Ring’s Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime

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.

Of course, we also talked about Ring’s technology itself, and I definitely asked Jamie when Ring would support new smart home standards like Matter and Thread. There’s a lot in this one, and Jamie was game for all of it.

Okay, Jamie Siminoff, founder and chief inventor of Ring. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jamie Siminoff, you are the founder, the former CEO, now you’re back at Amazon, and you are the chief inventor of Ring. You’re also the author of a new book called Ding Dong — a great title — How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve interviewed you before when we were secretly piloting Decoder on the Vergecast feed in 2018. You and I did a great interview, which was right after you’d sold the company to Amazon. Since then, you left Amazon, and you’ve come back as chief inventor of Ring; that’s a big deal. There’s a lot there that I want to unpack, but let’s just start with the basics. Why’d you go, why’d you come back?

I actually did stay for five years, so it was a fairly long time; I didn’t just sell and leave. I built it literally from my garage to when I sold it to Amazon. We had gone from 3 million, $30 million, 170, 480, so it was crazy. Then we got to Amazon and we almost 10X the revenue there, got it profitable. I was flat out for so many years that I finally got to a point where I could feel myself not being the best leader of the overall business. I could just feel that I was just burning out. So, in 2022, 2023, I talked to leadership at Amazon, and they were awesome, they were like, “Do something else here, do this,” and I was like, “I think, guys, I just need to step back and reset.” And of course, as soon as I did that and got out, I realized that I only like doing one thing, which is Ring.

I love Ring, I love the mission we have, I love what we do, and, fortunately, it worked out that I was able to come back. And so, I was able to take a little bit over a year off, almost two years off, do some other stuff that I realized I just … It was cool but I just didn’t get the same satisfaction. When I wake up in the morning as the chief inventor of Ring, I pop out of bed, I’m ready to go, I want to get to the office. I just want to get here and do stuff, and that’s true, and so it’s been fun.

I want to dig into all that. The book is about that grind: Starting the company, going on Shark Tank. There’s a great section about how you felt about Mark Cuban, and you thought he was going to invest, but he didn’t — that’s an interesting story. There are a lot of bumps on that road. There was a lawsuit from ADT that you thought was going to kill the company.

There was a great scene where you had accidentally written, I think, the number of weeks of payroll you had left on the whiteboard, and your team saw it and got kicked out. That grind is a lot, but Ring is a very different company now. It’s the market leader, it’s a brand, it’s up there in the hall of fame of tech brands, it means things to a lot of people. What’s your perspective on that now? To go from you had this idea to now, everyone’s expectations of what Ring is are outside of your control? 

To unpack it, I think it is part of why I left. It got so, I’d say, in a way, overwhelming. It was crazy. I literally did start this in my garage. I had an idea and I started in my garage, it’s the true American dream, got on Shark Tank, and the next thing you know, you’re at Amazon. This thing is still building; it becomes a verb, and it’s the thing. And so, I didn’t understand how impactful it truly was until I left and that’s from … When you’re in the business, you’re trying to figure something out, you’re trying to fix something, you’re talking to, we call our customers neighbors, you’re talking to a neighbor about a problem you have and so you don’t feel the impact of it. And as soon as I stepped out of it, fully where I didn’t have any of those other signals, I did have this just holy cow moment of, wow, this is really something. The impact is truly there on every single level.

So, going back, I came back with, I’d say, a newfound respect for that, a newfound understanding of that, and also I think a very clear mission for myself of what to do here. Not just the mission of the company, but even for myself, of what I can do to have a greater impact at Ring for our neighbors.

I want to dig into that because of the notion that we should have cameras everywhere, and that will connect directly to safety, which is what you have been talking about the whole time. I went back and looked at our interview in 2018; you were talking about that back then as well, but that has always been your thesis. If we can put enough of these products everywhere, we can dramatically increase safety.

I know you just spoke with our reporter, Jen Tuohy, and you said we can bring crime down to zero if we get it right with AI. There’s a lot there. But the reason I want to start with why go and come back and connect it to what you think Ring is now, is because Amazon itself has changed dramatically in just the short time that you left.

You left when Andy Jassy was just the new CEO, and Dave Limp was still the head of products and services. Dave left; he went to join Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company. Panos Panay, whom I know very well, is the new head of devices and services. He’s got a big vision for how to bring that ecosystem together, make it tighter. Is Amazon differently situated for you now to achieve your goals? Was that part of it?

