Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has announced he is stepping down, paving the way for Elizabeth (Liz) Hamren to replace him.
Siminoff founded Ring and has served as CEO, taking the company from a scrappy startup to one of Amazon’s leading divisions. The executive penned a blog post announcing his decision to step down from the top job and re-focus on his passion:
Invention is my true passion. I am constantly looking at how we can adapt to deliver for our neighbors, which is what we’ve always called our customers. This is why I decided to shift my role to Chief Inventor and bring on a new CEO.
Hamren has been tapped to replace Siminoff as CEO, bringing years of experience at Microsoft, Meta, and Discord:
Today, I’m excited to introduce our new CEO, Elizabeth (Liz) Hamren, who is joining us most recently from Discord where she is COO. Liz has a long history in consumer devices and subscription services, building and launching some of the most innovative and beloved consumer products from Oculus to Xbox and more. When she and I met eight years ago, Ring was so small and I hadn’t shared our mission with anyone except our team, mostly because no one would listen. Even then, Liz understood what I was feeling about the space: Our work wasn’t about trying to make a faster chip or shinier plastic, it was about changing the way neighbors think about security for the better. I’ve felt a kinship with her ever since, and I am honored and excited to have her join the team on this mission.
Siminoff says this decision has been a long time in the making, first revealing the transition plan to employees in June 2022. At the time, Siminoff emphasized that the company would take the necessary time to find the right replacement, and he voiced his confidence that Hamren is that person.
Hamren Ring following a number of privacy and security scandals that have tarnished the company’s image. The tech industry in general, and Amazon specifically, are also facing greater legislative challenges and regulatory scrutiny, ranging from antitrust to privacy concerns.
Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has a rags to riches story that most entrepreneurs can only dream of. He was famously turned down on Shark Tank only to later sell his company to Amazon for $1 billion just this past February. Siminoff says he is now appearing on an upcoming Shark Tank episode on the other side as one of the Sharks. Even though he was turned down he says “I really have no animosity for any of the Sharks.”
Jamie Siminoff, CEO of Ring, discusses his return to Shark Tank as an investor, the Ring integration with Amazon, and the true reason for the success of the Ring product line on Bloomberg:
New Technological Innovations Coming to Ring Soon
We are doing a number of things around battery life. One is around solar where we are adding a lot of solar accessories to our products. We are also going to be coming out with some other technology innovations that we will be announcing over the next couple of months.
A lot of that technology comes from the integration that we have been able to do with Amazon, now being able to leverage a much bigger pool of technology and experts that we just couldn’t as a small independent company.
Amazon has done a wonderful job of securing and protecting the privacy around their customers. We’ve focused on that for our neighbors. We are one of the best solutions for security in the neighborhood and I think we will just let customers continue to choose that.
We Are the Market Leader Because Ring is Effective
From the competition side, we’ve had literally hundreds of people come into the market. Why we’ve been able to keep such a large market share I believe is because we really are there to deliver effective affordable solutions to our customers.
We are not just about selling a product, it’s about selling something with effectiveness and we’ve really been able to prove that. A study we did with the New York police showed we were able to reduce burglaries by 50 percent. It’s really about that effectiveness of our solution not just about the particular hardware product.
I Have No Animosity for Any of the Sharks
I think as an investor now that I’ve been able to go to the other side of the Tank I’m sure I will miss the next big Ring because investments are very tough to pick. Who’s the best, who’s not? I really have no animosity for any of the Sharks. That platform is really what helped build Ring into what it is today so I’m thankful that we just had the opportunity to be on it.
I do wish that we had gotten money at the time because I was broke and it would have been very nice to have had that money, but we still made it. What I tell any entrepreneur that doesn’t get the money either from Shark Tank or another investor is we were turned down over 100 times and you just got to keep going.
You’ve all heard the story of Jamie Siminoff, creator of Doorbot, later renamed Ring, who was famously rejected on national TV on SharkTank, but then went on to create a wildly successful business. Earlier this year Amazon paid a reported $1 billion in cash for the business.
Here are the key highlights of how Jamie and his small startup hit it big:
From a SharkTank Reject to an Amazon Success
If you can get acquired by Amazon your about as lucky as you get because they really do let you just keep going. Five years ago I was very much on the other side. I was on Shark Tank looking for money trying to get an investment. I did not get one on the show and now it’s funny because everyone says to me, well you were so smart not to take that money. I’m like no, I was driving back from there to my garage almost in tears broke. I actually needed the money.
I think Shark Tank has been a great show for families. Families watch the show, people watch it with their kids, it’s aspirational, and it shows that people can do things. It obviously has to be entertaining because it is TV so you need people to watch it but I think it has been good for overall for startups in general.
For Ring, we were Doorbot at the time, it gave us awareness and credibility that we never would have had that sort of jumped us up. It was a great platform for us to launch off of and we really used it. We turned out to be the largest company ever to be on SharkTank and it was it was a great experience.
We Were the Consummate Hustlers
We were the consummate hustlers. Looking back at those days, you work the booth at TC, you go to CES, you just grind. You wear your shirt everywhere, you just grind and embarrass yourself. I think that level of a start-up at the beginning you almost have no shame. You have to just put yourself out there, get the stories out there, and get the name out there. You have to focus on the business, but you have to hustle.
I always get asked by people that have a startup, what worked? What they really want is the one thing. They want me to tell them we did X, and then I can just go do X and be successful. The truth is it’s like 5,000 things that you have to do to make a successful company. The first thing though is you have to have a reason to be a business.
A Company Should Start With a Core
At Amazon, they call it thinking from the customer. That’s starting with the customer and working backward. We called our customer’s neighbors, so we always start with the neighbors and it’s always around a mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods. As a company you should start with some core that says why am I hustling, why am I trying to track you down at CES to get you to write a freaking article? You have to have that reason.
There are a thousand things you have to do and wearing the shirt yeah, it’s all these little things. Wearing the Ring shirt, for example, creates a conversation on an airplane with someone who asks a question and then that leads to something. My family’s laughed at me because I literally wore the Ring t-shirt almost non-stop for seven years!
Why Did I Sell Ring to Amazon?
Why Did I sell Ring to Amazon? You hear all this stuff like this did you sell out? The company was started with a mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods. From day one that’s been our mission. We’re going to reduce crime in neighborhoods by delivering effective and affordable products and services. We were working with Amazon on some integrations and other things and when Amazon came to us they had bought into the idea that the mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods made sense for Amazon on a strategic level. For Ring that became the best possible outcome, the fastest and most scalable with the best foundation. Amazon has enabled us to accelerate our business.
The Truth of Business is Luck
It’s cool when you get inside Amazon. They really do start, and this is from Jeff down, with customer backwards and infinite truths. Are people going to want to have a safer home and neighborhood in 50 or 100 years? Yes. They look at these like bigger truths around things. When they’re making these big decisions it’s really about an infinite truth of something that can make a customer’s journey or life better.
The truth of business is luck, luck, luck, luck, luck. I worked hard, I focused, I did everything right, but the amount of luck that happened along the way, getting on Shark Tank and having the right investors come when they did, having a house where if the freaking doorbell had reached to the garage I’d probably be here trying to pitch some other hardware thing in the roundup group.
Especially at this scale, to build a business to the size that we have so far and to have that success I think luck is a huge part of it. Timing is not in your control, you don’t know what’s gonna happen next year or the year after and all of these things went our way. You know, luck.
