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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. For the fourth time on the program in 10 years, my friend Jamie Siminoff, the founder of ring.com, and a shark on Shark Tank, and a great friend of mine, a great creator, and one of my biggest misses as an angel investor. We were just laughing about it before we went on air. If you want to see Jamie's prior appearances, episode 90 in October of 2010, he was in the first 100 episodes.

SPEAKER_05: Episode 277 in 2012, episode 700 in 2017, and back again for his fourth appearance, Jamie Siminoff. How you doing, brother?

SPEAKER_07: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me back on for the fourth time.

SPEAKER_02: Fourth time. You're almost in the five guest club. That's when we send you a blazer. You get a blazer, and it just has the twist bulldog.

SPEAKER_08: The green jacket.

SPEAKER_09: You get the green jacket. Absolutely. We're going to make them. It's definitely going to happen now that we're in our 11th year of the show. You remember the show back in, like, when I started it.

SPEAKER_12: Totally. I think you used to have people at, like, the Mahalo when you were doing it there.

SPEAKER_02: Yes. We'd have people at the Mahalo office, and it was kind of like, sometimes I'd do it on Friday nights. People come by for a drink and hang out, and you were on those early shows.

SPEAKER_04: People don't remember your early days as an entrepreneur, but I was always super impressed about how you understood consumers' behavior. One of the things you created was phone tag, correct? Yep. And this was a brilliant service. You would let somebody forward their messages, voicemails, to Manila, where the Philippines are somewhere, where somebody would transcribe it, send it back to you with an MP3 in your email.

SPEAKER_15: Greatest service ever. People, is that service still running and people still using it?

SPEAKER_18: It literally just sold again to a company called Umail, which was just, like, crazy to see that happen.

SPEAKER_15: And now that's built into every phone, I believe, right? Like, people transcribe them and use AI to do it. Back then, AI didn't work. So you did that. Then you did something called unsubscribe.com, which was a Chrome extension where you would press any button, and you would get that person unsubscribed. From spam, email, or any newsletter. And that, too, had some level of automation. Explain how that service worked, and you sold that one as well, right?

SPEAKER_17: So best product, worst business ever.

SPEAKER_21: And it was just basically getting rid of everything that the hard sort of spam bots were not able to get. So the gray mail, the newsletters, and you just would hit a button, unsubscribe, and then we would go through and crawl and figure out where the links were and where to put in your email address and make it automatic. It was amazing because it's still 50% of email is gray. So if you look at the amount of time people spend on it, it's still a huge problem. It was just one that no one wanted to pay for, and so, you know, that was that.

SPEAKER_04: That's a big lesson, isn't it? Like, you can find something that's a pain point in your life, you can build the perfect solution to it, but if people won't pay for it, it's not going to work.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, and on that one, I played out sort of, at least for what I could figure out, every single, like every avenue could go down. And the only way I could figure out how to make money was to do the wrong thing, which would be to try to figure out how to, in essence, get people back in to pay to come back in to your mailbox. And so to kind of go the other way, and I just said, you know what, it's like, and that's where I kind of started my missionary sort of business career of saying, you know what, I'd rather lose than do the wrong thing.

SPEAKER_33: That's interesting.

SPEAKER_04: You are the opposite of some entrepreneurs who are in hot water with the government right now, with antitrust, because sometimes you get to that juncture and you just decide, you know what, F it, I'm just going to take all this user data and I'm going to sell it to somebody like Facebook did or other folks.

SPEAKER_02: And then the next thing, I remember you and I went for a hamburger, and you were in your creative phase, and I was just starting as an angel investor.

SPEAKER_15: I had Sequoia's little checkbook, writing my little 25, 50K checks, and you pitched me on the worst idea, I think top 10 worst ideas I've ever been pitched on, and explain what you pitched me on over hamburgers, because you took it out of your bag.

SPEAKER_37: That was the pop charger, correct?

SPEAKER_40: That was the pop charger, correct? Yeah. The intersection of charging and design. Yeah. Give me that pitch.

SPEAKER_41: Just so I know I'm not crazy.

SPEAKER_11: You know, I was exploring, I literally had opened up, as you know, this lab in my garage called Edison Jr., my little garage in the Palisades. And like one of the first products was this idea that charging, you know, it's actually looking back, I still think you were wrong, because it was, you know, charging, like our mobile phones were dying faster and were more valuable to us. And so I was trying to build sort of these mobile charging stations and sort of portable charging, you know, point of power pop. You know, I thought that was very creative. Charging stations and, you know, throw it on Kickstarter. At the time, Kickstarter was just sort of starting out. This is 10 years ago. Yeah. I think we were at the time, I think we were in the top 10 or something Kickstarters, and that was like $140,000. So it's just like crazy.

SPEAKER_04: It basically looks like a little garbage can, like a waste bin. And there are some design elements that I will say are dope, because the top of the garbage can, the waste pocket opens up and you can put your cables in there. Yeah. And then underneath, you had cables you could basically pull out and plug in. And it was retractable cords, correct? Correct. So this was like, you know, one of those hoses that theoretically gets pulled back in. Of course, those hoses never work, but theoretically, they're a good idea. And I remember the really cool thing was at that time, there was like micro USB, and then there was Apple's horrible iPod connector, which was the first connector.

SPEAKER_51: The long one, like the-

SPEAKER_04: The 30 pin.

SPEAKER_51: Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Which was gigantic. And you made it so it snapped out, and it was both chargers. Yep. Which was, I have to say, that was brilliant. And I asked you like- You didn't think so. Well, no, I asked you, what's the use case for this? I always think about the use case, right? And you were like, well, you know, when you're in the club and your battery's dying, we want the bottle service to come with one of these.

SPEAKER_56: And I was like, and I was like, Jamie, I need to have a heart-to-heart with you.

SPEAKER_33: You were going backwards in your career.

SPEAKER_58: And I gave you, do you remember this? I gave you a talk. I do. I gave you a stern talking to. I do remember that.

SPEAKER_62: I do remember that. I was like, Jamie, you're Jamie Siminoff.

SPEAKER_63: You made phone tag. I totally remember you saying that. You're Jamie Siminoff. And now you are going backwards with the pop. You made a battery with a cable.

SPEAKER_15: It already exists. This serves nobody. Back to the drawing board. I would never invest in something as silly as this. And of course, whatever, a month or two later, you had DoorBot. So explain what was the origin story of DoorBot for people who don't know.

SPEAKER_21: So DoorBot, so here I am, I'm building pop in my garage. I'm being told by good friends that I'm literally out of my mind. And I can't hear the doorbell when someone comes to visit because the garage is like behind the house. This is a small little house in LA. I think you had been there once, but it's like a tiny little place, you know, like right on the street. I just couldn't hear the doorbell. The little wireless doorbell wouldn't reach the garage. So on the weekends, and this is actually like really funny because I had taken a tiny bit of money in for the lab. And so on the weekends, I built this. I said, why wouldn't the doorbell just go to my phone? So I built this thing, DoorBot, to go on my front door, to alert my phone that I could talk through when someone rang the doorbell. But I built it on the weekends because I didn't want to take the time during the weekdays when I was like a fiduciary to my little company. So that's how little I thought of the idea in terms of it being big at the time.

SPEAKER_73: And I remember looking at this idea and I was like, huh, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_04: And then DoorBot was universally panned. The Amazon reviews were absolutely brutal. I'm looking at them now. 36% one-star reviews.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah. And if you read those, it's like that when they read the tweets, you know, on like the- Mean tweets. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_77: Dumber than my old dumb doorbell. I would give it zero stars if I could.

SPEAKER_79: Nothing worked properly. Don't buy this product. This product specifically says quick and easy setup. This is not true. Advanced knowledge of Wi-Fi routers is needed. I honestly believe this company is no longer supporting this device.

SPEAKER_09: Two days into making it work reliably, I was at my front door with sufficient test equipment that I tried this product for two weeks.

SPEAKER_79: I really want it to work, but it just doesn't. You got absolutely demolished.

SPEAKER_82: When we get back from this quick commercial break, I want to know how you took a product

SPEAKER_15: which had, I kid you not, 60%, three stars and below reviews, and turned it into one of the most loved and iconic products of the last decade. When we get back with Jamie Siminoff on This Week in Startups. Is your team behind on planning for Black Friday? Or how about Cyber Monday? No worries, because Klaviyo is here to help. Klaviyo is the ultimate e-commerce marketing platform for online brands of all kinds and sizes with email automation, SMS marketing, growth tools, and more. You'll get everything you need to build a strong relationship that keeps your customers coming back. And with the holiday season right around the corner, there is no time like the present.