I think Ring changed every year for me. So, when you would go from a $3 million company to a 30 million one … I think I’m very comfortable with how every year, something is different, it’s like coming back would be different. But certainly, yeah, there’s been a ton of changes at Amazon. I think they’ve been, if you look at, I think, any metric, they’ve been positive. Dave Limp is still a great friend of mine. I travel with him, my son became very close friends with his son, so he’s still within the family, and so I still stay in touch with him. Panos has been very awesome to work with, we’ve had a lot of fun, and we’ve been building stuff. We already launched some stuff at our launch event in the fall. These Alexa Plus greetings and some of these familiar faces and some of this stuff. So, I do think the idea of bringing the brands together is very smart. Let’s leverage what we have as Amazon together, especially with AI, and see how we can get the most out of it for everyone.

Take me inside the process here. You leave, then, in short order, Dave leaves, Panos shows up, it’s 18 months later, when we’re hearing rumors that you’re coming back, and then you come back. Did Panos call you and say, “Hey, you’ve got to come back and run this thing?” Did you show up and say, “Hey, you got a new vision, I’m here for it?”

It’s not as Hollywood as you’d hope for, maybe, but it was that we started just chatting a little bit. I was giving some ideas of what I would … The reality is, I left before AI, I’ll say. Sure, there were neural networks and there was computer vision. But what we see in AI today was not there when I was burning myself out in ’22 and ’23; there were pieces of it, but not anything like what we have today. And so, I started seeing things like our Search Party for Dogs. I was thinking how we could not, as Ring, be looking for pets that are lost in neighborhoods using AI. This is amazing, we could do this now. So, I started to talk to them about some of these ideas. I think they liked the ideas, and then things came together where it made sense, and I told them, I said, “I think I made a mistake leaving”… Or I shouldn’t say I made a mistake.

I left for the right reason of being burnt out. I think I wish I had done more of a sabbatical, who knows if that would’ve even worked, but I do love Ring. I want to be here to take it through this next generation of AI and what we can do for the impact on neighbors with Ring, and really fully see out my vision of what we started within the garage so long ago.

That vision really implies there are going to be a lot of cameras, right? Amazon obviously has that scale. I’m curious…  As you look at Ring now, again, it’s a verb, it’s a household name, and you could do more if you had even more cameras, right? If you could connect other competitor cameras to Ring, if there are other parts…

Yeah. It’s been rumored — by me — that there are over a hundred million cameras that we have out in the field.

But you could make that number a lot bigger. I’m just wondering if you think the centerpiece of the ecosystem is your cameras or if it’s the network.

The centerpiece of Ring is the mission to make neighborhoods safer. I really think you have to go back to that. And, so far, it’s been … I do believe, by selling our own first-party cameras, it’s been very good; we’re able to tie into them in a way that makes it easy. If it became that, to make neighborhoods safer, tying into third-party cameras was the right way to go, and that’s faster, sure. I think, definitely doing partnerships, how we could do that, I really do believe whatever we can do to get there faster. That said, I do think there has been value, and other companies have seen this, of having vertically integrated software to hardware. That does help. And, a lot of times, when it’s not like that, it creates a lot of issues with customers and experience.

I asked that because I was reading your book, and there’s a paragraph in here that just made me start laughing. I’m just going to read the paragraph. “There was risk in agreeing not to be bought by Amazon; they could swoop in and buy one of our competitors, like Blink, based in Boston, smaller than us but growing fast and impressively creative.” Amazon did buy Blink.

They did.

And the last time I spoke to you, in 2018, I said, “When are you going to integrate Ring and Blink? I have Ring cameras, I have Blink cameras, it’s crazy to me these are not the same platform,” and you’re like, “We’ll work on it.” And then I interviewed Dave Limp and asked him the same question; he was like, “We’re working on it.” And I interviewed Panos recently, and I asked him the same question, and we’re working on it. And it’s not even third-party cameras, it’s inside Amazon’s own ecosystem, there aren’t these integrations to make the network…

So, one integration. I think having Blink… Blink has been a great brand that just … You have Blink, it delivers a different experience for customers. I think that’s good. I don’t think it’s bad to have different experiences for customers, and not everything has to be integrated. I think that’s actually fine. That said… we’re working on it.

