What I’d like to do is go through my story of Ring and really interweave into that some of the learnings I have had along the way.

I’ll start off with advice. I’d say one of the first things I learned at Ring, and this is part of my journey of success, is to not take advice and, with that, to not give advice. The one thing I’ve found about advice is that everyone has a different viewpoint. Everyone has a different set of examples of experiences that they’ve lived through. When you give someone advice, you’re coming from your set of experiences, and that’s going to be different from the set of experiences that someone else has. I think this is something that in life transcends even business. I always say, “Learn from others,” and I hope you learn from my talk today. I hope you learn from the examples and the things that I’ve gone through. But I do ask everyone that you don’t take it as advice because I think there are just so many different ways for us to become successful.

I will say that the only thing I’ve seen in common among successful people, and I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of people, is hard work. I’ve come to the understanding that I believe hard work is a big part of success. I think each hour you work is like getting one lottery ticket. It’s not guaranteed to pay off, but the more you get, the more chance you have of winning. So, I think probably the one thing I’ve seen of a commonality of success is hard work.

In going into and building what is now probably one of the largest home security companies in the world, I want to share with you some of where that came from. I was an entrepreneur who went to a small college in Boston, graduated and just started building businesses — none of them very successful. My journey in that was that I kept getting ideas. I’d get an idea, I would get into it, and it would cap out. I would be into something; it would be a small, little business. It would be nice. People called me a serial entrepreneur, which I think they thought was a compliment. I did not take it as a compliment because I really wanted to do something impactful. I wanted to do something that was going to change the world, and I wasn’t doing that. So I was really frustrated. I kind of had what I call my entrepreneurial midlife crisis. When you have an entrepreneurial midlife crisis, what you should do is go into your garage. This is literally the garage that I went to. [visual] My chair is the one in the back, and I hired two other college kids. I decided that I was going to start just working on ideas. I didn’t have any sort of big theme, but I was just going to start working on ideas, and I was going to let them germinate more. I was going to let them grow more before I went down the path of making them into a business.

I called it Edison Jr. because I was now realizing that I was more of an inventor than an entrepreneur. I had this thing called Snap Guard, which was a modular gardening system. Don’t worry about what this is; it didn’t work. [visual] I had Lasso; that was a conference calling system. It didn’t work either. That’s fine.

So, I was working on a lot of different things, and the theme that I had that I told my team — this was two college kids who had just graduated and whom I was paying as interns — was “What we’re going to do is look for a potentially big market.” By a potentially big market, I meant —and I think this actually is still very interesting today, and this is where the doorbell fit in — it’s not a big market from a dollar size; it could be a big market. For example, a doorbell can be big because there’s a doorbell in almost every home around the world. The video doorbell market was very small, as well as, actually, the doorbell market. The dollars spent on doorbells globally was very small. So, when I came out with it, people said, “No one spends that much money on doorbells.” Now, we invented a new part of that market.

Then the third thing was, I wanted to do something beneficial. I said, “I’m tired of just working on things.” I’d become so frustrated with sort of capping out that I wanted to do something that was going to actually make an impact and have a benefit. Luckily, this is the real map of my house. [visual] The garage was in the back, the front door’s all the way down the front, and those wireless doorbells would not work at the back of the garage. So while I’m working on these other things that did not work, as I told you, I couldn’t hear the doorbell. It’s 2011, the smartphone is now becoming a more and more popular thing, and I just said, “Why couldn’t it go to my phone?” So I looked on Google. There’s no such thing as a doorbell that goes to your phone. What do you do when there’s no doorbell that goes to your phone, and you’re working in a garage? You build one.

So I built the DoorBot. That’s probably about the actual size on the main screen there. [visual] What was amazing is, I built this thing, I put it on my front door, I destroyed most of my house doing this, and not only did my wife not hate me for it, but she said, “This actually makes me feel safer at home. When we’re not here, there are people in the neighborhood.” And she was much more aware of what was happening. So this little gadget that I invented had a potentially big market, so a check by No. 1. It was an invention, so it was No. 2. And now it also checked No. 3, which was that this could actually benefit people.

