Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Shaan Puri: Jamie created the Ring doorbell. You sold it for $1.15 billion, right?
Jamie Siminoff: 1.15. But if you want to, you can round down.
Shaan Puri: The part after his decimal point is worth more than our entire career so far. I want to brainstorm business ideas with you. I want to see how you think. Is there a $5 or $10 billion company hiding in the bug space?
Jamie Siminoff: Probably. There it is.
Sam Parr: You said, “I just don’t know how to stop, and sometimes it’s not smart and it costs me.”
Jamie Siminoff: Yeah. You’re going to make me cry, Sam. Are you going to do this?
The World’s Worst Morning Routine [00:00:15]
Sam Parr: So Shaan, listen. If you’re like me, you woke up this morning, you rolled out of bed, you checked Business Insider, and you read this amazing article about Jamie. It says, “I’m Jamie, and I’m the CEO of Ring, and I have the world’s worst morning routine.” It’s a whole article about how he rolls out of bed and scrolls his phone for about four hours. Everything they say he shouldn’t do—immediately all the wrong things.
Shaan Puri: That was the whole article? About how Jamie has the world’s worst routine?
Sam Parr: Good PR strategy, right? They sit down with you and they’re like, “Hey, we need to get some cool tech billionaire weirdo stuff. What do you got?” And you’re like, “Nope, don’t have anything.” So they’re like, “Okay, we’re going to use that.”
Jamie Siminoff: Yeah. I’m the average guy from Missouri.
Sam Parr: Are you from Missouri?
Jamie Siminoff: I’m from New Jersey, but I tell people I’m from Missouri now because I have this farm in Missouri and I’ve decided that there’s no reason why you can’t just be from Missouri.
Sam Parr: Guess where I’m from, Jamie. Can you just look at me and guess?
Jamie Siminoff: Missouri.
Sam Parr: I’m from Missouri, my friend.
Jamie Siminoff: Where?
Sam Parr: St. Louis.
Jamie Siminoff: My farm is in La Belle, Missouri. So, I’m from Missouri. You’re from Missouri. You’re more like a city folk, but we are two and a half hours north of St. Louis.
Shaan Puri: Dude, I love how he just out-Missouri-ed you even though you were actually born and raised there. He just actually was like, “You’re a city slicker, not a real true Missourian.”
Sam Parr: We don’t like you folks. This is like going to Tony Soprano and being like, “Actually, Tony, it’s bruschetta.”
Brainstorming with the Inventor of Ring [00:02:10]
Shaan Puri: Let me tee this up. I did a call with Jamie and it was super fun. Jamie created—if you’ve ever seen a doorbell that has a camera on it, this is the inventor. This is the man who did it. He created Ring Doorbell, grew it, and sold it to Amazon for tons of money.
I was like, “Hey, I want to have you on the podcast and brainstorm business ideas with you. I want to see how you think. How do you approach businesses?” And he’s like—I don’t know the exact quote, but it was something like, “Ideas are my drug of choice.” He said, “I have this list on my phone of thousands of ideas. Which one do you want?”
So I want to do that. Sam, you saw the doc that he sent over, which gives us bullet point ideas. We don’t know what he’s going to say, but where do you want to start?
Sam Parr: Wait, can I ask a question before we get in? How much? You sold it for $1.15 billion, right?
Jamie Siminoff: 1.15.
Sam Parr: Okay. So we’re talking to a guy who has a billion-dollar company.
Shaan Puri: The part after his decimal point is worth more than our entire career so far.
Jamie Siminoff: I think you should point out I sold it for a billion when a billion was a lot of money. Back when a billion was actually cool. Back when you could buy more than a cup of coffee with it.
The Amazon Acquisition Story [00:03:45]
Sam Parr: Can we actually go to that story? Do you remember where you—I’m always curious about two things. One, was there a good negotiation story or a “throw out a number” story of how you arrive at that $1.15 billion? And then, how did that come about?
Jamie Siminoff: What was cool with Amazon is we had been working with them on stuff for years. I actually went to Amazon and showed this guy, Nick Koumarianos, the Ring before we launched Ring because we had been talking to them. They were with Alexa and stuff. They were looking to reach out to all the small IoT people at the time. There were a lot of little hardware things bubbling up. I literally brought them the first one and showed it to them.
We had been working together for a long time. We were very aligned on the mission and what we were trying to do. They started to look at video, realizing that with Alexa they had the ears in the home, and they started to see the eyes and saw what we were doing. We had this dating-awkward conversation because we would talk all the time.
We met and Nick said, “Let me come down and let’s have lunch,” which was not that abnormal. We’re sitting there and Nick’s like, “You know, we should go to the next level here.” It was this very funny dating conversation where you don’t want to just jump out and be like, “Okay, let’s do it.” It’s like, “Do what?” We kept going back and forth. I’m like, “So you mean…?” and he’s like, “Yeah,” and I’m like, “To…?” We kept going back and then he finally said, “Yeah, it’s time we should combine.” Not a merger of equals, by the way, but that Amazon should buy you.
Sam Parr: What was your revenue then?
Jamie Siminoff: That was 2017. That year we did $480 million.
Sam Parr: Okay. So you guys are just huge. Was it a profitable business or were you burning money?
Jamie Siminoff: Here’s what’s so interesting. The individual customer economics were insanely good. The fundamentals of the actual business were good. It was growing so fast that money was just being lit on fire everywhere. It’s not that we had crappy offices; it’s just you have to hire so fast to get ahead.
Think about customer service. When you’re growing at 500% a year, and if customer service takes three to six months for a person you hire to get up to speed, that means you’re hiring two to three times what you need at that exact time just so you don’t blow up as people are buying. You’re putting out all this cash to do this stuff.
It sounds cool, but when you’re doing $170 million and you’re ordering for $480 million, it means if anything slows down, you are just dead. On one side, I’m sitting there with Nick and I have a $480 million business that’s growing triple digits at that scale, which is insane. On the other side, I’m going out of business every day. Every day I’m facing the wall. The only way to stop that is you raise a little money, you get a little financing, or something else comes in. It was getting to a point where I just couldn’t handle it. The stress was getting to me. It was years of just that.
