Five years after its acquisition by Amazon, smart doorbell and home security technology company Ring named a new CEO: Elizabeth (Liz) Hamren, a former executive in Meta’s Oculus division and Microsoft’s Xbox business, who was most recently chief operating officer for social messaging platform Discord.
Hamren is scheduled to start in the new role March 22, with a purview that goes well beyond Ring. She’ll also lead Amazon’s Blink smart home security camera business; the Amazon Key in-garage delivery service; and the Amazon Sidewalk neighborhood wireless network.
Jamie Siminoff, the Ring founder and longtime CEO, who started the company in his Southern California garage in 2012, will remain with Ring as chief inventor, he told employees in a memo Wednesday introducing Hamren as CEO.
Siminoff described Hamren as a longtime believer in Ring’s vision.
“When she and I met eight years ago, Ring was so small and I hadn’t shared our mission with anyone except our team, mostly because no one would listen,” Siminoff wrote. “Even then, Liz understood what I was feeling about the space: Our work wasn’t about trying to make a faster chip or shinier plastic, it was about changing the way neighbors think about security for the better.”
He added, “Invention is my true passion. I am constantly looking at how we can adapt to deliver for our neighbors, which is what we’ve always called our customers. This is why I decided to shift my role to Chief Inventor and bring on a new CEO.”
The sale of the company to Amazon in 2018 for a reported $1 billion elevated Siminoff to legendary status as a startup founder, thanks in part to the company’s role in a popular ABC television show.
“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary called Siminoff’s 2013 appearance on the show, in which Siminoff was unable to land an investment for his company (then known as DoorBot), “probably the biggest miss” in Shark Tank history. Siminoff returned to the show for a guest appearance as an investor in 2018.
Under Amazon, Ring has dramatically expanded its product lineup beyond its signature smart doorbells into a wide variety of home cameras, exterior smart lighting, home security systems, a vehicle dashboard camera and a flying indoor security camera.
Ring has also weathered a series of controversies inside Amazon, including revelations about its policies and practices for sharing video footage with law enforcement; and previously lax security measures that gave hackers access to private home cameras, allowing them to see and talk with children in footage that quickly went viral.
Hamren will be based in Seattle, reporting to Dave Limp, Amazon Devices & Services senior vice president, a company spokesperson said in response to GeekWire’s questions about the leadership transition.
The transition follows a tumultuous period for Amazon’s Devices & Services division, which also includes the Alexa voice assistant and Echo smart speakers, and has been impacted significantly by job cuts in recent months.
Siminoff wrote that he first shared his plan with Ring employees in June, as the company searched for its next CEO.
Hamren has a civil engineering degree from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard, according to her LinkedIn profile. She started at Microsoft in 1995 as a group program manager, before working in marketing leadership roles at companies including Jawbone, Plantronics, and Dropcam.
From 2015 to 2017, she was head of global marketing and sales for Oculus, the virtual reality arm of Facebook parent Meta, before returning to Microsoft as corporate vice president for the Surface hardware business and then consumer Xbox gaming. She was named COO of Discord in December 2021.
