Jason Johnson On Raising $70 Million To Pioneer Bluetooth Smart Locks And Now Building His Next Intelligent Home Venture

Jason Johnson’s entrepreneurial journey is the kind that lives at the intersection of tech history and personal resilience. He talks about building, scaling, and exiting, as well as navigating the different cycles of company building with Darwin Networks and August Locks.

Jason’s latest venture is Doma Home, which is transforming smart homes into infrastructure-first living spaces. It has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Uncork Capital and Modern Ventures and is now gearing up for its Series A round.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Jason Johnson’s journey shows how resilience and timing can turn early setbacks into defining successes.
• Founders Den reignited his entrepreneurial spark, proving the power of surrounding yourself with builders.
• August Home pioneered smart locks by focusing on user experience and elegant design.
• Strategic partnerships and competitor relationships can be a powerful path to acquisition.
• His leadership philosophy evolved from intensity to embracing imperfection and team trust.
• Doma represents a shift from “smart” homes to truly intelligent, infrastructure-first living spaces.
• Balancing team, product, and distribution remains his core framework for building durable companies.

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About Jason Johnson:

Jason Johnson is a Silicon Valley technologist and entrepreneur with nearly twenty years of technology expertise. He is the Founder and CEO of smart lock maker August Home. Jason is also a Managing Partner of startup incubator Founders Den and the Founder of the Internet of Things Consortium.

Previously he was VP of Dolby Laboratories, VP of Global IP Solutions (acquired by Google) and was the co-founder and CEO of InterQuest (acquired by Darwin Networks). Jason earned a Bachelor’s degree in business from Pepperdine University.

Connect with Jason Jackson:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• Entrepreneur
• YourStory

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Dealmaker Show. So today we have an amazing founder — a founder that has done it many, many, many times, actually. You know, we’re going to be talking about all the good stuff that we like to hear — the building, the scaling, the exiting, the crazy times, the different cycles, whether it was during the dot-com bust or even now, and how things have changed over time. Again, I think that you guys are all going to find this episode quite inspiring. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Jason Johnson. Welcome to the show.

Jason Johnson: Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Portland, Oregon — give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up over there?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, you know, Portland’s a great, great town. It’s a great place to grow up — very granola. My parents were hippies, and so it was a very nice place to grow up. But I’ll be honest with you, I moved to California for college, and I’ve lived in California ever since. The weather down here is a little bit better. So I love being an Oregonian, but I also love being in California.

Alejandro Cremades: And then in your case, you actually studied business out of all things. So what got you into the whole business world?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, so my dad worked for a Japanese trading company, and he got to do business trips over to Japan. I got to see what it’s like to do big business, and so I dreamed of someday working maybe for a big Japanese electronics company or something. The business degree was sort of the path towards that.

Alejandro Cremades: And obviously that first company had to do with Apple Computer. In ’93, I’m sure it was a different type of Apple.

Jason Johnson: Yeah, for sure. So there were two companies I wanted to work for out of college — either Apple or Sony. Back then, Sony was the biggest consumer electronics company in the world. They made all kinds of awesome gadgets. There was this showroom in Tokyo that, even to this day, rivals the best showroom showing the most gadgets of anything anywhere. I got to go multiple times.

And yeah, I ended up at Apple, which was pretty special. I got to oversee their distribution business, which was before there were Apple retail stores. It was quite an experience for a young person in their twenties.

Alejandro Cremades: So you did Apple, then you did Tutt Systems. How do you evolve all the way to, let’s say, Interquest, which was your first company that really ventured into the world of entrepreneurship?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, so the jump is I joined Tutt Systems, which was the first venture capital-backed startup that I was an employee of. Tutt made these internet routers — these modems for the home.

And while I was working there, I got the idea for Interquest. That was to actually take these modems, put them into people’s homes, and create one of the first broadband DSL services that was really focused on apartment buildings. That was our niche. We operated in 17 states doing high-speed internet service to apartment buildings.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s incredible. So then tell us, how did Interquest come together?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, so Interquest was funded by some friends and one of my mentors from college — from Pepperdine University, the vice chancellor. He was one of the first checks in there. We built up Interquest and ended up rolling it together with two other similarly sized startups doing broadband.

