YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamie Siminoff

lines on the record: 142
first: 2020-06-22
most recent: 2020-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so it was that before that. So there wasn't that feature on Gmail. You basically get the button like you have now in, there would be like a little, it would show up, we'd actually insert the button through an extension in your browser.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this was unsubscribe.com, which is. His spam had been solved with spam meaning emails that are not legally sent basically. So those have been like sort of the filters for those have been really tuned to get all that out. The problem you now had was legal email, but it's filling up 50% of your inbox. And so I got this idea of if you could automatically unsubscribe from things, you could clean out 50% of your inbox, you could give back time to employees or yourself and sort of make a service around it. It is still to this day, I think, one of the best products I've ever done in one of the worst businesses I've ever been part of. So like the financial side of the business is bad as it gets and the product was just awesome.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Like, let's put out of the 17, I got basically zero. So I got my money I had invested, I got back, which was amazing. And so then I came up with my next idea, you know, which is like going through it like this. It's almost like exhausting of like, yeah. And then I... On to the next one.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You gotta read between the lines. So, like, I was, I mean, something I've always been sensitive to is like the fiduciary responsibility to investors. And so I did get every dollar back to every investor.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found this small public company called Ditech, which they were in the telecom business selling services to carriers. So we ended up, we sold it. I was able to sell it for to get this sort of investors their money back.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I basically wrote that there's no way for you to do this with the way telecom networks work and that they will just end up having to lose money on this.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, I remember writing this blog post that I wrote that morning. It's like almost a movie where the person's just smashing the keys. They're just writing so fast.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I thought even worse than that. But yes, no, it was a tough day. And it's one of those funny things because on the outside, I had to come out and be like, this doesn't matter. We can fight this. We're bigger than this. And inside, I'm like, we're so screwed. Like, we are done. Do you remember when?”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great lesson of if you're a small company trying to do deals with big companies is it's almost guaranteed to be a kiss of death because they just take so much time and so much energy out of you and it's so hard to get something to happen.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. This is pre apps, mostly BlackBerry. And then we went to AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and tried to get them to add it as a service that they could add, which was”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the original idea was that we would go direct to consumer, and so we literally would just, you know, people, you could just go to phone tag and you could reroute your voicemail to us and pay us $10 a month or $30 a month. I can't even remember.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was originally called Simul Scribe, a simultaneous transcription. Again, like Gadgetronics, you're seeing probably a. Trend here, and then we renamed it to Phone Tag because we realized that Simon Scrabe was a terrible name. And wasn't going to be the biggest company in the world. It still exists today. It's an interesting service. But yeah, it wasn't, you know.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Telecom networks now. So, again, like this is building on, I had some fundamental knowledge of how to route a call, how to build a voicemail server. So I literally built a voicemail server, and we built this little system to be able to transcribe voicemail messages and then send them to you as email.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was with a friend, mentor, this guy Bill Wactel, really successful lawyer in New York who was visiting LA and we were just kind of, you know, we were going to go out to dinner and we were sitting around talking and his son was there and it was like the dad's yelling about a voicemail message or something and he's sitting on his BlackBerry. And I've kind of been thinking about this, but it's like I just kind of blurted it out and said, what happens if you could read your voicemail? And he was like, that'd be great. I'm like, let's do it. He's like, let's do it. And so that started the business. It was like one of those like, we'll just do a 50-50 done. Like, we're just going to do it. And he helped fund it. Because I understood voice over IP and because I understood.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's funny when you say idea, it sounds like I was planning things out For a long time, I think I was more like a snowball, just kind of flying down a hill, trying not to crash into something that was going to blow me up. So it wasn't as purposeful as like, oh, I'm now going to do the next company. I had already started playing around with voicemail to text at the time. And so I'll say I just moved my focus there because I didn't have anything else to do. So I just kind of moved the focus to that and kept and really kind of doubled down on that business.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I took a founder's salary, not a. I wasn't driving around in fancy cars. I think at the time. So I think when I got the money from the sale, I maybe had like $5,000 in the bank or something. I was always sort of just, you know. Scraping it”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was living in. No, I was living in California now. We moved to San Diego, the company in 2002 or three. So that brought me to California, which I then met my wife who was in LA, and so that kind of kept me here.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2000, we emerged in 2002, and then I think I sold out in 2005. So it was like three or four years with him. I sold my stake”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the business collapsed, I literally had to learn the other side. Like I had to like read the Cisco book and understand, like I understood why voiceover IP now, to me, before this voiceover IP was just a protocol that was doing something that I was making money with. Now I understood why it was so powerful and how you could send calls, how you could do stuff. And so that really, then I became like a voice over IP technician and engineer and architect of networks. So I started building this back up. And then another kid who went to Bapson had been doing a phone card business that didn't have a network. I was a network without a phone card. He had the customer. I had the logistics. So it was like putting together the supplier and the distributor, you know, putting that whole thing vertically integrating it. And so we both saw the benefit of that, put it together, and it was good.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And through doing that, two things happen. One is I got the business going started up again, which was great. The second thing that happened was I actually understood, again, to like going back to the RC cars, I understood really how to fix them. At first, I didn't even understand what I was doing. Right.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so basically my partner ends up this, he's gone. I have this network, but I didn't understand really how to run it. And across the street from my apartment in New York was a Barnes& Nobles. And I went over and I bought this Cisco how-to voice over IP book, which was like 700 pages. And I read the entire book, Cover to Cover, to figure out how to program these gateways so that I could turn them back on, so that I could run this network. Because it was the only way to get out of this thing was to try to sort of make it work. There was people that I owed money to that said, you know, you owe me money. And I said, listen, and this is a good lesson for the rest of my life, which was I want to pay you, I will work hard to pay you. But if you shut me down now, I'll never be able to pay you. So we just have to work this out together.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I got into this, I ended up basically being a nomad because once I got a place started and going, I didn't really need to be there that much longer. The partner was based in the US, and he understood the technology. And I was sort of the one who, I wouldn't even say I understood how to do this, I was just willing to like, I'll just go and I'll make this work. Like I'll figure this out.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened was there had never been the ability for an individual. Needed physical lines, and like, I mean, it was like you literally had a boat putting copper through the ocean. I mean, it was like And so what voice over IP did is it allowed literally two guys in an office to deploy these gateways and send a call from the US to Bulgaria. And so what you could do is you would get local phone lines, you would get a little apartment, and you'd put this box in there and you'd send the call through the internet. And then you'd dial it out locally and your cost was the internet cost plus the local charge, which usually was basically free. So now a call to Bulgaria instead of being 25 cents was the cost was Call it a penny. And so you would sell a phone card against that, and you would, and this is what sort of”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And I went there and it was like January, February of 2000. I think for my type of brain, those places were like, they were like empty canvas to an artist. Going to a place where there's so much that needs to be done, my brain wanted to explode. There were just so many businesses, so many things you could do because things are just kind of coming out and people are, you know, just everything was needed. It was pretty exciting. So I go there, I do this business plan and then I meet a guy who's doing voiceover IP. And so that was like my first transition from, I'll say, from being like this service business to actually getting into a real business.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is not if you made them into a physical book, like you just gave that to someone, they were like, wow, this is real. This is good. And everything inside of it was just crap. I mean, how would I know what to do with a business plan? And again, looking back, if you needed a kid to write your business plan, it means you didn't understand your business. It was bad.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, the clip art, market studies. I mean, it really was. It was funny. You got a lot of points for how it looked. So I ended up figuring out that I could get a book binder, which was like a thing that would make it a hardcover.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny, just kind of like, and again, I didn't need to have the world know about me. I just needed to have the next job know about me. So it was, you know, and I was doing these every couple months. So it wasn't like I was doing hundreds of business plans. I was just doing a few”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just said like $10,000. I mean, I literally was like a joke. Sure, for $10,000, I'll come do this. And they said yes. And I'm like, okay, done. For $10,000, I'll do anything. I had no idea what I was doing. And so I started doing this business plan, which I guess I think it ended up being, I guess it was okay. And then from that, I got other business plan jobs. And so I started a company called Your First Step, which was a business plan company. So I kind of started doing this thing and I just, because I didn't like doing it, I kept sort of raising my price and people kept paying it. It was during the dot-com boom too. So people were a little bit had lost touch with reality.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I got contacted by like a friend of a friend and they were opening up a hot dog chain in Hoboken and wanted a business plan to raise money. And they kept asking, would you do this? And I'm like, no, it wasn't really. And they're like, well, if you would, how much would it be? And I'm like, I don't know, $10,000.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best one ever, and we would obviously also sometimes want to make the $15 an hour. So we would just do the work ourselves as well. One of them was this huge hillside full of poison ivy, and they're like, Can you just pull all this poison ivy out of this hillside? And we're like, hell's yeah. Oh, I mean, that was like for like three weeks.