The ADT Lawsuit and Near Bankruptcy [00:07:30]
Jamie Siminoff: Then we started to get into negotiation. During the negotiation, I get sued by ADT, probably for something that was a little bit self-induced, to be fair. They win an injunction and literally—you can’t make this up—Nick calls me and says, “I’m going to send you a term sheet tomorrow morning, just FYI.” Great.
An hour later, the injunction hits us. I have to call Nick back and be like, “Hey, just FYI, not a big deal at all. Shouldn’t matter at all. But as an FYI, we did get an injunction from ADT on this lawsuit.” And he’s like, “Dude, we’re out.”
Sam Parr: Wow.
Shaan Puri: What does that mean? ADT was suing you for what?
Jamie Siminoff: We had been building an alarm. They had a company they were invested in that was building it. They stopped funding it. The company basically shut down. I hired all the people from there. They told me I couldn’t hire all the people from there. I told them in a very respectful way—no, I was a total jerk and I was so dumb. I poked the bear.
Looking back, it’s funny because it’s that same insanity and passion that gets a company to go from 170 to 480 that is also the person that blows it up. It’s the demolition man. The same person that can use the demolition to clear the way for the road is also the one who can blow everything up for everyone.
Shaan Puri: It’s my favorite Elon thing of all time when he goes on Saturday Night Live and says, “I took all my money and I spent it on trying to get rockets that will take us to Mars and electric cars. What did you think? I’ll just be a normal chill dude?” It’s like, oh, actually that explains so much. Of course, we can’t have mad genius and then also a stable, respectful, peaceful, reasonable man over here. You can’t be unreasonable in one area and totally reasonable in the other.
Jamie Siminoff: I think that’s the problem. It’s just true. If you want to do something—Ring is a one-in-a-generation company. I say that as someone who looks at it and I can’t believe I’m even part of it. People just call it a “Ring.” To build something like that is incredible.
Yes, you probably have some traits that are very strong, but those can cut both ways. When the person from ADT calls you and you’re in this vortex of doing stuff, maybe you don’t take the time to say, “Why don’t I just come to you? Why don’t we sit down? We’re two humans and we can work this out.” If I had just flown there and sat down for dinner with them, I really feel like they probably would have just been like, “Fine, whatever. We’re good. We just wanted to talk.” Instead, I was a lunatic doing stuff. They said, “Well, why don’t we teach you some business?” And they did. To be fair, it was fairly painful.
The “Pilot Checklist” Mentality [00:10:45]
Jamie Siminoff: So, I call the guy and I’m like, “Hey, feel silly even bringing this up, but there’s a little lawsuit you should probably know about.” And then he’s like, “We’re out.” And I’m thinking, “Well, look, you drafted the term sheet anyway. Just go ahead and send it over.” And he’s like, “No, no, no. We’re out.”
I said, “Why don’t we just keep the negotiation going and if I settle this thing out, then we’re good?” He’s like, “Dude, we’re done. Basically pencils down until whatever.”
On the flip side, I had a safety net. I was going into this Amazon deal with a safety net, which was if we don’t do the Amazon deal, I’m going to raise $200 million. So I also had to call those investors and say, “Just FYI, I know we’re about to close this deal for this money, but we had this little injunction on that little thing that I said was not going to be a big deal.” And they’re like, “Yeah, we’re out, too.”
The two doors I was looking at were selling to Amazon or raising $200 million. It was the first time I was going to take secondary money off the table—meaningful money that would have been real for me. All of a sudden, both those doors evaporated and now we’re negative $70 million in the bank because we didn’t plan the cash flow. We thought one of these doors was going to happen. All of a sudden, we are technically a bankrupt company almost immediately.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I’m hooked. What happens? More importantly, what’s the conversation you have with yourself in that moment? Because there’s what you did, but there’s also what you said to yourself before you figured out what to do.
Jamie Siminoff: The one thing I do have, which has kept us from completely blowing the place up when things are really bad, is I go into a pilot checklist. I am just deadpan calm. We have to do this, we have to do this. I’m like, “We’re going into the holidays. We have to sell everything. We have to break every record.” The only way to survive is just to do this.
We also had to stop paying our bills to anyone that couldn’t actually tow us away. We did that too, which was pretty—that’s not fun. You’re calling vendors and you’re like, “Hey, listen, I know, but if you stop shipping this, we’re dead. If we’re dead, everything you’ve already sent is dead.” It’s not a conversation you want to have.
Sam Parr: It’s everyone’s problem at that point.
Jamie Siminoff: Yeah. It’s a bad situation. We go through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That whole week, we literally blow out everything. Ring is the product of the holidays. It’s the number one seller at Best Buy. It’s literally on fire.
Sam Parr: If this wasn’t happening, how much less do you think in sales you would have had? Percent-wise, how much do you think you got extra just with the forcing function of necessity?
Jamie Siminoff: At least low double digits, 10% to 15% at least.
Sam Parr: Was it just your intensity because you had to, or did you come up with a new idea?
Jamie Siminoff: We did everything. Every social post, everything. You just put it all in the field. You send in your best. We just went crazy. But for sure, that was a part of it. We needed to literally break every number, blow everything out. And still with that, it wasn’t clear that we would live. It just felt like it was more likely you’d live if you were blowing it out than not.
Then all of a sudden, ADT calls and says, “Hey, would you like to talk settlement?” Imagine if you have no oxygen and someone’s like, “Hey, would you like a little oxygen?” You’re like, “I’d love some oxygen.” We went and they were actually pretty fair. Once we settled that, everything else was amazing. It was this weird thing where everything underneath was the best ever and we had this one cloud that moved everyone away. As soon as that dissipated, it was over. We settled around December 9th.
Shaan Puri: That’s really fast.
Jamie Siminoff: You go to this office where there are two conference rooms and a retired judge who walks back and forth between these two conference rooms all day. Finally, they’re like, “Okay,” and you’re like, “Okay.” Then you sign it and you’re like, “Is this done?” and they’re like, “It’s done.” I’m like, “Done done?”
Then I called Amazon and just said, “Just FYI, settled.” And they said, “Okay.” That’s all. They loved the business; they just didn’t want to get involved in that. Once it was settled, that was December 9th. December 31st, we signed for $1.15 billion to sell it.
