Ring CEO Claims Cameras Will Nearly Eliminate Crime in a Year

Jamie Siminoff has returned to Ring, the company he founded, with a renewed focus on its mission statement to “Make neighborhoods safer.” Talking to The Verge ahead of the release of his new book Ding Dong, Siminoff says he believes the new wave of AI could finally help him fulfill that vision.

“When I left, I felt like Ring had gotten to a place where it was linear innovation,” he says. But new features like Search Party, an AI-powered tool that can search your neighbors’ Ring camera footage for lost dogs, are the type of innovations he always dreamt of but couldn’t execute. “Now, with AI, we can,” he says.

While research suggests that today’s video doorbells do little to prevent crime, Siminoff believes that with enough cameras and with AI, Ring could eliminate most of it. Not all crime — “you’ll never stop crime a hundred percent … there’s crimes that are impossible to stop,” he concedes — but close.

“I think that in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology — not too crazy — and with AI, that we can get very close to zero out crime. Get much closer to the mission than I ever thought,” he says. “By the way, I don’t think it’s 10 years away. That’s in 12 to 24 months … maybe even within a year.”

This ambitious, albeit unsettling, vision will bring his company back under the scrutiny it had begun to move away from when his successor, now predecessor, Liz Hamren, walked back the company’s relationships with law enforcement. Siminoff is bringing those back and adding new ones through its community request tool that allows local police to ask Ring users for their video footage.

Siminoff brushes off the controversy surrounding the tool. “I believe very deeply that we have a world where you can have technology make you more secure while also keeping your privacy in your control. I think that the two can coexist,” he says. “When you look at these quote controversies, what’s sad about it is it’s just misinformation. They’re not controversies. Police asking people anonymously for their video … is not a controversy,” he says.

Privacy advocates and civil rights groups strongly disagree, citing concerns around both privacy and the creation of a private surveillance network.

‘I was the demolition man’

Surprisingly, Ring didn’t start out as a security product. The story of how Siminoff invented the Ring video doorbell is a famous part of smart home lore.

The idea came to the serial inventor while he was working in his garage and getting frustrated by missing the package deliveries to his front door. It was 2011, and he had just bought an iPhone. He thought, “Why can’t it alert me somehow?” And so DoorBot was born. It took several years, a very public rejection on Shark Tank, and a 4-hour car ride to Las Vegas before the smart home security company Ring became a reality.

In Ding Dong, which is available to pre-order today at Amazon and launches November 10th, Siminoff tells the story of how the startup became the Kleenex of smart doorbells, eventually branching into home security cameras and a home security system.

Co-authored by Andrew Postman, the book is pitched as “part entrepreneurial playbook and part personal journey,” with a strong focus on what Siminoff believes is the key to Ring’s success, that mission “to make neighborhoods safe.”

I’ve not read it yet, but Siminoff tells me it covers the founding of Ring through to 2018, when they signed on the dotted line with Amazon. This means it doesn’t deal with Siminoff’s time at Amazon, but he says it does touch on Ring’s law enforcement partnerships, despite “most of that” happening after the Amazon acquisition. “The emotional arc feels like it ended at the sale to Amazon,” he says. “Once we got there, it was hard to say we were stressed about money; it just didn’t fit into the entrepreneurial story.”

For Siminoff, writing the book was a humbling experience. “Looking back, it turns out I wasn’t always right. I probably did get too crazy with some stuff. But I can tell you that dumb shit is the best thing for a book. Luckily, I did a lot of dumb shit.”

One example he shares is how he handled a phone call with an ADT executive in 2017, while the security company was suing Ring, alleging it had stolen trade secrets.