Ring’s CEO says his cameras can almost ‘zero out crime’ within the next 12 months

Jamie Siminoff has returned to Ring, the company he founded, with a renewed focus on its mission statement to “Make neighborhoods safer.” Talking to The Verge ahead of the release of his new book Ding Dong, Siminoff says he believes the new wave of AI could finally help him fulfill that vision.

“When I left, I felt like Ring had gotten to a place where it was linear innovation,” he says. But new features like Search Party, an AI-powered tool that can search your neighbors’ Ring camera footage for lost dogs, are the type of innovations he always dreamt of but couldn’t execute. “Now, with AI, we can,” he says.

While research suggests that today’s video doorbells do little to prevent crime, Siminoff believes that with enough cameras and with AI, Ring could eliminate most of it. Not all crime — “you’ll never stop crime a hundred percent … there’s crimes that are impossible to stop,” he concedes — but close.

“I think that in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology — not too crazy — and with AI, that we can get very close to zero out crime. Get much closer to the mission than I ever thought,” he says. “By the way, I don’t think it’s 10 years away. That’s in 12 to 24 months … maybe even within a year.”

This ambitious, albeit unsettling, vision will bring his company back under the scrutiny it had begun to move away from when his successor, now predecessor, Liz Hamren, walked back the company’s relationships with law enforcement. Siminoff is bringing those back and adding new ones through its community request tool that allows local police to ask Ring users for their video footage.

Siminoff brushes off the controversy surrounding the tool. “I believe very deeply that we have a world where you can have technology make you more secure while also keeping your privacy in your control. I think that the two can coexist,” he says. “When you look at these quote controversies, what’s sad about it is it’s just misinformation. They’re not controversies. Police asking people anonymously for their video … is not a controversy,” he says.

Privacy advocates and civil rights groups strongly disagree, citing concerns around both privacy and the creation of a private surveillance network.

‘I was the demolition man’

Surprisingly, Ring didn’t start out as a security product. The story of how Siminoff invented the Ring video doorbell is a famous part of smart home lore.

The idea came to the serial inventor while he was working in his garage and getting frustrated by missing the package deliveries to his front door. It was 2011, and he had just bought an iPhone. He thought, “Why can’t it alert me somehow?” And so DoorBot was born. It took several years, a very public rejection on Shark Tank, and a 4-hour car ride to Las Vegas before the smart home security company Ring became a reality.

In Ding Dong, which is available to pre-order today at Amazon and launches November 10th, Siminoff tells the story of how the startup became the Kleenex of smart doorbells, eventually branching into home security cameras and a home security system.

Co-authored by Andrew Postman, the book is pitched as “part entrepreneurial playbook and part personal journey,” with a strong focus on what Siminoff believes is the key to Ring’s success, that mission “to make neighborhoods safe.”

I’ve not read it yet, but Siminoff tells me it covers the founding of Ring through to 2018, when they signed on the dotted line with Amazon. This means it doesn’t deal with Siminoff’s time at Amazon, but he says it does touch on Ring’s law enforcement partnerships, despite “most of that” happening after the Amazon acquisition. “The emotional arc feels like it ended at the sale to Amazon,” he says. “Once we got there, it was hard to say we were stressed about money; it just didn’t fit into the entrepreneurial story.”

For Siminoff, writing the book was a humbling experience. “Looking back, it turns out I wasn’t always right. I probably did get too crazy with some stuff. But I can tell you that dumb shit is the best thing for a book. Luckily, I did a lot of dumb shit.”

One example he shares is how he handled a phone call with an ADT executive in 2017, while the security company was suing Ring, alleging it had stolen trade secrets. Siminoff recalls giving the guy “some attitude” and being proud of himself for standing his ground.

“Looking back, I’m like, What the fuck was I doing? All I had to do was say, ‘Let me just come there, we’ll sit down, we’ll figure it out.’ I can almost guarantee if I did that, everything would’ve been fine.” Instead, Siminoff believes his attitude pushed ADT “into a place where maybe they didn’t want to go.” The fallout almost sank Ring.

The litigation went ahead, with a judge issuing an injunction on sales of Ring’s yet-to-launch home alarm system. That move spooked investors, and Siminoff says it killed a funding round that could have taken the company public and also scuppered a potential sale to Amazon.

“It created a set of events that almost put us out of business,” he says. “I went from ‘the world is my oyster,’ with $10 million on the table and Amazon looking, to the Series E round exploding right as Amazon pulls their offer. On the same day, at the same moment, both collapsed because of me. Because I was a fucking idiot.”

Miraculously, ADT came back saying it was interested in exploring a settlement. Ring ended up paying ADT a reported $25 million, launched its alarm system, and Amazon came back to the table, buying Ring for $1 billion in 2018. “Going through the process [of writing the book] made me see that I was the demolition man. My same energy and passion that created the business also created… that.”

The ADT troubles weren’t the startup’s only brush with disaster. Siminoff recalls the story of the first time the fledgling company almost went under. It was late 2013, and they were preparing to ship the first substantial order — 3,000 DoorBots. “It’s right before Christmas, and every customer email says, ‘Get it to me for Christmas or cancel my order,’” he says. “I had to ship them out; I didn’t have the money to pay anyone back.”

But there was a problem: the video feeds were erratic. “I’d hired my first real engineer to fix it, and he thinks he’s done it,” says Siminoff. They send the fix to the factory, the factory sends the product, and they ship them to customers. Without testing them. Reports of errors and non-working DoorBots quickly followed.

“It’s Christmas Eve eve. We take one out of the box and set it up, and it’s got all these green lines on the video feed,” he says. “We take another one out and set it up. Green lines. Shit.” The “fix” hadn’t worked, and neither did any of the DoorBots. “I remember sitting down at the table with my wife and son, who was about 7, and I was almost calm. I knew it was so over.”

A last-minute Hail Mary — cofounder and then CTO Mark Dillon spent the entire night switching DoorBot’s server from the free one they’d been using to a paid platform — somehow fixed the problem. “He calls me at 6AM on Christmas Eve, saying, ‘Holy shit. It works!’”

Siminoff says they never found out exactly what worked or how it worked. “We were so new to cameras and everything else, we didn’t even know what he had changed.” Reflecting on the incident a decade later, he believes that their colossal mistake is actually the reason the company survived. “If we had checked them, that would’ve pushed us out until after the holidays — which could have bankrupted us.” And without the pressure of having to find a fix, they may have dragged on for months without shipping product.

“Most startups have these stories of being dead in the water with the only way to survive being a miracle,” he says. “When you have to survive, it turns out you get very creative.”

Ding Dong! The Untold Story of How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door is available to pre-order now at Amazon and will be released on November 10 in paperback, hardcover, e-book, and audiobook.