Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light About this episode Most of us are dependent on our smartphones. In fact, Americans spend an average of three hours a day on these devices — devices that only came into existence relatively recently.
Designers Kai Tang and Joe Hollier have long believed that it’s not normal for humans to be so attached to their phones. So they launched their own company in 2014 to create an alternative...called the Light Phone.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Kai and Joe talk about their work to build a simpler mobile phone - without apps or tracking of personal data - which has been adopted by users across generations. Plus, the duo discuss the impact of society’s growing reliance on tech and their hopes for a less-connected future.
This episode was produced by Casey Herman with editing by John Isabella, research by Kerry Thompson, and music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.
You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] .
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Guy Raz? Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,
0:46 Guy Raz? build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.
1:32 Guy Raz? Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back
2:16 Guy Raz? on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,
3:00 Guy Raz? new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort Round Trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge, with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits
3:45 Guy Raz? or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talk to on this show, because the best
4:27 Guy Raz? ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.
5:11 Guy Raz? Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So imagine you're waiting somewhere, right? Maybe you're in the checkout line at the grocery store or at a restaurant and just waiting for the bathroom to open up. And while you wait for a few minutes, what are you doing? I bet there's a high chance that you take out your smartphone and just start scrolling. I do it, I'm embarrassed to say. In fact, a recent study found that, on average, American adults spend almost three hours a day, three hours, staring at their smartphones. Of course, smartphones are amazing. They've brought massive convenience to our everyday lives. But they've also let tech companies access intimate details of our private lives for advertising. They've also allowed our work to creep into our personal time off.
5:55 Guy Raz? And of course, smartphone use has been linked to an increase in anxiety and depression, especially in children and teens. Well, Kai Tang and Joe Hollier looked at these problems and they thought, what if there was a different kind of phone? And so they set out to design a phone that would give people a set of useful functions without the endless stream of social media content and other distractions. They called it the Light Phone, and it has calling and texting, but it also lets you do things like play music or podcasts and get directions. You can take notes on it and set up a hotspot, but no apps. And it doesn't track users for advertising. It doesn't sell their personal data. It's not designed to keep us glued to the screen.
6:39 Guy Raz? It's actually quite the opposite. The company's tagline is "a phone for humans." Anyway, before they started work on the Light Phone together in 2014, Kai worked in product development on some major cellphone brands, including Nokia, BlackBerry, and Motorola. So he had experience with actually making cellphone hardware. Joe worked as a filmmaker, animator, illustrator after college. And because both Kai and Joe had design backgrounds, they met while attending a 30-week incubator program for designers that was put on by Google in New York.
7:16 Speaker 01 The premise was that each of us might come up with an idea for a new sort of technology company, a smartphone app specifically.
7:24 Guy Raz? Right.
7:24 Speaker 01 And that if a designer could make the vision of such a product seem real, that would entice investors or developers and engineers that could help bring that to life, because that's something Google was doing internally. And they wanted to see if that was something that they could multiply externally.
7:44 Guy Raz? And presumably, like most of the people in this program are like, OK, what kind of app can we build that can attract attention and presumably can make money? I would imagine that's how most people were thinking, right?
7:55 Speaker 01 Well, there's a kind of like a golden metric that was really what was most important. And that was how many hours a day someone spent with a product. So if you could make something that was sticky, you know, that people would use for hours a day, there didn't really need to be an inherent business model because you could start collecting all sorts of data and selling advertising. And that was sort of the kind of business model that so many smartphone apps in particular had already embraced.
8:27 Speaker 02 This is like the height of that kind of thinking. I think with after Facebook kind of just blew up, people are like, don't worry about how you're going to monetize, just focus on getting, signing up users and then we can make money off them in different ways.
8:40 Speaker 01 Exactly.
8:41 Speaker 02 So what about this was in 2014 was troubling to you, to either of you, if at all?
8:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that's exactly why we decided to do something different. It was almost nerve wracking watching people use their smartphones in public, you know, in the park, in the train station, restaurant. If you just look up, it's almost bizarre that everyone is touching and staring at a little screen instead of, you know, enjoying the conversation, making eye contact or actually pay attention to your kids. That's the reason we feel like the goal to maximize people's time, attention and data is just not fair. The reason I quit the job is just because I don't understand why we need to make a new phone every two months, every three months.
