“The drive home sucked,” Jamie Siminoff said rather matter of factly this week when asked what he was thinking five years ago when he and his idea for a smart doorbell were rejected by the investors on “Shark Tank.”
The Ring founder is returning to the ABC hit Sunday night as a guest shark, and after selling his company to Amazon for a reported $1 billion earlier this year, the drive in to ABC’s studios was probably decidedly less sucky.
During an appearance at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Siminoff shed some light on how he kept going after failing to get Mark Cuban and company to invest in his original idea.
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“The good news was, I was so over my skis, I was so over-invested in this thing, I had everything in it, that all I could do was keep going,” he said. “Stopping at this point was literally … stopping was death.”
Getting from the proverbial startup garage, getting rejected by high-profile investors, returning to the garage, ultimately finding massive success, and now returning to be one of those potential investors was a goal Siminoff said he could have never set.
When asked whether or not, in tonight’s season premiere, he told the sharks they made the biggest mistake of their lives when they passed on him, Siminoff said he is not that kind of person.
“So, yes, I did!” he laughed.
“Shark Tank” airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on ABC.