Shaan Puri: Wait, so the deal closed 30 days later?
Jamie Siminoff: We signed the binding LOI in less than 30 days.
Sam Parr: Did you shop it around as well?
Jamie Siminoff: I didn’t for a number of reasons. The biggest one was I did not know of another buyer that would back our mission. We were very missionary around making neighborhoods safer.
Working with Jeff Bezos [00:16:15]
Sam Parr: What were your interactions like with Jeff Bezos?
Jamie Siminoff: Jeff loves entrepreneurs so much that they’ve learned not to have him involved in the purchasing because I think Jeff would just be like, “I love you, man.” Jeff’s so great. I had met him once before, but I didn’t really know him. It was post-deal that I got to really start to spend some time with him, and he is just one of the greatest people ever for lots of reasons. I’d say the number one is he’s just a good human.
Shaan Puri: Do you have any good Bezos stories? It’s rare that you get to actually interact with or work with him. There are always levels to the game. I meet people and I think I’m doing great, then I meet somebody and I’m like, “Wow, that person’s got a different level of intensity or they’re a different level of sharpness or they ask a different style of question.” You don’t know until you meet them. You don’t even know what level 12 looks like until you see level 12. Did you have any moments like that with Bezos?
Jamie Siminoff: Definitely many moments. I’d say the biggest thing I took away from Jeff is he’s the most positive person I’ve ever met in the weirdest way because he gets stuff done. It’s not like he’s just like, “Hey, good job, guys.” But he’s able to be so patient on things. He sees the future and he’s just very patient and very positive.
I’ve tried to—it’s definitely different than my personality. I’m more like punch-a-wall, run around and yell a little bit more, like inventor passion. But he has taught me to try to just be a little bit calmer and let things work themselves out versus forcing everything. I think maybe that’s the biggest learning.
Scaling to $4 Billion and Stepping Down [00:18:30]
Sam Parr: Why have you stayed? The deal was seven years ago. Why are you still there? Obviously, money is probably a big part of it, but…
Shaan Puri: No, dude. Mission. He’s going to say mission. I could bet anything he’s going to say the mission.
Jamie Siminoff: Money. No, in 2023 I ended up stepping down. I’d taken the company and almost 10xed it from when we got to Amazon. I brought it to profitability. I felt like I had delivered the package. I’m like, “Here it is.”
Sam Parr: It’s pretty amazing. So you grew it to $4 billion in revenue?
Jamie Siminoff: Around there, yeah.
Sam Parr: Oh my gosh, that’s wild.
Jamie Siminoff: The thing just kept growing. It’s just insane. I finally was just like, “I am feeling super burnt out on the whole thing.” I stepped back and I realized I missed Ring. I missed the mission. I missed what we’re building. I’m an inventor at heart and being at Amazon, you can invent at scale. For an inventor, the best thing is to see your invention out there.
Sam Parr: It’s pretty amazing because most inventors—there are many inventors that are successful, like Dyson or Edison, maybe Musk—but typically the stereotype of an inventor is someone who’s got two different matching socks and they don’t know how to do anything other than invent. They’re a little bit messy. But it sounds like you actually knew how to operate.
Jamie Siminoff: I would say I’ve used invention around operation, but I don’t operate in a normal way. I’ve never had a staff meeting. Everyone’s always like, “What day do you do your staff meeting on?” I’m like, “None.” Because I’ve never had one. We never had an all-hands meeting at the company. You do things when you need to. I don’t have those processes of how to run a business.
Sam Parr: Dude, you are exactly like Shaan. 100%.
Shaan Puri: Who?
Sam Parr: Elan Lee from the card game Exploding Kittens. He had the exact same mentality where he was like, “Yeah, we don’t do this at the company,” whereas Shaan and I were like, “Wait, but I thought everyone had to do all-hands.”
Jamie Siminoff: I thought about the reason why and we just invented a different way to do it. If you can turn—again, it’s still inventing. Just because it’s not a physical product or just because it’s internal doesn’t mean it’s not an invention. I love that you can use invention across the board, especially how you build a business.
Dyson is my mentor—the mentor I don’t know. Look at what Dyson’s been able to do by having built a great business. If he hadn’t built a great business, he’d just be a guy in a barn somewhere in Oxfordshire. Instead, he’s able to build all this crazy good stuff and have this company. I felt like the business was something you needed in order to be able to get your inventions out there bigger. That’s what Ring has been, and being at Amazon just thousand-xed that.
The Inflection Point [00:22:00]
Sam Parr: Was there a moment in those early days for Ring where it went from not working to it’s a thing? An inflection point? Or did it take off right away?
Jamie Siminoff: Looking back, it probably took off more than I thought because being inside of it, you’re dealing with the problems. You don’t really see it as easily. When I wrote the book, I was able to go back and think about all of what was happening and look at it in a different light.
It was 2016. My wife was out trick-or-treating. I was away on something and that was the year she called and said, “Every house has a Ring. This is insane.” You really felt it because they’re literally trick-or-treating and they’re hitting the Ring at every house.
Sam Parr: That’s got to be one of the most proud moments ever.
Jamie Siminoff: Early on, we would literally drive around and yell when we saw a Ring on a house. We kind of had to stop the “Ring game” because you just became yelling “Ring” the whole time. As an inventor, I never felt like it was successful until we got the wire, just because I felt like it could blow up. But I did feel like I had created something meaningful and had that satisfaction just by seeing these on everyone’s front door and the stories they created—stopping a crime, doing whatever. That was amazing.
Shaan Puri: I’m curious about when the wire hits. We’ve asked a bunch of people about this because it’s a moment you look forward to as a founder, but it’s hard to actually get there. Some guys say when the wire hit, they went to the ATM the next five days just to print the balance. Some people feel lost right afterwards. Wire hits—where were you and what was going through your mind?
Jamie Siminoff: I booked this company TaskUs—it’s a great public company now. The founders are friends from Santa Monica that I had known. They asked me to speak at their customer conference six months earlier. It was in New York in April of 2018. Because of how everything happens—you sell, then the government has to inspect it, then they have to file stuff—the actual wire date is not like any of those dates. It’s kind of a random time when it just comes.