One was doing hotels, one was doing office buildings. It was literally called a BLEC — a building local exchange carrier. That roll-up of those three companies was going to be the biggest IPO of 2000. It was called Darwin Networks. We wrote the S-1. We had Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers as underwriters.

And on paper, Jason Johnson was going to be extremely wealthy. But we all know what happened in April of 2000, just after we filed that S-1.

Alejandro Cremades: Wow. Because, I mean, the valuation at the peak… what was the valuation at the peak? And obviously we know what happened at the end.

Jason Johnson: I mean, the underwriters were expecting this to be one of the biggest dot-com IPOs. It was going to be huge. I can’t remember what price they were aiming for, but we were literally just getting ready to go do the roadshow.

They were going to run a jet, we were going to fly around the country. We hired a CEO that had the best pedigree you could imagine. We raised a tremendous amount of capital. And yeah, long story short, Darwin is dead. Darwin Networks went from being the potential biggest IPO of 2000 to probably one of the biggest failures of 2000.

Alejandro Cremades: What do you think that whole experience taught you about cycles and how to weather the storm and the cycles as an entrepreneur?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, so I’m lucky that I was still in my 20s at the time. I still felt like I had a lot of my future ahead of me. I actually — it’s very strange to say this — I really wasn’t that upset, which I know sounds crazy.

I went from being potentially this hugely successful entrepreneur to needing to find a job. And I literally had to go find a job. Fortunately, one of my mentors — a famous lawyer in Silicon Valley, Craig Johnson (unrelated to my last name) — he was a mentor of mine. And he said, “Jason, you’re still young. You still have a lot of energy behind you. What I suggest is you go get a job, go back to a big company like an Apple, spend a few more years retooling and getting your confidence back, and think about what you would do next.”

And that’s exactly what I did. I went and got a job at Dolby Labs and worked there for a whole bunch of years. I learned a lot and retooled to get ready to take another swing at the fences.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, that was 12 years. So that’s quite an amount of time because once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. So what do you think needed to click for you to really feel good about the idea of going at it again with August Home?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, so honestly, I had some friends that were kind of giving me a hard time because now I was an executive. I was a candidate to potentially be the CEO of Dolby Labs had it gone public, and they were picking different people to groom as potentially a future CEO.

They sent me to do the Harvard programs and the Stanford program. I had an executive coach and all that. And I was kind of enjoying that path. You know, I had a giant salary and a big RSU stock grant, making lots of money.

But one of my friends said to me one day, “Hey, you’ve been at Dolby for a while now. I thought you were an entrepreneur. Are you ever going to take another swing at it? You’re going to have to start another company.”

And once the gears started spinning on that, I started thinking, “Boy, I might have to do something to make myself take another risk.”

Alejandro Cremades: So then tell us about the sequence of events that needed to happen for you to have the exposure to, “Hey, I think that this may be a risk worth taking.”

Jason Johnson: So this is a true story. This sounds kind of wacky, but it’s actually true. I went to my boss’s office one day. We were working on acquisitions for Dolby.

I had an acquisition I thought should be recommended to the committee, and I was going to be the champion. I presented it to my boss in his office and said, “I think this is a really good one. I want to champion driving this one.”

And he said to me — and I’ll never forget — he said, “Hey Jason, you’re very ambitious. I love your vision. I love your energy here. But I think you should just, you know, just don’t try so hard.”

He said, “Go back to your office.” And I might point out, our offices were really nice. I had an amazing, huge office with a table and chairs and a couch and a nice view. It was just a beautiful office.

He said, “Go back to your office and just read the Wall Street Journal. Just relax.” And he was dead serious. “We’re a very successful company. We don’t have to do these acquisitions. Just kind of enjoy how great it is. We don’t have to work this hard.”

I’m very grateful he said that to me because I went home and told my wife that story that night. She said, “It’s time for you to go. It’s not for you. You need to move on.” And so I quit. I just quit.

Alejandro Cremades: So then what happened next?