9:33 Speaker 02 You quit your job as a phone designer because you felt like, why are we making a new phone every few months when this last one's perfectly good?
9:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, like just because there was a slightly better camera, let's make a new phone, or because we could rotate the phone this way, that way. And I was like, but who needs that? And does anyone actually look at how people use it? Like, I remember this feeling that my smartphone is the source of anxiety when I look at it because I know if someone calls me after 10:00 PM, there's something bad happening in other side of the world, right? So I just remember this feeling that smartphone being the source of anxiety. Yeah.
10:12 Speaker 02 So you guys are in this incubator program for Google. And at what point, Joe, did you start to think, hang on, maybe there's something else to think about here? And how did you find Kai, who clearly agreed with you?
10:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it was in the program. We were doing user research and asking people about their relationships with their smartphones. And no one was saying, I wish I spent two more hours on my smartphone. In fact, people were kind of had these over the top. I almost wish I could just go off the grid forever kind of sentiment. And I found myself as a freelancer, checking my email when I was at the beach, trying to change a song and seeing some email that I could do nothing about. And I said, why is it that I bring everything with me everywhere? I thought back about even further AOL Instant Messenger and dial up computers of my childhood.
11:11 Speaker 01 There was only one room in the house that you could access the internet. And there was this very clear distinction between online and offline time. And I think the smartphones became so ubiquitous that we almost forgot we have the agency to actually sign off from time to time. And when I talked to Kai about the idea, he immediately resonated. And it was kind of felt like something we might be able to do together with his background.
11:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, tell me about the idea. I mean, you said to him, hey, let's forget about working on an app. Let's build a phone that doesn't distract you. Is that what you said?
11:51 Speaker 01 I mean, it was basically like, instead of making an app to keep people on their smartphones, what if we make a phone to get people off their smartphones?
11:59 Speaker 02 Right.
11:59 Speaker 01 Almost taking the app into the physical sense. And Kai's first reaction was, it's really, really hard to make a cellphone. You don't want to make a cellphone. But we started talking about what this might look like and pitching it to peers in the program with us. And we got a really deep, polarizing reaction.
12:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, Kai, what did they say?
12:23 Speaker 03 Well, it's really interesting because some of them would say, this is gonna change my life. And some other group of people would be like, this is, why do I ever need that? Right? My smartphone is perfect. It does everything for me. There's nothing wrong with my smartphone, right? But I think everyone had a reaction. You either love it or you hate it. And I think that's every designer's goal, just to create something that actually relates to the individuals.
12:52 Speaker 02 All right. So you guys decide to partner up and see if you could create a phone that didn't distract you. Once you agreed to kind of work on this, what was your first step? What did you, did you guys start to sketch it out on paper? What it might look like? What did you start to do?
13:12 Speaker 01 Our first step was really actually trying to test the hypothesis that people might enjoy taking a break from their smartphone. So we actually got a couple flip phones and we set up call forwarding for about two dozen people over the course of a couple of weeks. And whether it was either a weekend or just an evening, would ask them to leave their smartphone. Calls would forward to this new flip phone, but they would only have access to nine contacts. What we saw from that was pretty amazing. Kind of described this initial anxiety, like tapping your pocket, checking the flip phone a couple of times every few minutes. But after, you know, a certain point, there's this kind of magical moment where
13:54 Speaker 01 you are present and it's incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating. And, you know, they described feeling ready to come back to work with a clearer head. And then when we actually looked at the flip phones, we realized that no one used them at all. It was really this kind of peace of mind that God forbid there was an emergency, my mom, my cat, you know, partner, whatever, I was reachable, but that the actual value that we brought them wasn't in any one feature, but actually in the lack of features.
14:27 Speaker 02 And both of you obviously have design backgrounds and Kai, you literally designed smartphones. So you basically knew how you could do this. But you guys decided, let's do Kickstarter, because that's a good way to raise money. You need money to do this. So you launched Kickstarter and you got $400,000. You get 3,000 people back this project.
14:50 Guy Raz? And with that money, what were you able to do? Because I'm thinking, you've got to send 3,000 phones to people. Wow, that that seems like a lot more than $400,000.
15:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's not even enough. Not even the friction that we needed to build the device.
15:07 Guy Raz? So what did you do?