I knew it was coming.

I got to give you that. But no, but Search Party for Dogs, this thing that we’re doing, we’re making sure that that works with Blink cameras. So, I think there are ways to start to tie more of those pieces, again, to make neighborhoods safer, to tie those pieces together. And yeah, it is a … The hard part is, Blink was truly … It was a start-up, it was a separate company. Ring was a separate company, Amazon bought both, and it is hard to … They both grew very fast when they got here, and it’s actually … It’s really hard to integrate when you’re growing fast. In some ways, it’s that you get one or the other. It’s “do you want to grow fast or integrate?” And, actually, part of it has been hard because both brands, and Blink has been extremely successful, have just grown really fast.

The reason I asked that question in that way and in that sequence is that Dave left, Dave’s strategy, and I talked to him about this at length, was that we should get Alexa everywhere. We’re going to have this platform for ambient computing, and we need to put microphones and speakers everywhere and get the intelligence as far out and as many places on the edge as we can. We’ll see what works and then that will become the basis of the ecosystem. And that led to Alexa and microwaves; there were just a lot of ideas.

Yes.

In Dave’s product launch events, we used to clock how fast products could get introduced.

Yup.

That’s Dave. I’ve known Panos for years. Panos is not that personality. He’s like, “I’m going to make one diamond and then we’re all going to look at this diamond and I’m going to tell you how shiny it is.” And it is very effective, and he’s very charming in doing that, and he has really pulled everything together. 

When I’ve talked to him about what Amazon should be in the AI moment, and when I’ve talked to him about what the Amazon consumer ecosystem should be in the AI moment, it really is pulling things together. Ring is a start-up, you’re the founder, you’ve come back. How much push and pull is there between Ring, which is an ecosystem unto itself, a household name, and it’s part of the larger Amazon ecosystem? I know the strategy is to pull it together and make it more integrated.

I think we’re trying to figure that out. Alexa Plus, for sure, is the centerpiece of the … It’s the center of the universe, it’s where gravity comes from, and so we’re all floating out there around it in its solar system. I think it is trying to figure out where to naturally bring it in and try to make it a better experience for customers as we do that. And then the other one is… But, at the same time, Ring also has, as you said, been pretty successful on its own. And so, you want to make sure you also just don’t smash things together for no reason and figure that out so that it doesn’t hurt customers. Because there’s also been, historically, I think people have gone that way too, where they’ve just taken two things and just pushed them together so hard that it doesn’t actually work for customers.

And so, I think we’re doing a good job of it. I think Panos and I are working well together. There’s also Daniel at Alexa. There’s also Fire TV in that, so it’s with Aidan. We have a whole team that’s, I think, coalescing and coming together and figuring things out. There’s also Nick with eero. There’s actually a lot there that we can bring together naturally, and I think it does create a great experience in the home, and I’m looking forward to what we can do with that. Alexa certainly will be the centerpiece as the agentic AI to it.

These are the Decoder questions. I always ask everybody how their teams are structured. You left, you came back. Did you restructure Ring at all? Did you make any changes to how Ring was operating? How were you structured, and how are you structured now?

I did. I’m certainly not enough of a student of business to even tell you what type of structure it is, but I certainly did … I would say I let things probably go in places where they … I built it, again, from my garage to five years at Amazon. There are things that, when I left, I realized I was doing wrong, that I had set up wrong. And a lot of the problems at Ring, I’d say that I came back to, most of them I’ll even say were things that I had set up that I just had allowed to fester and become wrong. So, when I came back, I did have a lot of clarity around how to fix that. I came in pretty quickly, and we fixed a lot of things. You saw the results of that with the fall event. We got a lot of product out, we’re getting a lot of product out, we have a lot of new inventions happening, even the Search Party for Dogs, all the stuff. I’ve only been back for, I don’t know, seven, eight months now, and we’ve literally launched from start to finish hardware products, which I’d say I don’t think we ever did in the history of Ring that fast.

And a lot of that is reorienting how teams are, AI just pushing things, understanding where to push, and a newfound energy. It has been fun to come back and, again, for being able to see it from the 30,000-foot, clear level, no noise, I got to really understand what it should do. Then, coming back, I feel like I had this clarity, this sniper focus on it.

