Pod Insights The Generalist Nothing’s Carl Pei on Building a $1B Smartphone Company, Why He Left OnePlus After 10 Days of Retirement, and Why He Thinks About Death Every Week About this episode Carl Pei is the founder of Nothing, the consumer electronics company known for its distinctive transparent design language across smartphones and audio products. Before launching Nothing in 2020, Carl co-founded OnePlus, where he spent seven years helping build it into a major smartphone brand. But Carl’s instincts as a builder showed up much earlier. As a teenager, he taught himself to code by building Pokémon fan sites, all while moving between China, the U. S., and Sweden. That combination of early creation and constant change shaped a founder comfortable with uncertainty—and deeply motivated by questions bigger than products. Carl thinks often about time and mortality, is skeptical of early retirement, and believes creativity is humanity’s real advantage. In an industry obsessed with optimization, he’s focused on making technology feel meaningful again.
In our conversation, we explore:
The origins of Nothing’s transparent design language and how it helps differentiate the brand in a mature, competitive marketCarl’s childhood fascination with mortality and how it continues to drive his ambition todayNothing’s multiple near-death experiences, from 80% defect rates on first products to fundraising strugglesWhy India has become a crucial market for Nothing’s smartphone businessHow Nothing approaches community involvement, including letting users invest alongside VCsThe company’s approach to integrating AI features without overhyping the technologyCarl’s admiration for Genghis Khan’s management style and talent acquisition approachThe future of consumer electronics beyond smartphones—
Thank you to our sponsor, Guru https://www.getguru.com/ — The AI source of truth for work
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/nothings-carl-pei-on-building-a-1b-smartphone-company
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Timestamps
00:00) Introduction to Carl Pei and Nothing
(02:44) Nothing’s long-term vision
(06:33) How existential thinking shapes Carl’s motivation
(10:12) Why Carl’s planned sabbatical ended after ten days
(12:35) Carl’s international upbringing
(16:02) Entrepreneurial experiments in China
(19:10) Carl’s competitive nature and attitude toward school
(25:30) Lessons from seven years at OnePlus
(28:07) Taking a break at age 31
(30:50) Carl’s fundraising strategy
(33:26) Why Carl chose London for Nothing’s HQ
(35:12) Lessons from Genghis Khan
(38:38) Nothing’s first near-death moment
(42:56) Nothing’s product evolution and breakout hits
(45:24) Partnering with Teenage Engineering
(49:28) Design inspirations
(51:36) How Nothing recruits talent
(53:42) Nothing’s approach to marketing
(56:51) How India became a key market
(59:48) Why Nothing created CMF
(1:02:12) Why Carl is bullish on India
(1:03:32) How Carl thinks about AI
(1:07:05) Rethinking ads based on community feedback
(1:09:05) How Nothing leverages community
(1:11:23) Why AI hardware is struggling
(1:13:37) Carl’s thoughts on the future of consumer electronics
(1:15:10) Philosophies that shape Carl’s worldview
(1:16:45) Final meditations
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Follow Carl Pei
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/getpeid
X: https://x.com/getpeid
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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/nothings-carl-pei-on-building-a-1b-smartphone-company
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Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] .
Transcript 14,133 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 You know, life is finite, so I just had a really tough time grappling with that idea. I still think about it quite a lot, actually.
0:05 Mario Gabriele? When I think about Nothing, and I think when a lot of people think about Nothing, they think about the transparent design. You guys have really become synonymous with this beautiful design language of the earbuds, the phones.
0:14 Speaker 00 Tech products are becoming more and more homogeneous, less and less dynamic. Every generation is pretty similar to its predecessor.
0:20 Mario Gabriele? People historically have maybe been keen to categorize you. You know, first you were sort of like, they make earbuds, now it's maybe smartphones. But I sense that you think of what you're doing in a more capacious way.
