Transcript

[Harry] Jamie, I am so excited for this. I'd obviously heard so many great things from Dave Clark, obviously most prominently, but thank you so much for joining me today, Jamie.

[Jamie] Thank you for having me, Harry.

[Harry] Not at all, but I wanted to start with some context, and we can go in a number of different ways here. I'm going to go in the first way, and then we'll go off schedule a little bit later. What was the aha moment for you when you thought, you know what, I'm going to revolutionize the doorbell? Can you just take me to that moment, Jamie?

[Jamie] Really, it was probably when Amazon bought it in 2018, but if you want to try to go a little early, because it was a slow burn aha. I hacked this thing up. I was in my garage building other stuff, and I literally couldn't hear the doorbell. I had just gotten an iPhone, and it was one of those, I went online and looked to see. I didn't even think I invented it. I wanted to get a Wi-Fi doorbell, and it didn't exist. I was like, oh, let me hack something up, so I literally just hacked this thing up, and then my wife said, this makes me feel safer at home, and I was like, that was part of the aha. It was an iterative aha. It wasn't just like, wow, I invented this. The band plays,

[Harry] and the fireworks went off,

[Jamie] and the fireworks were going off, and they put me on a chair, and took me around the room, and sang. No, none of that happened for a very long time.

[Harry] No bar mitzvah style, it was always a shame. We spoke about this, but I think it's actually really important. I find people are reflections of their histories. You love the show, and you've had it before. What do you think you're running from, Jamie?

[Jamie] I think my happiest thing is when I can use my mind to help people. I'm probably running from, as a kid, I was not the coolest person in school. I had definitely my share of incidents where, looking back, I would have liked to have been the cooler person, but I think the inventor in me, I just see problems everywhere, and I want to solve them. The hardest thing I had to learn was you can't solve every problem for everyone, because then you do nothing. Like, how to focus that energy was what took me a while to learn, and took me until I got older to harness.

[Harry] I feel so sorry for Melissa and your team, because we did so much work on this, but I'm just totally free-wheeling. You mentioned not being necessarily cool as a kid. I wasn't either, and I'm a people pleaser as a result. I desperately seek other people's approval, and always try and please other people. Are you a people pleaser as a result, and I guess what advice would you have for me always looking for people's affirmation?

[Jamie] I always say I don't have an ego, but I certainly like people seeing me successful. Looking back, it's not terrible that people had to send me emails saying, wow, I can't believe where you've gotten to. Again, I don't think that's the reason you should do it, but it doesn't hurt. 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. When you're a kid, and you're in that position, one thing I learned is I moved schools, because I was literally ostracized from my high school. My parents were very nice, because they were middle class, and I went to the private school. They paid for me to go. It was a little bit of a hardship. When I got there, I was just like, I'm going to be the cool kid now, and I just made up this life, because by the way, screw it. Why not? I think that's part of entrepreneurship, is you've got to 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. You have to say, yeah, I'm going to build the biggest security company ever in the history of the world. You've got to be a little crazy. Maybe that's what taught me that.

[Harry] I think in terms of bluntly people seeing you succeed, I think one moment in particular where I'm sure a lot of people mentioned it to you, but was when Richard Branson invested. I heard this was a great story. Obviously, Dave, how did Richard Branson come to invest in Ring?

[Jamie] I'll give you the longer, and feel free to make it as short as you want. A venture capitalist named Wes Chan, who was at Google Ventures, I went up to his house in San Francisco and set up a ring on his house really early. I was trying to get influencers on Ring, so I was literally, I was flying around and setting them up on people's homes. He went to Branson's Island for something, and they're having dinner, and Richard's, what are people seeing? What's cool? He said, look at this. I answered my door from the beach today and told the UPS person where to put the package, and I showed him the video. And Richard's, oh, I want to give this to my friends for the holidays. So I get this email. Wes is like, hey, Richard copied wants to give rings to his friends for the holidays. So at first, I'm like, oh, great. His friend Richard wants to give 20 rings. I'm so swamped. And then I look, and I'm like, oh, wow. This email address looks like it's not Richard. It's Richard. We started going back and forth, and I said, it's going to be great for your friends to get this for the holidays, because it actually makes their homes safer and their neighborhoods. And Richard's like, what do you mean? And then I sent him this link. Our mission was always to make neighborhoods safer. And we had just had our first real big, got a criminal in the act, stopped them, got like the whole thing. So I sent Richard the link. And then he immediately was like, wow, this is amazing. I had no idea. And this was on a Friday. I'm going to have someone there this weekend, because he said, can I invest? I said, well, we were looking at closing a round right now. I don't want to rush you. He said, I'll have someone there this weekend. And so this poor Latif who worked for Richard and the Venture Group shows up on Sunday, not happy. And I see the call of Richard being like, oh, Latif, it's Richard. Like I'm on the island and a doorbell came up and I need you to go to LA and meet with this Jamie. Latif saw like my life, because probably this is just my life.

[Harry] So what happened? So Latif turns up and says, hey, we want to do the deal. Just take me to the moment.

[Jamie] Latif, honestly, I love Latif. He's one of my good friends now to this day, but Latif honestly showed up and was like, I have to check this box for Richard. And so let's do this. And so for the first 15 minutes, I would say it was not the, he was very nice, but I wouldn't say he was leaning in. Two hours later, Latif said, I'm going to see if I can invest also in this personally.

[Harry] I love that. That was hilarious.

[Jamie] To be fair, he did listen from there on. And Richard really became one of the huge steps in the business. Just the credibility that came with Richard coming in and Richard said, I'm investing because this makes neighborhoods safer. That credibility of Richard saying that really turned the whole thing.

[Harry] Can I ask, a lot of people ask, what really is the value of having big names like Richard? Does it really make it worthwhile? When you reflect on that, how would you answer founders who say, when you have Richard Branson, when you have, you name those kind of incredible business moguls, how would you advise them on whether it's worth taking or not?