SPEAKER_04: You want to get up and running right now quickly, and you want to use Klaviyo's flexible automations. You want to get those powerful insights and have super precise targeting so you're sending the right message at the right time to the right customer with the right product or service. So, whether you're a billion-dollar business or just starting out, Klaviyo is the e-commerce marketing platform for growth during the holidays and into 2021, which is going to be an amazing year. So, get a free trial at klaviyo.com slash twist. That's K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash twist. Get a free trial right now at klaviyo.com slash twist. K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash twist.

SPEAKER_84: Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_04: Welcome back to this week in Stardust. My guest is inventor Jamie Siminoff of ring.com. I absolutely demolished Jamie's early career when he was in the trow of despair, which every

SPEAKER_15: entrepreneur must go through. Correct, Jamie?

SPEAKER_44: I think, you know, as we were kind of laughing about it getting into this, the truth is at the time it was to, I would wake up at night in my bed and I tried not to wake up my wife when I was crying. And that's like, no, that's serious. Like, I really was- Literally weeping. I had, I basically had taken the little bit of like success I had, put it all into this and was watching it in front of my eyes, if you will, the Amazon reviews go just blow into the ether. And I didn't know how to get out of it. I didn't know how to build product. I didn't, you know, I was trying to do the best we could, but it was, it was like at the time you couldn't see an avenue out of this. You know, it looked like a death spiral. And, you know, luckily I had gone so far down this one-way road that turning around was just death. So I just kept going, but it was brutal.

SPEAKER_91: In other words, you burned the boats on the beach. There was no going back.

SPEAKER_92: I burned the beach, the boats, the everything. Everything.

SPEAKER_93: The compass, everything was earned. Everything. The maps. There was no way to get back. We have to make this work.

David Friedberg: Yes. And in a way, was that freeing in that you knew what direction to go or were you still

SPEAKER_09: absolutely anxious and, you know, had your toes over the cliff?

SPEAKER_21: I think the problem is in hardware is it's so capital intensive that to say you're scared looking at the future of like what you, you meet with someone like, oh, what you have to do is hire 500 engineers and rebuild this. And you're like, we're broke at the time. And it's like, you know, and yeah, I'm going to now go raise money on what you're, you're seeing like the, the dashboard is public basically of the company. Yes. And I'm going to go to an investor and say, hey, put in $5 million. Look at what I've done. And it's like, okay. So it was, it was, you know, it was scary.

SPEAKER_07: I mean, it was, it really was.

SPEAKER_82: So did you try to raise money and go to people and say, look at my, and they would pull up these reviews and how do you get over that objection?

SPEAKER_103: So I, I, I got super lucky. Um, yeah, again, I, I, I would say I was working hard, but I also got lucky.

SPEAKER_21: We got on shark tank. Um, and with the awareness and credibility of shark tank, it gave us enough of a, uh, sort of a flywheel effect that I could get a little bit of extra money in through sales that I probably would not have gotten otherwise, which let me hire some engineers and rebuild the inside of the company to then go to an investor and say, Hey, I see what you're seeing here, but look at, this is what I'm really doing. Um, yeah. And I brought it to true ventures and they, like, I think they were so skeptical. They had to invest. Like they, it was like, it was like such an insane story that it was almost like, let's just see what happens.

SPEAKER_105: Do you attribute the fact that you were unwilling to give up to what made you attractive to them as an investor?

SPEAKER_21: I think definitely like, yes, I think coming in, like, I should have already shut it down and been pitching them on my next thing. And I think they were impressed that I was like, and I was totally open about it and humble. I was like, here's what I've did. Here's what I learned. And this is where we're going. And I, what got them, that was the mission because my mission from day one with this, which I, what got me excited about the product was that I thought it could be a new way of deterring crime in neighborhoods that had never been done before. So I really did see early on this, like once I built it on the door and sort of got there, it was, my wife was kind of the one who said, you know, this makes me feel like we have gates. And when people come to the house, they'll now think we're home, even if we're not. And so that's what had me excited. And so when I pitched True, I said, you know, this is a way to make neighborhoods safer and a way to build home security and neighborhood security in a different way.

SPEAKER_107: And that was the, that was the hook. I mean, that was the.

David Friedberg: So you basically took these really hard-earned lessons, but when you opened the aperture up

SPEAKER_58: and said, hey, listen, I, I know that the product got mixed reviews and let's be fair. It wasn't all bad reviews and everybody saw the potential. I mean, one of the things you get from those reviews is disappointment because they really wanted this to work. And so that's very powerful. That's almost like, I wanted to love this movie or I wanted to love this restaurant. And, but you know, they sat us late or something. It's not like the killer where I don't want this product. It's, I really do want this to exist. I'm rooting for it.

SPEAKER_112: It's, and you're right. It's actually very interesting.

SPEAKER_44: There's a lot of hardware companies that launched that had five-star review products that, but in the review, it said like, I got it working. The product's great. I'm not that interested anymore. It was like, and it was almost a false positive. Then people would invest and put all these, like, there's a lot of companies that looked a lot better than we did in this sort of timeframe of hardware being funded that looked a lot better, got a lot more money than we did, where I would look at them and say, wow, man, if I could have raised $10 million, what could I could have done with that? Yeah. And they all just, like, just right into the ground.

SPEAKER_04: There was one that was like the XOX or something that was like a camera you would attach to your iPhone that would make it a better camera. And they had raised tens of millions and, you know, just tons of dashboard cameras, all kinds of interesting ideas that people just, yeah, you're right. They, they got them working. They loved them in concept, but they didn't actually use them. And this was something that was a really acute need for people and opening up to a bigger

SPEAKER_116: mission made people more attracted to it.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. And I'd also say, because of the people who listen to your show, I'd add this, because I think it is interesting, is that when a product comes out and it's perfect right off the bat, it's actually typically been, if you look, and I think you can see the data on this, a bad sign for the company, because it means that what you're doing is not innovative enough and it's too easy.

SPEAKER_44: And it's almost like having a, again, like, like you said, like it worked for some people. It wasn't like, DoorBot wasn't like a, you know, a total dud, but it didn't do the promise that people wanted it to do. But part of that was because it was so hard to do. And so it took us longer to figure that out. It took us iterations of learning on that, which built that internal sort of like in the company, it built that muscle, which then made us, you know, stronger and obviously into a, you know, long-term into a successful outcome.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. If it's too easy, it's not ambitious enough, I guess, is a way to say it.

SPEAKER_04: And this was so ambitious and providing neighborhood security and this network of security was so, um, such a big, heady, uh, mission. And you immediately saw a payoff where people started to have, you know, package at the same time, Amazon packages were getting stolen as like a, a reoccurring occurrence.

SPEAKER_02: Uh, and you decided to let people share those and build advertising around them, correct?

SPEAKER_21: Uh, not advertising, but we built, definitely built the social media, this, yeah, the way for people to connect in their neighborhood, um, to share that information, to be safer, to talk about what's happening. And so, yeah, we built a, definitely a very different, um, it's interesting even today when people say, who's your competitor? The truth is that there really is only one ring. Um, the way that we present the product because we're so missionary, I think is different than we're not just sell, we're not selling product. We're selling a experience around neighborhood security.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And, but it was really interesting, I think as a viral component at the time, because social media was getting its legs under it and these videos of people, you know, being able to prove, Hey, look, somebody actually took that package. I can, I can actually prove that that happened and we can, and then magically, if there was crime in a neighborhood, somebody's, you know, uh, doorbell could be a key piece of information of a getaway car or something like that. What's an example, what was the first example where you realized, Oh my God, we could, we could solve a crime that had, had occurred.

SPEAKER_21: So, so we actually, so we had the mission. We never, we were very quiet about the mission externally early on because we thought that we could lose trust with our customers if we over-promised. Um, and so internally, like if you came to work for ring, I'd say, here's the mission, here's this, and it was this guy, Greg Garfield, who was in, um, Tarzana, which is, you know, from living in LA, it's just sort of just north of where we were in LA. And, uh, someone came to his door, knocked on it. He saw them on the doorbell. They broke the door down while he's like looking at it. He's like, Oh, like, holy cow. I think probably more than that even. And calls 911, cops come get, get this guy. He has a gun on him, the whole thing. And we take this, this, you know, burglar, uh, off the streets with a gun. And it was just an unbelievable, like, that was like our first, like true, like we saw the, like from, you know, total thing, like this person who had a gun was off the streets because of our product.