That’s what sort of got the juices flowing on this idea. From 2011 until 2012, I was sort of working on the prototypes and doing it. And then at the end of 2012, we put it for presale. And then in 2013, I was able to show it to the world.

DoorBot was even featured on ABC’s “Shark Tank.” I was able to go on “Shark Tank,” which is a big show here in the United States for entrepreneurs. It was an amazing thing for us to be able to do. The entire time that I was doing this, we had our three things. Are we going to make a real benefit? If I look back now, and it was really looking back now that I see it so clearly, I thought the invention was the product. But the real invention, what made Ring so powerful, what made Ring so big, was our mission: to reduce crime in neighborhoods; to do something different with security than ever had been done before; to actually prevent crime before it happens; to build devices, services, features — things that are going to actually make people’s neighborhoods safer.

We attacked the market in a completely different way, and what I realized about missions is that — and again, I’m not smart enough to have understood this at the time. I was in my garage, I was doing this — looking back, I see that some of the stuff actually was kind of smarter than I even thought.

What a mission does is it aligns your customers. Your customers want to be part of what you’re doing. They’re going to be more flexible with you when you make a mistake. They’re going to love you. They’re going to tell their friends about you. You’re able to attract a better team, higher quality people. They’re going to want to stay with you longer.

The one thing I always say is that money is the worst motivator ever in the history of the world, and I am saying this to a group of people who literally are only here because of achieving a certain level of money. I would bet that for all of you, it’s not the money. It’s something else that drives you. Whether it’s helping the people who are your clients, whether it’s finding those solutions, whether it’s the story you hear of what you did by selling them a product that then ended up saving their lives or their families — these are the things that matter, I think, more than money. And a mission is able to align your team into a place where they’re going to be more loyal to you than if you just pay them.

Vendors, it’s amazing. I remember sitting down with a vendor early on and telling them what we were trying to do. They gave us 120 days financing, which, in my industry, does not exist. We go by a financing called prepayment in our business. They give us 100 because they love the idea that for the first time in probably 1,000 meetings, they’ve heard something different. They’ve heard something that was actually someone not just pitching, “I’m going to sell a million units of X,” but that “I’m actually going to change the world. I’m going to change the way we live in our neighborhoods.”

It shows how you position your business. Product development is an interesting one because companies want to last for a long time. If you just come out with a product that’s successful, what about the next one and the next one and the next one? And the problem is, a lot of times we run out of that runway. When you have a mission, it’s easy. You know exactly where you’re going. You have that North Star the whole time. It transcends money and this kind of also goes to that North Star, which is “I don’t know what the future’s going to be. I don’t know what the world’s going to be in 10 years.”

People always ask me, “What’s the product you think that’s going to come out in 10 years, the technology?” I have no idea. What I do know is that people are going to want to have safer neighborhoods in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years. At least that’s my bet. And, so, if we keep building in that direction, no matter what technology comes out — whether it’s laser beams or microwaves or whatever — it doesn’t matter because we will always be there because we’re going in that direction. Having a mission that matters, that does something. That transcends money, transcends just trying to jump on the next X thing that people are buying. It puts you in a position to build something for the long term, which is the infinite truth.

Infinite truth actually comes from my boss, Jeff. That’s where you look, and you try to say, “How can you position a company for so long?” We always talk about it at Amazon, that we work from the customer backward. Are customers going to want to have more selection? Seems likely. Are they going to want to have faster delivery? Probably. Are they going to want to have lower prices? Seems likely. These are things that you can build a business around for 100 years. You don’t need to know what the technologies are.

I’m going to go back now into the Ring story just a little bit just to kind of bring you through. Now, we’re kind of cooking, we’re going. We got the DoorBot out. We’re selling them as on “Shark Tank,” a little bit of success. I felt like our first product wasn’t that good. Everyone now knows about us because we’re on this TV show and that I was going to be working at a bar in a few years. And when the video doorbell was this huge thing, I’d say as I was delivering the drink to the person I’d just made it for, “I was the guy who invented the video doorbell.” They’re going to be like, “No way.” I’d be like, “Yeah. No, I really was” because we knew that we had to get to this next level of what we were doing.