0:31 Speaker 00 If we think about like a more longer term future, let's say 20-year time horizon, we want to make tech fun to inspire human creativity. Longer term, I don't know how many years it'll take, or if we're gonna see it in our lifetimes, we should be able to discover other types of intelligent life. And hopefully by then, humans are pretty competitive with whatever, whoever else is out there. And I think that creative muscle is the key to unlocking that.
0:59 Mario Gabriele? What smartphone do you use? An iPhone, perhaps? Maybe a Samsung or a Google Pixel? For a growing number of consumers, the answer is Nothing. That's the name of the London-based startup founded by today's guest, Carl Pei. In our conversation, Carl and I explore what it takes to build an Apple challenger in 2025, how Nothing's transparent designs have helped it to break through in such a hyper-competitive market, and why Nothing's products have found such a strong customer base in India. We also talk about Nothing's multiple near-death moments on its way to a billion-dollar-plus valuation, Genghis Khan's managerial prowess, and why building AI-specific devices is so difficult.
1:45 Mario Gabriele? I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist.
1:49 Mario Gabriele? Every revolution in AI creates one question that never changes: Can you trust the output? AI for work is incredible, but without trust, it's just leading to faster mistakes. The challenge isn't building an AI that can answer questions, it's making sure those answers are right. That's where Guru comes in. It's the AI source of truth that connects everything your company knows. So every insight, every answer, every recommendation is grounded in verified knowledge, not outdated information or hallucinations. When your teams and your AIs share one trusted foundation, everything moves faster with fewer redos, fewer blind spots, and more confidence in every decision.
2:31 Mario Gabriele? Because in the age of AI, truth isn't just power, it's protection. See what Guru is doing for thousands of companies like Spotify, DHL, and Stripe at GetGuru.com. That's GetGuru.com. Carl, I'm super excited to have you here and to chat about you and
2:49 Speaker 00 Great to be here.
2:50 Mario Gabriele? You know, there's so many places that I've thought about starting this conversation, but one thing that came up for me was when I think about Nothing, and I think when a lot of people think about Nothing, they think about like the transparent design. You guys have really become sort of synonymous with this really beautiful design language of the earbuds, the phones. And you also talk a lot about technology sort of being fun again. And when I was researching your background, one of the things that I came up, came across was that your first company was like building a website for Pokemon Game Boy walkthroughs. And I imagine at the age you were, when you were writing that, like the Game Boy was the translucent Game Boy?
3:33 Mario Gabriele? Is that where that like sense of fun comes from in the design language?
3:36 Speaker 00 So first of all, it wasn't a company because I was 12. I didn't really know what
3:39 Mario Gabriele? Fair, yes.
3:40 Speaker 00 What a company was. I just learned to build websites about things I was passionate about. And Pokemon was definitely one of those things. And actually, all our products today, internal code names are all Pokemon.
3:52 Mario Gabriele? Oh, that's us.
3:53 Speaker 00 It's a Pokédex. But my first Game Boy was actually the translucent purple one. I didn't make that connection until now.
4:02 Mario Gabriele? Okay.
4:03 Speaker 00 So maybe, maybe it impacted me in some subconscious way, but we never thought about it that way.
4:09 Mario Gabriele? Okay, that's really interesting. Well, maybe the, a good place to start is what Nothing is, because I've heard you say in some other interviews that, you know, people historically have maybe been keen to categorize you. You know, first you were sort of like, hey, they make earbuds. Now it's maybe smartphones. But I sense that you think of what you're doing in a more capacious way.
4:33 Speaker 00 I think it all depends on what time horizon we talk about. Yeah, it's it's super fine to be misunderstood as long as you keep progressing and evolving.
4:43 Speaker 00 And it's not the it's not other people's fault that you're misunderstood. It's basically they look at what you do and therefore you are this thing. And so it's normal. So we don't have any problems around that. But I think if we if we think about like a more longer term future, say 20 year time horizon, we want to make tech fun to inspire human creativity. And make tech fun part is kind of clear for people like tech products are becoming more and more homogeneous.
