Ring founder Jamie Siminoff on selling to Amazon—and staying on

For some founders, the goal is simple: Build something great, sell it for a lot of money and exit on top.

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff did that. But his experience after the sale offers a different lesson: Sometimes the biggest payoff comes from thinking beyond the deal itself.

After seven years of building Ring, Siminoff sold the video doorbell company to Amazon in 2018. Rather than treating the acquisition as the end of his involvement with Ring, he stayed on at Amazon, eventually stepped away for a few years and returned again in 2025.

Today, Siminoff serves as Amazon’s vice president of product and said his return allowed him to “go back to my playground and build stuff.”

His path offers an unusual look at life after an exit—and the trade-offs that come with going from being the person calling the shots to working inside a much larger company.

Exiting doesn’t always mean leaving

Instead of viewing the sale as a handoff, Siminoff saw the Amazon acquisition as a continuation of his trajectory with Ring.

“I really wanted to continue running and building the business when I sold it, and part of why I sold to Amazon is I felt that they would allow me to,” he told Founder Brew. “I definitely was not done with it yet.”

He considers his “first tour of duty” with Amazon as a success. “I stayed for five years,” he said. “I built it, almost 10x-ed the business between when I sold it to Amazon until I left. I got it profitable.”

That success came at a cost. “I also burnt myself out. I had been doing it for at that point like seven years myself, as a private company, and then five years at Amazon,” he said. “I needed to take a step back and just take a few years off.”

About two years after he stepped away, though, he felt ready to return, especially as new advances in technology seemed poised to create new opportunities.

“One of the big things that brought me back was AI,” he told Founder Brew. “I call myself the chief inventor. I really like to invent things and build stuff, and AI really unlocked our vision of making neighborhoods safer. It unlocked—literally—a whole new world of inventions and things that we could do with what we built.”

For Siminoff, the difference between leading Ring as its founder and working for Ring under Amazon’s ownership was less than it might seem to an outside observer. While running an independent company, he always had to deal with outside investors and the pressure of keeping the Ring running. “I certainly was able to make more decisions. That said, the flip side of that is I had to raise money,” he said.

And Amazon’s resources, he said, didn’t hurt. “It might be, for an inventor, more fun to be in a place like Amazon than to be an independent company,” he said. “If I come up with something, I can fund it. I can get it out there.”

Siminoff isn’t the only Ring loyalist at Amazon for the long haul. “Still to this day, most of the team is still intact at Ring, and that’s eight years later,” he shared.

“Most people think that when you sell a company, it’s like, ‘What beach did you go to?’” Siminoff said. “Instead, we tripled down. We went harder, I would say, the first day that we were at Amazon than we had the day before when we were just on our own. We all wanted to prove that we could really take this thing to the next level, and that’s what we did.”

Shark-like wisdom

Siminoff made a nationally televised splash in 2013, when he appeared on Shark Tank to pitch Ring, then called DoorBot. Infamously, he turned down the only offer he had and left the show without an investment. Years later, after the Amazon acquisition made Ring one of the most successful companies featured on the show, he returned as a guest judge.

Siminoff says entrepreneurs looking to catch his eye should plan to focus on their company’s long-term success. “Anything shortsighted is usually a trap,” he said, cautioning against cutting corners on values like ethics, morals, or profit. “There’s all these things that, you feel if you just bend it for like a short time, you could probably jump ahead. It’s that betting mentality.”

“We’re seeing a time now with AI where there’s companies coming out that are 90 days old, and they sell for $6 billion. Those are lottery tickets. That’s not a business,” he told Founder Brew. “It’s a very bad example of what you can do.”

“The businesses that I think people should look at are the ones that have been built over a long time that continue to evolve and matter and impact,” he said.

“Build your business for value.”

Siminoff’s main advice to entrepreneurs contemplating selling their companies is counterintuitive: “Don’t try to sell it.”

“Another trap people fall into is they try to make it look good for a sale. Maybe that works in the lottery ticket sense,” he said. “There’ll always be someone who wants to buy a valuable business. If you focus on not selling it but building a valuable business, people will be attracted to it and want to buy it. The best way to sell is to just build a good business.”

Siminoff pointed out that his relationship with Amazon started far before they entered negotiations. “We were talking to Amazon for four years about not like ‘Oh hey, I’m here to sell,’” he said. “It’s like, ‘How can we work together? What can we do?’”

“Think long term,” he advises. “If you’re doing this, it’s going to be a marathon.”