Give me an example. This is a weedsy show about structure more often than not. What are the actual changes you made?

I’ll go into why. So, over time, processes, you start building a product, and it takes X months, and you just … The PDP process and they always have every … It’s three-letter words for everything, and then people even forget what the three-letter words are, but we still have the process, so it’s all these different … So, we’re trying to get something out. It was a product we came up with when I came back. We wanted to launch it; it is shipping now, so this is, let’s call it, seven months. So, from zero to seven months, that’s crazy, and the team said we can’t do this. And so, before I would’ve been like, “Okay, okay, let’s look at it,” and they would’ve shown me the PDP process or some three-letter word, and it’s 90 days, and I’d be like, “Oh, well, I guess you can’t do it. You have 90 days for the PDP process. How can we” … So, I would’ve just let that go.

So, this time, no. Why? Why? Why? And we drove down and drove down and drove down and drove down and then you realize that process could be four hours if everything goes okay. But they give it 90 days because, if something goes wrong, you need the time to fix it. And I’m like, “Well, the problem is, of course, you’re going to need the time to fix it. And, of course, it’s going to go wrong if you give yourself the time.” So, let’s just say we only have four hours for it, let’s give it one day, and, of course, we’re not going to ship a broken product, so don’t worry. If it’s broken, we’re not going to ship it, and we’ll just push it out, but let’s actually … But if we don’t pull that in, we’re also not telling the factory to start cutting the steel, and everything cascades from that. And so, we took this product, we broke everything down from that, and, instead of it taking probably 18 months, which would’ve been the regular, it shipped in six months.

All right. Now what’s the product?

I’m not going to tell you.

Well, I have to know.

You’re not going to get that out of me. It’s one of the products we shipped. Just look through the nine cameras I shipped.

And one of them must have the accelerated approval process.

Nine cameras, I shipped nine new cameras. Just look through those, just look at those.

Right. I’ll see. I’ll see which one is the most obviously accelerated PDP product.

Yeah, perfect.

You can see that as consumers, right? Did you change anyone on your team? Did you change how your reporting lines work inside of Amazon? Did you change where … I’m curious. You have this outside view, so how did you think about making those changes?

Yeah, we changed a bunch of stuff, changed a bunch of the reporting stuff. I’ve never been a big reporting person. At Amazon, you do. A big company does; you need to have a structure. I’ll admit it, I hate to admit it, but you do need to have a decent structure. You have 1.5 million people, 1.7, I don’t even know what Amazon is, but it’s a lot, so I guess you have to have some structure. But I did, yeah, I did change who goes where. I brought in some people that I’d say others probably thought were more junior, that maybe wouldn’t normally report to me, and I had them report to me. I broke apart how I made them individual contributors. So, instead of having reporting people and trying to make these triangles, I said you’re just going to run this thing, and you’re going to report to me, and let’s see how that works.

I’d say I’m also more willing to break stuff this time, a little bit more willing to try to break things. Then, obviously, within reason, you break things and then fix them up if you have to, and we’re not always right. We try some stuff and change it. But certainly, yeah, no, change some people around, change some stuff around, and so far I think we’ve really gotten fast and it’s been … The team seems excited. There’s always going to be some people who are less excited when you have changes, but overall, I do feel like, actually, the energy here is… I’ll call it exciting.

One of the more interesting themes that we experience making Decoder is that everybody who comes into contact with Amazon leaves just speaking Amazon. Talking about one-way doors and two-way doors and two pizza teams and single-threaded owners, it’s very rare that Amazon’s culture does not turn into everyone’s culture. You have the opportunity to leave and come back. What parts of Amazon’s culture were valuable out in the world, and what parts of Amazon’s culture did you think: Oh, this actually isn’t working. When I go back, I want to actually reorient myself and tweak that.

Doing docs…

They’re still writing the memos and all that stuff.