[Jamie] Mostly people want to put a square peg in a round hole, like Richard Branson invested in this and step back and wait for the customers to come in. That's not going to happen. Richard Branson doing a blog post saying, I invested in this because it makes neighborhoods safer and I'm a missionary investor. And here's this interesting thing about this was one of a thousand things that led to our brand being big. So you had to also play this into a whole, like a rolling thunder of things. It was not just one piece, but it was an important piece. Everyone always asked me, like, I get introduced to someone and they said, what made ring? I'm building this product. What made ring? And I was, it's the mission that made ring. And then the thousand things that we drove to do that. It's because there's literally a thousand things I could talk about.

[Harry] Everyone always wants a silver bullet. It's, hey, what is self-help, but it's made so much fucking money is because three things to lose weight. But my question to you is we all want the silver bullet and we were chatting before the show. And I instantly realized that I have a man crush on you when you said this, cause I said about doing the work behind the scenes for the show and putting in the prep time. And you said about people not necessarily doing the work today. What did you mean by people not doing the work in entrepreneurship and how do you think about that?

[Jamie] It's the silver bullet thing. I go to conferences, it's dirt under your fingernails. I want the people that are missionary, passionate dirt under the fingernails and realize how hard this is going to be. And they're doing it for the right reason, which is to make an impact. The thing they have in their brain, the thing they've felt, the thing they're doing in their gut has to happen. It has to, it doesn't matter. It has to happen. And those are the ones that I believe always make it. And the ones that are like, oh yes, I have this pedigree and this resume. We hired all these great people and we have all this great money. They don't dig down enough to get there. That might've worked a little bit more in 2010 to 2021 or two, but the tide is out now. If you don't know how to drive a bulldozer yourself, I don't know. I think you're in trouble.

[Harry] My worry, Jamie, is we haven't needed to and being very frank and open. Most of my companies still have money till mid 25. They have the same mindset as they did in the last 10 years, but they just have the wrong way to drive it out. And so my question to you is bluntly, what are the signs of those that have the dirt under their fingernails? For you and your meeting founders, when you're meeting potential hires, where are you like, this one's got it?

[Jamie] I've never been good at hiring. I'm great at finding talent. It's like fight club. Like it's the person that you said can't work here, sorry. And then you come the next day that are sitting at the office. You want that person that just, they have to do this. I always say that we want marathoners at Ring. And to me, a marathoner is like doing a marathon is one of the dumbest things you can do. I think I have my marathon. Yeah, that's like my Boston marathon shoes are back there from doing the Boston marathon. It's the dumbest thing you can do, but I want people that do that, which is you train for like a year in the dark, you have to get by 3 a.m. because you do a four hour run before work. It's terrible. Then you go and do this race that no one watches. You're going to finish 20,000th place if you're a normal human and you are so proud of yourself for it. You're just so ecstatic on what you accomplish. I want those people. I want the people that want to accomplish something, not because they want that hot top accolades. They don't want to be showered with stuff. They do it because they need to do it.

[Harry] Do you want to hear something funny, Jamie?

[Jamie] Sure.

[Harry] I finished a marathon an hour ago.

[Jamie] So see, you're crazy. I want you to work with me. There we go. And by the way, what place did you finish?

[Harry] I just did it on my own in London.

[Jamie] Maybe you might be over the top, but you might be changing.

[Harry] The reason people are asking me is the obsession to the extreme is-

[Jamie] You might be. You might be a little far for us, but-

[Harry] Poor Dave has to put up with a lot of shit. We see like the Richard Branson moments and a lot of the incredible moments. There are always near death experiences also. Dave said that I had to ask this one. When we say near death experience for you with Ring, what's the one that's, oh, I remember that one.

[Jamie] We had four or five real run out of money kind of times. Even when we raised our A round, I kept calling True Ventures because it was like the money is supposed to come in. I'm like, hey, just wondering like when the wire's coming in, just had a plan for that. We literally had payroll on Thursday. It's Monday. We're out of money. And they knew it, but they didn't. And I'm trying to like not scare them that we're literally out of money. And so like, just they're like, oh, it's going to come in Wednesday. I'm like, that's great. Okay, cool. Trying to be like super calm voice.

[Harry] No worries if it comes in Wednesday, I'm totally fine.

[Jamie] Wednesday, Thursday we're bankrupt, but Wednesday is totally cool. The worst one though is the company is we're screaming. So we're growing. That's very hard on cash. Growth isn't as good as it is for building value. It's ugly inside. You're hiring, you're thrashing, you're trying to get ahead of yourself, especially in a hardware business. You have to order six to 12 months ahead of you're growing hundreds of percents, like multiple factors. I have to order. We went 3 million, 30 million, 170 to almost 500. So when we went from 170 to 500, I had to order $500 million of inventory when we're a hundred million dollar business. That's an incredible risk to take. So we are in that 170 to 500. We're going into the holidays. 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 I will not comment on either way. The investor decides and fair is fair, a little too risky now, and our a hundred million dollar investment gets pulled days before the wire. And now instead of having a hundred million of fresh capital in, we have zero dollars can't raise and we're heading into the holidays. We have our inventories at the highest level and it is the wheels shot off the bus. We now owed money to our factories, which we couldn't pay, which is the only way we stayed in business was basically just owing money to factories that we didn't pay. So we probably went negative 50 to 70 million at one point, but that's just because we just didn't pay the factories.

[Harry] How do you get through that, Jamie?

[Jamie] So very stressed out. I think one of my talents is when things get to the most extreme, I actually get very calm. I'm not a calm at a normal level. I'm usually a little bit passionate and whatever, but when things go that extreme, I'm actually a pilot. I get my checklist out. The wings could be ripped off the plane and I'm calm and reading the checklist. So I was like, okay, we don't have money. I call the factories and said, basically, we don't have money. You need to ship us product or else we're going to turn this thing off tomorrow. And I'm sorry to do this. And I told the team, I brought everyone under the covers. There was no hiding anything. I brought everyone in and said, here's the situation. Here's where we're at. We need to sell everything we made, we got to sell this holiday. We do everything we can to sell everything we can this holiday. So everyone worked, everyone came together. This is where people are always scared that when you say this, everyone will leave your business. It's exactly the opposite. They literally are arm in arm with you immediately. I'm not like a veteran or anything, but people stick together. And so, especially when there's an outside force that's coming at you. And so we went arm in arm and we freaking sold everything. And then we settled this case and the company, we broke the record for QVC for the year for sales in a day, $22.6 million in a day. I did that literally. I drank 25 Red Bulls. I was on for 12 hours of TV. I almost killed ourselves to sell. I mean, we just did it. What's crazy is that was going into the holidays of 2017, we signed the term sheet with Amazon on January 1st of 2018. So from solving this to selling to Amazon was like 45 days.