I’m at this event speaking in New York and I’m sitting there and I’m like, “I’m sorry everyone, my phone’s out. I can barely even talk. I’m just going to keep refreshing this because the wire is supposed to come in.” Everyone knew I had sold. I’m like, “The wire hasn’t come in yet but it’s supposed to come in right now.” I’m like, “Sorry, I keep checking Wells Fargo.”
Shaan Puri: You’re on stage like, “Look, I know I was talking about customer service, but today I’m going to give a talk on how to get rich.”
Jamie Siminoff: I’m like, “Money doesn’t matter to me, it’s all about mission, but hold on for the next hour.” Literally, it comes in and there’s just commas and commas and commas. How many commas could this be? It’s a run-on sentence. I just—it was the best. Especially since I had just gone through the most traumatic thing ever. From a money side, if Ring had exploded at that point, it would have been really impactful to my family.
Sam Parr: Were you just a $150,000 to $250,000 a year salaried person?
Jamie Siminoff: Yeah, I was at $150,000 at that point. I prided myself—and looking back, this was a real mistake—on being the least paid executive.
Sam Parr: That makes you desperate. I did the same thing on a much smaller scale, but it made me desperate.
Jamie Siminoff: That’s exactly right. Here’s the other problem: when you’re making that kind of money and you’re at a company that’s doing $480 million, people say, “Hey, come to this charity event. Oh, it’s only $10,000 a table.” You kind of have to take part in some of this stuff, but you don’t actually have the money. You’re spending even more than you would making that salary regardless.
I was basically at zero dollars. I wasn’t in debt, but I didn’t have a nest egg. If Ring all of a sudden went away, all my future money was in Ring.
Shaan Puri: I love how honest you are. Most people, the more successful they get, they try to either downplay it or they’re just less honest. This is why when I called you, I was like, “That dude’s happy.” It’s not like you’re some yogi or a monk who’s at peace. But you seem free. I think that’s something that we all hope success gives us, but it’s actually not the success that gives you that. You have to decide how you’re going to be.
Jamie Siminoff: When you see what the other side is that clearly, I remember how lucky I am every day. Money gives you the freedom to do what you want. I get to wake up and work on things that I want to work on and impact things that I want to impact and be with my son and take him on college tours. I get to do things because of that. Overall, that is very happy.
The “Problem First” Approach [00:28:00]
Shaan Puri: I want to take the mindset that you used to build Ring and break that down, then see what other ideas might fit that. One of them you told me was, “Rule number one: I like to start with the problem, not the solution or the technology.” What did that mean for Ring, and what’s another example of an idea where you could take that problem-first approach?
Jamie Siminoff: Ring was: I was in my garage and I couldn’t hear the doorbell. What do you need to do? You need to hear the doorbell. Now, when you find that problem, it turns out a lot of times new technology can help impact it. Smartphones are coming out, those have screens. There’s Wi-Fi now in homes. Technology can assist the problem.
The issue is most founders will say, “I found this new chip that’s out there. What can we do with this?” They don’t find a real problem. They just have a technology looking for a problem. I like to start with something that is a true problem, and then it doesn’t matter what the tech is.
That’s part of what built Ring into what it is today. By being on a mission to make neighborhoods safer, we don’t follow any technology. We’re not a camera company. We’re not an alarm company. We’re not a social network company. We are a “making neighborhoods safer” company, which means regardless of what comes out, it doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s a steam engine in the middle of the neighborhood and that’s going to make things safer, sure, I don’t care.
Shaan Puri: If I’m you and I’m like, “Oh, I was in the garage, I couldn’t hear the doorbell,” there’s a part of me, the inner critic, that would have been like, “This is too small. That doesn’t sound like a big fancy idea.” Did you do napkin math on how many doorbells you could sell? Or do you just not care about market size?
Jamie Siminoff: There’s a guy who’s somewhat successful who said to me—it was the most insulting thing almost anyone could ever say—right when I’m doing this, he put his arm on my shoulder and said, “I love you, man, because you just like to work on these little things and it’s so cute and fun to see.” I was like, “Oh my god.”
When you’re finding these things, if it were obvious that they were huge problems, someone would be doing it. You have to find these problems that are not obviously huge. With the doorbell, it was a small thing because people were like, “$200 doorbell? Doorbells are $10.” But if you really looked at it and zoomed out, everyone has a doorbell on their house across the world.
Sam Parr: Was Nest popular at this point?
Jamie Siminoff: Nest was popular as a thermostat. They were just selling or had sold to Google. Dropcam was the Wi-Fi camera that was out there doing well, and Tony Fadell ended up buying that at Google to bring into Nest.
Sam Parr: So maybe there was some inspiration where it’s like, okay, not the same thing, but a household item.
Jamie Siminoff: For sure. I was actually super inspired. I have an email to Matt Rogers, the co-founder of Nest. When the Nest came out, I was one of the first customers and I told him, “What you’re doing here super inspires us.”
It is hard to see at the time how big a market is. If it was obvious, everyone would just be like, “Oh, we should just do a doorbell.” No one thought it was going to be huge. My wife was the one who said, “It makes me feel safer at home.” That was when I realized this is more than just scratching my itch in the garage.
I realized the security market had not yet started looking at how you could build and invent products around presence and true crime prevention. The alarm was built in the 1800s and was pretty much the same thing: trigger off of a trip and call a central station. We were like, we could look at this problem differently. That was the superpower. Not just the doorbell, but then we did the floodlight camera, then we did all these things that were unique because we were looking at the problem. Even the Neighbors app, which is a huge social network for crime and safety, came out of looking at the problem and trying to solve it.
The $10 Billion Bug Problem [00:33:15]
Shaan Puri: What’s an example of an idea today where you see a problem and you’re like, “Somebody could go try to solve that”?
Jamie Siminoff: Bugs. I just hate bugs. I’ve never found anyone that likes bugs. It’s amazing that we can launch rockets up in the air and land them on a little barge, but we can’t get rid of freaking flies at my house in Missouri. There have to be simple ways to do this between solar and—there have just got to be ways to look at this problem differently than just hitting it with some toxin that’s going to kill us all as well, or these other products that just don’t work.