SPEAKER_04: It was, it was no longer a theoretical. Yes. Uh, it was actually reality. The mission, uh, and it was so, it was so in your head, you can even remember the name of the customer and the exact detail because, and so now that night you go to sleep and instead

SPEAKER_02: of prying in your bed, you sleep like a baby whore. You're so excited.

SPEAKER_04: You're going out popping bottles and taking the pop charger with you. So everybody's phone is fully charged at the club. I correct.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. We still had a long way to go. So I don't, but we were definitely, that was one of the early sort of, yeah. Like, wow.

SPEAKER_21: Um, you know, and that was actually Richard Branson pinged me like right after that news

SPEAKER_34: report came in and that's what got him in.

SPEAKER_02: Wow. All right. When we get back from this quick commercial break, I want to talk about, um, actually

SPEAKER_04: all these new products you've come up with and this, and this suite of products, because I saw you launch something that I think is, uh, peak Jamie Siminoff. I think it might be the greatest product of your, I mean that in a good way.

SPEAKER_141: A good.

SPEAKER_40: That's why I said peak Jamie Siminoff, you at your best. And I think it'll be your best product ever. And I can't wait for it when we get back on this week in startups.

SPEAKER_144: This week in startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley bank. What's next?

SPEAKER_04: What if, are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that can keep founders up at night and no one understands this quite like Silicon Valley bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley bank has helped thousands of high growth companies by providing scalable financial solutions, along with insights and expertise that many banks just can't from healthcare to hardware, software to infrastructure, Silicon Valley bank works with companies across the innovation landscape at all stages of the journey, anticipating their needs before they do. And by providing access to insights and in-depth reports, SVB can help you make more informed decisions and assist in turning your great idea into a great business, which could be why 50% of US-based, venture-backed tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Will your business be next? Learn more at svb.com slash next.

SPEAKER_02: Silicon Valley bank built for what's next. Hey, my good friend Jamie Siminoff is with us and we're chopping it up, talking about the old days in LA and what an amazing journey he's had with Ring. If you don't have a Ring product, there is a complete line of amazing products at ring.com.

SPEAKER_04: You should go check them out. And you released a new product that to me is, as I said, peak Jamie. I think it's going to be your best-selling product ever. It is an in-home drone that'll do what I've always dreamed of, which is,

SPEAKER_33: I believe this is what it's going to do. When I'm not home, I don't want to have cameras all over my house on the inside. That's weird.

SPEAKER_04: But when I'm not home, I do want to be able to fly, I think they call it a sortie. Is that what they call it in the business where the plane just flies over in there and just checks everything out? I want to fly that mission, check every room and have it land again, just so if I'm out or I'm out of town, whatever it is, the drone can fly and tell me there's nobody in the house or this is where fondue is and I get a little picture of my dog.

SPEAKER_15: Explain this product and how close it is to reality because I've been waiting for this a long time and I was actually pitched on two or three companies, one doing it outside of the house, one was doing it inside of the house. Nobody's ever seemed to get this right and get a product to market that I know of. Explain the product. What's the name? How much will it cost? When can we get it?

SPEAKER_21: So, I mean, you explained it the best because I think products should come from a user need, not the technology. And so, we call it the Ring Always Home Cam. It is a drone, but we're kind of, to me, the drone and the tech and all that stuff should be something the customer doesn't ever think about. It should be exactly what you said, which is, I also don't want to have indoor cameras all over my home. But if something happens in my home and I'm not there, then I want to literally have every angle of every part of my home to be able to see it. And so, what a drone lets you do is do that. So, we have built a autonomous drone. It's not, you don't fly it like a RC car. You know, you set it up, you preset it up. So, you say like master bedroom, fly the house route. And so, you set up the map and do all that stuff. And then when you're gone, you could always just hit a button. It'll go and it'll go to the master bedroom or whatever. And you'll see what you want to see. It'll go back and land on its cradle.

SPEAKER_44: What's also really cool is it integrates to our alarm system. So, if someone, you know, if the front door blows open, it'll just automatically launch,

SPEAKER_21: go there, and then you can just go right into your phone and see and be like, oh, you know, no, it's fine. It blew open. Or, you know, someone came in. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04: Wow. That's incredible. Can you imagine, though, in the case of a break-in, if that person who broke into that Tarzana home was greeted with a drone, they're running the hell out of there.

SPEAKER_156: Yeah. They're done. They're out. And we call it that it's like privacy you can hear. Because the drone is actually loud, which is good. Because I don't want a stealthy flying camera that, like, I don't know it's there.

SPEAKER_44: I love that you hear it. I love that, like, if, yeah, if that guy had come in that door and a freaking coming out, like, that is horrifying and you're out of there. So, I do love, like, how the whole thing sort of comes together to build a product that

SPEAKER_156: never existed. And the price point, which I usually, I never sort of harp on price because I don't think that's how you compete.

SPEAKER_159: I pay, I would pay $1,000 for this.

SPEAKER_15: Instantly. I would not even think about paying $1,000 for it. I would order one for each of my six homes. I don't have six homes. I have one. I have one in an office. But I would order those two and I'd order for my parents. I'd give it as a Christmas gift at $1,000.

SPEAKER_21: Well, I have to figure out how to charge you $1,000. It is $249.

SPEAKER_164: That's not possible. How is that even possible, Jamie? That's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_21: And this is, like, when we started looking at this, part of why we never came out with one is the cost of all the components was, I mean, it would easily have been over $2,000 to build this, you know, two years ago. But autonomous cars, all of these things have been pushing the cost of these components like LiDAR down. And so as they come down and come down and come down, and they get more volume in other places, it's allowed us to finally cross the barrier of where it's a consumer sort of product that you can buy.

SPEAKER_02: Now, LiDAR is a key piece of this. I saw the new iPhone 12 has LiDAR built into it. That, to me, is a little bit of a tell that Apple wants to get the price, as you're saying,

SPEAKER_171: of LiDAR down. Because if $100 million or $250 million of these phones go, and they put an order in for $100 million of those little LiDAR units, that's going to lower the price.

SPEAKER_04: So with this, is it like, I guess, some of the Google technology where you walk around with your smartphone, and you build the model of your house, or is that built into the drone

SPEAKER_58: where I walk the drone around my house, and it builds the floor plan, as it works?

SPEAKER_21: That's exactly what you do. You basically walk around with it. It's building it. It's telling you, like, I don't have data here. Go back. You then go on, and you sort of can build the map, ensure your windows and doors are. You put where different things are. Yeah, you pre-build the whole sort of system, and then you pre-build the routes, or the sorties, as you said, which I like that. But yeah, you just pre-build all the routes, and then you just have it. You just click on them and tell it where to go.

SPEAKER_04: What would be great, too, is if I, I don't know if this is possible, but if I'm not home,

SPEAKER_15: can I set it up to do one of these every hour, and make me a little GIF or something, you know, and text it to me or something, or, you know, have it in the app as like a little looped thing, so I could have it, you know, on some regular basis?

SPEAKER_21: So I think that's what's exciting, is that you could see this with an alarm system when it's, you know, when it's armed in a way, that you say, when it's armed in a way, I want you to do X and Y and Z. Yes. And yes, and stitch it together. And I think you've probably seen some of those 3D scans of homes and things like that. So you could sort of see how you could play that out. For now, you know, we're going to walk before we run. There's a lot of technology here to sort of build, and we want to deliver on the sort of that first use case. But definitely, I think it could be a better, you know, a product that does more for the home. And again, knowing when you're away from the home, and the privacy side of this is just so important. Like when it's in the cradle, you can't even, like the camera can't see out. So it obscures the camera. So there's just, so it's, it is like a, it is the uber privacy focused camera that then

SPEAKER_178: allows you to have these features in your home when you want them.

SPEAKER_02: And of course, that was like the ridiculous late stage journalism reaction to it was like, oh my God, you know, privacy in the home.

SPEAKER_09: Now Amazon's going to know what's going on inside your house. Um, and it was like, wait a second.