15:09 Speaker 01 Well, a big part of the Kickstarter wasn't just the money, but actually the traction that could be used to, you know, inspire partners or investors to see the value in this, that people were willing to contribute at such an early stage. And that was a huge momentum push for us.
15:32 Guy Raz? We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, Joe and Kai confront some big challenges creating what they call a phone away from phone. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
15:51 Guy Raz? Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted, but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in. So the work is production ready from day one, and you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale,
16:35 Guy Raz? and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights
17:20 Guy Raz? exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.
18:03 Guy Raz? If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built.
18:22 Speaker 04 Football is back, and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right. If you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want, this football season, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you on?
19:07 Speaker 05 Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game. Must be present in certain states. Visit prizepix.com for restrictions and details.
19:23 Guy Raz? One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free.
19:40 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's May of 2015, and Joe and Kai's Light Phone has generated a lot of interest and backing on Kickstarter. And with that support, it's time for them to take their design from the drawing board and figure out how to make it real.
19:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, so we, I think we started by just getting phones from Amazon or Alibaba and break it apart and try to, you know, Frankenstein, build a phone that looks like what we're trying to do, so that we have a physical prototype we could show suppliers as well as our investors. And the crowdfunding campaign was really helpful for our suppliers to understand what we're trying to do and how many people, or is there a market for this kind of product?
20:32 Guy Raz? Yeah.
20:33 Speaker 03 You know, suppliers was like investor.
20:36 Guy Raz? Yep.
20:37 Speaker 03 You know, they could build any other product with their capacity, but they have to decide, okay, I'm gonna, you know, take a shot with Light Phone. So getting the first couple suppliers on board were really critical for the part of manufacturing.
20:52 Guy Raz? Describe that first Light Phone. I mean, what did it, what was the promise? What would it do?
20:57 Speaker 01 We called it your phone away from phone.
21:00 Guy Raz? Right, okay.
21:01 Speaker 01 And the idea was that it wasn't necessarily trying to replace your smartphone, but to just say, hey, for, you know, a couple of hours a day, or maybe for a weekend, or, you know, while working on a certain project, you might want to go light. What that actually meant was that the original Light Phone was a simple 2G cellphone that had its own SIM card, and we made software that would kind of make it seamlessly feel like it was your, an extension of your smartphone number. Your calls would Forward to the light phone, when you called someone, it would display as if the call was coming from you. And it would allow you to leave your smartphone behind and just take the phone aspect out of the phone.
21:45 Speaker 02 Okay, so you start working on it and this is not, I mean, this ends up taking quite a long time. Did it take longer than you had anticipated to actually develop it and then deliver it to the Kickstarter backers?
22:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure. I think we estimated a year and a half. I feel like it took us almost two years to actually get the product out, which we appreciated that people were being very patient with us.
22:14 Speaker 01 Mostly.
22:16 Speaker 02 And so when you finally delivered these phones, I mean, there was mixed reaction to them, right? Because it was on a 2G network originally and there were some challenges with it, right?
22:28 Speaker 01 Definitely. I mean, aside from any technical challenges, it's quite the ask for the end user. So I think what we saw a lot of was almost like a gym membership where someone wants to go light, but is struggling to actually integrate that kind of experience into their day to day life.
22:47 Speaker 02 So this phone comes out in 2017, January of 2017, and you ship, I think about 15,000 units. Before you had to kind of put a stop to it and there was a waiting list, like people were actually even selling some of these on the secondary market for like two, three times the price.
23:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that whole time we were taking pre-orders, which was, you know, help keeping our lights on. And we were incredibly grateful that people would be willing to spend money for a phone that might not be delivered for one to three months, depending on where we were and that kind of timing.
23:21 Speaker 02 And that $400,000 that you raised, I mean, did that take you all through this period of time? Or did you have to seek other sources of financing?
23:31 Speaker 03 It took us to the first stage, which is paying our suppliers to do the design work and getting samples built. I think we needed 2 million more just to actually go through the process. So we raised money from the mission aligned investors along the way to help us deliver.
23:54 Speaker 02 And clearly, this was going to be just the first iteration. I mean, you clearly had. An ambition to make a more sophisticated phone, and that would be the Light Phone 2. And in 2018, you launched another campaign, this amount Indiegogo for the Light Phone 2. And that one raised about three and a half million dollars. What did, what did the Light Phone 2, what was that phone going to be able to do?