[Harry] Wow. Can I ask, you mentioned the skating processes there from 3 to 30, 30 to 170, 170 to 500. When I listened to that, I thought 30 to 170 sounds like the most difficult. It's almost like teenager to adult in transition. Which would you say on reflection was the most difficult transition phase?

[Jamie] They're all difficult because they all have their own issues. As you get bigger, this, the problem of bigger, you go from being from 3 to 30, anything I could solve almost personally, if we made a mistake, the size of the mistake was so small. Even our investors. And I said, Hey, we made a million dollar mistake. They'd be like, Jamie, a million dollar mistake. That's terrible. We'll do a note for a million dollars. Okay, great. 30 to 170, you're sort of in there and you can get people to back you. 170 to 500, they took away the, you're on the tight rope and all of a sudden you look down and they're pulling the mats away. The safety net is being pulled away. And when we had that issue come up, our investors, there was nothing they could do. They couldn't write a hundred million dollar check into a company that had a problem. You couldn't do that. So that was probably as you get bigger, it does get harder because of that. Because literally the actual net numbers are harder.

[Harry] I think what's so fascinating is when I spoke to so many of your investors, they said one of the very iconic and important things about Ring was the brand. You mentioned the $22 million in sales in a day, insane. It made me think, what does truly great brand mean to you, Jamie?

[Jamie] When you walk into a store and you see our logo, you have to feel immediately, I know that whatever's in that box is going to make my neighborhood safer. So you need the brand, as soon as you see it, you have to associate it with something that you know around that product, because that's how much time you have with the customer at point of sale. You have one second.

[Harry] Is that storytelling? What's the difference between brand and storytelling?

[Jamie] I think it's authenticity. It is like a thousand things. Now, when you have a North Star, everything drives to that. So it's how you build the product, how you build the service, my email’s on every box, the sound of it, it's literally the thing you do because it's not that easy to build a brand. If it was, there'd be lots of brands. And I think iconic brands come initially from authenticity though, too. The team has to be authentic behind it. You can't just make up a brand. Maybe you can, but I don't know how you do it.

[Harry] You said about authenticity. You put your email on the side of the box, Jamie. Why?

[Jamie] Originally I was shipping 500 of them. It just felt, put your email on there so people get a hold of you. It was almost like a customer service thing. And then as we grew at every level of growth, someone would come in and say, you have to stop doing this. It's not going to scale. I say that putting the email in the box is the one thing that actually did scale at Ring. And the reason I did is because one is it made the team, my team knows, thousands and thousands of people at Ring, and everyone knows that if someone emails me, I will respond to it and I will act on it. So if you're in customer service, you certainly know that you want to deliver the very best on every call because literally the customer has access to me. Now because of that, it doesn't get that abused, which is surprising. And I think it's because my team does such a good job of being accessible, of helping customers, of being customer first, because they know that this system will work. And then you also get ground truth. One of the biggest issues in business, this goes back to that dirt under the fingernails. We very quickly get into our ivory tower at our big conference rooms and we have big meetings and we go over survey results and we're very proud of ourselves, but we don't get ground truth. I think listening to ground truth directly is one of the most valuable things you can do to continue to grow. And the other CEO that I know who did it was Jeff at Amazon.com.

[Harry] Ground truth. What is ground truth and how do you engage with it without also being a perfectionist or micromanaging?

[Jamie] These are all the balances like never going to extreme. But ground truth, it's listening. And again, you don't want to take one email from one customer. You're not going to just go off and go create, or we're going to build a new product. Someone told me. But when you listen to these things, it's like the Henry Ford, they always say if Henry Ford had asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses. But if you listen to people and you listen, all of our features and all of our stuff comes from just listening. One of the best examples is our car camera. I didn't want to do a car camera because our mission is around making neighborhoods safer. But I kept hearing people talk about issues with their cars in their neighborhoods and what that was. And over time, I'm like, oh, wow, not only am I going to build a car camera, I'm going to build something that's a different car camera. And that's the best one that's ever been built. And we were able to do that by getting the ground truth. If we had been doing surveys, I hate surveys, by the way. In my gut, I hate them. Because they don't tell you anything. 95% of people are happy, 87% who gives a shit.

[Harry] Why do you hate surveys?

[Jamie] They're not useful.

[Harry] So what should we do instead? What's a better way to get?

[Jamie] Listen to your fucking customers.

[Harry] How? Like Twitter?

[Jamie] Yes, Twitter. Stop saying that it's not scalable. Like, everybody says it's not scalable to listen to your customers. The only job you have all day is listening to your customers. Everything else is superfluous. It's like an add-on. It's gravy on the frickin' turkey.

[Harry] To what extent do you let customers guide your product roadmap? Hey, we need this, we need that. How do you determine between, hey, there's enough weight that we should do car cameras?

[Jamie] This is great. So mission. Mission allows you to stay focused. Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Now you have a mission, everyone's focused on it, like our teams are focused on it. Now listen to customers and listen to what they're really saying. When you understand your technology, your capabilities, and then you see what's happening. Again, our drone. The drone happened because people were saying, I want indoor cameras, I don't want indoor cameras. And I'm like, God, that's a weird, so you want an indoor camera? Like when I'm away, I want indoor cameras all over my house. Okay. But when I'm home, I don't want indoor cameras in the house. I'm like, that's tough. And then I'm like, wow, a drone. A drone can fly around the house. There's no autonomous drones. We know how to make, we have LIDAR, all these LIDAR. So we start hacking around and we make this thing that's not a drone. It's an indoor camera that can be anywhere in your house at any angle, anytime, but super privacy protected in terms of when you're there, it's sitting in a shrouded thing and it doesn't do anything.

[Harry] I think one thing that's really fascinating here is competition. You were going up against Tony Fadall and Google in these products. How was that as a competitive match?