We came out with a project called F5, which stood for, and forgive the speech, F***ing Five Star Reviews. And the lesson in this one is if you’re going to bet, bet. What I mean by that is if you go to Vegas and put your money on every single number, you’ll never win. You’ll win every single time, but you’ll never win because you’ll actually get back less money than you put in. If you’re going to bet, put it all on one number. On F5, we put it all down. We said, “We think we understand this market, but we need to redesign everything from the ground up — the product, the name, how it works, every single piece.”

I said, “If we don’t get it out for next Christmas” — this is now January of 2014 — “If we’re not out for Christmas of 2014, we’re dead.” For nine months, we went absolutely crazy. It was the Manhattan Project level of work effort. I mean, really, seven days a week. I know everyone says that in startups, but it was really seven days a week. We ended up launching the Ring in October of 2014, and competitors started coming in the market right after this. Looking back, if you look at the alignment, I think if we had missed this Christmas, because basically the next cycle was starting in January of consumer electronics with competitors coming in, I don’t think we would’ve made it.

It was amazing timing, but also, obviously, something that we worked very hard for. Right after we launched it and started to get going, we had also some luck. Luck is a part of any business or any success. I think we can all admit to that. Also, the mission attracted some amazing people. Richard Branson came in right after this and invested and led a big round for us. So the mission I talked about at first was only internal because we were always worried about talking like, “I sell five doorbells and now I’m going to say that I’m going to make your neighborhood safer.” It seems ridiculous.

We didn’t want to be laughed at, so we wanted to build our way up. It was with Richard Branson that we decided that’s where we’re going to make the mission public and really become and own that mission around the neighborhoods. We have this thing when you set up a Ring that it sometimes takes a while for the Wi-Fi to come on, and so actually on the voice it says, “Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Sometimes, I get emails on that saying, “You’ve got to take that voice away,” but I can’t do it. It’s too funny. The interesting part of business is that because of how we read about success stories, I think we want them to be overnight successes. We all know, because we’re all successful here, that they’re not.

I think it’s just so easy to forget that. We had planned that. You’ve got to remember. So, we go public with the mission in 2015 that we came up with in 2011, maybe even into 2012. You’re talking like the plan of this business is a couple of years. We really did plan out the business very long term. We still have things that people haven’t seen in the business that we’re still planning on putting out over the next years. This was the first time it came out with the mission publicly, and this was the video we came out with when we did that. [video]

Yassi: Hi, my name is Yassi. I’m brand manager at Ring. We’re really excited to head out to the Wilshire Park neighborhood and sell some Rings.

Jamie: This small community, which is maybe a half a mile radius, is actually hit with over one burglary every other week. I try to get a large percentage of the homes here to actually have Rings on them.

Yassi: We’re here to install your Ring. With the hope that we’re able to have enough cameras in the neighborhood to work with the police, we can actually reduce the crime in this community. With this doorbell, you can see and talk to anyone at your front door from anywhere.

Speaker: Oh.

Jeff: We went around to different houses to talk to the customers, showed them how to use the device and installed it for them.

Jamel: Pretty cool experience. So many customers, the way they reacted was unbelievable.

Speaker: Thank you very much. The whole neighborhood’s really excited about this.

6 Months Later

Speaker: In Los Angeles, police revealing a six-month pilot program using the tool helped to reduce burglaries in one neighborhood by more than 50 percent.

LAPD: Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for being here to learn at the same time that he is here. That particular neighborhood had a significant reduction in burglaries, approximately 55 percent.

Jamie: When I founded Ring about five years ago in my garage in Los Angeles, it was with the idea of reducing crime in neighborhoods. Today, we’re a 250-person team that’s around that idea.

Speaker: Now to keeping your home safe. A high-tech gadget is having high-yield results when it comes to catching criminals. A doorbell camera, ringing right to your phone, catching potential thieves on camera. From Nevada, to California, to Tennessee.

Speaker: Police in Los Angeles say they are helping keep criminals away.

And so that’s what we went with. I mean, we came out with that. We had now actually shown how our system could reduce crime, and we kept that cadence going. We kept that focus. A lot of hard nights obviously, but it did result in a Top of the Table exit, I guess we’ll call it here. And what was so cool about this is that we had been working with Amazon. Not many people knew this, but we worked with them for about four years before they acquired us. We were working with them on different projects, whether it was literally selling on Amazon or working with them on strategic initiatives around that. But also Amazon was in the home with Alexa. We were working with them on how to get video into Alexa and different things with that.

