Today I’m talking with Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring, the video doorbell and security company. Jamie actually wouldn’t let me call him the CEO. He says his title is and always has been chief inventor, so obviously, we talked about that a little bit.
Jamie just published a book about his experiences launching and leading Ring. It’s called Ding-Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door. And I have to admit that it is a great title for a doorbell company.
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The last time I interviewed Jamie was all the way back in 2018, right after he’d sold Ring to Amazon, and when we were piloting Decoder on The Vergecast with some sneaky backdoor interviews.
Since then, Jamie left Ring and Amazon, both started and sold another company, and he’s only recently returned to Amazon to lead Ring once again. In that time, we also started Decoder, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to talk to Jamie about why he left, why he came back, and what’s next for Ring.
Jamie’s mission with Ring has always been to make the world safer, and he has an expansive view of what that means. Seriously, you’re gonna hear him mention Ring’s new AI-powered Search Party feature that helps find lost dogs a lot during this conversation, but his goals and his vision for safety are enormous. He told Verge reporter Jennifer Tuohy in an interview last month that he thought Ring could almost “zero out crime” in the average neighborhood within the next year.
That’s a big promise, right on the face of it. It’s also potentially a very troubling one as we face more and more erosion of privacy and a surveillance panopticon that seems to only ever expand. Sure, Ring is a private company, as are many others, but public entities like police, immigration enforcement, and other agencies use private companies’ data all the time in all kinds of ways. They can just go buy it like anyone else, or sometimes they get it for free if they ask.
Ring’s various partnerships with police departments were pretty controversial when they first spun up, especially against the background of the Black Lives Matter protest movement in 2020. Amazon stepped back a little bit from working directly with the police after Jamie left the company, but now that he’s back, Ring is once again very gung-ho about police partnerships.
But here in 2025, the combination of surveillance and public safety is more controversial than ever. There are federal authorities snatching people off the streets in many cities simply because they look like they could be immigrants and building giant biometric databases of everyone’s faces. This is scary stuff.
There’s also the question of what safety really means. You’ll hear me push Jamie on this throughout this conversation, as he lays out his vision of an ideal neighborhood. To him, it’s one where constant monitoring erases crime. His model is one of constant pervasive security forces, which is not really mine, and we went back and forth on this a few times.
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