[Jamie] I'm literally basically just out of my garage in this tiny little space. There was like chalk lines where the murders were, you know, before we got there, this place was rough when we got to it. This little tiny little garage office in Santa Monica. We're doorbot still, we're not even Ring, we're doorbot and we're trying to build Ring and I'm so tiny. And Tony Fadall is like this just larger than life and nest and he buys drop cam. I would say it was very scary, but the other side was we had such a strong mission. I also had this thing where I always said, if we're not going to make it, I want there to be like a giant hole in the ground where our office was in Santa Monica. We're burning the boats so much that I wanted to be a crater. We're not going to squeak our way out of business. We are going to literally be the greatest bankruptcy of all time. We're going for it. And so we really truly, which is a venture thing is we went for it. If you interviewed any of the people that were in there, they were probably like, yeah, Jamie scared the shit out of us many times.

[Harry] Do you think founders see competition today? Do you think they use competition right? You said about burn the boats. People say kill them with kindness. David Goggins says no, strangle them with your success. Do you know what I mean?

[Jamie] You have to exist for your customer. Mission to me is of one thing. It's probably the strongest north star because if you have that, if you're a missionary, it's amazing if you look at how missionary people are able to defy gravity when they shouldn't be because you believe in something that's bigger than this tactical business because on the tactical business side, we said, oh yeah, we're going to out of our garage in Santa Monica. We should be fine going after nesting Google like in drop cam. It shouldn't be a problem.

[Harry] Would you ever invest in people without a mission? I'm an investor by day. A lot of people who do four by four quadrants and say highest margin couldn't care less.

[Jamie] Business changes, technology changes, chatbot AI comes out. What do you want in your soul to achieve? And if that's something that's interesting to me, then I want to back that. I do like when it benefits society. It doesn't have to. There's people that do lots of things and make money that don't benefit society. I like putting my time, money, energy, brainpower on something that has some benefit to society. That's stuff that if I lose, I still won. Losing trying to help people is still a good thing.

[Harry] But do you think people convey their mission in the right way today? And what I mean by that is I always say if you had a billboard, what would you put on it? 10 words or less. And so few can do that.

[Jamie] So they're scared too for the right reason. I did a triple deck. So when I raised, I had one round that I raised. It was a later round and where I was actually in control. It was like the first time that I was actually like the belle of the ball. People wanted to talk to me for a little bit. And so I went with this triple deck. The first deck was all mission. And when I ended it, it felt like it could have been all that I talked about. And literally there'd be venture capitalists, very prominent ones that would be like, oh, wow, you have a great mission. I'm sure your business sucks. Thanks for coming. And I'd be like, yeah, it sucks. It totally sucks. It's a shit business. And then there'd be these great venture capitalists that would be like, wow, that's so cool. And I'd be like, I totally get how this could lead to all these products. Let me show you. And then deck two was all a product roadmap of what we could build off of this mission. This was very early. And we still were like a few products, not like showing the whole roadmap. Then some people would be like, that's great, but you're probably not selling anything because all you keep talking about is mission and product. And I'd be like, yeah, shit business. And I'd leave. Then for the people that were like, wow, things must be going really great. This is awesome. I love what you're doing. I'd show them the third deck, which was actually our financials, which was pretty damn good at the time from revenue growth, everything else. And the best part about this is very prominent VC we sell comes to me and says, 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

[Harry] because they didn't dig deeper because they didn't get it

[Jamie] No because they were like, so great. You have a mission who gives a shit like, how's the business. I wanted people that cared that they would have been also happy losing if this mission was accomplished.

[Harry] Jamie, I'm going to push back just on one sec.

[Jamie] Let's do it.

[Harry] We meet 30 companies a week. Okay. Everyone wants to change an industry. Some are sincere. Some aren't sincere. You learn over time. You meet once. You've never met before. It's one intro. You come in. It's an hour at max. It's really fricking hard to tell when you're meeting 30 companies, your wife's kicked you off out of the bedroom because you snore, your kid's not happy at school. And you know what? Maybe they're just like, ah, this is my 29th mission of the week. Where are the fucking sales?

[Jamie] So I'll flip it around that I meet 50 of you a week and everyone says they care about mission. Who cares about it enough to ask the right questions? Who cares about it enough to realize that this mission could actually lead to something that's so special? Who fits that? Yes, of course, like anything, you're going to miss someone. But I think we were able to put together an investor group that when we did hit the wall, when I hit that wall, my investor, I'll never forget Mood from, from Kleiner. He was literally up all night on the phone calling people and would 7am be like, I talked to 25 people yesterday because they really, they cared.

[Harry] A final one before we move on to the acquisition, but I have to ask it. We look at the ring brand and it looks like just a series of right decisions. When you review it, if you had your time again, if you had your time again, what would you do differently with the ring brand decisions that you made?

[Jamie] I look at making a brand or a company like making wine. And so the best wine comes from grapes that are stressed, that have, they're on a hillside with rocks and they don't have all the water. They don't have all the, they get stressed because if they have too much water, too much fertilizer, they become like big, juicy, fat grapes. And so I look at the same thing, which is like the stress of the problems we had led to the innovations. If we didn't stress ourselves, we continue to do this even sometimes artificially. You have to stress yourself to make something great happen. It's like I said, pressure creates diamonds. I would love to take away all the hard parts because they've probably aged me 10 more years. If I die 10 years earlier than I should, it's because of ring, which is okay, but they did stress me out, but then I think they led to all the great things. So if you took them out, we'd probably just be like a big, juicy, fat, sugary, dumb grape.

[Harry] I had Brian Armstrong on the show from Coinbase and he said that the best CEOs insert risk into the business, which I thought was a really interesting perspective. Do you agree with that? And if you reflect, do you think you inserted enough risk?

[Jamie] I would use the word constraint. It's probably, it might be the same exact thing what he's talking about, but to me, it's these artificial constraints. It might be deadlines to get something out by that are too early. When we do product development, everyone wants to do it. We're going to build this product in two years and it does everything we know today. And I'm like, oh, that's fun that technology for two years hasn't evolved. We're going to push it to stuff that we can just imagine being done, but is hard to imagine how it'll get there and force ourselves to invent. You have to keep putting yourself in the box. The problem is that I do this well. I think I do a good job at this in the company. And then I also do it in my own personal life. I always realize I'm always pushing myself deeper, whether it's my time into something. So it is learning how to balance those constraints and whether the business are personal so that they don't go too far. Because to the grape example of the wine, if you give the grapes zero water and zero fertilizer, they're dead grapes and dead grapes don't make any wine.

