Years After Shark Tank Debut, Shaquille O’Neal Helped 46YO Businessman To Secure Billion Dollar Deal With Jeff Bezos

Everyone is aware of the beast that Shaquille O’Neal is on the court, but he is much more than just a great basketball player. Using his impressive business acumen and business strategies that he has developed over the years, the Lakers legend eventually could quadruple what he’s worth. How, you ask?

Well, the four-time NBA champion is an amazing investor who really puts his money where his mouth is. Years after Shark Tank debut, Shaquille O’Neal Helped a 46YO businessman to secure a billion-dollar deal with Jeff Bezos.

How Shaq helped the 46-year-old businessman secure $1 Billion

Jamie Siminoff is a 46-year-old entrepreneur and is the founder of the company ‘Ring’ (initially named ‘DoorBot’). A customer of DoorBot went on a vacation to Richard Branson’s resort, which is where Richard saw the video doorbell in action. Afterwards, the customer connected the two and Richard became an investor. That round of funding in 2015 was $28 million, giving Richard Branson 5 percent of the business. The next year, Jamie rebranded the company to “Ring” and raised another $100M.

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This is also when Jamie met Shaq. Shaq started off just as a customer of Ring. He was shopping for home security solutions for his new house and felt he was being price gouged by the home security companies. Shaq saw Ring Doorbell in a Best Buy and thought that was good enough.

So apparently Shaq was just walking around a Consumer Electronic Show (CES) exhibit where he introduced himself to Jamie, who had a booth there. After meeting each other, they decided to partner up and make a bunch of commercials together. Also, Jamie gave Shaq a million dollars worth of doorbells to give away to people in the inner cities. That definitely sweetened the deal. A couple of years later, in 2018, Jamie sold Ring to Amazon for $1 billion dollars.

Jamie Siminoff’s journey from his garage to $1 Billion

Jamie was constantly working in his garage and couldn’t hear his doorbell when somebody was out in the front and that is when he came up with the idea of a “video doorbell”. He needed something that rang his phone and showed who was at the front door.

In 2011, he started by building the first prototype in his garage, which took him one entire year to build. When he finally launched his product (called ‘DoorBot’ at the time), he reached $1M in sales in the short span of nine months. However, Jamie started looking for investors, as he couldn’t take the financial burden of growing the product himself. This is when Jamie landed on ‘Shark Tank’ in 2013.

Unfortunately, he didn’t get any deal as none of the sharks liked the concept of ‘DoorBot’. However, going on ‘Shark Tank’ was a blessing in disguise for Jamie as the fanbase for “DoorBot” sky-rocketed after the episode aired on TV and ‘DoorBot’ did $3M more in sales that year after his appearance.

One of the customers who he sold his ‘DoorBot’ product went onto introduce him to Richard Branson. Another stroke of luck helped him meet Shaquille O’Neal at a Consumer Electronic Show (CES) exhibit and the rest is history. The famous saying definitely applies to Jamie’s journey “Luck only favours the bold”. What are your thoughts on Shaq’s investment in “Ring”?
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