The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 30 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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.”
Siminoff: Outsourcing a business plan proves a founder misunderstands their business
“If you needed a kid to write your business plan, it means you didn't understand your business.”
Siminoff: Enterprise deals with large companies are fatal for early startups
“Trying to do deals with big companies is, it's almost guaranteed to be a kiss of death because they just take so much time and so much energy out of you. And it's so hard to get something to happen there.”
Siminoff: Entrepreneurs build businesses, whereas inventors just want to create products
“Entrepreneurs want to build a business. An inventor wants to literally invent a product or service to just get it out there.”
Siminoff: Kickstarter kicked hardware creators off its platform in 2012
“Kickstarter kicked off all the hardware people at this point, so this is 2012.”
Siminoff: Ring launched in October 2014 with zero dollars in the bank
“We launched ring in October of 2014, like, you know, basically October first, 2014, and we were zero dollars in the bank account the day we launched.”
Siminoff: A big security company probably could have unseated Ring early on
“If one of the, if someone that big had come out with something much earlier, could they have unseated us? Probably.”
Siminoff: Amazon is the only tech giant that elevates acquired companies
“Amazon was the only large company that I saw or felt
When they bought companies truly like brought it to the next level. Like I, you know, with audible and IMDB and Zappos and I mean, you look at Twitch, like you look at all the, they've just kept founders and…”
Siminoff: Ring Receives Over 1 Million Missing Pet Reports Annually
“Which we get over one million people tell us that their pet is missing in a neighborhood a year.”
Siminoff: Early Ring Devices Were Bricked by Unmodifiable Firmware
“Most of our units are now in the field with customers that not only do they not work, but we can't change that software on them. So they're basically bricks.”
Siminoff: Prepped 300 questions and watched every Shark Tank episode
“I took Shark Tank seriously. Like, I mean, and when I mean seriously, I had 300 questions that I thought that they would do. I watched every single Shark Tank episode multiple times that had been on to that point.”
Siminoff: Shark Tank appearance drove millions in DoorBot sales
“And so we got, in the end, it was millions of dollars of sales from being on Shark Tank,”
Siminoff: DoorBot's first factory run required 20,000 units
“I had to order, my first order was 20,000 devices, which was a lot then because otherwise they wouldn't even do it.”
Siminoff: Early DoorBot microchips could not be updated after factory flashing
“So it turned out, and we learned this on Christmas Eve Eve, that you can't rewrite the software on this chip. It just doesn't, like, the chip only takes it once at the factory, and then it never allows it to be rewritten again.”
Siminoff: DoorBot shipped over 5,000 defective doorbells ahead of Christmas 2013
“I think it was like, it was over 5000.”
Siminoff: Ring lost money on most doorbells sold in 2015
“So we were not. So the rings were very expensive, the first ones that came in. Most of the ones that we sold, we were losing some money on.”
Siminoff: Ring is the largest company to ever appear on Shark Tank
“I am really proud to have built the largest company ever to appear on Shark Tank.”
Siminoff prints his personal email on every Ring box and responds
“My email's still on every box. I still respond to them.”
Siminoff's Shark Tank clips have generated over 100M social media views
“On, like, TikTok and Instagram, on the reels, people keep cutting up my shark tank, and then putting, like, the story, like, in, like, in a reel. It's over, like, a hundred million views, like, way over a hundred.”
Siminoff: PhoneTag sale returned 100% of capital to investors
“I mean, something I've always been sensitive to is, like, the fiduciary responsibility to investors, and so I did get every dollar back to every investor.”
Siminoff: Ring originated because garage lacked cell signal and doorbell range
“My phone didn't get signal in the garage, and the doorbells, those wireless ones, wouldn't reach to the garage, just, like, through, they wouldn't go through all the walls or whatever, and my, the garage was like a little separate unit, like, going to a back a…”