SPEAKER_04: I looked at it and I was like, that only comes out when I tell it to, it's only to come out when I'm not home. And I think the cameras at the bottom of that, like stick on it. So this actually is less intrusive than having cameras inside your home.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah. But of course, you know, everybody misses that because they don't even read or the product spec or watch the video.

SPEAKER_184: There was one like tweet that went back and forth and someone said to the person who wrote

SPEAKER_21: the first thing about privacy said, you know, like, well, here's all the features that actually has, but you probably already knew that. And the person who wrote the original tweet, uh, was like, yes, I did. I was just trying to be, you know, like it's like a jerk, but yeah, but it's, it is interesting that that is like, you know, has become a thing, which is like salaciousness is like better than fact. And on this one, you know, it's, it is loud. It's, it's like, it's, if this sneaks up on you, like, I mean, it can't, it's, it's just like, that's what I love about it. Like I, and I like that, like, I like that we built a, just a super privacy centric indoor camera.

SPEAKER_05: Does it have like bright lights on it? So if it does go to a situation, it can put the lights on or blare an alarm or something.

SPEAKER_21: It has a, it has a light on it. Um, and so, yeah, so you, you have a light on it, camera, um, you know, see that when

SPEAKER_190: the light goes off, that's going to be a big one for deterring people who might come to

SPEAKER_171: the house. So if somebody was outside the window and they're messing with the window, yeah, this thing

SPEAKER_02: comes by and puts the light on them. It's like really cool. And then, uh, I guess the optional paint gun, paint ball gun is, uh, coming soon.

SPEAKER_44: The ability to shoot, you know, Amazon, Amazon legal, I think, you know, I think they did not approve that one.

SPEAKER_199: So no armaments on your drone. I'll have to, yeah, they have to, I'll have to look back at that one.

SPEAKER_09: Actually, if you go on YouTube, there are a bunch of, you know, people in Russia who like play with the weaponry or whatever. You've probably seen some of these where they, they just put paintball guns, uh, and then sometimes real guns onto drones and they zoom them over and they, that's pretty, pretty compelling.

SPEAKER_21: There's big outdoor drones. I mean, they'll, they'll carry stuff.

SPEAKER_04: They have, they can really carry stuff. Hey, when we get back, uh, from this quick and final break, I want to talk about the

SPEAKER_40: acquisition. Cause I had Mark Suster, our mutual friend on the pod, I believe, was he an investor?

SPEAKER_206: He was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: He was an investor, big investor. Um, and I asked him point blank, like, Hey, if, if this company had existed today, would they have SPAC? And he said, I think that would have been a possibility. So I want to talk about the Amazon acquisition, how you made that difficult decision when you

SPEAKER_15: had such a great growing business to become part of the Amazon family. Uh, and if you regret it, and if you think you should be a standalone public company right now, would you have SPAC'd when we get back on this week and startups, one of

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SPEAKER_04: Uh, so you heard the tease. Do you think if the company had existed in this area, would it just SPAC'd?

SPEAKER_103: I think, um, I don't know if we would have SPAC'd. I think we would be public. Um, and I think we'd actually be a great public company.

SPEAKER_21: Um, looking at other companies, what, you know, revenue wise, what we're doing compared to them. I think we would be a very large, uh, public company right now and leading packed in the sort of tech space. Uh, of the newer ones, you know, like Amazon doesn't break out your revenue.

SPEAKER_85: They don't, they don't.

SPEAKER_44: That's why I'd be a little careful with how I talk about it, but I do think we would be a.

SPEAKER_171: Yeah, it would be hundreds of, it's clearly hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, obviously, because you were at tens of millions when you were a private company. So, uh, we'd be good.

SPEAKER_04: We'd be fine being SPAC'd. So how did the Amazon acquisition go down? Were you running a process and looking for a buyer? Were you out of money and desperate to sell?

SPEAKER_175: What was the situation?

SPEAKER_21: It's a, I mean, it was a. Up and down. We were actually, we were, we were raising around. Um, we had a issue come up with an injunction on one of our products that, that prevented the round from completing a day before, two days before the wire, um, going into Christmas. It kind of, it was, it was like. Yeah.

SPEAKER_215: Like a patent type thing, an IP type thing.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. And it, and it, it was a little thing, like the actual, like on the surface area of ring, it was like a tiny little area, but the optics of it were just not good. And this, you know, it was one of my best lessons is never have an investor come in who wasn't missionary as well.

SPEAKER_44: Um, this was a total financial investor and they just got immediately scared off, ran for the hills. It was literally, we had done hundreds of thousands of dollars of, of consultants in and the whole thing and finished the whole process. The wire was, the wire was coming. Oh yeah. It was right at the end. Wow.

SPEAKER_218: That is brutal.

SPEAKER_44: So going into the holidays in 2017, we have now the maximum amount of, of, uh, inventory out there. So we're in the worst cash position. We were having, you know, over a hundred million dollars come in at the time.

SPEAKER_21: So, you know, you didn't plan sort of, the way you planned was to have that money coming in, which was coming in. And when it didn't come in, we were then in a very bad cash position. Um, and at the same time, Amazon was sort of talking to us about sort of, you know, Hey, maybe we'll do something. They actually also then said, Hey, like we're, you know, until this is solved, we're out as well. So all of a sudden I went from like either raising around or maybe even selling or whatever to like, just end of 2000, like, this is like November of 2017.

SPEAKER_15: It's just like, and brutal, all that work to get to the top of the mountain. Yeah.

SPEAKER_33: And then somebody just knocks your legs out from under you and you start tumbling down the mountain again.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_175: As you're about to summit.

SPEAKER_11: We weren't even tumbling. We were just like free falling. Like it was like a cliff. That was a cliff. And so we ended up settling.

SPEAKER_225: I hope one of these, what do they call those carabiners or whatever they are? Yeah, exactly. I hope one of those sticks because they're popping off.

SPEAKER_226: Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

SPEAKER_228: Oh, zip, zip, zip.

SPEAKER_44: And so it one day catch that we settled the thing. As soon as we settled it, Mark Schuster came in with a check to back us.

SPEAKER_21: Nice. A big check, but for his size fund, like a big check. I'll never forget him coming into my office. And I said, listen, I understand if you don't want to do this. And he was like, during the, as we're still free falling, he came in and said he was going to do it. And I remember saying like, you know, you don't have to do this. It's like, kind of like, and he said, no, I still believe in it. And we're going to do this. And so that's like one carabiners catches. And then we settled the thing. Now you got two.

SPEAKER_230: You're good. Now you're swinging.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. And then Amazon said, hey, like, well, let's, let's talk again. And, you know, my thing was, at that point, we definitely could have raised more money and could have kept going for it.

SPEAKER_44: But, you know, what, what, what really did it for me with Amazon was I told my team from day one that our mission was to make neighborhoods safer and that we would do anything to, to scale and to make neighbor, like anything that would make neighborhoods safer, we would do. Like that's how, that's where we're going to make our decisions. And if I looked at going public and standalone and in X years or being part of Amazon and, you know, having a team like that help us to make neighborhoods safer, which one's going to accelerate us faster? And, and to be, you know, I had to be honest with myself and with the team. And I said, listen, this is a good outcome for everyone. Yeah. Is it the financially best outcome? I don't know. I'm not an economist. Right. But it is certainly the best for ring and, uh, and because of that, I'm happy I made the decision. I think, I think Amazon has been a great family to be part of. They've, they've kept to their word and they've allowed us to really do something exceptional

SPEAKER_235: with the brand and help people.

SPEAKER_171: Yeah. I, you know, I'm, I'm, I think, you know, Tony Shea as well, and I'm good friends with Tony for a long time. And I was always amazed that, you know, Jeff to his credit, like let Tony run Zappos and

SPEAKER_09: it always had its own culture.

SPEAKER_04: And I, I think one of the great, um, companies to be acquired by really has become Amazon because they know when, how to help, but not hurt and not kill the culture at a company.

SPEAKER_15: And, you know, the, the fact that they kept Tony Shea there for so long was amazing. The fact that you're still there is amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_237: Uh, he's still there. Audible CEO is still there. Yeah. Whole foods. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, it, it is Jeff, Jeff has a sort of a tenant that you let, you know, let the

SPEAKER_17: entrepreneur, like support the entrepreneur, you support them. And it's, so it's been amazing.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, just curious, like, does Jeff drive these acquisitions?

SPEAKER_176: Is he involved in them or does his team just do it? And, you know, he gives you a high five at the end.

SPEAKER_21: It depends on like, obviously where they are. Um, I mean, Jeff knew about this acquisition, but this was driven by my now boss, Dave Lemp, who runs devices, uh, for Amazon. So it was in his group. And so Amazon's now sort of, uh, you know, AWS sort of the com, the commerce business and

SPEAKER_17: then devices is kind of three of the bigger pieces.

SPEAKER_04: And at the scale Amazon's at now, I'm assuming the manufacturer of your devices has changed completely. You must've learned a ton or no, was it on the same trajectory it always was? Cause they, they were building those Kindles for close to two decades.

SPEAKER_171: Now they've been building, you know, their tablets and, um, the, what's their device,

SPEAKER_159: their fire or something. What's the one that they're stick, fire, fire stick. I mean, they've been at this for a while. I mean, they even did their phone for a while.

SPEAKER_156: Yeah. They're big. They do a lot of consumer electronics. Yeah. Um, Alexa, of course.

SPEAKER_253: Yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_21: It, it's been interesting. Um, you know, I always say it, it feels like when my dad gave me a credit card and said, like, buy the things you need, like, it's almost kind of like, I feel like Jeff gave me a credit card and said, here's the store. Like you can choose what you want, uh, to get from it. Um, but don't let the sort of the stuff fall off the shelf into your cart. So don't let us push things onto you, you decide. And so some stuff we've actually kept very ring, uh, like our marketing, you know, we've kept it, uh, very much. Cause that's really shows who we are in the brand. Um, and so that's really stayed in house. And then other parts like, yeah, manufacturing, certainly we've gotten a lot of benefit from,

SPEAKER_11: you know, as, as you saw my early days of manufacturing, when you said you're Jamie Siminoff, like you got to stop doing this. It's like, that's the early days, you know, now where we are now. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: And you're doing a ton of marketing yourself. I see you in the commercials. I always get a kick out of that.

SPEAKER_09: What's that like to now be like micro famous or, yeah, I don't know. Do people like see you on the street and just yell the word ring or what happens now?

SPEAKER_21: Actually, it's funny. The commercials did a little bit of that, but being on shark tank actually got like, that really did. When I, when I became a shark on shark tank, that like, that was funny. People did like, I say, like I was at a Lakers or Celtics game or something, or a Clippers

SPEAKER_11: game with my son. And this guy behind me goes, you know, he like comes up and goes, you're my favorite shark.

SPEAKER_259: And I was like, whoa, let's like, whoa. Don't tell Cuban in soccer.

SPEAKER_262: Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_138: How many of those did you do?

SPEAKER_262: I only did two.

SPEAKER_263: You did two. Yeah. So they brought you, that was, that was kind of sweet of them to bring you back and do that. That's super cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_264: I mean, as you know, I mean, you knew me like early, early on. Yeah. Just being on shark tank for me, it was like winning the Olympics.

SPEAKER_21: I mean, that was totally, that was huge. And so to go back as like a shark. Yeah.

SPEAKER_73: Was, you know, that was like, I, it's interesting, you know, entrepreneurially where until you

SPEAKER_04: have success, people can be very dismissive and then you have success and people can be overly, you know, whatever. I mean, it just basically fair weather friends, right? I mean, you and I were coming up at the same time, trying to figure this stuff out. And then you get a couple of hits and then all of a sudden everybody thinks you're a genius and you're like, but I was the same person yesterday. Yeah. And it is, it's always been very interesting for me in my career when I've had, because

SPEAKER_02: I, you know, had some big early wins with the magazines and became famous early on in New York and then lost everything, then up again, then down again. And talk about that and just what that's like as an entrepreneur when nobody wants to take

SPEAKER_04: the meeting, nobody takes you seriously. And then all of a sudden, everybody wants the meeting and everybody wants to get a piece or

SPEAKER_105: get you to be an LP in the fund or fund their startup or mentor you and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_274: I mean, I think the most important part of it is to remember, and I think you've done a great job of this, of like who you are.

SPEAKER_21: And that like, to what you said, like people are people, like money actually is such a bad indicator of how smart they are or how interesting they are, even like go past smart, like just interesting. And I think it's finding, I try to find interesting people at all levels of their career to sort of spend my time with, because that to me is like, what is fun. And when you can fund then someone who really needs it, you know, I love doing that. But certainly you're right. I think there is this, it's kind of like the stock market. It's like, if your stock is up, you guys must be doing really well.

SPEAKER_103: And it turns out like not a great short-term indicator of how good someone is.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it is certainly interesting. I always thought you were one of the most talented product people I ever met. And I always said that, like people say, who do you respect on a product base? I'd be like, well, you know, this kid, Alex, too, from Million Dollar Homepage and Calm and Jamie Siminoff and Elon and Ev Williams and Jack, like there's a group of people who just know how to build product. They have this like really good intuition about what the customer wants and they have the ability to sort of will it into being. Um, what have you learned on that note about your gift of identifying a problem and creating the solution because I phone tag to me and unsubscribe are as brilliant as ring. I, I saw in those like, wow, these are just such really great insights. What have you learned about channeling those insights into products?

SPEAKER_02: If you could explain it to somebody coming up in their career was listening to the podcast

SPEAKER_33: of how do you take your idea and manifest it in a product and know it's a great idea.

SPEAKER_21: So I think there's, I, I called myself when I started ring, the chief inventor. Um, and I think, so keeping that mindset of, I think there's too often we focus on the business. Like we focus on trying to build a company and I focus, when you focus as an inventor, you focus on solving problems. And I think companies exist to solve people's problems. Um, you know, Jeff says Amazon's the most customer centric company in the world. And I think if you keep that focus, so I'd say maintaining customer focus and not getting sort of, uh, getting, letting the company sort of become its own way of pulling you out of that is very important as you grow. Um, early on, I think also standing for something, I think mission is something I really learned matters because it helps focus your product. It helps focus your solution. It helps get your, when you have a mission, customers want to be part of that. Uh, employees want to be part of that. Investors want to be part of that. So you're like getting all these tailwinds in your direction by having a mission versus just saying, Hey, I built this thing, buy it. Uh, I get 40% margin on it. And so I, I really do believe that like missionary versus mercenary is just such a better way to go, especially because most of the time we fail anyway. And so at least if you fail doing something good, it feels better than failing doing something that was literally just for, you know, capital gain.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And when you say that, it brings me back to that moment. You were like curled up in a pole, trying to not wake your wife up from sobbing. And you're like, you know, if you're going to cry in bed, uh, it's a lot better to cry in bed about something you care deeply about and you're a missionary about than a mercenary thing. Like if you're crying in bed because you built something, that's a widget that has no meaning to you.

SPEAKER_282: Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: And the, and the only success is like literally success. Like that's like, it's like, if it doesn't make financial success, you, you, you lost.

SPEAKER_156: And with ring once Greg Garfield and I got that kid off the street with a gun. Yeah. Honestly, in some ways, like that was like, I had, I, I rang the bell.

SPEAKER_21: Like that was, you know, that was success for the company. Now doing it more and more was more success, but, but you know,

SPEAKER_02: yeah, it's kind of as good as it gets when somebody has that kind of experience for an entrepreneur. It just, it closes the loop in a way, right?

SPEAKER_171: From that moment of inception to the moment of it actually getting there. I was actually with Elon when the rocket got to space and had dinner with him that night. The first time he got there, I was actually at dinner with them as well.

SPEAKER_98: And the one sprawled out of control and it was like so close.

SPEAKER_21: I don't know if you remember you, you invited me over to your house the night before my son was born. Yeah. It was me, you, Elon. And there was like maybe two other people. You're playing poker.

SPEAKER_291: Ah, yeah. I remember that. Yes.

SPEAKER_21: We were all hanging. And he had just met with the U S government to try to get the big contract.

SPEAKER_293: Contract. Yeah.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. And if he didn't get it, I think I pretty sure he would have been like,

SPEAKER_293: yeah, I think he said that was like it gone.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Like, and so that was, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I mean, it's where it's, it's really interesting how tenuous these companies are, you know, like

SPEAKER_15: that one carabina saves you, you know, two, all of a sudden when two of those break, people forget how much speed, right? Like the velocity becomes, I'm not a, I'm not a math genius either, but I think it starts to become an exponential. Like the chances of the next one holding up gets worse and worse. The more force is going down.

SPEAKER_21: Because it's also interesting from the other side is being the carabina for someone is not only a nice thing. It's like not only a good thing to help save someone, but how profitable it can be. Like Mark Schuster, I believe made more return on that investment in terms of the speed at which he returned it. Right. And the amount than ever in his history of his fund. So, so he did a good thing. He literally saved my life. Ah. And he also got a very nice return for it. So I think, you know, it's, it's a.

SPEAKER_04: That's fantastic as well. Yeah. Um, as we're getting towards the end of the hour, and I know, I know you've been very gracious with your time. Um, what is the story with, uh, police having access to the cameras?

SPEAKER_02: I know that's been a flashpoint. Uh, for me, I think it's brilliant. I, I would love for police to have access to local cameras, uh, in London and England.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, CCTV has really helped make it a much safer place in San Francisco. We preemptively banned AI for cameras and we're kind of anti camera in a city that's overrun with crime. I think it's completely hypocritical. If anybody's kid, God forbid was kidnapped, they would be begging for there to be a camera network out there. Um, and I'm fine with there being some level of cameras out there to help protect people. And obviously privacy could be compromised, but I'm kind of okay with a little bit of that risk in order to make the world a much safer place. So explain to people what the network of cameras, uh, and that sort of system, the vision for it, and then where you're at in terms of executing on it.

SPEAKER_21: Um, yeah, I think it's what it is. Yeah. We actually built something for the police. We actually built something that is more privacy centric for our customers. Um, which today, today in any neighborhood, uh, without any technology, if something happens, if a kid gets taken on the street, the police are going to come in, they're going to knock on doors. They're going to ask, do you have camera footage? Do you have that? So if you were the person in the neighborhood, you're going to get someone knocking on your door in a uniform and they're going to say, Hey, can I see your cameras? That's just in essence, that is a unnerving thing regardless now. And then the police, you gotta figure out how to get that data, whether it's on a little hard drive or on the cloud or emailing it. It's a, it's a super, uh, inefficient process and it's also not privacy centric where they're actually face to face with you. What we built was a system for our, for our customers that if the police need footage, they can request to our cloud. Uh, we then send an alert saying, Hey Jason, uh, this incident happened in your neighborhood. Would you give the police footage from, you know, 9am to 10pm on this day from your cameras? Now, if you say no, it's anonymous.

SPEAKER_156: They don't know. So it literally versus that person at your door. If, if they knock on your door and you say, no, that's a kind of a weird thing to say. And maybe it's because of something, it might not be nefarious. It's just because like, I don't know, you were doing something weird that day in front of your house. Who knows? Right. Um, and you just don't want to share. Right.

SPEAKER_235: Yes. Then obviously yes. Then we, the, the foot it, you know, you are now handing it over. The police then use it under.

SPEAKER_02: So you're creating a process, which then also creates an audit trail. Yes. Which is better for everybody. So if the police were doing something that was fugazi and they shouldn't be, it was somebody was trying to spy on their ex or something, uh, nefarious. It would be an official request versus the knock on the door request. So now it's an audit trail. So that's better.

SPEAKER_17: It's tracked. It's anonymous. It's so that like, we really did bring to this process.

SPEAKER_21: I think like we, we, you know, we upped it. Um, it was very thoughtful.

SPEAKER_04: It's very considered. You thought the process through. It's not that they have unlimited access to every ring doorbell. They have the ability to request access to it. Yes. And then you have the ability to opt into that request, which by the way, is just making the real world process better.

SPEAKER_17: Yes. And you can also opt out fully and never see it again.

SPEAKER_05: So it's a hundred percent in control.

SPEAKER_02: And of course you get barbecued this by late stage journalists who are looking for a headline

SPEAKER_105: to just barbecue technology because now all of a sudden technology and companies and entrepreneurs are the enemy of the state for some crazy reason.

SPEAKER_09: It's weird, isn't it? Like 10 years ago, everybody loved technology and companies and innovation.

SPEAKER_293: And now it's like this weird moment where everybody is a socialist communist hates it. Yeah. And I think I guess I vote the minority.

SPEAKER_103: I do.

SPEAKER_44: I think some scrutiny is good or I should say some, I think scrutiny is good. Yeah. But I do think facts should win. That would be nice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: So that to me, that's the thing. Like I'm fine with being grilled on anything that we do.

SPEAKER_44: We are a large company. We do, you know, we're, we're doing a lot of things in neighborhoods and I think there's nothing wrong with the press or someone else giving us scrutiny. I do think that the facts should win.

SPEAKER_21: And on this one, I do, I do believe that what we're doing is, is really good for our customers, our neighbors and privacy in general.

SPEAKER_33: Yeah. It's absolutely no brainer to do this, uh, to make your neighborhood safer.

SPEAKER_04: I don't understand why people would not want to have a more efficient way to just deliver that information and have that a lot of trail. Um, now, how do you feel about facial recognition? Cause that seems to be another flashpoint where people are like, uh, I don't know if I want to be identified. And obviously in some countries, the government has CCTV cameras and they can track people. What do you think the right approach to that is?

SPEAKER_21: So we have not launched facial recognition as a company to our customers. Uh, we would not sell it to police or sort of organizations like that. Um, and our position on it is, you know, with, as with any feature is until it's something that really brings value to our customers, we're not going to launch it. So I always look at like the always home cam with the drone. Um, you know, I saw that for a long time that I could build something, but until the price point hit the right thing, until I could build the right features on it and thought that it was really a, um, a true product that people could use and get benefit from.

SPEAKER_17: We're just don't, we're just not going to put it out there.

SPEAKER_116: Yeah, I think that's pretty thoughtful.

SPEAKER_04: It would be nice. Uh, and I think some other camera companies allow you to know this person's home. So you can identify specific people if you want to program it, but it's not like it's

SPEAKER_02: hitting some database of all faces in the world. Yep. So what about that? If I just wanted to know, oh, hey, my, this daughter's home or this person's in front of the camera and I program it on my side, is that a bridge too far?

SPEAKER_116: Or is that seems to me to be my choice of which faces?

SPEAKER_21: I think it's definitely, it's an interesting new area. And like you said, there are some camera companies that are doing it. Um, yeah, we're, we're still watching it. We want to make sure that whatever we do is thoughtful and, and, uh, and good for our customers.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's to me in a city, it's a no brainer. I think the way it should work in a city is it should be like when you subpoena phone records, where you go in front of a judge and say, Hey, there is this corpus of video cameras over the last 10 days in the city, city of San Francisco, city of LA, wherever it is, London. We have an abducted child. We would like to search for this child's face for this purpose over this number of days. So we're not searching for your ex-wife for the last year to try to find out who she's dating. So you can stalk her or some crazy police officer who's gone rogue. It's like this specific instance, it goes to a judge. The police captain brings it. The B cops then get the results and it's for a limited timeframe. That would be such a no brainer and make everybody super safe, which I think they have at all the tunnels.

SPEAKER_02: It's one of the ways they catch criminals now is every time they go through an easy pass or something,

SPEAKER_171: they can catch them with that.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, I think thoughtful regulation around any of these things is good.

SPEAKER_21: Like that's what sort of the role of government can play. And I actually look at that as exactly what you're saying, which is like bring thoughtful legislation to the forefront. And then, you know, let's use that.

SPEAKER_02: Do you guys have your own like alarm company to then go, you know, dispatch the police now? Is that all built in now? We do.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. So we have the ring alarm, $10 a month with professional monitoring.

SPEAKER_178: So we sort of broke the sound barrier of that whole sort of thing. Yeah. No contracts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_105: So that whole ADT thing now is paying 150 bucks a month for getting barbecued. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_118: Yeah, we can, we can. You bring it down to $120 a year. 10 bucks a month.

SPEAKER_171: Yeah. And that's become a popular option. I take it.

SPEAKER_274: Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: That's been a great product for us. And it's a good ecosystem product because also knowing the status of the home is important to set your cameras of how you want them to give you motion detection of an always home, you know, camera like the drone. If you're in this alarmed away mode, it can do things based on knowing that. So that's really what I love about the alarm is knowing the status of the home of what you decided,

SPEAKER_336: not just what some sensor decided, but what you've stated. Like you've said, the status is I'm away and it's armed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_171: That makes total, total sense. What hardware are you looking at? Like we talked about LIDAR lowering costs.

SPEAKER_105: Are there other things that are coming down the pipe that you look at hardware and say, that's sort of interesting. Um, AR maybe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: I'd say, uh, from a hardware side, I think, I think LIDAR is probably one of the most interesting. And like you said, you just see it get in the iPhone now. Um, which I, I, I'm really looking for, like, are they actually gonna make it? So when you're walking down the street, is it gonna warn you when you're about to hit something? Um, I think I, I, I do wonder if that's, yeah, I, I think that I, I, I haven't heard anyone talk about that, but I, it's, people actually do run into stuff. Like it's a real thing. They walk into the street and get hit by cars.

SPEAKER_341: I mean. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: So like, so I, I wouldn't be surprised if they build some sort of, uh, almost like a self-driving system. Slam on the brake system. Yeah.

SPEAKER_343: It's like, you're about to bump into somebody at the airport when you're looking at your black mirror.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly. I wonder how far that LIDAR goes too, because I, my understanding LIDAR on cars is still massively expensive. Yep. And I'm assuming that's because it goes a hundred or 200 yards or something.

SPEAKER_44: Yes. I wonder what the field is of this. So it's field of view accuracy. So all of those things come into play with, with these like LIDAR radar, all these systems.

SPEAKER_21: I think there's a seven feet. Um, and again, the accuracy doesn't have to be within, you know, some of it's like millimeter wave. And so it's like literally within like a millimeter, um, autonomous cars obviously have to do also, they're going much faster. Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: So you have to like, you know, like if you're doing 70, 80 miles an hour, think about how far you have to throw it to just make sure that you're getting ahead of where the car would know then to stop or not stop. Um, so there's, there's interesting stuff, but yeah, but, but that's, what's driving down the costs in our area of a, you know, a few miles, like a, you know, a single digit mile per hour drone.

SPEAKER_21: Um, does not need to throw the LIDAR, you know, thousands of feet or a phone, a phone doesn't need to throw it that far that fast.

SPEAKER_190: So Apple is going to come out with AR glasses at some point.

SPEAKER_15: It seems inevitable. What do you think the world will look like post AR glasses? Are you excited about that?

SPEAKER_159: Do you think that, you know, becomes the next major platform and, and sort of retires the phone or, you know, de-emphasizes the phone?

SPEAKER_21: I don't think, I really still don't think that the wearing glasses thing happens. I mean, we saw it with 3D TVs and it like, you know, it was a huge thing and like, no, and, um, we saw it with Google glass and it was like, and, and then I just don't think, I think the phone, I wouldn't be surprised if in 30 or 40 years, we still have something like that in our pocket. Um, just because of the size and the efficiency of the, you know, the, the problem is anything else, like, like on your wrist or like just the size of it is a physical limitation. Glasses are, I don't know. I just don't see everyone walking around with glasses on their face. Um, I just don't, but you know, what do I know? I mean, I, I didn't invest in Uber and you did.

SPEAKER_57: So I didn't invest in door bot. Yes. It cost me $25 million. I mean, you were raising at what valuation was that? Probably. Oh, five. Probably five.

SPEAKER_211: God, it's so painful. You sold for 1.5.

SPEAKER_82: Yeah.

SPEAKER_211: It's a couple. Yeah. It's a little bit above that.

SPEAKER_82: That's a stinging right now. Luckily I invested in calm at five.

SPEAKER_365: So are you angel investing now? Once in a while you put, you put a little bit out there.

SPEAKER_156: I don't really get a lot. I don't like, you love like the, I mean, you've like made like, you've made like, you've

SPEAKER_21: like, that's like a thing. Yeah. I don't really love the angel investing. I like when I do like a very specific targeted thing. Um, I did that Moink meat thing on, um, it's like a, a meat box called Moink to, uh, Shark Tank.

SPEAKER_369: Oh, what is it?

SPEAKER_21: It's a, like, uh, ethically farmed, like sort of like, you know, natural meats, M O I N K. Um, and it's like a box that comes to you, uh, kind of like a butcher box. Uh, but like higher end meats at lower prices. Um, I love that idea. Yeah. The, the, the, the, the, the entrepreneur is unbelievable. She's super missionary in LaBelle, Missouri. Uh, I've since bought a, I bought a farm in LaBelle. Uh, really? Oh yeah. Look at you. Oh yeah. Farm now. I kind of like what I focus on things. So like on that one, I like, you know, I, I like really like I've gone, I've gone deep.

SPEAKER_190: Um, uh, and it's all ethical and they, it looks like they have some nice ribeyes on this. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_133: The ribeyes I, I was, the ribeyes this weekend. They're very, very good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: See that's, and it's grass fed, right? That's the thing. Yes. Once you go out, once you start eating grass fed, it's very hard to go back. Cause you start realizing like the other, the corn fed beef is so mushy and doesn't have that flavor.

SPEAKER_164: Grass fed beef and it tastes so good.

SPEAKER_29: Corn's not as, from what I've learned is like, corn's not as good for the animal.

SPEAKER_21: No, it's just like a, it's like a very high protein, cheap feed. Yeah. And so grass is like what they're supposed to eat. So they're like much healthier, which then, you know, just that it's like better, like environment. It's better everything.

SPEAKER_381: So yeah. Um, oh, congratulations on this one. And they came through shark tank, huh?

SPEAKER_21: I did. It came through shark tank. So I've done like a couple, but like very, very select and stuff that I can like really focus.

SPEAKER_02: Mark told me like when it's on shark tank, a lot of those deals don't actually close because you have to go then due diligence on them. So what happens after you make the commitment there?

SPEAKER_04: Is there like a retrade that goes on or D diligence? What happens after the show when you actually have to consummate it, just up to you to call

SPEAKER_58: them and close it.

SPEAKER_21: It's just, yeah. It's like, it's just, I mean, they obviously want you in good faith to be when you're up there, you're not supposed to be saying like, but as you know, with investing, the due diligence is 90% of the, like, you know, you meet someone for an hour. Great. But like, you know, you got to check everything out. And so, yeah, like, like Mark said, I mean, not every deal goes through this one. I mean, I said, I'll do 400,000 on the show.

SPEAKER_44: I ended up doing 500,000.

SPEAKER_337: For what? What percent was it for?

SPEAKER_44: 20%?

SPEAKER_337: 20 something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_164: I think it's going to be a good investment for you. That's a great valuation. There's upside still there.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. It's grown, grown a lot. But it's a nice, I like the mission. Like it's like a, you know, it's like, you know, the, the meat business. I mean, there's a lot of like factory farming and stuff. That's just not good for farmers. And so like, it's, it's bringing, you know, buying from small family farms is important. So I, again, I just, I love like when you're doing something that you can feel good about.

SPEAKER_171: It is a pretty, I mean, when I, when I look at the calm.com investment, it just, it makes me feel so good that as Alex told me, like they met with, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 VCs. They all said no. And I got to be the Mark Suster in this situation where I was the Caribbean. Yeah. That held. And I was like, fuck it. Like, I think this is going to work. My, you know, my guy, Sam Harris was like, yeah, this is, you know, meditation is a big deal. Like, yeah, you should do this. And I was like, okay, no problem. We'll put in $378,000 at a $5 million valuation. See what happens.

SPEAKER_21: That's it. But that's the amazing thing. If you look back, everyone always thinks that like the ones that made it new and the ones that didn't, didn't. And it's like kind of in some ways, it's the opposite as you've seen, like there's so many,

SPEAKER_156: like, I always laugh when investors are like, oh, I can't get into good deals because it's too hard. I'm like, well, go fund all the people that have great deals that can't even like get to Silicon Valley. Like there's so many great companies and entrepreneurs that can't get any sort of oxygen.

SPEAKER_392: Yeah.

SPEAKER_171: And it's, it is really amazing. You really don't know if you told me that the two most successful investments would be a meditation app and a cab dispatch company.

SPEAKER_386: Yeah. It's like, we're like, didn't see that coming. Yeah. You know, it's very, very, very random.

SPEAKER_235: And especially early on both. Definitely an Uber.

SPEAKER_21: I know like early, early on, like it was not thought of to be like, you know, it was like a black car thing that you could get picked up and look cool.

SPEAKER_396: And like, it was like.

SPEAKER_164: Suster passed on it. He was at that open angel forum and he always laughs about it.

SPEAKER_15: He's like, ah, you know, I, I, I left the email in my box. I kind of didn't get to it. I didn't get it.

SPEAKER_04: And that's always with you. I always tell folks the story of missing that investment. And I was like, I thought Jamie was brilliant. I just. This pop thing was so ridiculous.

SPEAKER_15: And then I kind of didn't bet, but I had watched him do unsubscribe and phone tag two products I paid for and loved. And I should have just bet the jockey at the jockey.

SPEAKER_164: Like you believe in a person, just give them money and don't overthink it.

SPEAKER_15: And that is my big mistake with you. But at least I get to be friends with you and build that friendship over the years. Yes. That's more valuable.

SPEAKER_397: Well, thank you.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. All right. Listen, continued success, my friend. Thanks for doing it. I hope you got Amazon stock. Did you get stock or cash in this deal?

SPEAKER_399: A little bit of stock? I'm so good. I'm all good.

SPEAKER_93: If you got that stock, you're real good. When you sold to Amazon, I think it was probably at. It was like. 1400.

SPEAKER_15: Oh, 1400. Okay. So it's only like, it's pretty amazing. When you think about what happened with this pandemic, it's really, it's been such an accelerant to all these people who had never ordered food online, who had never used Instacart or Amazon or Uber Eats, Postmates.

SPEAKER_21: It has true. I mean, you know, obviously lots of bad things from this thing and a lot of hardship, but yeah, it is incredible. Some of the shifts that have happened that might be 20, 30 year, like what it would have taken 30 years to shift and just have happened like literally almost within a flash. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: I was talking to somebody and I was asked, I always been asking people like, what do you think? And I've been getting asked, what do you think is being compressed? And somebody said to me, telemedicine was the number one thing. And I didn't even think about that. And I was like, you know what?

SPEAKER_406: That's the one, isn't it? Is there one that's better than that?

SPEAKER_21: I mean, that's definitely one. I think office space will be an interesting thing in the future. Yeah. I mean, there's just, and then there's always going to be the one that we, in five years

SPEAKER_178: was obvious, but no one saw. That was like, you know, the one that really compressed it. It was just, we kind of didn't see, but yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_73: Online ordering is an interesting one. Obviously cloud kitchens and that kind of stuff. Yep.

SPEAKER_171: Um, the, the, uh, online education stuff, I think is going to be a major one where people

SPEAKER_02: started learning how to educate from home. Obviously people having studios at home and being able to do zoom at home. That's another one. Telemedicine, distance medicine. But that one to me was super interesting.

SPEAKER_171: I'm trying to think of the other ones that were, oh, you know what the other one is? Uh, people using Robinhood and trading stocks again, which we were lucky to be angel investors

SPEAKER_411: at Robinhood. Oh, wow. There are 15 million members. I heard.

SPEAKER_412: I mean, I don't have inside information, but it literally moves the market. I mean, it's, it's like, it's literally that, I mean, it's that big. It's, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, when, when, and it's young people making small bets and that's really interesting on a societal basis because you have boomers who are just playing for their 401k and they don't really care about the environment as much or carbon.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And then you have these young people who are like, I just want to buy whatever stocks are going to be good for the. I'll buy Tesla. Yeah. I'll buy Tesla.

SPEAKER_04: You know, and the, you, you actually have a generational war occurring. Yeah. In, in portfolios. It's bonkers. They're like, I want to see a, a, a carbon, you know, I want to see carbon go down. Therefore I'm going to buy Uber stock. I'm going to buy, um, Tesla stock.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah. It's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_21: It's super amazing. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of interesting stuff happening right now. It's definitely, it's, it definitely a dynamic time. Um, and what do you think is going to, let's close on that.

SPEAKER_171: What's, how do you think this all wraps up? What does your heart tell you about 2021? We get the vaccine and we're, we get out of this, or do you think this is going to be a two year thing? Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: You know, it's, I'm, I'm hopeful for, I'm, as I always say, I'm long world.

SPEAKER_21: So, um, I'm hopeful that, you know, a vaccine comes, I'm also very hopeful that, and I think this is going to be more necessary than the vaccine, that there's better treatments, which we're seeing some of those sort of trickle in. Yeah. But it, you know, again, if you could treat this like a common cold, you know, if you could have some better medicine for it, then the vaccine becomes less important because I do worry about distributing vaccine to the entire globe in a few months, how hard that's going to be. And so like, I think the treatments could be as important as the vaccine itself.

SPEAKER_184: So that's what I hope. But yeah, I'm hoping by next summer that we're all.

SPEAKER_427: Back at it.

SPEAKER_184: Yeah.

SPEAKER_427: Go to a, go to a basketball game again.

SPEAKER_400: Oh, it'd be dope. I love to say courtside finals. Ah, would have loved to be a courtside for the Lakers.

SPEAKER_18: That StubHub app that I haven't like touched for, you know, six months. Yeah.

SPEAKER_400: Get some of those last minute tickets on the way to the arena. You buy the tickets. Ooh, get a good deal on some good tickets.

SPEAKER_11: I can taste the street meat outside. Oh yeah. It's absolutely.

SPEAKER_430: Get that, get those, uh, sausage sandwich, hot dogs wrapped around or whatever.

SPEAKER_432: Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_15: You'll pay for that later. Yeah. I think it is. I think the other thing that I'm really hopeful about, I've been talking to people is the cheap testing.

SPEAKER_171: And so I've been to a number of events where they had the 15 minute tests from other countries and they're using, I was talking to an actor, actress, uh, and she was telling

SPEAKER_02: me about on set. They have these and you know, 15 minute tests and everybody can go onto set. They do them every day. Uh, and then, you know, that combined with treatments, all of a sudden we start isolating this thing.

SPEAKER_82: We have tracing and I just, it's unbelievable. We don't have like testing and tracing working right now. Like this is America. We could have rallied the whole country, all these entrepreneurs, and we never use that energy to, to get this testing up and running. We're only doing a million tests and in Korea and in India, they have $2 to $10 testing strips that use a swab in your mouth.

SPEAKER_163: Anybody can do them. And people have them all over their house. And there's no more cases in Taiwan. There's no more cases in Korea.

SPEAKER_21: Every post office, which is in every town in the US should have been a testing facility unlimited. It should have been for the first six months. It should have been free. You have to go at least once a week and you find this thing.

SPEAKER_178: Yeah. You contact trace it. You, yeah. We're done.

SPEAKER_58: Yeah. We're pouring trillions of dollars into the economy when we could have just done that.

SPEAKER_439: Yeah. And testing, testing was really a key.

SPEAKER_04: We, we should have said anybody wants a free Starbucks, you know, or any local business, go to a local business. We'll give you a $5 gift card.

SPEAKER_02: And we just give people a $5 Visa, American express card to use in a local business in their town, uh, if they get tested. Yep. So you, you get off the train or you, you're walking around town. When you park, you know, at the Santa Monica place or whatever, they give you a test. You can go in and here's your $5 gift card. Yeah. Free parking and a $5 gift card to use anywhere in Santa Monica place. Boom.

SPEAKER_444: Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: We're done.

SPEAKER_444: That's.

SPEAKER_82: This failure of leadership and, and just execution, you know, like when you look at the entrepreneurial space and how good entrepreneurs. This is why I want to Bloomberg, you know, blue me would have been so good. He's just such an executive and he would have executed. So wow. I just want testing. Oh, testing is just so obvious and easy. Like India and Korea and Taiwan. They all figured it out. Yeah. The United States can't figure it out. Yeah. We've got the greatest tech companies in the world. We, we, we got the most capital laying around. It should be done by now. It's so frustrating.

SPEAKER_171: I can't wait till we get this done. All right. Listen, Jamie, I kept you for over an hour.

SPEAKER_04: I appreciate your time. I'm so happy with your success. Honestly, just.

SPEAKER_447: Thank you.

SPEAKER_04: You know, we know each other for so long now. I am so happy for you. Um, because it was so obvious to me for so long that you were one of the most brilliant product people. I mean that sincerely in the industry. You just understand it.

SPEAKER_02: And it's just so wonderful to see one of the good guys win and win big and really succeed in the mission. So just, you know, friend to friend, congratulations again on all your success.

SPEAKER_171: Thank you.

SPEAKER_449: And to you as well.

SPEAKER_171: All right. I'll talk to you soon, brother. Okay. See you all next time on this week in startups. Bye. Bye.