- Jamie Siminoff pitched Doorbot, a smart video doorbell, on Shark Tank in 2013, but none of the Sharks saw enough potential to invest in it. Despite this rejection, Siminoff rebranded Doorbot as Ring, leveraged publicity and new investors, and ultimately sold the company to Amazon for about $1 billion. Today, Ring is installed in millions of homes and seen as one of Shark Tank‘s most prominent “misses.”
Few major success stories come without a bout of rejection. Take Amazon’s Ring.
The popular home-security brand first came into the limelight when founder Jamie Siminoff pitched the product on Shark Tank in 2013. But Siminoff didn’t land a deal with any of the Sharks he was hoping would invest in his idea. At the time, the product was called Doorbot; Siminoff had asked the Sharks for a $700,000 investment for a 10% stake in his company, valuing it at $7 million.
He marketed it as a caller ID for your doorbell and said during his pitch the company had done about $1 million in business with each unit priced at $199 during its first nine months. Several Sharks, however, doubted Siminoff’s product could do enough or they could offer enough value to his company.
“I’m wrestling over where this goes in the market,” Daymond John said. Siminoff declined an offer from Kevin O’Leary, a.k.a. Mr. Wonderful, where he would’ve provided $700,000 with a 10% royalty that dropped down to 7% after he recouped his initial investment, plus 5% of the company’s equity.
Siminoff left empty-handed that day. But just five years after Siminoff’s Shark Tank appearance, he sold his company, which had been renamed Ring in 2014, to Amazon for $1 billion. More than 10 million people now have a Ring doorbell, according to a 2023 stat cited by Politico.
Siminoff took a brief hiatus from Ring after leaving Amazon in 2023, then returned in April 2025 to oversee the business again. More recently, his return has coincided with a new chapter for Ring, as the company leans harder into AI-powered neighborhood security. After a splashy Super Bowl ad touting a new partnership with Flock Safety faced scrutiny, Amazon dropped its planned partnership that would’ve allowed Ring customers to share doorbell camera videos with police in some instances. In the Super Bowl commercial, Amazon had touted a new opt-in tool called Search Party that would allow Ring customers to share footage to help find lost dogs. But people online criticized the feature because, they argued, it could be paired with facial recognition technology to track people, although that program was unrelated to Flock.
This also landed at a time when home video surveillance is under intense scrutiny due to the Nancy Guthrie abduction case in which Today host Savannah Guthrie’s mother was taken from her home. Law enforcement was able to recover footage from her Google Nest (not affiliated with Ring or Amazon) even though she reportedly didn’t have a subscription.
“You have the AI angst, you have the Nancy Guthrie thing happening,” Siminoff told The New York Times in response to a question about why the Super Bowl ad struck such a chord with consumers. “All this came together and it created a perfect storm and it just hit and exploded.”
Still, Ring is a popular home surveillance option, and O’Leary later admitted in 2018 it was “probably the biggest miss” in the show’s history up until that point.
“It just shows you how big the Shark Tank platform is becoming,” O’Leary told CNBC. “Every year the deals get bigger and the exits get bigger.”
Mark Cuban maintained his previous position in a 2018 LinkedIn post, where he commented he wouldn’t invest in Ring if he had the chance again.
“While Jamie did an amazing job turning [D]oorbot into [R]ing, I have a fundamental aversion to companies that require raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do less in revenues,” Cuban wrote.
How Jamie invented Ring
Like many other major tech companies such as Amazon and Apple, Ring was a product of tinkering in Siminoff’s garage. He wanted to invent a doorbell that could connect to a person’s phone and that would be cheap to produce—but it turned out to be much more of an undertaking than he had anticipated.
“It turns out we were way over our skis,” Siminoff told Fortune at its 2019 Brainstorm Tech conference.
Siminoff even used his last $20,000 to build an elaborate set to pitch Doorbot (now Ring) on Shark Tank, but that fell short when he didn’t land a deal.
“We were at the point where we had sales, we had a good product, but we had such a complex business,” Siminoff told Inc. in 2018. “We couldn’t show how we were going to get to the next step. We were at that awkward adolescent phase.”
Even though he didn’t seal a deal with “the Queen of QVC” Lori Greiner on Shark Tank, Siminoff still got to sell his product on QVC in 2016.
Shark Tank visibility also got Siminoff investors including basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and Virgin Group cofounder Sir Richard Branson.
“What excites me about Ring is its efficient, convenient approach to crime prevention and home monitoring and also its entrepreneurial leadership team,” Branson said in a 2015 statement. “I’m speaking as both an investor and a very happy customer.”
Jamie Siminoff leaves—and returns—to Amazon’s Ring
After a decade spent building Ring and five years integrating it into Amazon’s smart-home product line, Siminoff parted ways with the e-commerce giant in May 2023. At the time, Siminoff said he was leaving to pursue other opportunities since Ring had become more established in Amazon’s portfolio. Liz Hamren became CEO of Ring in Siminoff’s absence.
“What started as just a quick weekend project to allow me to see who was at my door while working from my garage has become a household name brand at one of the world’s most innovative companies,” he wrote in a statement at the time. He then went on to become CEO of smart-lock company Latch.
But just about two years later, Siminoff made his return to Amazon as vice president overseeing Ring and several other smart-home initiatives.
While Ring had become somewhat of a community forum, Siminoff’s first message to employees and customers was that the company would return to its original mission. Still, Siminoff recognizes the balancing act in making sure people don’t feel as if they’re constantly being monitored.
“That’s the balance. It’s not just like unfettered mass surveillance,” Siminoff told NYT. “That’s not what we have with Ring. You get to choose what you want to do with your individual home.”
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on July 17, 2025.