Shaan Puri: Is that your current obsession?
Jamie Siminoff: I have realized over time you have to work on one thing. You can’t work on 10 different products. When I meet a founder that’s like, “Oh, I’m doing this and this,” and they’re all different, 99 out of 100 times they’re going to fail because they’re splitting their energy.
Shaan Puri: For the sake of entertainment and teaching our listeners, can we walk through this? Let’s say you’re not at Ring and this is the idea. A lot of people are going to think, “Bugs? Flies? That’s it?” Walk us through why this is a big problem and how you would attack it.
Jamie Siminoff: I would literally stick myself on the farm, get the soldering iron out, and I would just start figuring it out. I’d immerse myself in the problem. Why are bugs going on the horses? What are they actually attracted to? I’d get on ChatGPT and try to figure that out. I’d look at everything and simplify. How do I go from a first principles approach? What is the way to just get rid of these things at scale? How could you do it inexpensively?
My feeling is it has something to do with solar and either some screw mechanism or suction because it’s a mass volume problem. I keep thinking of these little stations that you just put all over your property and they’re just continually collecting. I wouldn’t do research. I wouldn’t ask friends if it’s going to be a big business. I wouldn’t spend time on any of that stuff. I would be out there with solar panels and Dyson vacuum cleaners hooked up to lights and tubes.
Shaan Puri: Sam, have you seen Julian’s obsession with bugs? We have this friend named Julian who moves to Hawaii, buys a ranch, and starts building a home. He’s got this bug problem. He was specifically focused on mosquitoes. He realized the problem is we try to kill the mosquito, but you need to kill the eggs. If you don’t kill the eggs, for every one mosquito you’re killing, there are a hundred more coming out.
He realized they lay their eggs in stale water. So he has this thing—it’s just a bucket with water and then you put this thing in the water that kills the eggs when they try to lay them there. It stops the cycle. He was so pumped. This thing has 11,000 bookmarks on a single tweet, which shows a lot of people have this same itch and don’t have a good solution.
Jamie Siminoff: Is there a $5 or $10 billion company hiding in the bug space? Probably. It’s global. They’re everywhere. It’s also an issue on health. Mosquitoes and flies cause health issues. If you can figure something out, it actually has real impact.
Shaan Puri: It also seems like there might be a branding thing that you did well with Ring that could be applicable in the bug space. I don’t know what all the big bug companies are, but I know Raid. They all literally look and sound like killing with toxin. The way that Celsius and Alani Nu and Prime came out—they’re just energy drinks but with a different vibe.
Jamie Siminoff: That’s a good point. There is probably a new brand in this that stands for something else. It’s not “environmentally safe” because I’m some eco-warrior; it’s because you don’t want to spray junk all over your house. You live in that. We do these bug bombs and stuff—there’s no way those are good for you.
Shaan Puri: I thought the “Monster Energy Drink mosquito spray” was a pretty good description. Isn’t that what the can looks like? I wish someone would go do it. Imagine in five years someone comes back and says, “I was listening to this, I got inspired, and I built a $5 billion business out of it.” That would be the coolest thing ever.
Sam Parr: Raid—like we’re at war. We’re going to go to battle. The thing about these weapons is if you don’t aim them in the right direction, there might be a self-inflicted wound. You know it’s bad when you say the name and I can taste it. I can taste what that is like because that toxin blasts through your skin.
Shaan Puri: My wife hates that stuff because we have a dog and a baby. She’s like, “Look, we can’t just spray this stuff all over. It’s too risky.”
Sam Parr: Well, you know how it is when there’s a bug. It’s like that one episode of Breaking Bad where there’s a fly in his lab. That was me with a bug the other day in my house. I was like, “Okay, fine. Mission.” I’m suited up in a hazmat just going to war. You get carried away.
The Snowball Philosophy [00:39:45]
Jamie Siminoff: One of the things I said was I called myself a snowball. The snowball would be: I hate these flies. The snowball starts going down the hill and then I’m just taking stuff and soldering it together. It’s gathering momentum. Then it hits something and you lose a little bit off the snowball, but it keeps going. You just roll down the hill.
By the way, some snowballs hit a tree and just explode. That could be the fly thing—you get to a point where you just can’t figure it out. That totally happens. If you can see the finish line when you start, it’s usually not a good thing. You’re not inventing or changing the world typically if it’s that clear how to get from start to finish. I just kind of feel like I roll down the hill and gather. You hope you don’t hit a tree and as you get to the bottom of the hill, you hope you’re a bigger snowball that’s hopefully good for the world.
Shaan Puri: When we got bought by Twitch, Emmett Shear, the founder—he’s this great entrepreneur. I really wanted to learn from Emmett while I was there. I asked him, “In the early days of Twitch, did you ever send investor updates?” He sent me this update from 10 years ago. They were doing a pretty unproven thing—video game streaming wasn’t clearly going to be a big market—but he felt a sense of momentum.
One of the investor updates was titled, “We were a steamroller going through a field full of flowers.” He was saying they had gotten 150 new streamers that week. He was taking a lot of pride in the small stage because if you just keep looking at the small stage and poo-pooing it, you never build up the momentum.
The second thing he said was, “I really want to try to get into this adjacent space.” I asked why, since there was so much room to run with game streaming. He said, “You never want to see the finish line. I don’t want to be able to see the horizon. Even if that’s still five years away, I need to do something that’s going to push the horizon out further so that we have more room to run.” I’d never thought of it like that, but as you play at scale, that’s an important thing.
Jamie Siminoff: I always think of goals as ceilings. Hitting a goal perfectly probably means the goal wasn’t set right. You want to have these directional goals—things that you could try to achieve that are tangible but in some ways unachievable so that you’re always trying harder. It’s the carrot on the stick where you can never get the carrot, but you keep going for it.
