The Aftermath of a $1B Exit | Jamie Siminoff

Shaan Puri

Jamie created the **Ring Doorbell**.

Sam Parr

"You sold it for, *like*, $1 billion."

Jamie Siminoff

Right. 1:15.

Shaan Puri

The part after his decimal is worth more than our entire career so far. I want to brainstorm business ideas with you. I want to see how you think.

Jamie Siminoff

Is there a $5 or $10,000,000,000 company hiding in the *bug space*? Probably — they're it.

Sam Parr

"You said, 'I just don't know how to stop, and sometimes it's not smart, and it costs me.'"

Jamie Siminoff

"Yeah, you're gonna make me cry, Sam. You're gonna do this."

Sam Parr

So, Sean, listen: if you're like me, you woke up this morning, rolled out of bed, checked **Business Insider** (businessinsider.com), and read this amazing article about Jamie. It just says: > "I'm Jamie, and I'm the CEO of Ring, and I have the world's worst morning routine." It's a whole article about how he rolls out of bed and scrolls his phone for about **four hours**.

Jamie Siminoff

"Everything he says he shouldn't do, he does—*immediately*. Like, all the wrong shit. Like, **everything**."

Sam Parr

That was the whole article about how JB has the *world's worst routine*.

Shaan Puri

**Good PR strategy, right?** They sit down with you and they're like, "Hey, we need to get some cool... like, *tech‑billionaire weirdo* stuff." "Yeah, what do you got?" And you're like, "Nope, don't have anything." So they're like, "Okay, we'll use that."

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, I'm like the average guy from Missouri.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"Are you from Missouri?"

Jamie Siminoff

I'm from New Jersey, but I tell people I'm from Missouri now because I have a farm in Missouri. I've decided there's no reason why you can't just be from Missouri.

Sam Parr

"Guess where I'm from, Jamie. Can you just look at me and guess?"

Jamie Siminoff

Missouri

Sam Parr

"I'm from Missouri. My friend's from St. Louis." </FormattedResponse>

Jamie Siminoff

So, my farm is in La Belle, Missouri. I'm from Missouri. You're from Missouri, too, but you're more like *city folk*. We are two and a half hours north of Saint Louis.

Shaan Puri

Dude, I love how he just *out‑Missouried* you, even though you were actually born and raised there. He just actually was like, "You're a city slicker — not a real, true Missourian."

Jamie Siminoff

We don't like you folks. This is like you going...</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

To Tony Soprano — being like, "Actually, Tony, it's *bruschetta*."</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

So let me tee this up. Alright — I did a call with **Jamie** and it was super fun. Jamie created, if you've ever seen a doorbell that has a camera on it, this is the inventor — the man who did it. He created the **Ring** doorbell, grew it, and sold it to **Amazon** for tons of money. I was like, "Hey, I want to have you on the podcast and brainstorm business ideas with you. I want to see how you think — how do you approach businesses?" He's like, "I believe..." I don't know the exact quote, but it was something like, "Ideas are like my drug of choice." He said, "I have this list on my phone of thousands of ideas — which one do you want?" Yeah, exactly. So I want to do that. **Sam**, you saw the doc that he sent over, which gives us kind of bullet ideas. We don't know what he's going to say, but bullet ideas. Where do you want to start?

Sam Parr

Wait, wait—can I ask a question before we get in? Yeah. How much did you sell it for, like a billion dollars, right?

Jamie Siminoff

1.15. But I mean, if you want to, you can round down if you want to, I mean.

Sam Parr

Okay, okay. So we're talking to a guy who, you know, has a $1 billion company... part.

Shaan Puri

"After this deal, he's worth more than our entire career so far."

Sam Parr

I think.

Shaan Puri

You just have.

Jamie Siminoff

"Out, I did sell it for *a billion* — when *a billion* was a lot of money."

Shaan Puri

Just... back when "billion" was cool.

Jamie Siminoff

"Back when a billion actually meant you could buy more than a cup of coffee with it." </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Well, can we actually go to that story? Do you remember where you — I guess I'm always curious about *two things*. 1. Was there a good negotiation story, or a "throw out a number" story of how you arrived at that **1,150,000,000** (1.15 billion)? 2. How did that come about?

Jamie Siminoff

I mean, what was cool with Amazon is, we had been working with them on stuff for years. I actually went to Amazon and showed this guy, Nick Camoros, the Ring before we launched Ring because we had been talking to them. They were working with Alexa and were looking at—all the small IoT people at the time—there were a lot of little hardware things bubbling up. I literally brought them the first one and showed it to them. So we had been working together for a long time. We were very aligned on the mission—what we were trying to do. They started to look at video, realizing that with Alexa they had, you know, the kind of "ears" in the home, and they started to see the "eyes" and saw what we were doing. We had this kind of dating awkwardness because we would talk all the time and meet. Nick said, "Let me come down and let's have lunch," which was not that abnormal. We were sitting there and Nick's like, "You know, we should kind of go to the next level here." It was this very funny dating conversation—you don't want to just jump out and be like, "Okay, let's do it." So we kept going back and forth. He's like, "So you mean..." and I'm like, "Too," and we kept going back. Then he finally said, "Yeah, it's time. We should combine," and he said that Amazon should buy you—**not a merger of equals, by the way**.

Sam Parr

"What was your revenue then? Do you know?"

Jamie Siminoff

We were... so that was 2017. That year we did 480,000,000.

Sam Parr

Oh, okay. So you guys were just huge.

Shaan Puri

"Was it a profitable business, or were you burning money and you had to..." </FormattedResponse>

Jamie Siminoff

Here's what's so interesting: the economics of each individual customer were *insanely good*. The fundamentals of the business were strong and it was growing so fast that money was just being lit on fire everywhere. It's not that we had crappy offices; it's that you have to hire so fast to get ahead. Just think about customer service. When you're growing at **500% a year**, and customer service takes three to six months for a person to get up to speed, that means you're hiring two to three times what you need at that exact time—just so you don't blow up as people are buying and the growth continues. So you're putting out all this cash to do this stuff. I mean, when you start to think about it, it sounds cool. But when you're doing **$170,000,000** and you're ordering for **$480,000,000**, it means if anything slows down, you're basically dead. On one side, I'm sitting there with Nick and I have a **$480,000,000-a-year** business that's still growing—*triple digits*, literally triple digits at that scale, which is insane. On the other side, I'm going out of business every day. Every day I'm facing the wall—we're going to hit the wall—and the only way to stop that is you raise a little money, get some financing, or something else comes in. So it was getting to a...

Jamie Siminoff

Where I just couldn't handle it. I was... you know, I was sort of— the stress was getting to me. It had been years of just like that. Then we started to get into negotiation. During the negotiation, I wrote this book. Part of why I wrote the book is the story — it's a bit of a longer story, which is why a book is good. But during the negotiation I get sued by **ADT** — probably for something that was a little bit self-induced, to be fair. They win an injunction. And literally — this is like, you can't make this up — **Nick** calls me and he's like, "I'm going to send you a term sheet over tomorrow morning, just FYI." Great. An hour later the injunction hits us. I have to call Nick back and be like, "Hey, just FYI — not a big deal at all, it shouldn't matter," but, "just as an FYI, we did get an injunction from ADT on this lawsuit." And he's like, "Dude, we're out."

Sam Parr

Wow. What does that mean? So, **ADT** was suing you for what?

Jamie Siminoff

So, we had been building an alarm. They had, like, a company that they owned part of and were sort of invested in that was building it. They stopped funding it and the company basically shut down. I hired all the people from there. They told me I couldn't hire all the people from there. I told them, in a very respectful way—I said "please" and "thank you." I was, like, *a total asshole*, and I was, like, *so dumb*, and I just... again, I...