Yeah. So, I get out in the real world, I’m in a real meeting with people, they’re doing a PowerPoint, and I literally lose my mind. I can’t sit here, I can’t do this. I can’t get information in this way anymore, like I’ve been so trained. The thing about a doc that’s so amazing is you get to teach yourself the information. So, you get to go at your speed, you get to think about things, and you get to process it yourself. When it’s on a PowerPoint, someone’s literally there teaching you at the speed of the entire room, so it’s all dumbed down. And so, I realized that, to me, the doc is one of these just uber, uber powerful things. The one-way door and two-way door thing, I do think it’s a great concept, but I think it’s been weaponized so much that it’s too easy to say something’s a one-way door. And so, what I’ve decided since I came back is that there are one-way doors, but you better not be able to break them down with a hammer. So, to me, don’t tell me it’s a one-way door unless it’s really a one-way door because a lot of the things that we decide are …

And for anyone listening who doesn’t understand it, the two-way door decisions are that it doesn’t matter, you could make the decision, you just go back on it, it’s a very sort of easy decision. One-way door decisions are supposed to be something that, if you make that decision, basically, you, in essence, can’t change; it’s so impactful that you can’t change it. And I think, over time, people have leaned too far into one-way doors, as this is a one-way door decision, and we have to meet on it, versus, no, it’s actually not. It is a little bit painful, but so what? And so, yeah, my mental model is, if you can break down the one-way door, it’s a two-way door.

Give me an example of your decision-making framework, then. This is the other question I ask everybody on Decoder. Again, the joke is, whenever I ask anybody who’s come within 100 miles of Amazon headquarters, I say, “How do you make decisions?” and I hear about one-way doors and two-way doors. It’s obviously riffed on that, right? What’s your framework?

But it is a good mental model. So, it does work because you should be allowing people at scale to make decisions that could be changed. It makes sense, right? It’s fast. If you want to make a decision that can be changed and is not that impactful, make the decision. If it’s a super impactful decision, we should talk about it. But then it’s the bar on that, how do you change the gauge to how sensitive you are to what is a one-way door, that to me is what we have to do. When I came back, that’s where we have to figure that out. And I do think I’m very good… My superpower is that I’m good at making these decisions. I was just in a meeting where we were branding a bunch of features, and I’m like, “Do this, this, and this,” and they’re like, “Ah, do we need to have seven meetings?” and I’m like, “No, just do these.” They’re like, “Oh, oh,” everyone’s shocked, and I’m like, “Guys, if it’s a bad brand, we can just change it, it’s a feature.” But you don’t want to do that, you don’t want to call …

It’s a new AI feature for us for one of our motion alert things. You wouldn’t want to rebrand it. It’s not great, but it’s also customers, our neighbors aren’t going to care if we go from calling it this to that, it’s not going to ruin their experience. What’s going to hurt them is us not launching something or taking more time; that’s worse. And so, to me, I’d much rather make quick decisions than stew on these things. But I do think the one-way door, two-way door is still a good framework. I think what’s difficult is trying to figure out which decisions are a real one-way door.

Do you think that the ability to move fast is the luxury of being the market leader, ensconced at Amazon?

I think it’s the luxury of also being a founder. I do appreciate the fact that the difference is being able to be the founder and having that. Even though I am … Listen, I’m an employee of Amazon, I’m not trying to act as if I’m not, but there is something that you get from being the founder overall that I’d say it’d be harder to have if you just came in as a VP of whatever and you were recruited in.

That piece, the founder mode dynamic inside of a big company, Amazon has preserved it, I think, more than anyone. You mentioned Nick Weaver. I’ve known Nick forever. I knew Nick when he was selling eero to Amazon; he retained the title of CEO. You had the title of CEO, you left, you came back, you told me right before I started recording.

Actually, I did not … I always had the chief inventor. I actually never took CEO. Even when I was at Ring, I never had the CEO title. If you go back to my oldest emails, it says chief inventor and founder.

Well, you get to do that when you’re the founder of a standalone company.

Of course.

You can pick whatever title you want. 

But inside of Amazon’s structure, you’ve purposefully not taken that title. Is there a reason for that inside Amazon? Do you have all the authority of a CEO inside that Amazon structure, and you just don’t have the title?