24:19 Speaker 03 Well, I think we learned so much from the first Light Phone. Our users were telling us that they wanted to go light more often, meaning use Light Phone more often. But they don't have Uber, they want text message. They want this one or two more things to make that experience more enjoyable or have that peace of mind knowing they have those tools. I think that's when we started to revisit our philosophy, saying that, hey, you know, the goal originally was trying to give people that peace of mind so it could break away even just from time to time. So what if we offer our users a couple more utility tool?
25:00 Speaker 03 If that enables millions of more people try Light Phone? That's what we wanted to do.
25:08 Speaker 02 So tell me about what this phone does, the Light Phone 2.
25:12 Speaker 03 It has phone call, you can send text message, you can write text message. Now we have music, MP3 player, podcast. You can get simple direction. We have hotspot as well as calendar and notes. You could take text notes or a voice memo.
25:31 Speaker 02 And so I guess eventually you'll be able to like hail an Uber with it?
25:36 Speaker 03 Hopefully Lyft, a ride sharing tool is something that we, we're trying to do. But that requires, you know, the ride share company to collaborate with us.
25:45 Speaker 02 So tell me a little bit about, I mean, building a phone company. It's not, this is not easy. This is a huge challenge. And you are basically saying to people, look,
25:58 Speaker 02 Smartphones have taken over our lives. We're losing our time and our attention to these devices. And so you've got to convince a certain number of people to adopt the product, but you have to build them too, which requires a lot of money. And I guess over time, that was became a sort of a focus. You had to raise more money to make these phones, right?
26:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, we got to raise a lot more money than we originally planned it just to make the Light Phone 2.
26:24 Speaker 02 So when you told investors about this idea, how did you convince them to back you? I mean, presumably, some of them were like, well, I don't think people are going to use these things.
26:34 Speaker 01 I mean, there's definitely the concern about, is this just a niche product? Is this, you know, does there any actual mass market adoption? I think anyone that's been interested in investing in the Light Phone does feel morally, there's something really beautiful going on with Light Phone in that we have this sort of honest and transparent business model that's so kind of unique.
26:57 Speaker 03 As a matter of fact, one of our investors from Foxconn, the company that make iPhone and Samsung. So we were in the meetings explaining what Light Phone is, what Light Phone is trying to do.
27:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:10 Speaker 03 One of the executives from Foxconn was saying, guys, I need this phone. My, my families are torn apart by smartphone. My kids don't talk to me. You know, we're all on our phone on a dining table. You know, I need this phone. And I think that emotional connection drove a lot of investors to us because of the business model that every app, every social media are deploying. Doesn't matter what you do, doesn't matter what product you're trying to create, as long as you're making money from advertisement or users' data, there's no way out. You will have to maximize their attention and time.
27:54 Speaker 02 You know, one of the things I struggle with because obviously, you know, for, for people who feel like their phones have kind of come to control them. And I think a lot of people listening feel that. And I certainly have days where I feel like that. But on the flip side, like I just, I think about yesterday. I went to San Francisco to have lunch with a friend and hailed an Uber. And then I looked at a map app to see how long it would take me to get there. I got to the restaurant a few minutes early, so I checked my Gmail, quickly answered a couple of emails. So it was like time efficient. And then my wife texted me and needed me to transfer some money in her bank, and I did that for my phone. And on the one hand, 10, 20 years ago, I couldn't do any of that.
28:39 Speaker 02 And maybe, probably, I stopped to notice things around me more, for sure. And I think there are elements of the world we lived in then that were better. But on the other hand, there's incredible efficiency. And so I have to wonder that we've just gotten to a point in human history where these things kind of won.
29:00 Speaker 03 Well, we're not disagreeing that smartphones is efficient, and it's a very helpful computers that help us do things. But at the same time, Joe and I, we're not asking people to give up technology.
29:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:16 Speaker 03 All we're trying to say is that we should have options. We should have tools that intentionally designed, just like a hammer or a screwdriver. You use it, you put it back, and you don't think about your hammer 24/7. You don't hold your screwdriver and swipe your screwdriver for five hours a day. Why can't we reimagine the mobile device that does not have the components of attention economy, but has all the modern utility?