Shaan Puri

"Poked the bear."

Jamie Siminoff

I poked the bear, and looking back it's funny because that same *insanity and passion* that gets a company to go from 170 to 480 is also the thing that can blow it up. It's like—you're the **demolition man**: the same person who can use demolition to clear the way for the road is also the one who can blow everything up for everyone.

Shaan Puri

And so, my favorite Elon thing of all time is when he goes on Saturday Night Live and he says, "I took all my money and I spent it on trying to get rockets that will take us to Mars and electric cars." Then he's like, "What did you think? I'll just be a normal, chill dude?" And it's like, "Oh—actually that explains so much." Of course we can't have one. We can't have *mad genius* and also, you know, a *stable, respectful, peaceful, reasonable man* over here. It can't be unreasonable in one area and totally reasonable in the other.

Jamie Siminoff

And I think that's the problem — it's just true. If you want to do something, I mean, **Ring is a one-in-a-generation company**. I say that as someone who looks at it and can't believe I'm even part of it. I mean, people just call it "Ring." To build something like that is incredible. So yes, you probably have some traits that are very strong, but those can cut both ways. When the person from **ADT** calls you and you're in this sort of vortex of doing stuff, maybe you don't take the time to say, "Why don't I just come to you? Why don't we sit down — like two humans — and work this out?" By the way, it'd be funny to go back now. I'm sure if I had just flown there and sat down for dinner with them, they'd probably be like, "Fine, whatever, we're good — just wanted to talk." So Kayla said, "Just wanted to talk to you instead." I was like, you know, a lunatic — doing stuff. They sort of said, "Well, why don't we teach you some business?" And to be fair, they did. That turned out to be fairly painful.

Sam Parr

Alright, so you guys are about to get to the best part of the podcast. This is the part where we ask Jamie how he comes up with new ideas for businesses: how he came up with the idea of Ring, and also a lot of the other projects he's looking into starting. He has this amazing name for his approach — the **"Snowball Method"** — meaning he likes to find very small ideas that can eventually become big. The problem is that these ideas are so small that people don't notice them or they forget about them. Here's what we did: we looked at what he's going to talk about on this podcast — which you're going to hear — and because he's talked about the Snowball Method on a bunch of other podcasts, we broke it down into a really easy-to-understand methodology. If you're interested in solving these four questions, this guide is for you: 1. How do you spot billion-dollar ideas? 2. How do you get inside boring problems? 3. What early-stage moves actually validated Ring before it took off? 4. How do you keep momentum when your business feels stuck or you're on the brink? And one more: what critical decisions make or break a founder's path from $200 to $1 billion? If this type of thing interests you — which I think it does because you're listening to *My First Million* — you can get the link in the description below.

Shaan Puri

So you call the guy. You're like, "Hey, I feel silly even bringing this up, but there's a little lawsuit you should probably know about." Then he's like, *"We're out, out."* You're thinking, "Well, look — you drafted the term sheet anyway. Just go ahead and send it over." And he's like, "No, no, no." So how did it go back on?

Jamie Siminoff

I said, "Why don't we just keep the negotiation going and, you know, if I settle this thing out then we're good?" He's like, "Dude, we're not—Amazon's not—we're done. It's basically pencils down." On the flip side, which was great, I had a safety net. I was like, "Don't worry, I'm totally fine. I'm going into this Amazon deal with a safety net, which is: if we don't do the Amazon deal, I'm gonna raise **$200,000,000**." So I also had to call them and say, "Just FYI: I know this deal—we're about to close it for this money—and just FYI, we had this little injunction on that little thing that I kind of said was not going to be a big deal," and they're like, "Yeah, we're out too." It was the two doors I was looking at: selling to Amazon or raising **$200,000,000**. It was the first time I was gonna take secondary money off, so I was actually going to take some money off the table—meaningful money. It would have been real for me. Those were the two things I was sort of looking at going into the holidays. And all of a sudden both those doors evaporated. Now we're negative like **$70,000,000** in the bank because we didn't plan the cash flow. It was like, "One of these doors is gonna happen—you're not gonna raise more money," I mean, you're not gonna raise a third round. So all of a sudden we basically go to being, technically, like a bankrupt company almost immediately.

Shaan Puri

Okay, go on — *I'm hooked.* So what happens? And, more importantly, what's the conversation you have with yourself in that moment? Because I think there's what you did, but there's also what you said to yourself before you figured out what to...

Sam Parr

Do.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah. So, what's, like—my... so again, two traits that are good: one thing I do have, which has probably, you know, kept us from completely blowing the place up when things are really, really bad, is I go into a **pilot checklist**. I'm just *deadpan calm*. "We gotta do this, we gotta do this." I'm like, "We have to — we're going into the holidays, we have to sell everything, we have to break every record. It's the only way to survive." We also have to stop paying our bills to anyone that *can't actually tow us away*, right? So we did that too. That was... not fun, because you're calling people—vendors who've worked with you—and you're like, "Hey, listen, I know, but if you stop shipping this, we're dead. If we're dead, everything you've already sent is dead." It's a bit of... it's not a conversation you want to have.

Sam Parr

Have it — it's *everyone's problem*, at that. Yeah.

Jamie Siminoff

**It's horrible.** It's just... it's a bad situation.

Sam Parr

And then, did the lawsuit go away?

Jamie Siminoff

So, we're going through whatever—we go; it's crazy. As we go through *Black Friday*, *Cyber Monday*—that whole week—we literally blow out everything. *Ring* is just the product of the holidays; it's the number-one seller at Best Buy. It's literally on fire. So by the

Shaan Puri

"Way on that — if this wasn't happening, how much less do you think in sales you would have had? Percentage-wise, how much do you think you got extra just with the *forcing function of necessity*?"

Jamie Siminoff

At least — there's definitely, probably low double digits, like **10%–15%** at least.

Shaan Puri

And was it just your intensity—because it's like, *"we have to"*—or did you come up with a new idea? What'd you do?

Jamie Siminoff

We did everything — every social post, every piece of content. I mean, we had people... we put it all in the field. You just send in your best, everybody, so we just went crazy. For sure, that was part of it. But we needed to literally break every number, blow everything out. Even with that, it wasn't clear that we would *live* [i.e., survive]. It just felt like it was more likely we'd make it if we were blowing it out than not. So we were doing that, and then all of a sudden ADT called and said, "Hey, would you like to talk in a settlement?" Imagine if you had no oxygen and someone offered you a little — you're like, *"I'd love some oxygen."* So we went. They were actually pretty fair. Once we settled, everything else was amazing. It was this weird thing where everything underneath was the best ever, and we had this one cloud hanging over everyone. As soon as that dissipated and went away, it was... I mean, it was great. So we basically settled on December 9 or something like that.

Sam Parr

That's *pretty* fast. That's *really* fast, right?

Jamie Siminoff

So you go to this place—it's this office with two conference rooms. There's a retired judge who walks back and forth between the two rooms: you're in one, they're in the other, and he just keeps going back and forth all day. Then finally they're like, "Okay," and you're like, "Okay," and then you sign it and you're like, "This is done." They're like, "It's done." I was like, **"Done, done, done, done."** It felt Laurel and Hardy. I literally called Amazon and said, "Just FYI—it's settled." They said, "Okay." It was like, "We love the business; we just didn't want to get involved in that." That was around December 9 or whatever. On December 31, we signed to sell it for $1,150,000,000.

Sam Parr

Wait, so the deal closed 30 days later after...

Jamie Siminoff

The interview. So, we signed the LOI — the *binding* LOI — *literally* in less than thirty days.

Sam Parr

So, did you shop it around as well?