I would say I probably do. I try to, though … I probably have what would be considered internally a CEO. I think it’s a little bit of a misnomer inside of a big company because the reality is there’s a CEO, there’s Andy, and then … I definitely have the feeling of autonomy to lead and make decisions for the area that I’m responsible for. So, whatever that’s called, I do feel like I have that. I think Nick feels like he has that with eero, and I think that’s why … Listen, it is not a thing, it is why people stay because you give them, whether it’s a CEO title or …

But they certainly have the power to make the decisions and, in the end, what we like to do, what Nick likes to do, what founders like to do is build stuff and make stuff happen. And so, that’s the thing I miss most about being outside of Amazon and Ring: I can make things happen at scale here, which, in a way, is just unbelievable. We’re launching this Dog Search Party thing, which is one of the most … I’m so excited about this thing because we’re going to find, hopefully, all these dogs. There are over a million dogs that are entered into our neighbor’s app every year, so the problem is crazy.

When I asked, “How many dogs are actually entered into our neighbor’s app?” I’m thinking they’re going to come back with … If they said 50,000, I’d be like, “That’s a lot. Wow, 50,000, that’s crazy.” They’re like, “There’s over a million pet interactions a year on the neighbor’s app,” and my mind exploded. That’s crazy. And so, to be able to touch something like that, build something like that, and think of something at that scale, and get it out there and impact people, that’s … I don’t know who … Especially for an inventor or a founder, that’s the coolest thing ever.

I want to actually talk about Search Party and how that interacts with Amazon’s platforms and Amazon’s scale. I am curious… There are founders. There’s moving fast. I want to put some of the one-way door, two-way door dynamics into practice here.

I look across Amazon’s portfolio, which is coming together. I look at eero; eero has a big bet on Thread radios. My eero routers, there’s one sitting right over there, and it has a Thread radio in it.

One day, that’s going to connect to Apple’s Thread network, and, for some reason, the iPhone has a Thread radio in it now. This is the smart home standard that a bunch of big companies, including, to some extent, Amazon, are pushing toward.

Yup, for sure.

You made a bet a long time ago when Ring was started on a different protocol, on Z-Wave, which I would describe as the security system protocol. That’s the one that all the security systems run on. That feels like a one-way door. You made that decision; there’s no coming back from it now to the big standard that your stable-mate at Amazon has bet on. Blink operates on a totally different, random, inexpensive RF protocol; there’s a whole thing over there about why those cameras are cheap and can run on AA batteries forever. That’s just an Amazon … A big company has three divisions, and they’ve all made three different technology bets. Someone, Andy Jassy, could say, “What are we doing here? Make it all one platform.”

You didn’t even make it as bad as it actually is. I also came out with Sidewalk, which is another protocol. 

So, it’s even worse than you’re saying.

Put that into practice. How does that work? Is there a meeting where someone’s like, “Yo, we could get a ton more value if we undo what felt like a one-way door decision and we all center ourselves on one platform, one protocol?”

Listen, for sure, especially those protocols, they get close to a one-way door, or the product that ships is the definition of a one-way door. You ship a Z-Wave product, that is a Z-Wave product, that’s it. A Z-Wave product is a Z-Wave product, so that is a one-way door decision. The two-way door part, though, is if all of a sudden, you see something in Thread that’s really happening. The replacement cycle on these products, call it, even on the long side, maybe three to five years, maybe six, seven, eight years. So, if, all of a sudden, you saw that everything was really going to go Thread and it was that’s it, and if you were not on Thread, you were … Thread or dead. If that was what we decided, we could flip to that; we have enough of our toe in the water to figure that out.

And so, maybe you hurt yourself for a tiny short-term thing, but you’ve also tried to figure out other things in the long term. So, I think that one, as much as it’s a one-way door on the actual product, I think it’s still a two-way door to figure that out. And I do think, Sidewalk… I think we’re going to see a lot of interesting stuff with Sidewalk next year, which is an IoT protocol, but more of a replacement for internet for the trillion devices that are going to need to come online that have very low data. So, very low, low data in and around the home devices.

The connection I would make there is you look at a Ring camera today … Let me start this the other way. The connection I make there is that you look at the first Ring cameras, you look at the DoorBot, and you had to invent a lot of stuff. There are chapters of your book that are: How am I going to get a camera to run on this power draw in this Wi-Fi enclosure? Whoops, I made the thing out of aluminum, and I shouldn’t have done that. There’s a lot of that for the people who are interested in that.

We are way on the other side of the smartphone commodity supply chain. You can just take a bunch of sensors, Wi-Fi chips, and camera modules off the shelf and make a door, and you have lots of competitors who are effectively doing that.