Influences and the Walt Disney Biography [00:43:00]
Sam Parr: You have a life philosophy and a life outlook that’s very different from mine, but frankly, I’m envious of how you think about things. You start with a problem and you’re an inventor, which sounds basic, but the way that you do it is quite nice. You have a really good attitude. What people or what books do you think have influenced you? If Shaan and I or one of our listeners wanted to develop this Jamie mindset, besides your book—and shout out your book…
Jamie Siminoff: Yeah, thank you. I would of course read Ding-Dong by Jamie Siminoff. I think that’s the how-to guide of business. Great title, by the way. Thank you.
In all seriousness, the book that stands out the most for me is the Walt Disney biography. If you want to read this, get ready. You better clear your calendar because the audio book is like 24 hours. Whoever did that audio book died afterwards. Of all the people that I’ve talked to and all the biographies that I’ve listened to, the Walt Disney biography might be the most cited version I’ve ever heard.
Walt was so maniacal about every detail of every experience. When you read this book, you realize that he was tortured. He could never achieve what he wanted to, which was absolute perfection. When a movie would come out—the thing that I took out the most from his book was every movie that would come out, because he was pushing animation technology ahead—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs comes out, he’s sitting in the theater in the back, everyone’s watching it, literally mind-blowing. But because he’s already working on the next movie and the next iteration of animation, he knows that movie is not as good as the next one’s going to be. He’s literally crying in the back of the theater that he’s showing such a bad product to people because it could be so much better. All he wants to show them is the next one.
I thought that’s the struggle of a true inventor and entrepreneur and product person. Everything I put out, I’m mad because I know I can be better. That constant drive is how you drive to be the best. You look at some of the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs out there, you see that engine that just can’t stop.
Shaan Puri: You seem a lot happier than him, which is a good attribute to also have.
Jamie Siminoff: It’s not terrible.
Hiring the “Tom Bradies” [00:46:15]
Shaan Puri: Another one of your philosophies as an entrepreneur that I really liked was this idea of Tom Brady. I’ve already used it twice in my thinking since we talked a week ago. Could you explain the Tom Brady hiring thing?
Jamie Siminoff: Every team trades the first trade pick for this and they’re always trying to get the first pick of the draft. But every team had the chance to get Tom Brady multiple times. It’s actually insane. He was the 199th draft pick. Everybody had the chance to get Tom Brady.
While everyone’s focused on the top 10 draft picks of that year—who are probably unknown to us today—Tom Brady is one of the greatest athletes of all time. To me, as a business, you have to find the Tom Bradies. They’re actually out there for you. Everybody has access to the Tom Brady of your business area. How do you find them? How do you incentivize them? How do you let them become the Tom Brady?
I meet with founders who are like, “Oh, I’m trying to get the person from this company.” That’s the number one draft pick and you’re going to pay too much and honestly, they’re probably not going to be known in 10 years.
Shaan Puri: How? Lots of people have different methods for finding great people.
Jamie Siminoff: My thing is hire fast, fire faster. The mission really helps. You bring someone in—the interview is basically: do you have the skills to do the basic job? There’s a light bar, but above that is just: are you passionate? Do you want to work on this problem with us? Do you want to wake up in the morning excited about this problem?
If you’re passionate and you have the minimum skill set, we’ll let you try. Go out there and throw the ball, see how you do. You give them massive autonomy in their area. Give them the ability to succeed or fail. A lot of companies wrap you in soft—they don’t want you to fail, so they stop you from succeeding. They’re so worried that maybe you’re over your head. Let Tom Brady be Tom Brady. Let him throw the ball. When you let those people do it, it’s incredible.
In the process, you’re going to have people that are not able to succeed at those jobs and you move on. You can be compassionate in that.
Shaan Puri: How fast do you fire? When people say “hire fast, fire fast,” that’s a little bit vague.
Jamie Siminoff: Back in the startup days, I’d say three to six months. You certainly don’t want to—it’s not like the first day someone comes in you say, “Okay, you’re bad.” It takes someone a little bit of time to get their feet wet. But you want to be pretty quick. It’s very rare if you talk to almost any entrepreneur that they say, “I wish I’d waited longer to fire someone.” It’s always, “I wish I’d done it sooner.”
Shaan Puri: So three to six months. What about hiring?
Jamie Siminoff: Hiring is on the spot. With Amazon, it’s a little bit different now. But Mimi, who is my Chief Revenue Officer today—she cold emailed me and said, “I worked at Dyson. I now work at Sonos. I see what you guys are doing. I’m in the neighborhood. I’d love to stop by.”
She sits down with Don and me. Don runs our sales. She starts talking. I look at Don, Don looks at me. I said, “We should just hire her, right?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Okay, you’re hired.” She’s like, “Are you two jokers serious? I was just coming to talk to you.” I’m like, “Do you not want to work here?” She’s like, “No, I want to work here.” I’m like, “Well, then just come in to work here.” She’s like, “What am I doing?” I’m like, “I don’t know. You just said you seem to know all these problems we have, so go fix them. Why don’t you just take whatever that is, make that job title, and go do it?” And she’s our Chief Revenue Officer today.
The “Too Hard” Pile [00:51:00]
Shaan Puri: Have you ever heard Warren Buffett describe his thing with people and the “Too Hard” pile? This guy came on the podcast, Mohnish Pabrai, and he described buying a charity lunch from Buffett for $650,000. He asked Warren, “You seem to be a really good judge of people. You’ve hired some pretty great people and you’ve avoided doing the wrong acquisitions. What’s the secret?”
Warren Buffett goes, “No, I don’t think I’m that good at people. I think what I do is I’m a very harsh grader.” He said the cost of saying no to a good person is not that consequential. But if he says yes to too many people who happen to be really bad, that becomes very costly and hard to unwind.
He goes, “If I was at a dinner party and there were 100 guests and you let me spend five minutes with each person, I could tell you these five, no doubt, are fantastic. These five, definitely stay away. Then there are 90 people who I don’t know; I can’t tell in five minutes. They all go in what I call the ‘Too Hard’ pile.” He goes, “A lot of life just works by putting everything else in the ‘Too Hard’ pile and just focusing on the five things that you were pretty clear about in a very small amount of time. Everybody wastes their time trying to get clarity on that 90%.”
Jamie Siminoff: My method on hiring is: I’m aware that I’m not that good at figuring out who’s in that pile always. If I’m wrong, I’m just going to be very quick to pull the trigger. By the way, you can also be wrong pulling the trigger. If you’re pulling the trigger after three to six months, you could be wrong.