Jamie Siminoff

I didn't for a number of reasons. *The biggest one* was I did not know of another buyer who would back our mission. We were very missionary about making neighborhoods safer.

Shaan Puri

What were your interactions like with Jeff Bezos?

Jamie Siminoff

So, Jeff loves entrepreneurs so much that they've learned not to have him involved in purchasing. I think Jeff would just be like, "I love you, man." He's so great. I hadn't actually— I mean, I had met him once before, but I didn't really know him. It was really post-deal that I got to start spending time with him. He is just one of the greatest people ever for lots of reasons. I'd say the number one is he's just a **good human**.

Shaan Puri

Do you have any good **Bezos** [Jeff Bezos] stories? It's rare that you get to actually interact with—or, in your case, work with—someone like that, because there are always levels to the game. I meet people and think I'm doing great, then I meet somebody and I'm like, "Wow — that person's got a different level of intensity," or they're a different level of sharpness, or they ask a different style of question. You don't know until you meet them. You don't even know what "level 12" looks like until you see level 12. So I'm just curious: did you have any moments like that with **Bezos**?

Jamie Siminoff

**Definitely many, many moments.** I'd say the **biggest thing I took away from Jeff** is that he's the *most positive person I've ever met* — in the weirdest way — because he *gets shit done.* It's not like he's just saying, "Hey, good job, guys." He's able to be incredibly patient with things. He sees the future; he's very patient and very positive. It's definitely different from my personality. I'm more of the "punch-a-wall" kind of person — run around and yell a little; more of that inventor passion. But he has taught me to try to be a little bit calmer and let things sort of work themselves out, rather than forcing everything. I think maybe that's the biggest learning.

Sam Parr

And why have you stayed? I mean—how long ago was the deal: ten years? Five years?

Jamie Siminoff

It was 2018, so seven years ago.

Sam Parr

So, why are you still there? I mean, obviously—**money** is probably a big part of it, but is there... oh? </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Dude — "mission." He's gonna say "mission." I could bet anything; he's gonna say the mission. Money? Yeah... no.

Jamie Siminoff

I actually... so in **2023** I ended up stepping down. I was just... I'd taken the company to nearly a tenfold increase from when we got to **Amazon**, and brought it to profitability. It felt like I had delivered the package—I'm like, "here it is."

Sam Parr

It's pretty amazing. So you grew it to 4,000,000,000 in revenue?

Jamie Siminoff

Is that around there? Yeah.

Sam Parr

*Oh my gosh.* Yeah, that's wild. Okay.

Jamie Siminoff

So, the thing just kept growing... it was insane. I finally realized I was feeling super burnt out on the whole thing, so I stepped back. I realized I missed—it sounds simple, but I just missed the mission. I missed what we were building. I love it. I'm *an inventor at heart*, and being at **Amazon** lets you invent at scale. For an inventor, the best thing is to see your invention out there.

Sam Parr

Yeah, but it's pretty amazing that, like, most inventors... I mean, there are many inventors who are successful — **Dyson**, for example. You know, **Edison** was a good businessman. Maybe **Musk** would be an inventor. I'm not sure who else. But typically the stereotype of an inventor is someone who has two different, non-matching socks, who doesn't know how to do anything other than invent, is a little messy and whatever. But it sounds like you actually knew how to operate.

Jamie Siminoff

I would say I've used *invention around operation*, but I don't operate — I certainly don't operate — *in a normal way*. I've never had a staff meeting. Everyone's always like, "What day do you do your staff meeting?" and I'm like, "None," because I've never had one. We never had an all-hands meeting at the company. We do things when we need to. So there are a lot of things I don't have, like those processes for how to run a business. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"Dude, you are exactly like— you know who. He's like, 'Sean, 100.'"

Jamie Siminoff

Who?</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

**"Elon: The Card Game"**

Shaan Puri

Yeah, **Elon Lee**. Yeah, **Elon Lee**.

Sam Parr

**Elon Lee** — oh man, he had the exact same mentality. He was like, "Yeah, we don't do this at the company." Whereas Sean and I were like, "Wait — I thought everyone had to do all-hands." He's like, "Well, I thought about the reason why, and we just invented a different way to do it."

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, yeah. I think if you can turn—again, it's still *inventing*. Just because it's not a physical product, or because it's internal, doesn't mean it's not an invention. I love that you can use "invention" across the board, especially in how you build a business. I would say—like, I mean, **Dyson**, I think... I don't know him, but he's like my "mentor." This is the mentor I don't know. But look at what **Dyson** has been able to do by having built a great business. If he hadn't built a great business, he'd just be a guy in a barn somewhere in Oxfordshire or some shit. Instead, he's able to build all this crazy good stuff and have this company. So I did feel like the business was something you needed in order to get your inventions out there bigger. That's kind of what **Ring** has been. And then being at **Amazon**—it's like a thousand times that.

Shaan Puri

Was there a moment in those early days for Ring where it went from *"not working"*—like *"it's not a thing"*—to *"it's a thing"*—an inflection point? Or did it take off right away? As soon as you had the product, did people start buying it?

Jamie Siminoff

It certainly... looking back, it probably took off more than I thought. Being inside of it, you're sort of dealing with the problem, so you don't really see it as easily. Again, *when I wrote the book*, I was able to go back and think about all that was happening and look at it in a different light. So, it was **2016**. My wife was out trick-or-treating; I was away on something. That was the year she called and said, "This is insane — it's like every house has a **Ring**." [Ring: Ring doorbell camera] I think you really felt it because they're literally trick-or-treating and hitting the Ring at every house. So I think there were moments like that.

Sam Parr

Because that's gotta be one of the **most proud moments ever**, where you're like, "My wife is seeing you."

Jamie Siminoff

I mean, we would literally drive around early and yell when we saw a Ring on a house. That was the game. Eventually, we had to stop the "Ring game" because it became constant—you'd just be yelling "Ring" the whole time. But early on, as an adventure, it was amazing. I never felt like it was successful until we got the wire, because I felt like it could blow up. Still, I did feel like I had created something meaningful and had that satisfaction just by seeing these on everyone's front door and hearing the stories they then created—like stopping a crime or whatever. Those were the things that were amazing.

Shaan Puri

I'm curious about the **wire hits**. We've asked a bunch of people about this on the podcast because it's, you know, a moment you look forward to as a founder — like, crazy — but it's hard to actually get there. We've had some guys say, "Yeah, when the wire hit, I went to the ATM the next five days just to print my balance. I'd never pushed that button before, but I was so excited." Or, you know, some people feel lost right afterward. So I guess: when the wire hits, where were you and what was going through your mind?

Sam Parr

So I...

Jamie Siminoff

Booked. I don't know if you know this company, **TaskUs**, but that's a great public company now. The founders are friends — kids from Santa Monica that I had known — who started it. They asked me to speak at their customer conference about six months earlier, and it was in New York on some random day in April 2018. Because of how everything happens: you sell, you finally announce it, then the government has to inspect it. Even after that, they have to file stuff and whatever. The actual wire date is not any of those dates; it's kind of a random time when the money just comes. So it ended up being that I'm at this event, speaking in New York, and I'm sitting there thinking, "I'm sorry everyone — my phone's out. I can barely even... I'm just going to keep refreshing this because the wire is supposed to come in." Everyone knew I had sold, so they were aware. The wire hadn't come in yet, but it was supposed to come in right now, and I kept apologizing — "Wells Fargo, you know..."

Sam Parr

"You're on stage, you're like, 'Look—no, I was talking about customer service, but today I'm going to give a talk on **how to get rich.'"