29:52 Speaker 02 When we come back after a short break, more from Joe and Kai about building their minimalist smartphone, the Lightphone. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
30:16 Speaker 02 Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guests today are Kai Tang and Joe Hollier. They think that we need to redefine our relationships to our smartphones, which is why they built a minimalist version of a smartphone called the Light Phone. There was a-- this is now, I'm sure lots of people listening know about this, but there was a famous study, probably 20, 30 years ago. It was a study into memory, and it studied London cab drivers. And you may know about this study. Definitely. But London cab drivers had remarkable memories. And that's because there was a time where to be a cab driver, and maybe even to this day you have to, I don't know, you had to memorize every street in London. I remember in the 90s, you'd get in a cab,
31:00 Speaker 02 and you would just say a street, and the driver would know. And, you know, I drive to, like, on the weekends, I go hiking. And I still use my GPS app to tell me where to go. And I'm going to the same places. And I thought about this recently. I thought, I can't believe that I'm relying on the GPS. It's kind of scary, because I've been there 100 times.
31:20 Speaker 03 I definitely think we're losing some brain muscles with the technology we have. Like, I don't even remember my parents' phone number or my girlfriend's phone number. I don't-- I can't remember phone numbers. And we rely on GPS to go everywhere, even just a couple of blocks away. You know, maybe it's a good thing. Maybe this boring task that's being replaced by technology is a good thing for us, that we can live our life better. Or we could, like, you know, actually talking to our friends while the computer is doing those things, right? But that's not what's happening.
31:55 Speaker 02 Kai, do you exclusively use the Light Phone?
31:59 Speaker 03 Yes. Both Joe and I use Light Phone exclusively. We do have our iPad or computers for everything else. So it's a separate tool for different purposes. If I know I need my iPad to do things that Light Phone doesn't do, we will carry that tool with us. But other than that, like commuting, taking a walk down the street, or having dinners, I'll just bring my Light Phone.
32:25 Speaker 02 Tell me about-- You know, I know you've raised up to, I think, about $11 million in total. Is that, is that right?
32:32 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:32 Speaker 02 Tell me where, where the company is now. I mean, it took Tesla 15 years to get to profitability. So Rivian and some of these other electric car companies won't hit profitability for another 10 years, probably. I have to assume that you're not yet profitable.
32:47 Speaker 03 We are break even at the moment with the sales from our website.
32:56 Speaker 03 With the support from our users, we don't do advertisement. So all the sales are water mouth and light phone. It just becomes such conversational piece to a lot of our users that if you have it with you, you know, usually people ask, hey, what's that? You know, what's your smartphone? Why don't you use a smartphone? Right? So the whole conversation becomes why I don't, I don't use smartphone? What's the problem? You know, and what's the relationship between our center technology? And, and, and our website sales is sustaining our operation and our R and D at the moment.
33:35 Speaker 03 We do have investors that are supporting us, but we trying to keep it as private as we can and stick to our agenda and our value. And yeah.
33:47 Speaker 02 Where do you see the most potential for growth? I mean, I know that there was like a, there's a school in Massachusetts, I think, that, that banned phones. And then they basically said, okay, everyone can have a light phone. Is there a sector, a category of people in particular who you think where you see growth for this product?
34:04 Speaker 01 I've been really pleasantly surprised by the wide kind of range of users that have found value in something like the light phone.
34:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:13 Speaker 01 We get a lot of families, not just buying it for their kids, but actually like the parents, maybe they have like a newborn wanting to be more present and a better role model. We have celebrities that are buying the phone as something to kind of keep some separation between them and the internet at large. We have a lot of artists and musicians that see it as a kind of like. Peace of mind, space for their own practice. And then, yeah, this recent school has been a really inspiring new angle because we've had dozens of schools in conversation since about promoting a similar kind of policy, or at least trying to make it more accessible.
34:55 Speaker 01 And actually, the Buxton School was kind of an amazing case study for us.
35:00 Speaker 02 Is the school in Massachusetts?
35:02 Speaker 01 Mm hmm. It's a small, private boarding school. And I think what was really amazing was that they banned smartphones for the faculty as well as the students. So that there was this kind of like level playing field. It wasn't just like, do as I say, not as I do. And the school just saw fantastic results, especially when it came to things like mealtime. I think, you know, the classroom was pretty expected that, you know, with people being more attentive. But I think the real magic was seeing kids integrate and mingle in mealtime and around the campus.
