Jamie Siminoff
Founder & Chief Inventor, Ring. On 3 shows, 4 appearances, plus 2 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@JamieSiminoff ↗ring.com ↗
Jamie Siminoff is the creator of the Wi-Fi video doorbell and founder of Ring. After Ring was acquired by Amazon for over $1 billion, he served as Chief Inventor and later returned as Vice President of Product.
3shows
4appearances
50statements
5resolved
5supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
28said about them ↓ Everything Jamie Siminoff said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
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, …”
Ring's $100M Funding Round Was Pulled Days Before Closing Over Lawsuit
“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 t…”
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.”
Siminoff: Raising Capital Means Founders Must Return 5x to 10x the Amount
“Whatever the amount is, times it by five or 10, because that's what they want back. So that's really what you're taking. If you take a million dollars, you're really taking ten million because you've got to give ten million back. That's what their expectation …”
Startups cannot achieve volume using cost-plus pricing
“You're not gonna get to volume if you just overcharge or charge, you know, kind of cost plus.”
Siminoff Ordered $500M in Ring Inventory on Just $100M in Revenue
“Imagine like we went 3,000,030 1,000,001 70, To almost 500. So when we went from, like, one 70 to 500, I had to order, like, five hundred million dollars of inventory when we were, like, a hundred million dollar business.”
Ring Signed Amazon Acquisition Term Sheet on January 1, 2018
“That was going into the holidays of 2017. We signed the term sheet with Amazon on January first of 2018. So literally like, it was like a, from solving this to selling to Amazon was like 45 days.”
Siminoff: Customer Surveys Are Useless Because They Hide Actionable Product Signals
“I hate surveys by the way, I like, literally, I, in my gut, I hate them. Is like, because they don't tell you anything, they tell like, 95% of people are happy.”
Siminoff: Selling to Amazon or IPO Were Ring's Only Acceptable Exits
“I told my investors, I told Amazon, I was either going to go public or sell to Amazon. Those are my two options. And it was because the only company that I felt would really take the mission Take it and allow us to keep executing on it and stay true to it was …”
Jeff Bezos Emailed Siminoff Post-Acquisition: "Don't Let Us Mess It Up"
“First email I got the day it closed, you know, came from Jeff and said, like, don't let us, you know, mess, mess it up. You know, you, like, you know, like you are in control.”
Siminoff: Amazon Respects Its Acquisitions More Than Any Other Corporate Buyer
“Amazon's had a lot of acquisitions that have been successful, maybe more than anyone. And I think the one thing I would say is that they respect the companies they buy.”
Siminoff: Raising outside capital locks a startup onto inflexible railroad tracks
“Like once you raise money for something, you turn a road into a railroad track. And what I mean by that is you can't turn.”
Siminoff: Hardware startups fail when relying solely on gadget collectors
“The issue is, and I think why a lot of companies have this sort of false positive where they look like they're going to be huge companies early on because their growth is just like astronomical, and then all of a sudden they just go to zero because you can't l…”
Products that do everything fail to sell without a tight focus
“The one thing I worry about when I hear something does everything is that it's hard to sell it. And it's like, even in my own, in my new business, I have that problem of like trying to boil things down to focus it. And it's very hard to do that because a lot o…”
Pre-sales validate demand better than surveys because customers vote with dollars
“And that's, what's just so awesome about presale in general and Kickstarter is that you're truly, you're not serving, you're getting like money votes. And when people vote with their dollars, it's a big, it's very different than when they're voting with like a…”
Consumers buy Boll & Branch for product quality, not company mission
“I think people buy Bull and Branch sheets because they're great sheets.”
Ring originally sold its products below manufacturing cost
“When we came out with it, we were making them for more than we were selling them for.”
Simenoff: Entrepreneurship requires believing in goals far beyond current reality
“A lot of entrepreneurship is like reality distortion. You have to believe in something that's much bigger and crazier than what can actually be accomplished.”
Siminoff: Richard Branson's Investment Did Not Automatically Bring Ring Customers
“I think mostly people want to put a square peg in a round hole. So they want like Richard Branson invested and they like step back and like wait for the customers to come in. And like, that's not gonna happen. Richard Branson doing a blog post saying, I invest…”
Ring Broke QVC's Single-Day Sales Record With $22.6M in One Day
“We broke the record for QVC for the year for sales in a day 22.6 million dollars in a day.”
Siminoff: VC Safety Nets Disappear When Scaling Past 170 Employees
“One 70 to 500, like, they took away the, you know, you're on the tightrope, and all of a sudden you look down, and they're, like, pulling the mats away, like, the safety net is being pulled away, because, and when we did, like, when we had that issue come up, …”
The other half of the tape: Jamie Siminoff's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 25 times in 10 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 8Adam D'Augelli 8Wesley Chan 6Mark Suster 1Harry Stebbings 1
Statements about Jamie Siminoff, by other people (3)
Ring will generate hundreds of millions in revenue in 2016
“He's, you know, going to do, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, if not more this year.”
Exceptional founders focus on removing unnecessary features rather than adding them
“It takes a very, very rare, very smart, very, very sophisticated founder to really start thinking about what should I take out rather than what should I put in.”
Allison Ellsworth is the second Shark Tank contestant to become a Shark
“By the way, Allison is heading back to Shark Tank once again for its new season, but this time she'll be a shark. She's one of just two former contestants to ever appear in that role. The first one was also a guest on this show, Jamie Siminoff of Ring”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 16
How I Built This 9
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2019 9 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jamie's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & Chief Inventor, Ring | 3 | 30 | 100% 4/4 | full record on How I Built This → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Chief Inventor, Ring | 1 +1 | 20 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 BIGDEALLEDGER | Founder & Chief Inventor, Ring | 0 +1 | 0 | — | full record on BigDeal → |