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah. I mean, money doesn't matter to me — it's all about *mission*. But, you know... hold on for the next hour. It's all, and literally it comes in and there's just commas and commas and commas. How many commas could this be? It's like... it's like... </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

It's a *run-on sentence*.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah. Like, yeah—exactly. Commas and commas. And I just— I, yeah. It was the best. I mean, especially; I'd just gone through *the most traumatic thing ever*. And from a money side... like, the ring had exploded at that. Which, I mean, it got right on the edge where it would have been really impactful to my family. And I...

Sam Parr

Yeah. Were you, like, just not broke? Were you, like, you know, a $150,000–$250,000-a-year salaried person?</FormattedResponse>

Jamie Siminoff

Like that, yeah. It was like 150, I think at that time. And I prided myself — and this was, looking back, a *real mistake* — on being, like, the least-paid executive.

Sam Parr

Yeah, man — that makes you desperate. I did the same thing on a much smaller scale, but it made me desperate.

Jamie Siminoff

And that's exactly right. So here's the other problem: when you're making that kind of money and you're at a company that's doing $48,000,000, people are like, "Hey, come to this charity event—oh, it's only $10,000 a table." You kind of have to... it's like you have to sort of take part in some of this stuff, but you don't actually have the money. So you're spending even more than you would be making that salary, regardless. So yeah, I was basically at zero dollars. I mean, I wasn't in debt—debt—but I didn't have a nest egg. If Ring all of a sudden went away, all my future money was in Ring.

Shaan Puri

"I love how honest you are. Most people—the more successful they get and the more of these moments they have—try to either downplay them or become less honest. And, by the way, I think this is why when I called you I thought, 'That dude's happy.' It's not that you're some yogi or monk who's just at peace — that's not it — but I was like, you seem *free*. I think that's something we all hope success gives us. But it's actually not the success that gives you that; it's that you have to **decide** how you're going to be."

Jamie Siminoff

I think, also—yeah—when you're facing it, when you see what the other side is that clearly, I do remember it. I remember how lucky I am, sort of every day. I wouldn't call it, like, "success," but I think I have so many friends who have a lot of money and are not free, which is a shame. Because that's really what this gives you: the *freedom* to do what you want. I get to wake up and work on things that I want to work on, impact things that I want to impact, be with my son, and take him on college tours this past weekend. I get to do things because of that. Yes—overall, I'd say that makes me *very happy*.

Shaan Puri

I want to take the mindset you used to build Ring—your approach as a founder—and break that down, then see what other ideas might fit it. One thing you told me was: **"Rule number one: I like to start with the problem, not the solution or the technology."** What did that mean for Ring? And what's another example of an idea where you could take that kind of *problem-first* approach?

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah. I mean, so, Ring [the company] — I was in my garage and I couldn't hear the doorbell. So what do you need to do? You need to hear the doorbell. When you find that problem, it turns out a lot of times new technology can help. For example, "oh, there's smartphones coming out" — well, those have screens. There's Wi‑Fi now in homes. These technologies can assist the problem. I think the issue is most founders will say, "I found this new chip that's out there; what can we do with this?" They don't find a real problem — it becomes technology looking for a problem. I like to start with something that is a true problem, and then it doesn't matter what the tech is. That's part of what built Ring into where it is today. And again, you're going to laugh at "mission," but by being on a **mission to make neighborhoods safer**, we don't follow any single technology. We're not a camera company; we're not an alarm company; we're not a social network company. We're just a "making neighborhoods safer" company, which means regardless of what comes out or what we can think of, it doesn't matter what it is. If it's a steam engine in the middle of the neighborhood and that's going to make things safer, I don't care.

Shaan Puri

And so, you take that. Now, if I'm you and I'm like, "I was in the garage—I couldn't hear the doorbell," I think there's a part of me, the *inner critic*, that would have been like, "This is too small. That doesn't sound like a big, fancy idea. I'm trying to do big, fancy. I'm trying to be a big success, not a small success." And you know, is it that you did *napkin math* on how many doorbells you could sell? Is it that you just don't care about market size? How do you think about that part?

Jamie Siminoff

There's a guy who's somewhat successful who said to me that it was *the most insulting thing* — like almost anyone could ever say. Right when I'm doing this, he put his arm on my shoulder. He was much more successful than me at the time; I am now much more successful than he has ever been. He put his arm on my shoulder and said, "I love you, man, because you just like to work on these little things. It's so cute and fun to see." I was like, "Oh my..." That comment felt so strange. It was like: when you're finding these things, if they were obviously huge problems, someone would already be doing it. So you have to find problems that aren't obviously huge but still have potential. I look at it as, *what could it be?* For example, with the doorbell, it was a small thing. People said, "A $200 doorbell? Those doorbells are $10." That was the problem. But if you really looked at it and zoomed out, everyone has a doorbell on their house across the world — literally a doorbell on every home.

Sam Parr

So, was **Nest** popular at this?

Jamie Siminoff

So, **Nest** was popular as a thermostat.

Sam Parr

And they had, but had it sold.

Jamie Siminoff

They were just selling, or sold to **Google**. **Dropcam** was actually the Wi‑Fi camera that was out there and doing well, and **Nest** ended up... **Tony** ended up buying it at **Google** to bring into **Nest**.

Sam Parr

So, maybe there was some inspiration where it's like, "Okay — *not the same thing*, but, like, a household item."

Shaan Puri

For sure.

Jamie Siminoff

Oh, for sure. I was actually super— in fact, I have an email to Matt Rogers, who is the co‑founder of Nest. When the Nest came out, I was one of the first customers and I just said, "It super inspires us—this is what you're doing here." So yeah, there was stuff happening. But I think it is hard to see, at the time, how big a market is. Again, if it was obvious, everyone would be like, "Oh, we should just do a doorbell—look, this guy's doing a doorbell, it's going to be huge." No one thought it was going to be huge.

Sam Parr

Did you have, like, a dream where you were lying in bed talking to your wife, and you're like, "You know, I think we can make **$100,000,000** one year, one day"?

Jamie Siminoff

I didn't — I kind of built it. My wife was the one who said, "This makes me feel safer at home." That was when I realized this was more than just scratching my itch in the garage. This could be something bigger. I realized the overall security market had not yet started looking at how you could build and invent products around *presence* and true crime prevention. The alarm was built in the 1800s and, in many ways, was still the same: trigger off a trip and call a central station. That was considered best in class. We thought we could look at the problem differently. That was the superpower — not just the doorbell. We built the floodlight camera and other unique products. We even created the Neighbors app, which is a huge social network for crime and safety in neighborhoods. All of that came from looking at the problem and trying to solve it. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

So what's an example of an *idea today*? You see a problem out there and you're like, "Somebody could go try to solve that."

Jamie Siminoff

**I just hate bugs.** I've never found anyone who likes them. It's amazing that with all our technology—we can launch rockets into the air and land them on a little barge; we can do all this stuff—but we can't get rid of the freaking flies at my house in Missouri. I feel like there must be simple ways to do this, perhaps using solar power... There just have to be ways to look at this problem differently than either spraying toxins that are going to harm us all or using these other products that simply don't work.

Sam Parr

Is that your *current* obsession?

Jamie Siminoff

So, I have realized over time you have to work on *one thing*. You can't work on ten different products. When I meet a founder or entrepreneur who says, "Oh, I'm doing this and this," and they're all different, I'd say **99 out of 100 times** they're going to fail because they're just splitting their energy.

Sam Parr

Alright. Well, for the sake of entertainment—but also teaching our listeners, and because it's fun—can we walk through this? Let's say that you're *not* at Ring. Let's say that this is actually the idea (which, potentially... I don't know how— I mean, now it's obvious that Ring is awesome). But maybe in 2014, when you were a fan of this one, people would say, "What? That sounds so stupid." Maybe a lot of people are going to think, "Bugs, flies — that's it? That's all you got?" So let's walk through this idea: why is this a big problem, and how would you attack it or go about solving it?