5:15 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
5:16 Speaker 00 Less and less dynamic. Every generation is pretty similar to its predecessor. The inspire creativity part might still be a little bit confusing or vague to people. The way I see it is that as humans, one of our superpowers is creativity, like both on an individual level, but also on like a species level. And by creativity, I mean the ability to solve problems. And we would love to create products that are not only fun, but help this creative process. But it's not just kind of writing or art or design. It's solving problems on a broader sense, like I see our software engineers as creatives as well because they're solving problems in novel ways through code.
6:00 Speaker 00 If we're able to do this, I think that has a net benefit on society because if people can exercise and manifest their ideas in a in a better way, it should be a net positive. Longer term, I don't know how many years it'll take or if we're going to see it in our lifetimes, we should be able to discover other types of intelligent life. And hopefully by then, you know, humans are pretty competitive with whatever whoever else is out there. And I think that creative muscle is the key to unlocking that.
6:34 Mario Gabriele? Do you think a lot about, you know, the the far frontiers of the world, space of, you know, intelligent life?
6:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, both like very far, but also like very in the present, like minute things that are so minute that it annoys my team. I feel like I can zoom in and out quite easily. Yeah, I was talking about these kind of things, like very far things, even in.
7:02 Speaker 00 Middle school and I, yeah. People around me couldn't really have a conversation with me. They just kind of wanted to talk about Pokemon or Naruto or whatever.
7:12 Mario Gabriele? Yeah. Where did that come from for you? Was that like, I don't know, science fiction thing that fed into that? Just something that seemed to come naturally?
7:19 Speaker 00 Don't know. You know, I had a very hard time sleeping as a kid. I was always thinking about what else like?
7:28 Speaker 00 What's beyond like? I'm in this apartment or house in my room, but like then you have countries, then you have earth, then you have planets. And is there an end to how much you can zoom out? Like I kept thinking about that, you know?
7:40 Mario Gabriele? Mm hmm. Well, this is great because I actually do want to talk about some of your origins. I always think it's really interesting to hear how really impressive founders and entrepreneurs sort of the things that influenced them from early on that are maybe obvious and not obvious. Um, both of your parents were Alzheimer's researchers, right?
8:00 Speaker 00 Uh huh.
8:01 Mario Gabriele? In this Twitter sort of, uh, you, you did like one of those things where you're, you know, I'm bored on a flight. Ask me anything question. Uh, you talked about, I think what motivates you and the answer you came up with was death. Uh, and something that I've noticed with a lot of entrepreneurs is this like really acute sense of their own mortality. And I sort of wondered if having two parents that are actually like constantly thinking about degeneration of some kind, like created that sensibility in you? Like, where does that acute awareness come from?
8:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was like six or seven and I kept thinking about, you know, both from a space perspective, like what's beyond, but also from a time perspective, what's beyond? And it was very clear that, you know, life is finite. So I just had a really tough time grappling with that idea. And I even one time told my mom, hey, what like, why did you give birth to me? Like now I have to die, like that kind of stuff. But, um, and I imagine like, you know, what if I could be a rock? A rock can live for forever. Actually, not forever, because once the universe explodes, then it's not there anymore. But I think none of that really makes sense as a grown up.
9:14 Speaker 00 But I guess my mind was very active. Then there was this Steve Jobs speech at Stanford, where he talks about death as being the best dimension of life and looking himself in the mirror every day to ask himself, you know, if this was the last day I would be alive, would I still do these things that I'm about to do today? I still think about it quite a lot, actually. Like, a couple of times a week, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and be like, wow, life is finite. I'm already, you know, thirty six.
9:47 Mario Gabriele? Me too.
9:48 Speaker 00 Oh, nice. Yeah, time is.
9:51 Mario Gabriele? It's ticking along.
9:53 Speaker 00 And like, oh, I still gotta do all these things. And how much time do I have left? It keeps coming up.
