Jamie Siminoff, the founder and CEO of Ring, looked out at a small patch of dirt. In January 2025, the garage that once stood there was wiped out by wildfires that tore through Los Angeles.
It was the site where he founded the video doorbell company over a decade ago.
“This looks like such a small pad where the garage was. It felt so big,” Siminoff said, comparing it to returning to your childhood bedroom only to find it much smaller than you remembered.
“I was so proud of it as an office,” Siminoff told me through tears, recalling the moment he discovered the garage had burned down.
The Pacific Palisades, a place Siminoff has called home with his wife and son for nearly two decades, still looks more like a construction zone than a neighborhood.
Fenced-in empty lots where buildings once stood now line part of the main drag on Sunset Boulevard. A troupe of food trucks and stands serves construction workers on their lunch breaks just outside the hardware store. Stores like CVS and Chipotle are adorned with large “now open” signs. Other businesses have yet to reopen.
Siminoff recently took me on a tour of memories through the Palisades on his golf cart, pointing out where a school his son once attended had stood, the former site of a Gelson’s grocery store, and a Ring camera affixed to a random front gate standing guard at a home that no longer exists.
We pulled down an alley and stopped at the former site of the small, detached garage that had burned down, the distinct smell of nearby eucalyptus trees contrasting sharply with the empty space. Siminoff founded Ring here in 2012 after realizing he couldn’t hear the doorbell while working in the garage and kept missing package deliveries. Six years later, he sold it to Amazon for a reported $1 billion.
One year after fires tore through the Palisades and Altadena, Ring is teaming up with Watch Duty, the nonprofit that became a lifeline to Angelenos seeking updates during the fires, in the hope that its doorbell cameras can help fight future wildfires. The new feature, announced Tuesday, will alert users when there’s a fire in their area and use AI to identify signs of fire caught on Ring cameras. Ring users can also opt in to sharing images from their cameras with Watch Duty, which can then share relevant updates with the public.
“Over 10,000 Ring cameras were in the burn zone, and one of the biggest problems was not knowing,” Siminoff said of the confusion during the Palisades fire.
Fighting the fire in the Palisades
Siminoff moved out of the home he founded Ring from and into another in the area in 2017, but the place remained special to him.
He left Ring in 2023, but shortly after the fires in January 2025, he posted on Instagram: “In that garage I created something that impacted crime. Now I sit here wondering if I could do the same with fire…”
Less than three months later, he was back at Ring as CEO, having written a lengthy email to Amazon leadership, including CEO Andy Jassy and founder Jeff Bezos.
“It’s a big part of why I went back,” Siminoff told me.
Siminoff was out of town when the fire first broke out in the Palisades. When he returned, he went straight into the evacuation zone and found the back of his home on fire. He and a friend put it out with his hose. Siminoff and other neighbors continued to patrol the neighborhood, collecting stray fire extinguishers and making triage decisions about which blazes to tackle. He described the experience as chaotic and surreal, like being in the “fog of war.”
“Once you’re there, you realize you’re not looking for fire — you’re looking for what’s going to become fire,” he said.
At the same time, he and thousands of others were turning to Watch Duty. The app provides real-time wildfire maps and alerts by monitoring various sources, including radio scanners, official government updates, and a network of mountain-top cameras.
John Mills, cofounder and CEO of Watch Duty, told me the app was inundated with new users and traffic during the Los Angeles fires, handling “100,000 requests a second.” For the Watch Duty team, he said it was “all hands on deck.”
“No one was sleeping very well for at least a month,” he said. “It was utter mayhem.”
Why Ring is teaming up with Watch Duty
Mills said Watch Duty consists of 50 paid staff members and about 250 volunteers, many of whom are active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, and first responders. He said the public often doesn’t understand how fires are fought and just how necessary quick and accurate information is in those moments.
“In these wind-driven fire events, these fires are starting miles ahead of the flame front because embers, the size of footballs sometimes, are getting tossed miles in advance,” Mills said.
While mountaintop cameras can help spot smoke plumes, they often miss what’s happening at street level, especially in canyons or hilly neighborhoods like the Palisades. “If we don’t know what’s happening, we’re going to be slower to respond,” he said.
That’s where he said Ring can help fill in some gaps. The new feature, called Fire Watch, will provide Ring users with real-time fire alerts when Watch Duty identifies a wildfire in their area. For Ring Protect subscribers, their outdoor cameras will automatically analyze the video to detect smoke and fires using AI, and then alert owners so they can assess the situation at their home.
Users inside the wildfire alert zone can also choose to share images from their doorbell cameras with Watch Duty. The nonprofit will then review and moderate the submissions before sharing relevant updates publicly, helping create a clearer picture of how fires are spreading on the ground.
As part of the partnership, Ring is also donating $1 million to Watch Duty.
Ring and Watch Duty said the system would not automatically access users’ cameras but alert them when there’s a fire emergency and ask if they want to help with providing data. Siminoff said that most people would not want to grant access to their data all the time, but he thinks many would opt in to help during a specific emergency.
“We’re not a Big Brother organization,” Mills said. “We’re a bunch of citizens trying to solve a problem that frankly should have been solved a long time ago.”
‘Maybe it was an information issue’
Siminoff said he has always had a vision for Ring that involves making communities safer, and that this is just another step toward that larger goal. While it may not stop a fire from igniting, he thinks that using Ring cameras could help fill the information gap that made it so hard for first responders and citizens like him to know where to direct their efforts while fighting the fire.
”Maybe actually, it wasn’t just a resource issue. Maybe it was an information issue,” he said.
In the Palisades, Siminoff noted the sporadic and unpredictable nature of the fire’s destruction, with some homes destroyed while their neighbors’ remained fully intact. He regularly visits the old garage, and was relieved to find that the house it belonged to was still standing and in the process of being repaired on the day we visited.
“I’ve definitely come up here and cried many times, including today,” he said, adding that he always thought he might buy the garage back someday and perhaps turn it into a little museum.
While it will take years for the Palisades to rebuild, Siminoff said that saving even one home would make the partnership with Watch Duty worthwhile.
“If you could have stopped one house from burning down, that’s a family.”
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