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, so I would just—*literally*—put myself on the farm. I would get the soldering iron out and just start figuring out.

Sam Parr

I'd just be.

Jamie Siminoff

Like—I’d immerse myself in the problem. Why are bugs going on the horses? What are they attracted to? What are they actually attracted to on the horse? What are they doing? I would get on ChatGPT and try to figure that out. I’d look at everything and just figure out... and again, simplify. How do I go from a *first principles* approach? What is the way to just get rid of these damn things at scale? How could you do it inexpensively? My feeling is it has something to do with **solar** and either some kind of screw mechanism or **suction**, because it’s a big, mass-volume problem. I keep thinking of these little stations that you just put all over your property and they’re continually collecting. That’s it. I would literally just be building this stuff. I wouldn’t do research. I wouldn’t ask friends if it’s going to be a big business. I wouldn’t spend time on any of that. I would be out there with solar panels and **Dyson** vacuum cleaners hooked up to lights and tubes, and I’d just be doing this stuff.

Shaan Puri

"Sam, have you seen our friend Julian's *obsession* with bugs?"

Sam Parr

No. We have this friend named **Julian** who's *out of this world*. He's only eaten steak for two years. Now he's moved to **Hawaii**, he has a ranch, and he's doing crazy stuff.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so he moves to Hawaii. He buys a ranch and starts building a home. He's got this bug problem—just like you. The big project was the ranch, and the big problem with that project was mosquitoes, so he specifically focused on mosquitoes. He emailed me over a couple of months about different things he was trying to do to, as you were saying, understand what the hell is going on with the mosquito—where the root problem is. It's kind of *first principles*. He told me, "The problem is we try to kill the mosquito. No—you need to **kill the eggs**." If you don't kill the eggs, for every one mosquito you kill there are roughly a hundred mosquitoes coming out. He tried and bought all the fancy contraptions, then realized they lay their eggs in the water. So what you need to do... I don't know all the science behind this, but he basically has this thing [on the screen]: it's like a bucket with water. You spray this, or you put this device in the water, and it kills the eggs when they try to lay them there, so it stops the cycle.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

And he's like, "I did it. I solved the problem with the mosquito — the mosquito problem, which is that they want to lay their eggs on stale water. So you put dirt in the grass to make old, stale water as a trap for them. Then you put this thing in it — it's a bacterium that's harmless to humans but will kill the eggs." He was so pumped: "Look at this thing — this thing has **11,000 bookmarks** on a single tweet," which is pretty unusual. But it kind of shows that a lot of people have the same itch, the same problem, and don't really have a good solution. Yeah.

Jamie Siminoff

So... is there a $5 billion or $10 billion company hiding in the *bug space*? Probably. It’s global — they’re everywhere. It’s also a *health issue*. Mosquitoes cause health problems, flies cause health problems, so there’s real impact. If you could figure something out, it could actually be a $5 billion or $10 billion opportunity.

Shaan Puri

It also seems like there might be a branding thing you did well with **Ring** that could be applicable in the bug space [insecticide market]. I don't know all the big bug companies, but I know **Raid**. They all literally look and sound like *killing* — like toxins, basically. It's all branded to look like a **Monster Energy**–looking can. You know the way these new drinks — **Celsius**, **Alani Nu**, and **Prime** — came out. They're literally just energy drinks but with a different vibe.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, I think that's good. It's the same thing: there is probably a new brand in this that stands for something, but **it's not environmentally safe**. I'm not some *eco-warrior*—it's because you don't want to *spray shit all over your house*. You live in that; that's not good. We do those bug bombs and stuff [aerosol insecticide foggers], and there's no way those are good for you. They can't be.

Sam Parr

I thought the *Monster Energy* drink or the mosquito spray was pretty good. That was pretty good, yeah. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Right — isn't that what the can kind of looks like? Is that something? </FormattedResponse>

Jamie Siminoff

I'd like someone to go do it. I wish it'd be amazing. Imagine in five years someone comes back and says, "I was listening to this thing. I had the same thing — I needed a little push, I got inspired, and I built a **$5 billion** business out of it." That would be the coolest thing ever.

Sam Parr

Raid—like we're at war, going to battle. The thing about this *weapon* is, if you don't aim it in the right direction, there might be... no, there might be a **self-inflicted wound** here.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, you bet. You know it's bad when you're using something—when you say the name, I can *taste* it. It's not like I can smell it; I can taste what that is, because it goes through you... it blasts through your skin.

Shaan Puri

My wife hates that stuff because we have a dog and a baby. She's just like, "Look, we can't just spray this stuff all over." Yeah... I don't know — it's *too risky*, right?

Jamie Siminoff

So.

Sam Parr

I mean, were you—like—using it as *hairspray*? Why are you spraying it all over the place?

Shaan Puri

You know how it is when there's a bug? It's like that one episode of *Breaking Bad* where there's a fly in the meth lab. I was dealing with a bug the other day in my house. I was like, "Okay, fine—mission." I suited up in a hazmat suit, just going to war. You get carried away. One of the things you said that I really liked was you called yourself a **"snowball."**

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, so the *snowball* would be like — if you think about the fly thing, it would be: "I hate these flies." Okay, the snowball starts going down the hill, and then I'm just taking stuff and soldering it together, doing it. It's now gathering sort of its mass, and then it hits something and you lose a little bit off the snowball, but it keeps going and you just kind of roll down the hill. By the way, some snowballs, when they're rolling down the hill, hit a tree and just explode. So the fly thing could be that you get to this point where you just can't figure it out. That totally happens. If you can see the finish line when you start, it's usually not a good thing. That's usually — you're not inventing or changing the world typically if it's that clear how to get from start to finish. So yeah, I just kind of feel like I roll down the hill and gather, and you hope you don't hit a tree. As you get to the bottom of the hill, you hope you're a bigger snowball that's, you know, hopefully good for the world — if snowballs are good for the world — that you are helpful.

Shaan Puri

When we got bought, we were acquired by Twitch. Emmett, the founder, is this—you know—great entrepreneur. I was there to earn out my deal and be helpful, but I really wanted to learn from Emmett. I thought, *this is the one guy I want to learn from while I'm here.* So I asked him, “In the early days of Twitch, did you ever send investor updates or anything? I'm a little bit nosy—would you share any of that with me? I'd love to see, as an entrepreneur, what it was like ten years ago.” He sent me an update. It was hard at the time—they were doing a pretty unproven thing. Video game streaming wasn't clearly going to be a big market, but he felt a sense of momentum. One of his investor updates was titled: > "We are a steamroller going through a field full of flowers." He wrote that after they had gotten 152 streamers that week. He was taking a lot of pride in the small stages, because if you just keep looking at the small stage and poo-pooing it, you never build up momentum. He also said something similar about strategy. He told me he wanted to try getting into an adjacent space. I asked, “Why do you want to do that? Seems like there's so much more room to run with game streaming.” He replied: > "You never want to see the finish line. I don't want to be able to see the horizon." > > "Even if that's still five years away, I need to do something that's going to push the horizon out further so that we have more room to run." I'd never thought of it like that, but as you play at scale, that's obviously an important thing.

Jamie Siminoff

As well. Actually, I—I think a lot of goals are actually ceilings. Like, you think of a goal and you want it to be something. Kind of hitting a goal perfectly probably means the goal isn't set right. You want to have these *directional goals*—things that you could try to achieve that are sort of tangible but, in some ways, unachievable, so you're always... like, you're just trying harder to get them. It's the *carrot on a stick* in front of you: you can kind of never get the carrot, but you keep going for it.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

You have a life philosophy and a life outlook that's very different from mine. But frankly, I'm envious of how you think about things. For example, the way you say, "I start with a problem and I'm an inventor," which sounds basic, but the way you do it is quite nice. You have a really good attitude, and you just made this line about "goals and ceilings." What people—or what books—do you think have influenced you? If Sean and I, or one of our listeners, wanted to develop this *Jamie mindset* besides your book, what would you recommend?

Shaan Puri

By the way — *shout out your book.*

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, thanks. I mean, I would, of course, read *Ding Dong* by Jamie Sivanov. I think that's the how-to guide to business.

Shaan Puri

"Great title, by the way — ding dong."

Jamie Siminoff

Thank you. Thank you. In all seriousness... I would — I think the book that stands out the most for me is the *Walt Disney* biography. If you want to read this, get ready: you better clear your calendar, because this thing is... I think the audiobook's like **24 hours**. I mean, it's... whoever did that audiobook died afterwards. It was like — that was like...

Sam Parr

Like, of all the people I've talked to and all the biographies I've listened to, the *Walt Disney* biography might be the most cited version I've ever heard. I've never read it myself, but there are all these stories about small details. Apparently someone was building a train in Walt's backyard for his kids or grandkids — I don't know exactly — and Walt wasn't there. A contractor said, "Well, we can't make the train curve." Walt replied, "It has to curve, because when someone's on the train, I don't want them to know what's coming up next."

Jamie Siminoff

He was the embodiment of it. He was so maniacal about every detail of every experience. When you read this book, you realize that he was *tortured*. He could never achieve what he wanted, which was like *absolute perfection* of his work. So when a movie would come out—for example, *Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs*—he'd be sitting in the back of the theater, watching everyone else be literally mind-blown by what was on the screen. But because he was already working on the next movie and the next iteration of animation, he knew that this current film was not good enough. He thought, "this is shit." He was literally crying in the back of the theater that he was showing such a bad product to people because it could be so much better, and all he wanted to show them was the next one. I thought that's the struggle of a true inventor, entrepreneur, and product person: you put something out and you're mad because you know you can be better. It's that constant drive—that engine—you can't stop. If you look at some of the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs, you see that same relentless drive.

Sam Parr

"Yeah, you seem a lot happier than him, which is a good attribute to also have."</FormattedResponse>

Jamie Siminoff

"It's not... it's not terrible."

Shaan Puri

There's another one of your philosophies as an entrepreneur that I really like. You talked about this idea of **Tom Brady**. I— we did this call before this pod a week ago or so — and I've already used it twice in my thinking since then. That's when you know an idea sticks. Could you explain the *"Tom Brady hiring thing"*?

Jamie Siminoff

Yes. I mean, every team—when you get to the whatever... *I'm not that into sports*, but you know, they trade the first pick for this, and they're always trying to get the first pick of the... of, like, the—what is it called, the [draft]?

Sam Parr

Draft the.

Jamie Siminoff

Draft—that's how much I'm into sports. Every team had the chance to get **Tom Brady**. It's actually insane. They didn't just have one shot at him; he was the 199th draft pick. Everybody had the chance to get Tom Brady. While everyone’s focused on the number-one draft pick of that year—or the top 10, who are probably unknown to us today—Tom Brady became one of the greatest athletes of all time. So, to me as a business person, you have to find the Tom Bradys. They’re actually out there for you. Everybody has access to the Tom Brady of your business or of that area. It's like: how do you find them? How do you incentivize them? How do you let them become the Tom Brady? That is the amazing thing. I meet founders who say, “Oh, I'm trying to get the person from that company,” meaning the number-one draft pick. You're going to probably pay too much, and honestly, they probably won't be known in ten years.

Sam Parr

Great. Sounds good. How?

Jamie Siminoff

So there's lots of people who have different methods for finding great people. My thing is **"hire fast, fire faster."** The mission really helps. You sort of bring someone in and the interview is basically—obviously—do you have the skills to do the basic job? There's a sort of light bar. Above that, it's just: are you passionate? Do you want to work on this problem with us? Do you really want to work on this problem with us? Do you want to wake up in the morning excited about this problem? If you're passionate, you want to work on the problem, and you have the minimum skill set to do it, we'll let you try. It's like, go out there and throw the ball—see how you do. Give them massive autonomy in their area: give them the ability to succeed or fail. I think another thing that a lot of companies do is they wrap you in soft— they don't want you to fail, so they stop you from succeeding. It's such a weird thing. They're so worried that maybe you're not able to do that level of the job, so we have to be careful—we don't want you to be over your head. Versus, *let Tom Brady be Tom Brady; let him throw the ball.* When you let those people do it, it's incredible. Yes, in the process you'll have people who are not able to succeed at those jobs. You move on with them, and you do it better. You can be compassionate in that; it doesn't have to be unkind.

Sam Parr

"How fast do you fire? When people say *hire fast, fire fast*, that's a little bit vague. So, let's say you meet someone—how fast would you offer?" "I would..." [sentence trails off]

Jamie Siminoff

At that time — I mean, we're probably not in that sort of situation with Amazon now and stuff. As you get bigger, things are a bit different. Back at the start, I'd say **three to six months**, because you certainly don't want to... it's not like on the first day someone comes in you say, "Okay, you're bad" or "You're good." It takes someone a little time to get their feet wet and find their footing, but you want to be pretty quick. I would say it's very rare—if you talk to almost any entrepreneur or leader—that they say they wished they'd waited. Pretty much every time someone talks about firing someone, it's like, "I wish I'd done it sooner."

Sam Parr

So, **three to six months**. What about hiring?

Jamie Siminoff

Hiring is kind of on the spot. I'm... I'm on the—well, Amazon is a little bit different now, so I'll just be honest: if you have a bigger company, you have more IT and you have to do that. It's par for the course. But yeah, we were like—Mimi, who is my **Chief Revenue Officer** today, cold-emailed me and said, "I worked at Dyson. I now work at Sonos. I see what you guys are doing. I'm in the neighborhood; I'd love to stop by." I said, "Great, stop by." She sits down with Don—Don runs our sales. She starts talking. I look at Don; Don looks at me. I said, "We should just hire her." He goes, "Yeah." I said, "Okay, you're hired." She was kind of like, "Are you two jokers serious? I was just coming to talk to you." I said, "Do you not want to work here?" She said, "No, no—I want to work here." I said, "Well then, just come in to work here." She asked, "What am I doing?" I said, "I don't know. You just said you seem to know all these problems we have, so go fix them. You just told me we're doing all this stuff wrong—why don't you just take whatever that is, make that the job title, and go do it?" And she's our **Chief Revenue Officer** today.

Shaan Puri

Have you ever heard **Warren Buffett** describe his thing with people and the **"too hard pile"**?

Jamie Siminoff

"No, I actually haven't."

Shaan Puri

So this guy came on the podcast, Mohnish Pabrai. In the episode he described that he bought a charity lunch with Warren Buffett for $650,000. He had learned so much from Buffett and had been super successful using Buffett's method, basically. He said, "This is my tuition—it's overdue," so he decided to buy the charity lunch. He went in with no expectations. I asked him what he asked Buffett. He said he asked, "Warren, you seem to be a really good judge of people. You hired some pretty great people inside Berkshire and you've avoided a lot of the wrong acquisitions. You seem to be a good judge of people—what's the secret?" Buffett replied that he doesn't think he's that good at people. He said, "I think what I do is I'm a very harsh grader." > "Basically, the cost of me saying no to a good person—somebody who actually turned out to be good—is not that consequential if I happen to say no because I couldn't tell. But if I say yes to too many people who happen to be really bad, that becomes very costly and very hard for me to unwind." He gave an example: if he was at a dinner party with 100 guests and could spend five minutes with each person, he said he could, without a doubt, tell you five who are fantastic and five who you should definitely stay away from—people who are toxic or who he doesn't trust. The other 90 people he can't tell in five minutes, so they all go in what he calls the *"too hard pile."* A lot of life, he said, just works by putting everything else in the *too hard pile* and focusing on the five things you're pretty clear and sure about. People waste time trying to get clarity on that 90%—that's very hard to figure out, it takes a lot of time and energy, and you're going to get it wrong a lot.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, that's it. My method on hiring for the "too hard" pile is: I'm aware that I'm not that good at always figuring out who's in that pile. So if I'm wrong, I'm going to be very quick to *pull the trigger*. And by the way, you can also be wrong pulling the trigger — if you pull the trigger after three to six months, you could be wrong. I'll also say there are lots of people who didn't fit our culture who went on to do incredible things and are incredibly successful. So it's not that failing at "ring" [unclear] was failing in life — you just didn't fit what we were doing. We are a *unique lock*, and you want a unique key to work in that lock. On the empathy side: I didn't fire them like, "Get out of here." It was more, "This just isn't working out together." I would feel bad for every single one of them who had to go back to their family or whatever. That did weigh on me. But I also wanted the business to have clarity, to move fast, and to know. From above, they're like — I will say the wrong people really could be bad.

Sam Parr

Can I ask you about one thing? Here, you said, "I just don't know how to stop." Sometimes it's not smart, and it costs me.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, it's like the Jerry Maguire moment — "You're gonna make me cry, Sam; you're gonna do this." I mean, if I look at part of it... and even like we talked about that ADT thing, it's that I just keep going. I just don't stop. Overall, that's probably it. I keep telling young people — they keep asking me, "What should I do? AI's coming out; I don't know where I should go to college or what I should do." My advice is: **put yourself in a position where you can just grind**. Just go grind, because you just gotta get out. No one knows where the world's gonna go. No one knows what's happening. You can't control the world. Everyone acts as if they can. **Luck has to be your co-pilot**, so just go out there and keep grinding. A lot of times when you're grinding it's hard, because you can't actually see where it's getting you. You talk to entrepreneurs who have already made it and people say the average business takes seven years to be successful. Some will ask me, "So you knew when you started that you had seven years?" It's like, no — you don't ever know it's going to be successful. It's just an average. I do think the grinding thing is underrated — it's hard to keep grinding because you don't see where it's going, and sometimes you need these weird other factors outside your control to make success happen. Just like Instagram coming out while we were building a camera at your front door — that superpowered our message. I didn't build Instagram. I didn't push it out there. I didn't help it. I didn't know it was coming. But I kept grinding on my side and got lucky on some of these other things.

Shaan Puri

One of the things I liked that you told me was that you look for products where 90% of the marketing is already done. I called it *"last-mile marketing,"* and you were describing how this worked in your favor at Ring. You also explained how sometimes an entrepreneur can go wrong if they really need to educate the market about something completely from scratch. </FormattedResponse>

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, so it's... I would call it **pre-awareness**. If you can try to give an invention a little differentiation to something that has pre-awareness, it's incredible. Because if you look at the cost—just look at the cost—of a **new-to-world product**, the cost to tell someone about it is incredibly expensive. If I have to tell you about some product and everything I have to tell you about it is new-to-world, it's very hard for you to understand it. Then, go to the film business: when it's a completely new film, it costs more to market it than Top Gun: Maverick, because with Top Gun you already know everything. You know Top Gun, you know Tom Cruise—there's so much pre-awareness there. Take the doorbell example: putting a camera on a doorbell. I sort of got lucky to learn this thing. Everyone knew where the doorbell was mounted; they knew what the doorbell did and its basic functionality. I just added a piece to that. I did the same with the floodlight camera. You knew what a floodlight looked like, where it goes, and what it does for you—now you add a camera to it. Wherever you can use this pre-awareness... I mean, like Liquid Death: it's water. You didn't have to tell someone what this drink was. They changed a piece of it. So I just think changing a piece of something—getting your edge on it in an area where there's pre-awareness—is a great, great way to start. Because you tap into billions or hundreds of billions of dollars. In my case, think about the doorbell: how much advertising dollars, or whatever you want to call it, come from the doorbell just being known for the last hundred years.

Sam Parr

Alright. So I told everyone that, you know, we give a list where we're like, "Let's start with **ideas**, let's start with **strong opinions**, and then **cool stories**." You have one on here that was probably one of the most *eye-catching* things I've ever read: **you bought a town in Missouri**, is that right?

Jamie Siminoff

I went to a town in Missouri that had... a lot of these small towns now. If you go out into the Midwest, to some of these areas—between the *opioid issues* and *industrial farming*—towns have just been **pummeled**. This town, *La Belle, Missouri*, when I went there, was in pretty tough shape.

Sam Parr

You're actually—you're actually the second guest we've had who has bought a town in Missouri. The first is Al Doan. He bought a small town. He and his mom own a knitting company that is a multi...

Jamie Siminoff

I totally know that town. Yeah, *that's amazing.*

Sam Parr

Yeah, so basically, Al and his mom—his mom started it, and then Al, I guess, is running it. It's a knitting company, and he has bought a town in Missouri. He calls it *"Disneyland but for knitters."*

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, I think it is. But it's become—this place has become like the *mecca*. People go there. It's amazing.

Sam Parr

God, by the way, Al — I'm so sorry. It's called *Missouri Quilting Company*; I totally missed it.

Jamie Siminoff

I actually... I do want to talk — I have to talk to him at some point, because he's done some amazing stuff. What I tried to do, though, is a little different. They've made it — it is an incredible destination, and from what I've seen they've done an incredible job. My thing was I really just wanted to help bring this town back. *I'm an inventor.* I look at things I see that are not where I believe they should be, or that are problems. Again, we don't have a problem, right? Like, what's the problem? The problem is that this cute little town no longer has any business. The sidewalks are broken, people... and also people's perspective has changed.

Sam Parr

"Like, how did you show up there, though?"

Jamie Siminoff

So I invested in a business off of Shark Tank. I went back on Shark Tank as a shark and invested in a business called **Moink**—this woman **Lucinda Cramsey** from La Belle, Missouri. She has a direct-to-consumer meat company where we buy from small farmers and ship it out. It's really mission-driven—such a cool little business. I go there and visit with my family and I just fell in love with the place. My son's running around on hay bales; he doesn't even know what his phone is. We're coming from Los Angeles, and it's just amazing. I ended up buying a little farm there, fixing up the house, and getting involved with the community. The town was in a tough place, so we started fixing up the sidewalks—kind of the broken-windows idea: if you start fixing stuff up, other people join in. There was a lot of trash on some lots, so people started cleaning up their properties. We cleaned up the streets and the sidewalks. We then took a broken building and fixed it up into a beautiful coffee shop. There was nothing like that within an hour—a place to sit during the day and talk, aside from the bar. I like going to a bar, but a bar isn't a great place for discussion. The coffee shop became an important fabric of the community and it actually became successful. We also helped fix up the tavern and turned it into this awesome place—the coolest bar ever. It's farm-to-table, with organic grass-fed beef from my ranch. Out there, people just sort of shrug—“whatever”—but honestly, it's literally some of the best food you'll ever have. It might be the best beef in the world. A doctor put an office there and a health clinic opened. That's been helping the town get healthier. As that happens, people get more involved. This is the *snowball factor*, the incredible flywheel: you get things going and then people take it from there. Of course, some people said, “Jamie, this city slicker from LA—why is he making all the money?” But that's fine. Somebody started building little apartments. It's a town of about 700 people. It's amazing.

Shaan Puri

That's badass. So, what do you think makes—there are all those levers you talked about: the coffee shop so people have a **"third place"**, fixing the sidewalks, and repairing the broken windows. I imagine sports or church—other things that kind of revitalize the community. Was there anything that surprised you about how much of a difference it made? It seems small, but actually it's pretty big.

Jamie Siminoff

What surprised me—or maybe I should say what didn't surprise me—was when I went to it. I thought, "I'll just buy," like you said. I bought a town, and I did not... I took part with others in the town to change the perspective. So I was like a *catalyst*, but it turned out you needed everyone.

Sam Parr

"Would you be comfortable revealing how much you had to invest, or...?" </FormattedResponse>

Jamie Siminoff

It's... quite a bit, but I'd say what really was needed was for everyone to join in. It wasn't the money. When I went there, I saw the town and thought, "I'll write a check." I was like, "I'll write a check and I'll just fix this whole place up and it'll be nice." But no one would even sell me any properties—everyone was hesitant. So I just started to get involved in the town. I drive my backhoe into town with a Bud Light in the cup holder, talking to everyone. They realized that I'm one of them, and we're all in this together.

Sam Parr

It's like a movie, man, and this is the scene where...

Jamie Siminoff

*Totally this.*

Sam Parr

Guy *might* be alright.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah, and I did. By the way, I love sitting out at the side of a pickup truck, watching the sunset on the farm and having a beer — *that's my happiest place to be.* We started fixing up the sidewalks, and I went out there and I was part of it. That was the other thing: truly being part of it. It wasn't the money; it was showing that support. Then another guy in town said, "I'm gonna help fix this up," and I was like, great — and we just kept going. It was, you know, also what created Ring; it's like a thousand things that we did. It's not one thing. So there was nothing that surprised me as a single thing we did. I am surprised — I mean, the coffee shop. I thought it would lose money. I just didn't want it to lose too much money. It actually makes money, so that was surprising. But I'd say what's unsurprising is that it's also a long process. It's been seven years that I've been working on this now with people there. I'd say we're now turning the corner, but it's probably another seven years to get it really where you'd hope it to be. Every year you do another project, every year you do another thing — you can't just do it all at once.

Sam Parr

**Every four months** on this podcast, here's what happens: you see Sean and me sit on our hands like this. We just stare at you because we're... [inaudible: "got us, dude, buddy, if"].

Jamie Siminoff

You guys are in—let's do a podcast from **La Belle, Missouri**, Sam. I mean, you can... you can go visit home and then come up, so...

Sam Parr

Well, I've been for that. That's... I'm—what I was saying was, "I'm in on Jamie."

Shaan Puri

I think it's so cool. I mean, even the way we said it was wrong. It's not that you bought a town; you invested time, energy, and money into a town — invested, kind of, a piece of soul into it. The idea is kind of like: some places just need a little bit of that, like *CPR*, just to bring them back to life. Yes — to get that... it takes a little bit of pumping.

Jamie Siminoff

"Like, I was a catalyst, but I was not the right one... again. It's a business, right? It takes a team. It takes everyone being on board—everyone, really. All these things are the same thing. It's not just getting venture capital money and then you make it. You don't just do that. It's *very* hard to build something great."

Sam Parr

The TripAdvisor page is pretty cool. You guys name stuff really well. It's called "The Top Places": "The Milkweed Inn," "The TikTok Motel," "Tippies Bar and Grill," and "Stanley's Diner." I'm in — I want to stay and eat at all those places.

Shaan Puri

Alright, that's awesome. I think, you know, I don't like the idea of *legacy*—I think legacy is just an ego thing. But I do think we get remembered for certain things by others, and it's not always what we expect. It's not always in our control. I think what you're doing here is really cool. If you were on a **TED Talk**, I'd actually want to hear this story more than the ring story. I think it's such a cool life-resume win, and I'm sure it's been very satisfying and fulfilling in a way that just doing another company or hitting another quarterly sales goal would never be for you at this stage. So I think it's pretty awesome to hear that, because, you know, we're all in the game of entrepreneurship initially for success: to satisfy some insecurity, to get some financial independence. But why do you stay in the game? Well, it's because it's fun to play. These projects are just vehicles—like workout equipment. You're there to go for a ride; you're there to grow a little bit. So I think this is a really cool project that you did.

Jamie Siminoff

**Entrepreneurs** should be making the world better. Whether it's on a big scale or a small scale, they should just be working to do that. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Is this going to be a **second act** for you? I mean, first of all — this is, you know... we have to figure out how the story ends. Hopefully there's a good, **fairy-tale ending** where the town thrives or whatever. But is there a book here? Is there a movie here? This seems like a pretty funny and interesting tale.

Jamie Siminoff

I don't know. I kind of just hope that more people would go do this. I just wish people would use what they've learned—**their brains and a little bit of their capital**—to do this, because we would solve so many problems. It goes to the **root of the problem**. We keep treating the outputs of problems. For example, we have hospitals that treat people who have eaten sugar all their lives, but we don't stop people from eating sugar. We tell them not to eat sugar, but we don't actually do things to make sure they understand why. Part of this is that this area is healthier now—there are all these improvements. So how do you figure out the root causes and fix them? La Belle is just one of—I don't even know—5,000 towns in the U.S. that have the same issues. If you grow up like that, there are going to be societal problems that come from leaving areas behind.

Sam Parr

We, we think that... I'm in **New York City** right now. I'm from **Missouri**. I'm in New York City right now, and there's the *Langone Hospital* nearby. It's just—you know—the guys at **Home Depot** probably donated **$1 billion** to start this hospital. But then, four blocks away there's this other hospital, this other hospital, this other hospital—all rich guys.

Jamie Siminoff

Yeah.

Sam Parr

And that's wonderful, you know — great. But what is not talked about is *Middle America*, or, instead of donating to different countries, investing in a small town. It's not particularly accessible in terms of being top of mind or even thought of as a thing. It seems like a really awesome way to give directly to the recipients, but also the *teach‑them-how-to-fish* idea. Like, "Look — I'm helping. It's our town, it's your town, and I'm just here as a part of it." It makes it just a little bit better, which snowballs into something bigger. And that's really fascinating, because every rich person — or a lot of [unclear phrase: "versace brewers"] — they want to do dope shit. They do want legacy, and it seems like a really great option.

Jamie Siminoff

I think it is. It's where you can also use your *superpower*—what you've learned. You can actually impart your knowledge. It's not just money. Money obviously does help, but you need a little bit of that spark to help. It's not cash; it's actually more about using your brain and helping. By the way, what you learn from it—what I've learned from being there—is incredible. That's the other side. We just need to share more.

Sam Parr

A lot of the tech guys think it's "cool to be in politics right now." That, however, is *not my personal inspiration.* When I hear a story like this, I'm like, "Man, that sounds so much more helpful and very fascinating."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, very cool, Jamie. Well, I appreciate you coming on and telling the story. **Shout out the book** — it just came out two days ago, so shout out the book. People should read it to get the full story. "What's it called? Where do people get it?"

Jamie Siminoff

So, it's *Ding Dong: How a Shark Tank Reject Went to Everyone's Front Door.* It's available on **Amazon.com**.

Sam Parr

"Man, you're the best. We— you know— Sean and I have a bunch of favorite people. I think Jesse Itzler, Rob Dyrdek, and we've had on about four or five other guys. You have just made our **Mount Rushmore**. Thank you for doing this."

Jamie Siminoff

"**You're the shit.** Thank you. I'll see you in Missouri. We'll be doing a follow-up podcast from there."

Shaan Puri

There we go.

Sam Parr

I'm in. I don't know about Sean — I'm in.

Shaan Puri

I'm in. I'm in. How could you say no after *such a great story*?

Sam Parr

Well, thanks for doing it. Alright — that's the pod. </FormattedResponse>