10:01 Mario Gabriele? Thirty six, do you feel like you're at par of what you expect for yourself? You know, a little behind where you want to be, given what you expect? You know, further than you? You know, have you made better use than you'd hoped or not yet?
10:17 Speaker 00 I think I'm pretty at peace with where things are. And I think maybe that's a theme for people in their thirties. I don't know what your experience is.
10:23 Mario Gabriele? I think that's right.
10:24 Speaker 00 But when I was younger, when I was seventeen, I told myself I need to be able to retire by twenty five. So that didn't happen.
10:33 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
10:33 Speaker 00 So maybe I'm a failure compared to my expectations as a seventeen year old.
10:38 Mario Gabriele? Or you maybe realized, like, actually, retirement would be like totally miserable and you would just do exactly what you're doing.
10:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, I also say that to comfort myself. Like, if I retired, I would still do the same thing. Because now it's, I'm having fun and just like traveling, going to luxury hotels and resorts and eating, you know, Michelin star restaurant food and drinking great wine. That will get boring pretty quickly.
11:04 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, yeah, I think, I remember, actually, this was, this was from, from researching you. You did sort of try and do that for like ten days after leaving the company before nothing, right?
11:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, because I worked there. Um, for seven years and I was only twenty four when I started. That was like my twenties and just kind of gone in work. And we worked like six days a week for most of the time. I felt like I had done a lot career wise, work wise, but what if I could take like half a year off, travel the world? And it sounded like a really good idea, but yeah, it just got really, um, really boring. After a while, like after a week, I was like, wow, this is same thing over and over again. Like wake up, uh, figure out what it have dinner, go to the pool, read a book.
12:00 Speaker 00 Um, and I felt this, uh, I felt super stressed, actually.
12:05 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
12:06 Speaker 00 Being in that environment, it's like time is ticking and I'm just doing nothing. So for me, it's, it's more relaxing to work than to be on an extended holiday. I didn't know it at the time, but a week later I, I found out.
12:22 Mario Gabriele? Hmm, uh, I understand that. Uh, I think I can do, I could probably do it longer than ten days, I, I suspect, but not, not that much longer. Uh, I think once you do a few days by the pool, you do sort of hit a point where you're like, okay, you know, uh, what's next? You grew up sort of between Sweden, the U S and, and were you, were you born in China?
12:43 Speaker 00 Born in China, left when I was four. Moved to the States for two years and then to Sweden.
12:49 Mario Gabriele? And the two years in the States sounded like they were like quite formative in a way and maybe.
12:54 Speaker 00 Different, maybe, yeah, maybe in hindsight. So we, uh, we lived in Staten Island. I didn't know that it was not the best place when I was a kid, but now as I've grown up, people have told me, wow, that's a really rough place. But I don't have a lot of bad memories. Uh, I remember the only bad memories like, uh,
13:14 Speaker 00 An American kid, um, maybe two years older than me, it's like very big. It was sitting and he was sitting on me. That's kind of the only thing I remember.
13:22 Mario Gabriele? Oh, gosh.
13:23 Speaker 00 That was bad.
13:23 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, that doesn't sound great.
13:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:26 Mario Gabriele? Uh, yeah, and I imagine also probably you're an unusual kid in in almost any environment, given the things that you were thinking about, but I imagine if I had to pick a few places on earth that maybe especially might not be filled with young kids who are thinking about the far future, Staten Island might be a good choice.
13:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, maybe, but actually my personality was very different.
13:46 Mario Gabriele? Ah.
13:47 Speaker 00 Uh, I was very talkative and very extroverted.
13:49 Mario Gabriele? Oh, really?
13:50 Speaker 00 So my parents had to go to school and, uh, you know, sit with the with the teacher and hear about how talkative I was, disruptive I was in class. But then when we went to Sweden, maybe because I was like moving around too much and I didn't know the language back then, I became more quiet.
14:08 Mario Gabriele? Ah, wow, fascinating. And that sort of stayed with you or now do you find yourself somewhere in between?
14:15 Speaker 00 I'm in between now. I'm like, um, this, this, what is it called MBTI?