There are lots of people who didn’t fit our culture who went on to do incredible things and are incredibly successful. It’s not that failing at Ring was failing in life. You just didn’t fit what we were doing. We are a unique lock and you want a unique key to work in that lock. I didn’t fire them being like, “You’re terrible, get out of here.” It was like, “It just doesn’t—we’re not working out together.” I would feel bad for every single one of them that they have to go back to their family. That did weigh on me, but I also wanted the business to have clarity and to move fast. The wrong people really could be bad.
The Grind and Luck [00:54:00]
Sam Parr: Can I ask you about one thing? You said, “I just don’t know how to stop, and sometimes it’s not smart and it costs me.”
Jamie Siminoff: This is like the Jerry Maguire moment—you’re going to make me cry, Sam. I think if I look at part of—even that ADT thing—I just keep going. I just don’t stop. Overall, that’s probably—I keep telling young people who ask me what they should do, “Just put yourself in a position where you can just grind.” Just go grind because you just got to get out.
No one knows where the world’s going to go. No one knows what’s happening. You can’t control the world. Everyone acts as if they can. Luck has to be your co-pilot. So just go out there and just keep grinding. A lot of those times when you’re grinding, it’s hard because when you can’t actually see where it’s getting you, you talk to entrepreneurs that have already made it. Someone will say to me, “So it’s kind of like you knew when you started that you had seven years.” No, you don’t ever know that it’s going to be successful.
The grinding thing is underestimated—how hard that is to keep grinding because you don’t see where it’s going. You need sometimes to have these weird other factors happen that are outside of your control to make your success happen. Just like Instagram coming out while we’re building a camera at your front door—that superpowered our message. I didn’t build Instagram. I didn’t know it was coming, but I kept grinding on my side and got lucky on some of these other things.
Pre-Awareness and Last Mile Marketing [00:56:30]
Shaan Puri: One of the things I like that you told me was you look for products where 90% of the marketing is already done. I called it “last mile marketing.” You were describing how this worked in your favor at Ring and how sometimes an entrepreneur can go wrong if you really need to educate the market about something completely from scratch.
Jamie Siminoff: I would call it pre-awareness. If you can try to give a little bit of invention and differentiation to something that has pre-awareness, it’s incredible. There’s a cost to a new-to-world product. The cost to tell someone about it is incredibly expensive. If I have to tell you about some product and everything I have to tell you about it is new to the world, it’s very hard for you to understand it.
Go to the film business. When it’s a completely new film, it costs more to market it than Top Gun 2 because with Top Gun 2, you know everything. You know Top Gun, you know Tom Cruise. There’s so much pre-awareness in that.
Putting a camera on a doorbell—I sort of got lucky to learn this—everyone knew where the doorbell was mounted. They knew what the doorbell did. They knew the functionality of it. I just added a piece to that. I did the same with a floodlight camera. You knew what a floodlight looked like. You knew where it goes. You know what it does for you. And now you add a camera to it.
Wherever you can use this pre-awareness—like Liquid Death, it’s water. You didn’t have to tell someone what this drink was, but they changed a piece of it. Changing a piece of it, getting your edge on it in something where there’s pre-awareness is a great way to start because you get billions of dollars of advertising value from the doorbell just being known for the last hundred years.
Revitalizing La Belle, Missouri [00:59:00]
Shaan Puri: I told everyone that we give a list of ideas. You have one on here that was probably one of the most eye-catching things I’ve ever read. You bought a town in Missouri. Is that right?
Jamie Siminoff: I went to a town in Missouri. A lot of these small towns now, if you go out into the Midwest, between the opioid issues, industrial farming—these towns have just been pummeled. This town, La Belle, Missouri, when I went there, was in pretty tough shape.
Sam Parr: You’re actually the second guest that we’ve had that has bought a town in Missouri. The first is Al Doan. He and his mom own a knitting company—Missouri Star Quilt Company.
Jamie Siminoff: I totally know that town. That’s amazing.
Sam Parr: Al and his mom started it. It’s a quilting company and he has bought a town in Missouri and he calls it Disneyland but for quilters.
Jamie Siminoff: It has become the mecca. People go there. It’s amazing. I do want to talk to him at some point because he’s done some amazing stuff. What I tried to do was a little different. They’ve made it an incredible destination. My thing was I really just wanted to help bring this town back.
I’m an inventor. I look at things that are not where I believe they should be. The problem is that this cute little town no longer has any business. The sidewalks are broken. People’s perspective had changed.
Sam Parr: How did you show up there, though?
Jamie Siminoff: I invested in a business off of Shark Tank. I went back on Shark Tank as a shark and invested in a business called Moink. This woman, Lucinda Coursey, is from La Belle, Missouri. She has this direct-to-consumer meat company where we buy from small farmers and send it out. Very missionary, really cool little business.
I go there and visit with my family and I just fall in love with the place. My son’s running around on hay bales. He doesn’t even know what his phone is at that point. We’re coming from Los Angeles and it’s just amazing. I ended up buying a little farm there and fixing up the house and getting involved with the community.
The town was really in a tough place. So we started fixing up the sidewalks—the broken windows theory. If you start fixing some stuff up, would other people join in? There was a lot of trash on some lots. People started cleaning up their stuff. We cleaned up the streets and the sidewalks. We then took the building that was broken on the side of the thing and fixed it up and made it into a beautiful coffee shop.
It’s crazy—there was no place within an hour to sit with someone during the day and talk to them about anything except the bar. I like going to a bar, but a bar is not a great place to have a civil discussion about things. The coffee shop is an important fabric of the community. We brought the coffee shop there and it actually became successful. Then we helped fix up the tavern in town and made it the coolest bar ever. It’s farm-to-table with organic grass-fed beef from my ranch. It’s literally the best food you’ll ever have anywhere.
Then a doctor put an office there and a health clinic. The town’s gotten healthier. This is the snowball factor—this incredible flywheel where you get things going and then people take it from there. Someone started building little apartments there. It’s a town of 700. It’s amazing.