[Harry] I feel like we should have a cocktail and talk about the process.

[Jamie] I mean, it's nine a.m. here. I'm happy to open up some wine. It's past nine.

[Harry] The common thing is, Harry, I just want you to listen to me. I don't need a solution. I'm like, OK, I'll just listen when I know the fucking answer. Anyway, poor Dave. Yes, with this. We talked a little bit. We mentioned the acquisition by Amazon. I want to understand that. How did the deal come to be? You mentioned 45 days after that challenging period. How did the deal come to be?

[Jamie] Amazon had been obviously a lot of stuff in the home, Alexa. They were just coming out with screens with Alexa. We were a large-ish camera company at the time, like we weren't that big, but in the sort of new age camera field, we were decent size. And so they came to us to integrate with the Alexa, with the screen. And so we had been working with them for a few years and forging a relationship where there was really a relationship of learning each other's culture and trust. It was a great run of doing that. And that's what led to then, in the end, that's where they said, let's put this together.

[Harry] OK. So when you say let's put it together, what does that actually mean?

[Jamie] So actually, I'll give you like the funny thing. So we're at lunch with the corp dev person, Nick Komorous, a great, great friend still today. And we're there. And he said, I think it's time we come together. And it's one of those, I don't want to jump across the table and be like, yes, I'll sell. Because then he's going to be like, no, come together on this next product. What are you talking about? It's like one of those like Zoolander moments. What do you mean? What do you mean? Back and forth. And so he's like, yeah, to buy you. And I'm like, yes. OK, let's do it. I'm so tired. I've been wondering when you're going to ask. I told my investors, I told Amazon, I was either going to go public or sell to Amazon. Those were my two options. And it was because the only company that I felt would really take the mission and allow us to keep executing on it and stay true to it was Amazon or staying independent and go public. I did not know of another company that would buy us and truly honor what we were trying to do. I wasn't actually done. That's the point. I was not tired of doing it. I was so on the mission. I wanted to accelerate that as much as I could.

[Harry] My question then is, if you weren't done, you just got over that very challenging period. I spoke to Randy at DFJ, I told you I stalked you before the show. And he said specifically asked why that time you decided was the right time because you could have done another year, 2x of the company, whatever, grown the company and sold for more. Why that?

[Jamie] So here you're a missionary person. You have this thing that you believe in and you love. And you almost lost it 45 days before this. It would have been sold, but a fire sale sold. I did the canary in the coal mine and the canary died. And like going to Amazon is going to allow us to now really execute on this vision we have and achieve what we know we can achieve. And we're not going to die in the process. I literally looked at myself. If things hadn't worked out the other way, I might have had to move my personally move. I don't know if I could have afforded the house I was in, which was not a fancy house. Everything was in the ring.

[Harry] What do you say to yourself when you're staring into the abyss? When you have that moment when you could lose the most important thing other than your wife, obviously, important addendum, the most important thing. What do you say to yourself?

[Jamie] Basically, again, this is where I get very common checklists, which is what do I need to do to get through this? And I take all the stress of it. It's funny, it comes back afterwards. You don't get to get rid of it, but I push it all to the side. And there's only one road to live. And I got to go down that road and it's risky, but I'm going to do it because if you flail, you're dead. So I just got super focused. And then afterwards, the stress was I might still be dealing with the PTSD today, seriously.

[Harry] I love it. How did you celebrate the deal? Dave said I had to ask this one. So Amazon happens, this Zoolander moment happens, and it's done. How did you celebrate?

[Jamie] There's been some celebration. I bought a mountain bike. That was great. I might have bought a couple of other things, but I really celebrated.

[Harry] Honestly, can I ask a super question? Does money just come into your account one day, boom, or is it overnight?

[Jamie] It's actually the weirdest thing. You end up announcing the sale and everyone thinks you have the money that day. Then the government has to look over the deal. And then the government says, okay, you can buy it. You have to still do this whole thing. So you actually don't know when this is going to literally refreshing the thing. So a friend of mine asked me to speak at Atascas, which is a public company now, asked me to speak at his conference. I said it months earlier that I would do it. So it just happens that I'm literally there and the money's supposed to come in and I'm literally sitting there. I'm speaking and I just hit like a refresh and all of a sudden I'm like, holy shit. And everyone's like, what? I'm like, sorry guys. The actual closing just happened. This is pretty cool. Did you tell them that? Oh yeah. I did. Like this is the first time I've ever had money in my life. So I'm sorry. I'm just going to take a moment here to just, you just got to bear with me. I've never had money in my life and this is unbelievable. And I'm just going to give me like one second and I will get back to our previously scheduled programming.

[Harry] I love that. You said that was the first time you'd ever had money in your life. How did you feel?

[Jamie] I think I never felt like things would be all right. There's a lot of different entrepreneurs and a lot of different types of entrepreneurs that are some that are so confident that I think they actually don't care. They're like, oh, I'll just make it no matter what. I'm not that guy. I live in fear.

[Harry] What are you in fear of? In fear of losing everything in fear?

[Jamie] So yeah, in fear of just, I think part of why I maybe that's, you know what, that's what I'm running from. There you go. You got it. You keep digging, you'll find it out. I'm so in fear of everything that I overcompensate on the other side. If I'm going to build a brand, I'm so in fear of not being the best brand that I do every single thing I can do to make that brand. Like my emails on every box, I just throw everything at it. And I think it's the fear that drives me for that, which is a funny thing because you think it's confidence. You think, oh, he's built this great company. He must be so confident and it's a no. I wake up every day sweating.

[Harry] It does. It seems weird honestly, Jamie, because we're told about the fearless leader. We're told about the courage, which comes from lack of fear, which is at-bat, the experimentation and the fear can create paralysis. Did it ever create actually a lack of progression because you were scared?