14:20 Mario Gabriele? Oh, it's the Mars Brakes, yeah.
14:21 Speaker 00 I'm kind of a in between on introverted and extroverted. It changes depending on the day.
14:26 Mario Gabriele? Hmm. Oh, really? Okay. I think the last time I did it, I was an INTJ.
14:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm, I think I'm I or E and TJ as well.
14:34 Mario Gabriele? Oh, nice.
14:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:35 Mario Gabriele? I can't, I can never tell how much I should put stock in it at all, but it is sort of interesting to like push against, right? There is a few articles when I was reading about your background where they talk about how you as a child were like very aware of the atmosphere you're growing up in Sweden, but also like the amount of growth and, you know, the speed of of sort of economic growth in China. And the way these articles are written, it almost presents it as if that's like a totally normal thing for a kid to be aware of. I'm curious like how that actually was on your radar that you were sort of like, hey, something's very different happening in China that is not part of my world here in Sweden.
15:16 Speaker 00 Um, I think you would see it in the, in the press, like I went to school every day and on my way to school, we have this free newspaper that we can read during the commute. And you would see news about the, the growth of economies around the world. So back then China came up pretty often. And then, you know, we would speak about it at the dinner table. So it was always kind of a theme, like, hey, there's a lot of growth happening. And I just got really curious about it.
15:44 Mario Gabriele? Were you going back to China to see family in the summers or not really?
15:48 Speaker 00 Uh, like maybe once every two, three years.
15:50 Mario Gabriele? Uh huh.
15:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, but that was in a very, uh, kind of controlled environment. Going from, going from the airport to the, whoever relative we were visiting. I didn't really get to explore it on my own.
16:03 Mario Gabriele? And then it sounded like you probably missed, you or jumped through a few years of school because you left high school at fifteen.
16:10 Speaker 00 I left high school at, uh,
16:12 Mario Gabriele? Or?
16:13 Speaker 00 Maybe sev- maybe seventeen.
16:14 Mario Gabriele? Okay.
16:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:15 Mario Gabriele? So, or sixteen, something like. Was that when you went, you sort of then went to go live in China for a period of time to sort of understand what was happening there economically?
16:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, so back then, so after that Pokemon website, when I was twelve, I just kept making a lot of websites. That's where I really wanted to learn how to make money online.
16:34 Mario Gabriele? And was that the first way you made money online?
16:36 Speaker 00 The Pokemon site didn't make any money, but it got some traffic. Um, but I created a bunch of other websites as well. And the big, the first like real money I made, looking back, it's not a lot, but I sold a Naruto, like another anime website for four point two thousand dollars.
16:56 Mario Gabriele? Oh, wow.
16:57 Speaker 00 For like a fifteen year old, that was a lot of money.
16:59 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, totally.
16:59 Speaker 00 And back then, money was worth more than now. So I was always really, really interested in business and, you know, having heard all the news about the Chinese economy growing, I just wanted to go and see it for myself, like, really see it for myself, explore without my parents being there. They were super worried, like, what's your plan? Like, do you have a twelve month plan? Where, where are you gonna be every month? What are you gonna do? But I didn't know how to make a plan. Like, I'm just gonna go and explore, you know? I haven't been there, so how can I make a plan? So I didn't make a plan. I just went and met people and started doing stuff.
17:34 Mario Gabriele? And so you arrive in Guangdong when you were seventeen or so with just, hey, I'm gonna see what this is like on the ground and what I can do.
17:45 Speaker 00 Yeah. And in the city I was in back then, El Juhai, it's not a big city. There was an electronics mall. So I just kind of went to the mall every day to see what the new gadgets were. And started haggling on the price. I bought a few for myself to test them out. Then I started selling them, like exporting them. I didn't know how to make a, start a company. I didn't know how to do international bank transfers. I literally went to the ATM with my Swedish bank card and withdrew a bunch of cash. So I was wearing shorts because it's pretty hot there. You'd see me like with a huge bulging pockets, full of cash,
18:29 Speaker 00 full of money going to the computer market, haggling and buying stuff, carrying boxes to my apartment. Then I would shoot videos, like unboxing videos and tutorial videos. This is how the product works, like these are all the features. And those videos were the main sales material when I was selling them on eBay and later on my own websites.