35:37 Speaker 02 Is there a world where the next iteration is, it has the same features, but maybe adds a camera? Not a camera that's going to go to social media, but just a camera to take photos?
35:48 Speaker 03 Yes, I think that's part of our plan. So camera is a great tool to capture a moment, to documenting your life, or even just a receipt, right? I think that's a very useful tool if we do have a camera. In Lightphone, it will be a tool that allows you to capture those moments, but we will not allow sharing or commenting or liking to be part of that experience. Because, you know, if you take a film camera, you take a photo, you don't think about sharing or where to post that photos, right? That's a great tool.
36:27 Speaker 03 And we, that's kind of inspiration of how we think a camera might work with Lightphone.
36:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think the thing we want to avoid the most is when you see someone had a beautiful monument or, you know, an overlook on a trail and they take the photo, but it's almost as if they didn't even see it with their own eyes because now they're looking down, trying to put the right filter, the right caption. And it's one thing to capture that moment for seeing it and remembering it, but if you're not present when you're taking the photo, I think that's missing the point.
37:01 Speaker 02 How many people work for the company now? We have around 15 employees. 15, and you do no marketing at all? It's entirely just word of mouth?
37:12 Speaker 01 We do a lot of projects and initiatives, but what we don't do is spend money on Facebook Meta platforms or Google Ads. It's really about things that our users can help spread, making videos. Or we recently just did a campaign where we made a fake company called the Alliance of Big Tech, and we used that to kind of say, "Do not buy the light phone for all of these reasons." And we sent about 700 shirts to some of our earliest users, a kind of great grassroots way to start a lot of conversations about the phone. And I think, as Kai kind of mentioned before, the conversations about the phone,
37:55 Speaker 01 whether or not someone immediately purchases it, it's not just like, "How does it work?" You really start to talk about the internet at large and what it means to be a human in 2023. And they tend to stick with people. So a lot of our new users have heard about the light phone for three or six months, or even maybe longer. And so a lot of our marketing is just kind of feeding them more anecdotes, more examples of how other users have fitted into their life to make that less intimidating of a jump.
38:24 Speaker 02 You know, we talked about how you launched this phone. And the idea came in 2014, when this problem, this sort of attention economy, was clearly, it was already a problem. But very few people were thinking about it at the time. And, you know, over the last few years, movies like The Social Dilemma, documentaries about the attention economy have come out. There's more attention being paid to it, but the problem is worse. So let's sort of fast forward 10 years from now. I mean, do you think that something will change? I mean, will there be a groundswell of action by like Gen Z-ers who are like, "No, we're, you know..."
39:01 Guy Raz? We're not taking this anymore. We want our attention back and we're gonna not buy smartphones?
39:05 Speaker 03 It's funny you mentioned Gen Z because that's actually one of the biggest surprise to me. I originally thought that our user will be, you know, older generation or my generation, 35 to 40. But no, it turns out like 75, 80% of our customers are Gen Z, a younger generation who are really brave to say no and willing to give it a try. And 10 years down the road, I think smartphone is just a glitch. Our behavior with smartphone right now, it's just not normal. In my opinion, you know, technology needs to be invisible.
39:47 Speaker 03 It shouldn't be the focus of our life every day, 24/7. Wake up with it, sleep with it, go to bathroom with the smartphone on hand and ignore your family and friends and, you know, the tree, the cloud around us. And I think eventually, a lot more people will be looking for a different option.
40:14 Guy Raz? That's Kai Tang and Joe Hollier, co-founders of the company Light and creators of the Light Phone. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please make sure to follow the show wherever you listen on any podcast app. Usually it's just a follow button right at the top so you don't miss any new episodes and it is entirely free. If you want to contact our team, our email address is h i b t at i d dot wondery dot com. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with editing by John Isabella, research by Alex Chung, and music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch.
40:55 Guy Raz? Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, Carla Estevez, J.C. Howard, Chris Messini, Liz Metzger, and Sam Paulson. Niva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.
Previous Orgain: Andrew Abraham Next Solo Stove: Spencer and Jeff Jan Page updated October 17, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated