OLIVETTE — Ring doorbell founder Jamie Siminoff loves St. Louis. Standing in an Olivette warehouse last week, he was nothing but smiles.
Siminoff had flown in from his home in California to oversee the first shipment out of the new warehouse and headquarters of his latest endeavor, Latch Inc., a smart lock system designed for multi-unit residences.
Siminoff gained prominence when he sold Ring to Amazon in 2018 for over $1 billion after the idea was rejected on Shark Tank. Then Latch announced the purchase of a different Siminoff company, Honest Day’s Work, technology geared toward residential service providers, such as housekeepers, dog walkers and drivers. Siminoff is set to become Latch’s CEO.
In September, Latch announced plans to move its headquarters from New York City to a 48,000-square-foot facility at 1220 North Price Road in Olivette, placing all of its operations under one roof for the first time. Now, the company has hired over 30 area workers and is looking ahead to its planned rebrand to Door.com in 2024.
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Last week at the company’s Olivette headquarters, Siminoff spoke of his plans for Latch and his love of St. Louis.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: What attracted you to Latch?
Siminoff: I was working on a services app, one of the pieces we launched is called James, and I had a whole concept around that. Latch doing locks for buildings doesn’t seem like it makes sense but by having density of services in buildings, you can kind of combine those together and have a full-service experience in your building. I personally own a bunch of multi-family properties and so I was interested in the space overall from a technology side. What can we do in multi-family to bring a better residence experience?
Q: What about Olivette makes it ideal for Latch’s headquarters?
Siminoff: We looked across St. Louis and this property is just a good property. We would’ve gone anywhere in St. Louis. I think it has a great employment base, so there’s a lot of people here who work across a huge litany of industries.
From Panera Bread to Express Scripts to Purina, there are just so many different large employers as well as small employers. And I think the cost of living to true quality of life is very high. You have a baseball team and a hockey team. There are things to do. I think it’s a very awesome city.
Q: And you would know that because you have property here.
Siminoff: I have a property two hours north of here in La Belle. When I was on Shark Tank as a shark I invested in a woman named Lucinda who had a direct-to-consumer meat business called Moink in La Belle. When I went up to visit her I ended up buying a farm, fixing up the farm, starting to get involved in the town, flying in and out of St. Louis. I was spending time here and I liked the people, I liked the culture, I liked the city. I think it’s a great place. I said to myself, “The next business I’m doing I’m going to do in St. Louis” and so I did and now we’re here.
Q: In the future there will be other businesses under the Door.com umbrella. Will those be based in St. Louis?
Siminoff: I’m a big fan of remote work. But there are physical jobs and so for that we will keep St. Louis as our headquarters. Finance, customer service, sales, our warehouse, our reverse logistics, quality assurance of products, all of that will be here. We will keep building here.
Q: Latch will soon become Door.com. What is the reason for the name change?
Siminoff: The corporate name will become Door.com. The physical products will still exist as Latch. Door is really to expand that vision of services. The app you get with it will have access control as one piece but there are all the other things around residential and services in there. It’s to expand the vision. Latch is a great word for a lock but it’s very constrained.
Q: Your investments seem to revolve around residences. Why is that?
Siminoff: People living in residences should be living in a better way, whether that means contacting your landlord or getting into your unit more easily, sharing access to a friend who is there for the weekend, getting someone to fix something — and having that be easier and more transparent to you.
Q: Latch has experienced some bumps: Getting delisted from Nasdaq; layoffs of over half its full-time workers. What steps are being taken to address these issues?
Siminoff: Certainly the company has had a tumultuous run. The only way to get out of that is to keep your head down, focus on creating a great business, fix the things that are out there and just move forward. You can’t dwell on the stuff that happened, you have to deal with it.
Thankfully, it was all basically before my time so I didn’t cause any of it. But now it’s like ‘let’s clean it up, see if there is a foundation here that makes sense to grow something off of,’ which I believe there is. There’s a business here that’s still worthwhile to build and to do.
Q: So Latch is the future?
Siminoff: A keyless building is what you want today. A key is a very antiquated concept. There’s no tracking, no audit trail. With Latch, every interaction with the door is tracked. Could this be a big company? In 10 years, are we still hiding a key? Probably not. Something has to replace it.
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