Jason Johnson: Yeah, so I quit, and then I had a couple of friends that we talked about getting a shared office together. One was Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster — the first social network. Zach Bogue, who was an attorney doing a bunch of different things before he started Data Collective Ventures with Matt Ocko.

And Michael Levitt, a longtime friend, also a big corporate guy but also an entrepreneur. The three of us decided to get an office together. We started looking at little offices to just share a space together, to just be in the same room.

I had coffee one afternoon with Tim Chang, who was a venture capitalist at Northwest Ventures at the time before Mayfield. Tim heard me mention this and said, “What if I gave you some money and you got a bigger space and you could have not just the four of you in there but other pedigreed people like yourselves? Would that be interesting?”

I mentioned it to the guys, and they said, “Yeah, Tim wants to give us some Northwest Ventures money to get a bigger lease and bigger space. Why not?”

So we got this big space, and that’s what became Founders Den. Founders Den was really the first coworking space that was invite-only. This was before WeWork. It was for pedigreed people — people that had either built and sold companies or, we actually had a good relationship with YC, so we invited most YC graduates to come be at Founders Den.

And to answer your question, that’s really where I got the inspiration to create August. I was suddenly around people who were building and creating things. I thought, “Gee, I’ve always wanted to do a consumer electronics company ever since college, wanting to work for Sony or Apple. If I’m ever going to do it, now’s the time. I have the connections. I have the background. Let’s go for it.”

Alejandro Cremades: And just to highlight one of those moments of Founders Den — how was it like to be next to Gavin Newsom for three and a half years? That sounds wild.

Jason Johnson: Yeah. So each of us knew Gavin kind of socially. But one of my partners came in the Founders Den one day and said, “Hey guys, you probably saw that Gavin was just elected as lieutenant governor. He’s not really someone who wants to be in Sacramento all the time. He wants to be where the energy is. He wants to be in San Francisco.”

And my partner said to us, “He wants to rent a desk.”

And I tell you, these desks — it’s kind of like what I’m sitting at right now — they’re like 44 inches wide. We were like, “You mean the lieutenant governor of the fifth largest economy in the world wants to sit at a 44-inch desk just like one of us?”

And he said, “Yes, that’s exactly what he wants to do.”

So over the next three and a half years, as he was lieutenant governor before he was elected governor, he actually sat there. That was his day-to-day office. It was fun because we got to learn a lot about how you run a giant economy.

And we also had great security. We were probably the most secure co-working slash incubator space in San Francisco.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So then, how was it like being there, really feeding yourself with all these great people, and the innovation that was happening amongst all of you? What was the inflection point for you to really be like, “Okay, I think that August is going to be my next thing”?

Jason Johnson: Yeah. So just being around people that are creating stuff and just asking them literally at the water cooler, “What are you working on? What are you up to?” And of course, we did demo days and stuff, so we got to bring in VCs. Just that energy and the excitement of people building and creating makes you ask lots of questions.

At Dolby, actually, one of the things Dolby does is license all kinds of technologies—not just audio and video technologies, but also a very wide range of technology standards. One thing that I created was the NFC licensing consortium. NFC is that technology in your phone that you use for authentication and payments. I had the idea of using NFC for authentication, for access, for door locks.

But I’ll never forget, there was a guy named Kanishk working there at Founders Den on this credit card that was Bluetooth. It would store all your credit cards. I was talking with Kanishk about NFC, and he said, “You know what would be better than NFC? This new Bluetooth standard called BLE—Bluetooth, this non-pairing version. If you’re going to do access control, this would be way better than NFC.”

It was one of those conversations that was incredible because it really made the August Lock able to do what it did. That is, allow you to issue a key from thousands of miles away to somebody, and they could have that key, so to speak, on their phone and access an Airbnb or a guest house. Those kinds of conversations really got August and many other startups going.

Alejandro Cremades: So what was the business model there? How were you guys making money with August?

Jason Johnson: When the August Lock was launched, the first version was $249. Now you can buy very inexpensive Bluetooth locks. But it was a very premium device. It was very Apple-esque, if you will. Yves Béhar is the designer. Yves spares no expense on materials and craftsmanship. He knows how to design things really, really well.