The innovation is going to come from, okay, AWS exists, there’s an entire AI platform for us to build on. Alexa Plus exists, there’s an entire AI platform, there are Echo devices, there’s whatever. And I’m just wondering how you think about the balance of the things you want Ring to do versus the potential benefits of taking advantage of Amazon’s ecosystem scale. Because that feels like the core tension of the entire Amazon device ecosystem.

For us, we’re lucky that most of our products… We have a lot of different products… If you look at the core products, they go to the cloud. And by going to the cloud, again, if you want to look at the two-way door, one-way door thing, the cloud is a two-way door. The cloud, a new Nvidia chip comes out, it’ll be available in the cloud, and so we are not that constrained because we’re not … Again, most of our products, especially our core products, they’re not stuck in the home where we can’t upgrade them, and that’s where we’ve been… The older Ring doorbells are doing smart video descriptions. They’re not doing it because we planned so far ahead; eight years ago, I wasn’t smart enough to put an AI chip in it. It’s because now there are AI chips in the cloud, and they’re already up there, and that’s what we use to do it.

So, I think it is… Specifically for around us, integrating with Alexa Plus is easy because it doesn’t have to be done locally. And that is the problem: when you get into these local things, did you plan ahead enough? And the planning ahead is years ahead. Because if I think of a product now, the reality is, on most products, it’s made in like six months, but it used to be that it would take you almost two years from when you thought of a product till it came out in the market. Then, it’s another year to get it to scale. So, it’s basically three years from when you think of a product till it’s at a point where it has enough in the field to matter, and so, whatever chip you chose three years earlier better have aged well because it’s out there now.

Do you think moving everything to the cloud, particularly video footage from people’s cameras from their homes, is where the privacy concerns come into play? That’s where the, hey, are we building an accidental surveillance network comes into play. I’m just looking at the headlines in my prep talk. You left, Amazon said we’re going to stop working with police, you came back, boy, Ring is going to work with police again. You have a partnership with Axon, which makes the taser that allows law enforcement to get access to Ring footage. Did that feel like a two-way door? They made the wrong decision in your absence, and you came back and said, “We’re going to do this again”?

I don’t know if it’s wrong or right, but I think different leadership does different things. I do believe that I spent a lot of time going on ride-alongs. I spent a lot of time in areas that I’d say are not safe for those people, and I’ve seen a lot of things where I think we can impact them in a positive way. And so, we don’t work with police in the way of … I just want to be careful, as we’re not … What we do allow is for agencies to ask for footage when something happens. We allow our neighbors, which I’ll say are customers, just to be clear… We allow our customers to anonymously decide whether or not they want to partake in that.

So, if they decide they don’t want to be part of this network and don’t want to help this public service agency that asks them, they just say no. If they decide that they do want to, which, by the way, a lot of people want to increase the security of their neighborhoods. A lot of people want their kids to grow up in safer neighborhoods, a lot of people want to have the tools to do that, and are in places that are dangerous. We give them the ability to say yes and make it more efficient for them to communicate with those public service agencies, and also do it in a very auditable digital format.

That’s the other side. Today, without these tools, if you wanted to have… If a police officer wanted to go and get footage from something, they’d have to go and knock on the door and ask you, and that’s not comfortable for anyone. It’s also that there’s no digital audit trail of it, and, with this, they can do it efficiently with an audit trail. It is very clear and it’s anonymous. If you say no, you never have to say … That officer’s at your door, or you have to say no, which you could, I guess, say — it’s very strange, it’d be a weird situation. If you say no on this, they don’t even know that they asked you.

I’m curious, you mentioned the audit trail. I know you’re really excited about the prospect of AI to analyze huge amounts of video and think about all the sensors in your home coming together with AI to bring people more insight. That’s interesting and, certainly, that’s how you get to build Search Party. There’s the other side of it that we cover at the Verge all the time now, which is, boy, people are using Sora to generate footage that looks like Ring video doorbell footage. And Ring, being a verb, the angle of the doorbell, all that stuff creates a feeling of authenticity, even though the footage is totally synthetic, it’s fake.

Are you thinking about that? Hey, we need to put in content credentials to Ring doorbells before law enforcement gets them, so we can verify this is real and not AI-generated?

Yeah, we’re certainly thinking about that, we’ve been thinking about that, and I do think it’s where we have to … In the end, the source of truth is going to have to come from a secure