Ring's $100M Funding Round Was Pulled Days Before Closing Over Lawsuit
Jamie Siminoff · Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff: The $1BN Amazon Acquisition; How Richard Branson Invested | 20VC #984 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 3, 2023 · at 15:32
Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring, reveals a severe near-death crisis where a $100M financing round collapsed right before the holiday season.
0:00 / 0:36exact quote · 36.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We have a round happening, and I get sued by someone who's very large in the business, They get an injunction against the product on me, which, you know, I will not comment on either way. We're, the investor decides, and you know, fair is fair, like a little too risky now, and our hundred million dollar investment gets pulled like days, literally, I mean, we had paper, everything's done, gets pulled like days before the wire, and now, instead of having a hundred million of fresh capital in, We have zero dollars.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jamie Siminoff
Siminoff: VC Overfunding Harmed Entrepreneurs by Pushing Them Toward Wrong Goals
“It over watered the grapes and that was an unfair thing to do to entrepreneurs. It actually hurt the entrepreneurs. It gave too much money to too many people too fast and the wrong goals. And it led people who are great people into the wrong places that it rea…”
Ring Hit -$70M Cash Shortfall by Withholding Payments to Factory Suppliers
“We probably went -50 to seventy million at one point. But that's just because we just didn't pay the factories.”
Siminoff: Printing My Personal Email on Ring Boxes Actually Scaled
“Putting the email in the box is the one thing that actually did scale at Ring.”
Siminoff Rejected a Prominent VC Firm for Ignoring Ring's Mission
“Very prominent VC. We sell comes to me and says like, when you pitched me, you totally screwed up. We never saw how good the business was. We totally would have invested. And I said, no, I was interviewing you. And you didn't pass the mission test.”
Jamie Simenoff: Early founders must project extreme ambition over raw vulnerability
“I think that's part of entrepreneurship, is you just, you gotta make it up, because when you're in your garage building a doorbell, if you really told people what you really felt and where you were at, you probably would never make it, and so you have to say, …”