[Jamie] So maybe that's my superpower. It's the furnace that powers me. So it drives me. I'm not crippled by fear. I over execute because of fear. So I think I use it to do that. It's really funny. Actually, I had a conversation with a very famous quarterback. I won't say his name just because I don't know if he'll want it out there or whatever. And I said, I gave him this whole thing about fear and I said, do you have any of that? And he said, nope, I'm the best there is. And I know that. And he literally is the best quarterback of all time. And I said, wow, okay. I said, see, two people can be successful, do it differently. You're more successful. So maybe I should have been the person who didn't have fear.

[Harry] I do want to touch on the acquisition post deal. It's gone so well, which bluntly is very rare. I think more than 50% of acquisitions don't really go well post acquisition. This has been a tremendous success. You break it down into what you did and what Amazon did. What did you do post acquisition to make the Ring acquisition deal a real success?

[Jamie] So I think the one thing I'll say, and again, there's probably a thousand things that made it successful. I was all in on being successful at Amazon. And the day that we closed, I was like, I'm an Amazonian. Now I run Ring and I care about what Ring is, but I'm an Amazonian. I'm all in on Amazon. We're going to do this together. And I realized that nothing's a 10 out of 10, that no company's perfect, but I'm in, we're in, we're doing this. And that I think oozed and marinated into my team, which marinated. And so everybody was like, we're on this together. This is great. And Amazon and the other side, they leaned in and said, we want to be part of Ring. And so it really culturally, we were so aligned. The things that we cared about culturally are the leadership principles at Amazon. I wish I was elegant enough to have written them myself at Ring. They are exactly what I believe a company should do, exactly how a company should run. What Jeff set out to do is he really is what I would love to aspire to be in terms of that leader and that leadership style.

[Harry] It's one thing that you say, I'm an Amazonian post deal, I'm an Amazonian. It's another thing to get everyone you work with in your team to. A lot of people often harbor a little bit of resentment. They loved what it was before. How do you bring everyone with you in your excitement post acquisition?

[Jamie] Again, it goes to authenticity. I can't tell people to, this is the problem. You have a meeting and you're like, okay, you got, you're all Amazonians now. And I expect, this is what I expect from. I did it because they saw in my heart that I was excited. It's not one day. If there's a bit, the leadership principle at Amazon is earned trust. And I love that one because it's not, you don't get to just tell them the next day, it's good. And everyone says, it's good. It took a while, but they saw that every day I came in and I had that same passion, that same energy. It just oozed out and everyone saw it and everyone could feel it. And then that's the culture.

[Harry] I really hope we'll be friends, Jamie, because I need your advice. You said earn trust. I don't hire people. And my one criticism from my investors is you don't hire people and you're the dependency. It's because I don't trust people. You meet me. Do you trust me? You don't know me. To hire me in a position of great responsibility. How do you build trust and accelerate trust building spruces when you are?

[Jamie] I think one of the important things for me is that no matter how many people have done things for me to lose trust, I've never lost believing in people. I'm always willing to take another risk because you have to earn trust. You have to take risk. I'm always willing to take a risk on someone and then let them either earn trust or if they don't, then deal with that. And so I think a team is taking risk. Everything is team. So the leverage you get in life is from team. You have to take the leap. And then if someone burns the trust, go get them out. The one thing I'd say is, and I think this is where people go wrong, is that they learn from that. Someone burns them and they learn from it. I'd rather keep getting hurt and find a few great people than never be with great people. And I think those are the choices we have. I don't think we have a third choice there.

[Harry] I think it's conflict avoidance. It's easier to learn from than to try multiple people. It's like this melee of six out of ten versus having the nine out of ten and the three out of ten.

[Jamie] Exactly.

[Harry] We mentioned what you did well there. What did Amazon do well to make you and the integration go so well?

[Jamie] The first email I got the day it closed came from Jeff and said, don't let us mess it up. You are in control. And so I think they were obviously it's a public company. We have a responsibility to them. But they were very respectful of us. And I think it's what if you look, 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. And it's an amazing thing when you have that respect.

[Harry] What does it mean? They were sorry. I'm really naive here. Do they like put in Amazon execs and say, here's your CFO and here's, you know.

[Jamie] Over time, it's been five years. We have done a lot of integration just naturally, which would be stupid. It's like you go to the best university and you don't use any of the instructors. Or the library. They let me lead that. They let my team lead that they were respected that. And so it allowed it to happen naturally versus yeah, here's the playbook. And here's this. And again, this is where it made it easy is like the culture. Here's our culture at Amazon is, wow, that's our culture at Ring. So we don't need to relearn that. We are who you are.

[Harry] What do you think they gave you that you didn't have?

[Jamie] When you grow that fast, you don't have the right processes in HR because these are things that you need to spread out over very large organizations. And so all of a sudden you go to this place and you're like, wow, I said in some ways it was like when your parents give you the credit card, when you go to college and get to just go in and buy stuff in some ways, like Amazon gave me a credit card said, here, go in the store and you get to choose what you want to use. You want more CFO in here, but go get our finance team. You want more of this, go get this.

[Harry] Does it change your relationship to risk when you have Amazon in the background as your bunny owner and parent?

[Jamie] Which is why the constraints thing, you have to figure out ways to still create those constraints. I think my internal furnace, this is what's interesting. People always say that money doesn't matter. I think any entrepreneur will go, oh, money doesn't matter, I just want to build this company. Bullshit. But once I sold, I did realize that money didn't matter to me in the sense of driving ring. You can ask people here, I still get just as emotional on calls when we screw something up because I'm angry about what we're doing for what we call our customers' neighbors. I'm angry what we're not supplying to our neighbors. I'm angry. And so money was a good part of this, but I still have that drive. And I think that's the difference. It's like, who still has that drive? Who really cares? If you care about that mission, it doesn't matter. And yes, money was great because now we're not going to go out of business tomorrow, but it doesn't make it easier to build a great product.

[Harry] Jamie, you are emotional, you're passionate. I'm the same. And I worry that it's not always actually productive in leadership. I will absolutely let go on someone. I will have my say and it is not varnished and I'm doing a feedback review. Do you think emotions can actually prevent you from being aggressive?

[Jamie] I still act sometimes in ways that are probably negative to the situation. I probably don't benefit the situation. But over time I've gotten better at letting the emotions help drive things. So when I was super young, yeah, I blew things up that looking back, it was like, wow, if you just had been a little more thoughtful about that, the outcome for everyone would have been better. So I certainly had those times and I was not perfect. But I'd say the other side is people do see if you're not an asshole, if you're yelling about something because you're upset about your customers, people also get upset about it. And then I think it does help drive things when people realize that they're not working for a robot. They're working for someone who cares and then they care. I do think it can be beneficial, but it is something to work on for everybody probably who's leading anything and is passionate.

[Harry] Before I delve into your personal life, which I'm fascinated to do, I hear you have some news. We talked about leadership styles there. I'd love to hear what the news is because I've been dangled a carrot that there is news and Melissa being the ultimate pro told me that you would tell me. So what is the news?

[Jamie] So the news is that I'm going to step aside as CEO of Ring and I'll be the chief inventor, which is what I always called myself. And we're going to bring a new CEO in to take the reins and try to take this, I'd say, fairly massive business to the next level.

[Harry] I think the question everyone will be asking is two things. Why now? One, and then two, what are you going to do now? Obviously, you're still there with Ring, but you'll have more time, I take it. So how do you think about those two?

[Jamie] So I think it's a great story of Amazon. It's not why now. I talked to Amazon a year ago and I said, I think where my passion is, where I am. I think I'm a good business leader, but this thing's gotten so big that there's probably a better person now. It is a real company and I still want to help on the product. I still want to get the emails, but I don't think I'm the best person to be the CEO anymore. There is a CEO and putting your title as CEO does prevent people being empowered to do other things. So a year ago, we started the process of looking and figuring that out and working with my boss who's Dave Limp, who runs all the devices. I actually told the team this summer that we were doing this and that we're in the process of it and that we would take some time. So it's been, I'd say, the right way to do this, which is no one felt like it was going to be immediate. We're trying to make the right decisions for the business. I do look at Ring. I have one kid. Most people have two. I think the average is two. The second one is Ring. No matter what, Ring is my child. It always will be. I'll always care for it no matter what. In 30 years, whenever it is, it'll always be something that matters to me.

[Harry] If my child was worth as much as Ring, I would have favorites.

[Jamie] That's true. Just letting it out. Sorry, Oliver, but Ring did sell for over a billion dollars. What are you going to do? He's 14.

[Harry] That's tough. I have to ask. I heard, obviously, about fatherhood being such a big part of your life, which is wonderful. What does being a great father mean to you, Jamie?

[Jamie] I think being a great father has been integrating my son's life. My son was three when we started this. He was at the factory with me when he was five in China, which people were like, you can't bring a five-year-old to China. I'm like, why not? Yeah. So I did. I could just bring a kid to China. Sure. Right. He's grown up with the business. I think that's, for me, it's partly it was a way to spend time with him, but partly it's all I want him to be able to achieve in his life is to find his passion. I just want him to do something that he loves, that he believes in. I hope that going through this journey with me and seeing this, that he'll see that this was my passion and that he'll get to that same place himself.

[Harry] Do you think that money allows him to pursue that freedom more than he would otherwise? I think it does because the truth is there are some people who love sculptures and being a sculptor or whatever the fuck.

[Jamie] I would say if you look at the statistics, it's probably the other way. I would say probably most kids that grow up with a lot of money have trouble finding happiness because I think the money becomes a responsibility. I didn't have that. I was just able to go out and do my thing because I didn't have to worry about being who my dad was or whatever. And so I think there's something to that that I'm trying to hopefully instil in him that it's really not, it wasn't the money. It was what we did for people, what we accomplished, what the product accomplished, like what we were able to invent. Like what we, that's what mattered. And so pray to anything that like my son grows up just passionate about. If it's sculpture, if it's running a food bank, I don't care what it is. I just hope that it's like what he feels like in his heart is what he wants to do every day and wake up to do.

[Harry] What's the hardest thing about parenting, Jamie? I didn't have kids. If you were like, Harry, this is hard, what would you tell me?

[Jamie] The worst thing for me would be having an asshole as a kid. There are kids that are just, and I think a lot of times it's parents that don't spend time with their kids or are busy or I'd hate if my son wasn't empathetic to people, didn't care about things. It would literally kill me. And my son is sweet and empathetic and passionate and about his own things. He doesn't like the things I like, which I like. I love skiing. He doesn't really like skiing. I kind of love that. It's like, he loves basketball. Great. Do you love basketball? Go be the best basketball player in the world.

[Harry] When he was born, where was the company? It wasn't. What stage?

[Jamie] Zero. I started it when he was three in the garage. We have some pictures of it, but he literally grew up in the middle of the garage floor with his toys, with three guys sitting around at desks and we called ourselves the Siminoff brothers. He'd come in after preschool and it would be Simonov brothers unite. And then he'd sit there with like a truck and on the thing. And by the way, those, the two other people that were in that are still at ring today, John Modestine and August Smit.

[Harry] My question is, do you think having a child drives you in a level that just you alone cannot? You are not responsible just for yourself now, but it's another, does it bring a different dimension?

[Jamie] It's certainly good and bad. So one is you want to do stuff because you want for the child, the other side is the risk side. It becomes harder because you're now affecting a life with what you do. When the company almost went under, I had to think about, wow, we might have to move my son out of the house that he knows and put them in public school versus the school that he's in right now. And again, we weren't living on the high horse at the time, but it would have been a big change. It's like, wow, I'm going to have to affect his life. And that's tough.

[Harry] Yeah. That's really tough. Final one. I promise before I intrude too deeply. You're an intense dude, respectfully. How would you like have this intensity in your marriage and with your wife without having, Whoa, Jamie, too much. Calm down.

[Jamie] I think something I've been lucky is to be somewhat balanced in and out. I almost look at it like an athlete on and off the field. I know when I'm on the field, I play as hard as anyone could ever play that game. But when I step off the field, I actually am able to turn a lot of that off in that way. I'm not competitive in my own personal life with some people and I see it like they're competitive in every single thing they do. If I'm drinking water, when I have to drink water faster, everything has to be better. I'm super competitive in what I do with ring. I'm super passionate about it. I cared so deeply about that, but then I am able to like go and be silly and be with my son and my wife and be with people and not have that same intensity. And I think that's a good, I hope it's a good balance. I think it is. And I would say younger, I didn't have that balance as much. These are some things that I learned over time, which is I do look at some of these super like you, some of these young people that are so successful. I don't think I could have been that successful that young. I think I needed to learn too many things. You're way better than I am. That's what I'm saying.