We sold those in thousands of stores—every Apple Store in North America, Best Buy, Home Depot, even Target stores. August quickly became the number-one selling smart lock. We even did a video doorbell as well, but it didn’t quite have the volume of sales that Ring had on their video doorbells.

Alejandro Cremades: And then you guys raised some money—about 70 million bucks. And then the company ended up being acquired. I heard this is your biggest exit to date. What was that journey like?

Make us insiders in that experience of going through this acquisition. Because obviously, this was the second time around that you had founded and went through an acquisition. From your first acquisition, I’m sure you learned a lot of stuff that you had in mind while going through this journey here with August. So make us insiders—how was that journey of going through that M&A, that acquisition like?

Jason Johnson: This is actually a good story. I hope your listeners will appreciate this because the way this shaped up was really interesting. August had great growth, but our locks were really only limited to North America. The way that we designed the device as a robot installed on the inside of your door was only compatible for locks in North America. So we really didn’t have much growth beyond North America with that product.

I saw that we could make other products and try to make other smart home devices in the home. But the time came when we kind of hit market saturation. I didn’t even know until a few years later how much market share we had. I’ll talk about that in a moment. So instead of just trying to drive more sales of these devices, I actually went to my competitors. At this point, we had built a software stack, an access control system that still is the best today of all smart locks.

It ties into Airbnb and Vrbo and many other systems. It’s really an amazing API. So I went to all my competitors—Schlage, Yale, and Kwikset—and I offered my access control software to them for free. This is kind of a crazy thing because every time I talked to these companies, they were like, “A, why would you talk to us? You’re our worst enemy and we’re your worst enemy. And B, why would you give us the jewels of your technology for free?”

The answer was because we wanted to do access control. We really wanted to own access control and deliver a really good experience—to help with vacation rentals, in-home delivery, and other things you can do if you do access control really well.

This is the key for your listeners: it was building those relationships with those companies and trying to offer them something—whether for free or for pay. Building a relationship and having a dialogue is what led to August ultimately being acquired, because all of them ended up asking if they could buy the company. That’s what you want, right? You want multiple people to want to buy you and to bid against each other. That’s exactly what happened.

I personally ran the whole process myself. I had a great COO/CFO, Bharat Hassan. He’s a brilliant former investment banker. He and I ran the process and had multiple companies bidding against each other to get to a price that my board was very excited to take.

Alejandro Cremades: It sounds like the years with Gavin Newsom also influenced you because now you’re a commissioner. What’s going on with you being a commissioner nowadays?

Jason Johnson: It’s funny. The day Gavin got elected as governor, he actually came to Founders Den. He just wanted some alone time. So he went into one of our conference rooms by himself and was just processing what had just happened. It’s a big deal being elected head of the fifth-largest economy in the world.

I think it was Zach or somebody who said, “Hey, we should go chat with him because we might not be able to hang out with him like we’ve been these past few years. Let’s go.” So we walked into that little room and started chatting with him.

One of the things Gavin said was, “Gosh, one of the things I have to do is make hundreds and hundreds of appointments. There are a lot of commissions and roles I have to fill.” I didn’t miss a beat. I said, “Well, I’d be open to serving on a state commission if I can be of service to you and to the state of California.”

And that’s how I ended up on the Little Hoover Commission.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. Obviously, part of the entrepreneurial spirit in you is that you’re not going to stop. And that brought you to DOMA, which is your latest baby. What are you guys doing at DOMA?

Jason Johnson: I did my earn-out and actually really enjoyed it with Yale. Yale is the company that bought August. Yale, also Assa Abloy, is the big holding company out of Sweden. I had a great earn-out—a really pleasant company. I really enjoyed working with them.

We did some great things, some acquisitions, and expanded the August platform I mentioned earlier. Now it powers their locks all over the world, which is pretty cool—to see your technology go into locks all over the world and be used by tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.

Then I had a little bit of time off. I built a home in Napa, California. I did a lot of bike riding and pickleball, had some downtime, and started thinking about the smart home—what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and if I was taking another swing at it, what I would want to do differently. How would we approach the smart home in a whole different, fresh way?

