literally use the vernacular. It’s still to this day very embedded in the company.

And Jeff has always been about customer. My mission of making neighborhoods safer, I’d say maybe is a piece of his customer. They really have stuck to the customer. They really care deeply internally about that. And I think that’s an incredible thing even at their scale. I am very similar on the financial side. Obviously they’re a big public company and they have to focus on things, but they still do, I’d say, a great job at focusing on the inputs, what are the things you have to do to have a great customer experience and then allow the sort of financials to come from that.

Stephanie: Yeah. I’m going to, at the end of our interview, ask you to reflect on your favorite home video from Rings so I’ll want to give you a moment to think about that. But as you look into your crystal ball and you think about where the U.S. economy and the global economy are going to be going over the course of the next three, six, 12 months, what are some of the things that you’re watching and maybe what are some of the indicators that you look at that economists and corporations aren’t necessarily?

Jamie: Yeah, so luckily as an inventor. I get to not be an economist. I get to be an optimist. Short term, I think there all could be all types of down and up. I do feel that if there is a recession, if there is a pullback... I don’t know, maybe it’s already happening if it does happen. I think what happens in those times is that it ejects people that are parked in places that are our entrepreneurs, that are our inventors. And so I actually think what happens when we get these little shakeups is great things come out of that.

So even if we do go through this, and again, I don’t wish anyone to be fired, I don’t wish for any sort of bad times in the economy, but if it did happen, I would actually be the optimist to look at what are the things that are going to get built out of that, because every time that seems to happen, the people that lose their jobs go out and they start the next something. So I’m almost excited to see what happens. And so I’ll try to stay the optimist on that. Even if things go down, I actually think it’s going to be a good for the world because it’ll allow more innovation to happen that benefits people.

Stephanie: And you cited a good example of that from the implosion of AT&T in the…

Jamie: Yeah, so I grew up in New Jersey and during a time when AT&T was this monopoly or whatever and it got broken up. I think the unemployment out of my class in second grade or something, 30% of the parents lost their job. It was crazy all of a sudden. And we were in this nice suburb in New Jersey. I mean it was very hard for, I don't know, six months, whatever it was. And then all of a sudden, there was hundreds of startups. There was a fiber startup and this startup and switches and all this resurgence of telecom and all these things came out of that. And that area became super successful. And so I love seeing that. Now again, you don’t wish the bad, but I saw the good that comes out of it. So if the bad happens, at least I’m optimistic that the good can happen too.

Stephanie: Yeah. We covered perseverance, we covered purpose. The other pillar of this is passion. What are you most passionate about as a business person and what are you most passionate about when you’re not wearing your inventor hat?

Jamie: I like to build. I like to invent and I think that’s my passion. And then I think inventors, if you look at what an inventor really does, an entrepreneur is like you’re trying to build something that benefits someone. I think if you own a coffee shop, it’s seeing the smile when you deliver the espresso. If you own a doorbell company, it’s driving around and seeing your products on people’s houses or seeing how they use them. So I think to me, the passion comes from being able to use my mind and my capabilities to try in some way to make people’s lives better and see the tangible results of that is very exciting for me.

Stephanie: And when you’re not inventing, do you have a pursuit or a passion, something you’re trying to learn?

Jamie: So the town where the meat business is that I invested in on Shark Tank, it’s a town in the Midwest in northeast Missouri. Ended up buying a farm there. My family started going there. The town was certainly in a... I think it's a beautiful town, but had maybe seen a better time just as industry left and things. And so we’ve sort of taken it on to try to rebuild the town. So that’s a project that I’ve undertaken. So we’re building a coffee shop there and redoing some of the sidewalks and streets and trying to see that.

And I’d say it’s a project that’s super interesting for me because trying to get a town to come back, money is a component, but like business, you can give someone money, it doesn't mean they’ll be successful. You can give a town money, it doesn't bring a town back. They need sort of the social fabric to come back. They need people to believe that it’s going to be a future. So these things sort of have to happen. So it’s been very interesting to see, just like a business, how do you create that push behind it and how do you change the energy? And so I’m in that right now. We’ll see. It’s a TBD.

Stephanie: Oh, well, that’s awesome. Final question, do you have a favorite ring video that…

Jamie: I do. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of funny ones. This one is, so there was a family that was in Southern California and they were redoing their house and the builders had left a bucket of the rags and stuff outside of the front door. It caught on fire, self-combustion or whatever. It had turpentine or something on it. And so an outdoor fire outside of a house is the most dangerous thing because it actually ends up burning sort of around the house and the smoke detectors don’t go off until it’s too late.

So the Ring kept going off because we have heat detectors, not on purpose for fire, but because that’s how we see motion. So it kept going off, so the person woke up at two in the morning, got their family out, the child out, and it was one of those just amazing, probably saved... And you see them running out. Thinking about that video, just it... Where’s passion and purpose and everything? It’s like, there you go. Build something like that impacts people’s lives and I don’t know how you don’t wake up in the morning excited to push through the problems.

Stephanie: Yeah. Well, Jamie, thank you so much for sharing your story of perseverance, your story of passion and your story of purpose. Ladies and gentlemen, Jamie Siminoff.

Jamie: Thank you.