[Harry] I've been doing it for eight years. I feel like there's sports stars who like, wow, it's like they've been in it for a long time. You fuck up a lot. It's the lesson. Sorry. Finally, are you tolerant? If it's not done right, I am pissed. Mediocre is not okay. Tomorrow is not okay. And I'm pissed off, and I'm all sorry I'm just letting you leash now. I'm pissed off with always having to be the one who is driving this. Seriously, I pay you to do your job. Why is it me chasing you?

[Jamie] I certainly, when it matters to our customers, our neighbors, like a hundred percent is all that I will accept. I will not accept anything less. Sometimes again, sometimes you put a product out that's not there yet. Sometimes you do some of these things, but it destroys me. And one thing that does kill me is I see what we're coming out with next always. And so I just always want to get that to our neighbors as fast as I can. And it takes time. And there's one of the best, I don't know, the biography of Walt Disney, if you've ever read that, read that because the thing I love is like, I've had this every product we launch. I'm always sad that day because I know what we're coming out with next. I know what it could be better at and Walt Disney at every premiere for these movies that people were literally like Academy Award winning and it was like best animation of all time and all that. But he knew that the next animation version he was working on was better. And so he would sit in the back miserable at the premiere because he was mad that he couldn't show what was actually better already. I do have that drive and that feeling of, I just want to get the next thing out, which there's always, hopefully they'll never not be a next thing. Then I'll run out of invention.

[Harry] I'm sure there'll be a nice thing. I heard about Edison Jr's incubation, so I think you've got enough on this, Jamie. Let me do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? So you mentioned that Walt Disney, what are the other books that you would say must read?

[Jamie] Oh, Invention by James Dyson. Anything with James Dyson, I'm in. He's my man crush hero.

[Harry] Then you see a picture of him. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Jamie] I changed my mind all the time on things. You evolve as a person. Amazon just went to basically a full in three days a week thing and I backed them in that. But I also will say I still do appreciate the work from home.

[Harry] Oh, you get it. You also have kids and a wife. I'm alone. Dark. That sounds really sinister and creepy. What are you most optimistic about, Jamie? What are you excited for in the world There's a lot of fucking pattern.

[Jamie] As an inventor, there's always problems. And so I think we are in a renaissance right now. The one thing that upsets me right now is the press has decided this is a bad time. The press is a bad time. It is tough. There are things that are tough, but there are so many great things happening in transportation, electrification. There's just even in my own business around security and stuff we're inventing, I don't think I've been more excited about a time of what's happening. Look at like the autonomous cars. There's just so much cool stuff coming. To me, I am very pro-world, pro-long-term, pro-excited.

[Harry] Are you not concerned by the de-globalization? Sorry, I'm thinking political, but are you concerned with security? From a world where we have been to these isolated, large blocks of nations that hate each other and throw missiles across borders.

[Jamie] I'm optimistic that things work their way out. I certainly am seeing things that are not working their way out makes me sad. But overall, I'm pro-world. I think these things will happen and I think these macro forces will win. I do think good will win over evil.

[Harry] What did you learn the most from Amazon and being involved with Amazon?

[Jamie] I would say the one thing I really saw was scale. Scale and big. I could never have imagined what scale and size is until I got into Amazon.

[Harry] What does that mean just as an example?

[Jamie] It's like going from thinking in millions to billions and then trillions. It's just everything there is so big that it just changes the way you look at stuff. How you look at the world, how you look at size. I do think we can strain ourselves by our own surroundings and our own thoughts. There are great entrepreneurs that can do this without seeing it. I was someone who probably needed to work my way up to it, but once that's released, it's hard to go back to ... I still have my email on every box. It's not about not doing things that are small. It's just how that comes into the consideration of big.

[Harry] How many emails do you get a day roughly?

[Jamie] Not that many. Probably 10 to 20 from neighbors. But that's because the entire organization is built around making sure that everybody is satisfied.

[Harry] I'm going to get everyone in my teams to email you. I have a great emailer.

[Jamie] I am a great emailer.

[Harry] That would be hilarious. What's the most painful lesson that you've been through that you're pleased to have been through because you actually came out stronger?

[Jamie] One of the most painful things in the last year has been the reduction of force that's happened around our teams. The effect that's happened on people has been just super tough to be a part of. It's something that company has to do as part of being a company. So I'd say from the ... I wouldn't use the word please, but I think we did it because it was the right thing. But wow, what a tough thing to have to affect people that and just being a part of that has been just really tough and how it's impacted the team.

[Harry] Jamie, what would you most like to change about Venture?

[Jamie] I do think it's the mission thing. 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 really hurt them. And so I think Venture has to be more disciplined because what it does can also hurt others.

[Harry] Whoa. You went there, Jamie. Whoa. I'm with you. That 1000x ARR company that I have there, that was really pricey, moving. We won't talk about that. We won't talk about that. They've got 10 years of runway, it'll be fine. My question to you is, we've got five years ahead. It's 2028, me and you sit down again for this, hopefully in person. Yes. Where are you then, Jamie?

[Jamie] I hope I'm still at Amazon as a chief inventor. I hope I am able to have some time to do things also on the outside. I have a few businesses that I've supported, one in Missouri that's very close to my heart now. There's a direct-to-consumer meat business called Moink and I'm supporting the town and doing so. I hope in five years we're able to see the things that I've done that have mattered and that I've continued to evolve in that way so that we talk about five years of things that have benefited society, people. Again, hopefully I've built some great businesses and things, but I hope that it's in a way that you'd say this person has mattered over the last five years.

[Harry] Jamie, I so hope that you didn't get the schedule beforehand because you're going to be going, what on earth did you do, Harry? This was not a line to what we said. I love this. Thank you so much for being so open and you've been an amazing guest, my friend.

[Jamie] Well, thank you. It was really fun. I try not to look at too much stuff because then I don't want it to be robotic and like, oh, here's the answer that I already came up with.