When it really came down to it, and this is what we were so proud of, Amazon bought us for our mission. It bought us because of this infinite truth. Because it believed that, yes, people are going to want to have neighborhoods that are safe in 30, 40, 50, 100 years. And that our drive and our focus that they saw over these years were true and that we were true missionaries, not mercenaries. That we weren’t out there to just try to make money. We were out there to actually build something. I was just with Jeff this week, and he said, “The funniest thing is that mercenaries, in the end, always make less than missionaries. That people who are out for something other than money always seem to make more money than the people who are out for money.” I just think that it is such a interesting sort of fact and something that is so hard because if you’re not out for money, it means you’re working much more long term. You’re thinking further ahead, and it’s much harder. Because when you’re just out for money, it’s easy. It’s transactional. You know exactly what you’re going to try to do tomorrow. When you’re out for something more than that, you have to have a little bit of belief and trust.

So that’s kind of the Ring part of the story. I’m going to go through a couple of little, interesting things that we did as a company along the way that I think also helped in the success.

In our culture documents, we had two things that I thought were kind of interesting, and this is what I would talk about to everyone who would come in. There’s no celebrating in the company, and there’s no alcohol. So it’s basically the worst place ever on earth. Let me go through both. On the no celebrating, my wife actually was the one who told me, “You can’t say no celebrating. That makes it sounds like a horrible place to come into.” And it wasn’t about not celebrating. It was about that when you celebrate, you are in essence saying you’ve achieved something, that you’re there. And by not celebrating, we never felt like we got anywhere.

I always said if you made one of our neighbors, which is what we call our customers, if you fix their device, if you made them safer, if you did something good, you can pat yourself on the back. You can say it’s a good job. But it wasn’t that way every month. When we hit a record in sales, we were going to celebrate. And by creating a culture around not celebrating those things, I believe we also ended up growing faster because the celebrations, in some ways, almost create a ceiling on top of you.

The no alcohol thing is very interesting. Now, I love alcohol, by the way. Personally, I love it. I was in Miami; I came in last night. Great place for alcohol. But as a company, alcohol can do something that is very interesting. It creates a fraternity, and I don’t believe fraternities are good as companies. I believe diversity is good. I believe having different thoughts is good. And you don’t want everyone on this same sort of cadence or same sort of social level. You want different people. You want the weird, the quiet, the loud — you want them all. And so by not having alcohol as a company thing — company parties and other things — it allowed for inclusion. And I think it kept us weirder. I do think that that’s a very important thing as a company. Now, again, outside of this, let’s just be clear: I’m happy to have a drink with anyone.

Another thing we did, and this came from our roots as a little company starting off, is that I put my email on every box. Originally, I did this because of customer service. I was the customer service of one, and so I put my email on there so that they could get ahold of me if they needed any help. Now, we’ve shipped millions and millions and millions of boxes. They all still have my personal email that goes to my phone. I do not have another email. Everyone told me along the way that I’d have to stop this. “You’ve gotten to 100,000; you have to stop this. It’s not going to scale. It’s not going to scale. It’s not going to scale.”

What I learned from this, the biggest learning, was diving deep. That’s when you get numbers, when your head of customer service tells you that 86 percent of calls this month were handled on time. If you don’t have your email on the box, you’re very proud of that. When you have your email on the box and say, “What about the 14 percent? And not only the 14 percent, but break the 14 percent down because I want to see what each of those percentages was all the way, the worst one, that one individual.” Because I think by talking to those individuals and by going to that level of detail, it’s how you feel the pain and the issues and the things that they need of the actual customer. I think sometimes it’s too easy as something builds to just sort of get into these high-level, fully curated things. That doesn’t tell you the story of the customer. Now, to the flip side, if all you did was listen to individual email customers, obviously you can’t scale. There’s a balance there. But I think putting those two things together, having the full detail at one side and then the top curated stuff and putting that together, really does give you the full vision of what’s happening in your business.

