Jamie Siminoff did not set out to build a global security brand. He was simply an inventor in his garage, frustrated that he could not hear the doorbell while he worked. Having just started using a smartphone, he went looking for a WiFi-connected doorbell that could send alerts to his phone. Nothing existed. So he built one.

He cobbled together a camera and some hacked hardware into a rough prototype he called Doorbot. The device let him see and talk to whoever was at his front door from his phone. The turning point came when his wife told him the device made her feel safer at home. Siminoff realized he had not just solved an inconvenience; he had stumbled onto a new way to think about home security, using connectivity to “make neighborhoods safer.”

Doorbot’s early days were scrappy. A Kickstarter campaign brought in presales and validation, but the product was still fragile when Siminoff walked onto the set of Shark Tank. He treated the appearance like an Olympic event, rehearsing in a mock set he built in his backyard and studying past episodes to understand how to keep the pitch sharp and compelling.

On camera, the live demo worked, but the deal did not. The Sharks passed, including the investor Siminoff was sure would back him. Off camera, though, the exposure was transformative. Orders surged, and viewers seemed to grasp that this was more than a gadget. It was a new layer of security for the front door.

Siminoff rebranded Doorbot as Ring and upgraded the hardware and software with better video, motion detection, and cloud recording. As competitors rushed into the market, Ring moved faster, scaling sales from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few years. The growth was exhilarating and brutal at the same time: massive inventory bets, constant risk of overextending, and a company straining to keep up with demand.

That momentum drew Amazon, which acquired Ring in a deal valued at around $1 billion. Siminoff stayed on, still in founder mode, pushing the product forward and later exploring how artificial intelligence could compress development cycles and power new features, while insisting that customer control and privacy remain central to the brand.