What does it take to bring a burned-out founder back to the company he sold to Amazon? For Jamie Siminoff of the video doorbell maker Ring, it was the potential of AI — and the Palisades fires that destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring itself.
Siminoff’s vision: turn Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “intelligent assistant” for the entire home and beyond. A handful of new features that advance that goal shipped just ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, alerts about “unusual events,” conversational AI, facial recognition features, and more. Some of these additions have not been without controversy, as consumers have to grapple with how much privacy they’re giving up in favor of convenience and security. But together, they point to Ring’s latest phase of its business.
“Turn AI backwards — it’s IA, it’s an intelligent assistant,” Siminoff explained in a conversation at CES last week. “We keep doing these things together that are making us smarter, and making it so that, for you, there’s less cognitive load.”
By 2023, five years after selling Ring to Amazon, Siminoff had been running at full throttle for so long that he needed out. “I built the company in my garage…I was there for all of it. We then get to Amazon, and I go even faster — like, more throttle,” Siminoff told TechCrunch. “I didn’t get to Amazon and say, ‘I’m an exited entrepreneur, I’ll just chill out,’” he adds. “I blasted the f**king gas.”
When he later decided to depart the retail giant, he said it was because it felt like the time was right — Ring had delivered its products and was profitable. AI’s advances soon had him rethinking his plans.
Image Credits:TechCrunch
Though Siminoff could have done anything, he wasn’t motivated to start something new because the things he was most excited about were those he wanted to build on Ring’s platform.
“AI comes out, and you realize, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much we could do,’” Siminoff said. “And then the fires happened,” he adds, referring to the devastating Palisades Fires that impacted Siminoff’s neighbors and burned the back of his house, destroying the garage where Ring was built.
One of Ring’s new additions, Fire Watch, was inspired by this tragedy. In partnership with the nonprofit fire monitoring organization Watch Duty, Ring customers will be able to opt in to share footage when a massive fire event happens, allowing the organization to build a better map that can be used to help deploy firefighting resources more efficiently. The AI will be used in that case to look for smoke, fire, embers, and more in the shared footage.
Image Credits:Ring
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