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I found there was a girl at school and her dad had an electronic store in Houston, Texas. And yeah, I was able to convince him to sell me stuff at a lower price. And so yeah, I was basically like, I wasn't trying to think about business in the way of like, I'm going to try to create a career or some like company. I was always just hustling. I was always like doing stuff and thinking about where's there a need hustle? Where's there a need hustle? A buddy and I in college, we put posters up all over the place for $15 an hour, we'll do anything. And so we'd pay kids $10 an hour and make the difference. This is Wellesley, Massachusetts, really nice town. The horrible things people would have you do for $15 an hour was pretty unbelievable. But, you know, we were happy to make a little spread.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was a little bit, when I got to college, I mean, I sold electronics on the campus. So I had a company called Gadgetronics, you know, Gadgets and Electronics, TVs, stereos, all that kind of stuff. So I was always hustling.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go straight to the counselor's office, and I'm like, I'm going to Bapson. How do I get in? What do I got to do? That was it. I heard that from this guy and I was in.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All this stuff. And the way I got to Babson was I used to drive this kid to school who was like the wealthiest kid in the town or whatever. And I remember being in his kitchen one morning and he was always late. And the dad came down who I really looked up to and always wanted to talk to him. And he said to me, just kind of off the cuff, you know, he's making his coffee and say, like, oh, where are you applying for colleges? And I gave him all these colleges that were like liberal arts, like, you know, just sort of general colleges. And I said Babson. And Babson literally just been thrown into my list. And he goes, huh, Babson? He goes, you know what? The most interesting and successful people I know went there. And then he just goes back to doing his coffee, whatever. I drive to school, dropped this kid off.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was. I was doing lots of entrepreneurial things, but not realizing they were like entrepreneurial. So I was on the way to school. I was like, you know, that we lived in a place where there was horses. And so on the way to school, I'd like shovel people's. Horse stalls out on the way to school, and I can make like a couple hundred bucks a week doing that. And every Parent that was in business or did anything, I would talk like it's kind of funny looking back, but like my friends would all be, you know, down on the couch playing games and I'd be like with the dad talking to them about business or like I wanted to learn”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like B's and C's. And then what happened Land Rover did like a thing in my town like they brought new cars to it and my dad and I just went, it was like in the park and this Land Rover Defender 90 was being brought into the US. And it was like it was seeing that thing, I can still picture myself seeing at this moment, like it's in my head right now. And I said to my dad, I'm like, man, I would do anything to have that car. My dad goes, get straight A's. And I literally did. The first semester, I actually got one B and I was devastated. And my dad said, I'll extend it. And then I got straight A's the next semester. And it was my junior year, which ended up being super critical for college admission. And so it was this amazing thing where, yes, it was a bribe, but it helped me so much in my life because it's helped me get into probably a better college. It was kind of an incredible thing.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And in high school, I had this architecture class. And in year three of it, you built the house that you had like you first did the architecture, you like did the whole plans, and then you actually built a model of the house. And the model that I built, I remember I wanted it to have cedar shingles. And my teacher is like, you can't do it. It's going to take too long. And I'm like, it has to have cedar shingles. And so I cut individually out balsa with shingles and glued them onto this house. And I don't even know how many hours it took me. And I don't know why I did this, but I literally, I did finish it.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like balsa wood, like pre 3D printers, you could make anything out of balsa wood. Like you could just shape it. Oh, man.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think the point of though is how things work The fundamentals of how things work, even as things get more complicated, more computing, still the fundamentals are the same. And so when you learn the fundamentals, it's incredible how you can sort of go up the stack. And do more complex things.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For Chester Hobby, and I would go there, and it was like a big thing to buy one. I mean, these things were expensive. And they would break. The greatest thing about them is that they broke. Almost every time you use them. And so I had to fabricate parts, fabricate tools, you know, and I wasn't like, you know, a kid saying, I'm going to fabricate a tool. It's just like my frogger's broken and I want to go play with Andrew down the street with his. Like, I need to fix it. And so I just had to do this stuff. And then I learned like that's how I learned engineering. I mean, I learned electronics from it, you know, from the speed controllers, the servos. I learned gears and mechanical. It's probably looking back at the RC cars might have been one of the bigger influences in my life. Of that, yeah.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you can't rewrite the software on this chip. And so this was like the end of the world. Like this really was. Basically the business is over.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start here, and it's like the week before Christmas. People are contacting me and saying it's not working, and their video was coming through like an old TV tuner. It was all like lines through it and just you couldn't see the picture. So most of our units are now in the field with customers that not only do they not work, but we can't change that software on them. So they're basically bricks.”
2020-06-22 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Ring: Jamie Siminoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT