Shaq, a Snowstorm Ride, and Other Entrepreneurial Tales from Ring Founder Jamie Siminoff ’99, H’21
Stephen Spinelli Jr. MBA’92, PhD faced a problem, and Jamie Siminoff ’99, H’21 provided the solution.
Roughly 25 years ago, when Spinelli was a professor at Babson College and not yet the institution’s president, the pair were attending a campus event. Spinelli was fretting. He needed to head down to New York City for his son’s swimming competition, but a snowstorm had cancelled his flight.
That’s when Siminoff, at the time a young alumnus, stepped up to help his mentor and a favorite former professor. “I have a four-wheel drive truck,” he told Spinelli.
With that, the two went on their way, though the ride was far from relaxing. The storm raged, and the roads grew rough. Siminoff sped along, but Spinelli asked him to go slower.
“He said, ‘I can’t go slower,’ ” Spinelli remembered. “It was a great metaphor for what his life was going to be like.”
Indeed, in the years that followed that white-knuckle ride, Siminoff’s life has been anything but slow. Filled with a driven entrepreneurial spirit, he started several ventures, culminating in Ring, the home security company. Launched in 2013, Ring led Siminoff to an appearance on the popular “Shark Tank” TV show, and after years of building the company, he sold it to Amazon for more than $1 billion in 2018.
Siminoff and Spinelli shared the snowstorm story and other entrepreneurial tales last week during a fireside chat before an enthusiastic sold-out crowd at Babson’s Knight Auditorium. Their chat concluded a busy campus visit for Siminoff, a day that included eating lunch with students in the Weissman Foundry, attending an entrepreneurship course on raising money taught by Professor Andrew Zacharakis, and recording an upcoming episode of Babson’s “From Problems to Possibilities” podcast.
The visit coincided with the release of Siminoff’s new book, Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, that reflects on his entrepreneurial journey. For the fireside chat, student attendees began queuing outside Knight more than an hour before the event, the line snaking down the steps. They later lined up to ask questions of the entrepreneur and have their picture taken with him.
Part pep talk and lecture, homecoming and reunion, the fireside chat featured two people who have a long history together. “We go back pretty far,” said Spinelli, an early investor in Ring. “I had hair when I taught him.”
The event also served as a celebration of entrepreneurship, of its challenges and rewards, its joys and long hours. Siminoff knows those things all too well. “Entrepreneurship is hard,” he said. “The journey is tough. You have to stick it through. If we had just shut down when it got tough, we would have been done.”
Here are a few highlights from Siminoff and Spinelli’s chat.
In the Garage
As a student at Babson, Siminoff was exposed to an entrepreneurial campus full of business-focused professors and students. “Babson helps you to learn the fundamentals of how to react and be resilient. That is entrepreneurship at its core,” he said. “I’m not sure if Ring would have been where it is if I hadn’t learned some of the basics here to get me started on my journey.”
In the years that followed graduation, Siminoff started PhoneTag, a voicemail-to-text service, and Unsubscribe.com, which sought to eliminate users’ unwanted email. Using baseball parlance, Siminoff labeled these early companies as “singles,” not home runs. He didn’t lose money on them, but they weren’t game-changing companies either. “I had a lot of not great successes,” he said.
With a great success proving elusive, he decided to hunker down. He needed to tinker. “I decided I was going in the garage and just invent stuff,” he said. “I had all these ideas, and I’m just going to work on them.”
That’s where the idea of Ring was born. It came about for a simple reason. “When I was in the garage, I couldn’t hear the doorbell,” he said. “I looked online for a WiFi doorbell. It just made sense that one would exist. It didn’t, so I built one. That was the start of it.”
In those early days, the venture was known as Doorbot. People didn’t know what to make of it. “When you said you were working on a doorbell, all people did was laugh,” he said.
Steve and Jamie
At the fireside chat, Donna Levin introduced Siminoff and Spinelli before they took the stage, remarking how the College president represented one generation of Babson entrepreneurs who passed on their knowledge and spirit to the next.
“He helped fuel (Siminoff’s) early drive to build, to question, and to create,” said Levin, the CEO of the Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership, which hosted the fireside chat.
Spinelli remembered the drive of Siminoff as a young man, how his flame was “burning so hot.” He said, “I used to say to him as a student, that you are somewhere between, toddling between, intensity and insanity.”
“I’m not sure if Ring would have been where it is if I hadn’t learned some of the basics here to get me started on my journey.”
Jamie Siminoff ’99, H’21, founder of Ring
Spinelli invested in Siminoff’s early ventures, but he wasn’t sure about Ring’s potential. When Siminoff called to ask him to invest in Ring, Spinelli mistakenly thought the entrepreneur needed guidance. So, slipping into the role of professor, he went on for about 20 minutes, teaching and counseling, before Siminoff said, “Steve, I’m not that interested in the advice. I need the money.”
Spinelli wrote a check. Not that he expected to see a return on that investment. Siminoff joked, “He lit it on fire as he was sending it to me.” Of course, Spinelli would be proven wrong a few years later when Amazon bought Ring. Siminoff left his old professor a voice message: “I just left Jeff Bezos’ office. I bet you’re going to want to call me back.”
Connecting with Shaq
When Ring was still a growing company, Siminoff realized it could use some star power.
Seeking a celebrity who could be a company spokesperson, he reached out to an agency in Los Angeles. It called back to say that basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, who had bought a Ring doorbell for his home, was interested and would meet with Siminoff at the upcoming CES tech trade show in Las Vegas.
Ring had a booth at CES, but Siminoff didn’t actually believe O’Neal would show up. Then Siminoff spotted him. “You see this giant man coming down the aisle,” he said. “He walks up and says, ‘I’d like to talk to the CEO of Ring.’ ”
The pair talked, and O’Neal said, “OK, I’m in.” Siminoff, though, wasn’t sure if he could afford to pay O’Neal to be a spokesperson. He tried to bring up Ring’s financials, but O’Neal wasn’t interested, plugging his ears with his fingers. That was when one of O’Neal’s associates spoke up, remarking that “when Shaquille wants to do something, he just does it.”
Ultimately, O’Neal was paid in equity in Ring to appear in commercials. “Back then, as an unknown brand, it was a huge impact for us,” Siminoff said. “He might be one of the most recognizable people in the world.”
Looking Ahead
After its sale to Amazon, Ring experienced extraordinary growth. Siminoff stayed with the company until 2023. “It was a crazy run,” he said. “I was burned out. I needed to do something else.”
His heart, though, remained with his old startup. “I realized I really loved Ring,” he said. “I missed the mission of making neighborhoods safer.” Earlier this year, he returned to Ring, and with the rise of artificial intelligence, he’s excited about what the company may accomplish in the future. “We have been launching some cool things in AI and neighborhood security,” he said. “I feel like we can change again what’s happening in neighborhoods and how people live and their security and safety.”
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Read a 2015 Babson Magazine article, “When It Hits the Fan,” about how entrepreneurs, including Jamie Siminoff ’99, H’21, handle the bleak moments that inevitably come when starting a business.
Siminoff believes that AI could prove to be “one of the biggest disruptions that maybe we have ever seen,” but he told the Babson students at the fireside chat that their education will prepare them well for the uncertainty to come.
“There will definitely be some headwinds and tailwinds. There will be tough things, but there will also be lots of opportunities,” he said. “I hope you’re able to find opportunities and find the positive and also build the positive for the world. I am very hopeful you will.”
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