Shaan Puri: That’s badass. What do you think makes—like there are all those levers you talked about, the coffee shop, fixing the sidewalks. I imagine sports or church revitalized the community. Was there anything that surprised you?
Jamie Siminoff: What surprised me—or should I say didn’t surprise me—was when I went to it, I thought, “I’ll just buy a town.” I did not. I took part with others in the town to change the perspective. I was a catalyst, but you needed everyone.
Sam Parr: Would you be comfortable revealing how much you had to invest?
Jamie Siminoff: It’s quite a bit, but what really was needed was everyone to join in. It wasn’t the money. When I went there, I saw the town and I thought, “I’ll write a check and I’ll just fix this whole place up.” Then no one would even sell me any properties. Everyone was like, “Ah…”
Then I just started to get involved in the town. I drive my backhoe into town with a Bud Light in the cup holder and talk to everyone. They realize that I’m just one of them and we’re just all friends.
Sam Parr: Like a movie, man. This is the scene where they’re like, “This guy might be all right.”
Jamie Siminoff: Yeah. Because I am. I love sitting out with them at the side of a pickup truck watching the sunset on the farm and having a beer. That’s my happiest place to be. I went out there and I was part of it. That was the other thing—truly being part of it. It wasn’t the money; it was showing that support.
Then another guy in town’s like, “I’m going to help fix this up.” And I’m like, “Great.” It’s like what created Ring—a thousand things that we did. It’s not one thing. I am surprised the coffee shop makes money. I thought it would lose money. But it’s a long thing. It’s been seven years that I’ve been working on this now. We’re now turning the corner, but it’s probably another seven years to get it really where you’d hope it to be because you can’t just do it all at once.
Legacy and Making the World Better [01:06:00]
Sam Parr: Every four months on this podcast, here’s what happens. You see Shaan and I sit on our hands like this and we just stare at you because you got us.
Jamie Siminoff: If you guys are in, let’s do a podcast from La Belle, Missouri. Sam, you can go visit home and then come up.
Sam Parr: I’m in for that. I’m in on Jamie. I think it’s so cool. Even the way we said it was wrong. It’s not that you bought a town. You invested time and energy and money into a town. You invested a piece of soul into it. Some places just need a little bit of that CPR just to bring them back to life.
Jamie Siminoff: A catalyst. I was a catalyst, but it takes a team. It takes everyone being on board. All these things are the same thing. It’s not just getting venture capital money and you just make it. It’s hard to build something great.
Shaan Puri: The TripAdvisor page is pretty cool. You guys name stuff really well. The Milkweed Inn, the Tick Tock Motel, Tippy’s Bar and Grill, Stanley’s Diner. I want to stay and eat at all those places.
Sam Parr: I think in the idea of legacy—I don’t like the idea of legacy. I think legacy is just an ego thing. But we do get remembered for certain things by others, and it’s not always what we expected. What you’re doing here is really cool. If you were on a TED Talk, I’d actually want to hear this story more than the Ring story. It’s such a cool life resume win. I’m sure it’s been very satisfying and fulfilling in a way that just doing another company or hitting another quarterly sales goal would never do for you at this stage. We’re in the game of entrepreneurship initially for the success and to satisfy some insecurity and get financial independence, but then why do you stay in the game? It’s because it’s fun to play and these projects are just vehicles. You’re there to go for a ride and grow a little bit.
Jamie Siminoff: Entrepreneurs should be making the world better. Whether it’s on a big scale or a small scale, we should just be working to do that.
Shaan Puri: Is this going to be a second act for you? We have to figure out how the story ends and hopefully there’s a good fairy tale ending where the town thrives, but is there a book here? Is there a movie here? This seems like a pretty funny and interesting tale.
Jamie Siminoff: Maybe. I just wish more people would go do this. If all the people that have learned so much could use their brains and a little bit of their capital to do this, we would solve so many problems because it is going to the root of the problem. We always treat the output of the problems. We have hospitals that treat people that have had sugar all their lives, but we don’t stop people from eating sugar. We try to tell them not to eat sugar, but we actually don’t do things to make sure that they understand why. If you look at this area now, it’s healthier. How do you figure out the root of problems and fix it? La Belle is just one of 5,000 towns in the US that have the same thing. If you grow up like that, there are going to be societal issues that come from leaving areas behind.
Sam Parr: I’m in New York City right now. I’m from Missouri, but I’m in New York City right now and there’s the Langone Hospital nearby. The guy who started Home Depot probably donated a billion dollars and started this hospital. But four blocks away, there’s this other hospital, this other hospital, this other hospital—all rich guys. That’s wonderful, but what is not talked about is middle America. Instead of donating to different countries, it seems like a really awesome way to give directly to the recipients, but also the “teaching them how to fish” idea. It’s our town, it’s your town, and I’m just here as a part of it. That snowballs into something bigger. Every rich entrepreneur wants to do dope stuff. They do want legacy. This seems like a really great option.
Jamie Siminoff: I think it is. It’s where you can also use your superpower of what you’ve learned. You can actually impart your knowledge. It’s not just money. Money obviously does help, but you need a little bit of that spark to help. It’s actually more about using your brain and helping. And by the way, what I’ve learned from being there is incredible. We just need to share more. For a lot of the tech guys, it’s cool to be in politics right now, and that is not my personal inspiration. I hear a story like this and I’m like, man, that sounds so much more helpful and very fascinating.
Shaan Puri: Very cool, Jamie. I appreciate you coming on and telling the story. Shout out the book. It just came out two days ago. People should read it to get the full story. What’s it called? Where do people get it?
Jamie Siminoff: It’s Ding-Dong: How a Shark Tank Reject Went to Everyone’s Front Door. It’s available on Amazon.com.
Sam Parr: Man, you’re the best. Shaan and I have a bunch of favorite people—Jesse Itzler, Rob Dyrdek—you have just made our Mount Rushmore. Thank you for doing this.
Jamie Siminoff: Thank you. I’ll see you in Missouri. We’ll be doing a follow-up podcast from there.
Sam Parr: I’m in. I don’t know about Shaan, but I’m in.
Shaan Puri: I’m in. How could you say no after such a great story? Well, thanks for doing it. All right, that’s the pod.