Another thing I learned is that it takes a village to be successful. It’s not you. I get to come up here and speak about how successful Ring was because I can’t bring the other few thousand people who brought us here. I can’t bring my family here to tell you that it starts with having a supportive family, and that’s your spouse, your kids.

This is actually in China. [visual] My son was 5. That’s the first door I bought off the line, and I had to go to China to do it. It was in the summer, and I said to my wife, “I might as well just bring my son; otherwise, I won’t spend any time with him because I’m traveling all the time.” It ended up being that that became amazing. People told me, “Of course you can’t bring a 5-year-old to China, to a factory.” It turns out 5-year-olds love factories in China. And so he started traveling with me everywhere, and we’ve now gone around the world. We’ve gone to stuff; I bring him in to every meeting. I included them in my life, which was sort of fulfilling for me and allowed me to travel more and not feel guilty. But also just that whole community idea, whether it’s your team, your family or everything else, you need to have that to be successful. Surround yourself with people who are going to bring you up because I don’t think there’s any other way to do it. I don’t think you can be successful alone.

So goals versus plans. I always say you want to have a plan. Plans are good. For goals, make sure you set goals that are at least, in some ways, unreachable. If all of your goals are attainable, again, it creates this ceiling. If, when I was in my garage, someone had said to me, “What’s success? What’s the goal,” I would have said, “Oh, my God. I don’t know. In 10 years, maybe I’d have a $100 million business.” That’s big, right? That’s an amazing goal. But then I would’ve probably built to that goal. It would have been a terrible goal looking back. That would’ve been way short of where we got to. And so I think with goals, you want to try to get them into a place where they’re unattainable but that they won’t kill you.

If anyone knows about wine here, and, again, as a company of no alcohol, I know that using this metaphor is a little bit weird, but if anyone understands wine, you know that to get the best grapes, the best wine comes from grapes that are grown on hillsides that are stressed, that don’t actually get all the water. It’s stressing the grapes that makes the sugar better in the grape to make better wine. If you just give the grapes all the water in the world, I actually think they don’t even make wine. I think that they’re just big, fat grapes. And so, to me, this is a great metaphor: Build the best wine by stressing yourself to the point of where you have to fight to win. Your team has to fight to win. It just doesn’t kill you. Because if you don’t water them at all, they will just be dead grapes.

This is one of my last ones: Linear inputs equal linear outputs. Everybody I say this to is like, “Well, of course.” But, then, if you look around, most people are doing linear inputs and wanting nonlinear outputs. When I was in a board meeting, and I’d say, “Here’s a crazy idea I’m going to do,” then they’d be like, “Don’t do anything crazy.” But at the same time, those board members wanted a 500x return on their money, which is insane. So, to me, if you want to be Top of the Table, I think you have to try to figure out the nonlinear things.

What’s the nonlinear thing? What’s the thing that no one else is doing or looking at that’s happening out there to break into that next level? Because, statistically, it’s probably impossible to be a Top of the Table person. Statistically, it’s impossible to sell your company to Amazon for $1 billion. But it does happen every once in a while. And I think you have to do some crazy stuff to get there. I’ll just give you one quick example of a crazy thing. I’m sitting in a board meeting; we’re not that big of a company. And I said that I want to hire a celebrity to be part of our ads. This celebrity is also a police officer. He fits our mission, and I think it’d be great. And they’re like, “How much is it going to be?” And I gave the number out. Crickets! And then one board member, the one with the most marketing experience, literally goes, “This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. There’s no way we can do this.” [video]

Jamie: At Ring we have over 1 million happy customers, and today I brought one to help install some work.

Jack: Let’s get to work, Jamie.

Jamie: Let’s do this. Let’s make this neighborhood safe.

Jamie Siminoff is a lifelong inventor and successful entrepreneur who created the world’s first Wi-Fi video doorbell while working in his garage in 2011. The doorbell has since transformed into what’s now known as Ring, a security powerhouse capable of preventing and solving neighborhood crime. Although much has changed since the company’s inception, it is the mission of reducing crime in neighborhoods that continues to drive Siminoff. Ring has seen incredible success and growth, and as its leader, Siminoff continues to innovate and remain at the bleeding edge of home security.

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Mission to disruption

Mission to disruption