Alejandro Cremades: So tell us about the business model and where you guys are at because I know you also recently raised a seed round, which is exciting.

Jason Johnson: I’m very fortunate to have some of my previous investors—Uncork Capital and Modern Ventures—as the lead for our seed round. We’ll do a Series A soon. We did that round about a year ago.

Doma, in essence, is taking a new approach to the smart home. In fact, we’re using a new term: the “intelligent home.” We think most smart home devices aren’t really that smart, and most of our homes aren’t that smart. So we’re looking at adding intelligence—not just connectivity, but how we can have these devices talk to each other.

For us, some of the key things we’re trying to solve with Doma are failure points. One of the challenges with these devices is that if they’re battery-powered or plugged into an outlet, those are potential failure points. Batteries die or things can be unplugged, and then that thing is no longer reliable. You can’t trust it to do what it’s supposed to do.

One of our core principles with Doma is we don’t have batteries or things to plug into walls. It’s more ingrained into the fabric of the home, into the actual existing devices, appliances, and systems of the home.

Alejandro Cremades: So if you go to sleep tonight, Jason, and you wake up in a world where the vision of Doma is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Jason Johnson: It’s that Jetsons-like experience we’ve all wanted—a home that’s responsive to our needs. Instead of us having to open up an app and press buttons or use voice or go around switching and sliding and pressing, the home is just more responsive to our needs and helps us feel safe and secure.

Maybe it’s monitoring our health. It’s taking care of problems that I don’t have to think about. I know my home infrastructure is doing what it’s supposed to do without me having to worry about it or maintain it or create schedules and automations and scenes that people don’t enjoy doing. They want it to just work.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s say I’m able to put you into a time machine right now and bring you back to that moment where you were at Todd Systems, thinking about launching something of your own. That moment where you and your wife were like, “Hey, maybe you should go do something else.” Let’s say you have the opportunity to give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a company. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Jason Johnson: I think it’s safe to say if you were to interview many of my employees over the years at my different startups—and there have been a couple we haven’t talked about that are not as fun to talk about, the ones that didn’t go as far—you’d hear I’ve always been a very intense person. I’ve always been very focused and intense, and I run a pretty tight ship.

If I could give younger Jason some advice, I’d say take more deep breaths and recognize that you don’t have to get everything right. You don’t have to be that intense. You can make mistakes, and you can let your people make mistakes. It will be okay. If it’s a good product or service, people are going to buy it, enjoy it, and appreciate it. If it’s not, then frankly, being more intense isn’t going to solve that. You probably need to be more reflective and more comfortable with change and pivoting.

Alejandro Cremades: When we think about pivots, I’m sure you’ve seen a few of those. What has been your biggest lesson around pivoting or adjusting to what the market is asking for?

Jason Johnson: I’ve always believed that building a startup is a three-legged stool. It’s team, product, and distribution. You have to have all three. Ideally, you have an unfair advantage in at least one of those. We can talk about unfair advantages.

What I’ve seen, in my own companies and in some I’ve been involved with, is that sometimes we get too focused on trying to overly optimize one of those legs when the truth is you just need that leg to be firm. It doesn’t need to be perfect. What you need is all three legs to be firm and not over-index on one at the risk of the other two.

That’s where pivoting and making tough decisions come in. I remember the first tough decision I ever had to make, with that first DSL company. We started doing not just apartment buildings but also office buildings and hotels. We were bringing broadband to the building and then using these little DSL modems. I hired a professional to come in and help me with the business because I was still very young.

He said, “You’ve got to give up two of the three. You can’t be a master of all three of those. Those are three different markets.” He was right. Working in one of those industries and really knowing the people and the relationships was very important, as opposed to trying to do all three at once.

Alejandro Cremades: I love that. Well, Jason, for the people that are listening who would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Jason Johnson: On Instagram, I’m @NapaJasonJ. On X, I’m @JCJohnson. I’m happy to get messages on either of those.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Jason, thank you so much for being on The DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Jason Johnson: Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

*****

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