Seeing people using and loving your products is the best feeling ever for any entrepreneur. But another best feeling is proving VCs wrong who were doubting your product or your idea in the first place. A company which failed to receive funding on Shark Tank has recently been bought by Amazon for a billion dollars. Ring manufacturers doorbells which allow users to see and talk to people while they are standing outside the front door. They appeared on Shark Tank in 2013 with the name DoorBot. But they couldn’t get much interest from the investors on the show. The DoorBot didn’t lose courage and five years later the company has sold itself to Amazon.
DoorBot appeared on the fifth season of Shark Tank and the founder of the company, Jamie Siminoff, asked the investors for $7 million. The investors were not very impressed with the product they were manufacturing so Mark Cuban, Daymond John, Lori Greiner and Robert Herjavec, refused to put any investment in the company. However, Kevin O’Leary offered a deal which was less than $7 million. At this, Jamie Siminoff decided not to take the deal and walked away with nothing.
Siminoff said that it was not an easy decision. He told, “I remember after that ‘Shark Tank’ episode literally being in tears. I needed the money, we were out of money at the time.” He said that it was not just the money. “I can’t count the number of people who didn’t invest in this, who said ‘no,’ the number of people who said it was going to fail. I don’t think [Microsoft] Excel could hold the number of records for it.”
The publicity they gained from Shark Tank helped the company a lot. DoorBot raised $1 million seed from First Round Capital later that year. Another year after, they raised $4.5 million. The huge names in the market also started noticing the company. In 2016, the founder of Virgin, Richard Branson also invested in the company. By the year 2018, the company has 1300 employees and was selling millions of its products and had a worth of $1 billion.
This is when the biggest companies in the world stepped in and purchased Ring, previously known as DoorBot, for $1 billion. The founder of the company Jamie Siminoff is now very rich and has learned to take rejections nicely. He said, “I will never forget leaving the set without a deal. It was horrible. I hear ‘no’, it hits me. It hits me square in the chest. I just have this thing where I get back up, and when I get back up I’m stronger and I fight harder.”