18:49 Mario Gabriele? Oh, wow, interesting. So you already sort of had some of that marketing sensibility that, you know, I think you see a lot with nothing. You sort of were aware that, you know, there's, there's gonna be these, you know, these different sales collateral that I need to include.
19:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I guess in hindsight, I really put my money on the line, right?
19:06 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
19:07 Speaker 00 Like, if it didn't, if I bought all this stuff and I couldn't sell it, then I'm pretty screwed.
19:11 Mario Gabriele? As part of this same Twitter AMA, someone, I think, asked you your favorite entrepreneur and you said Genghis Khan, which I thought was a really interesting answer and speaks to a sort of level of ambition. Were you a really competitive kid?
19:27 Speaker 00 Maybe even the opposite.
19:28 Mario Gabriele? Hmm.
19:29 Speaker 00 Looking back, I was probably quite an annoying kid. Um, I was very dismissive of uh everything. Like, oh, you, this, this, uh, this lesson is very boring. Oh, if you wanna get good grades, all you have to do is raise your hand and ask like two, three questions every lesson. And then you stand in line after the lesson to pretend to be interested in the class. So I kinda saw the
19:57 Mario Gabriele? You saw through it.
19:58 Speaker 00 The game.
19:59 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
19:59 Speaker 00 And I just didn't, didn't choose to do it. Um, that was my, like, thinking back then, it's kinda immature, but uh, so not competitive. I didn't really care about my grades and I think in high school, my grades were not very good. And in Sweden, you have to, there's no test like SAT, right? It's, it's your, every course has a grade and then you average it out over three years. So I was about to graduate, I'm like, wow, I gotta shake my grades up. And I only kinda focused in the last two weeks, both by studying hard and trying hard, but then there were also like hacks. Uh, we took some teachers out for drinks and that gave us a better relationship with the teacher and kind of helped grease the, the wheels a little bit.
20:44 Speaker 00 Um, so, so I don't know how to summarize it. I'm more, I was more uh, kinda more arrogant kid, I think. And I spent a lot of time, um, you know, doing my own websites and not going to school and playing games. I would kind of, so I would leave first and then my parents would go to work. Then I would just circle back home and be on the computer the entire day.
21:07 Mario Gabriele? Then that you'd be, uh, they'd come home after you were supposed to be back from school anyway. So who's the wiser? Right, that's so funny. Um, wha- what happened while you were in China such that you reached a point where you were like, hey, it's fun to export electronics, but actually this isn't gonna be my life's work?
21:24 Speaker 00 My parents didn't like it.
21:26 Mario Gabriele? Okay.
21:27 Speaker 00 They're like, hey, you don't have a degree, you don't, you're not going to university. What you're doing now is just like a small thing, it doesn't really matter, it's, it's uh, it's not serious. Why don't you go to school? Just kept repeating that and, well, yeah, maybe they're, they're right. So, um, and it just happened that, um, uh, the best business school in Sweden, they were opening up, opening up a new course. And very few people knew about the course, so my grades wouldn't have gotten me into the main. Course, but it got me into this new course because it was the first year the program ran. And there wasn't enough competition.
22:07 Mario Gabriele? But in the end, it sort of sounded like it was probably not the right way to spend your time anyway, because you didn't seem to think too highly of it as a course, right? It didn't prepare you for the future from the sounds of it.
22:20 Speaker 00 But I do think it was good to get some structure.
22:23 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
22:24 Speaker 00 Because if I had continued just selling stuff online, maybe the ambition level would have kind of plateaued after some time. But getting some structure in like the real world might have been good in hindsight. I was quite disappointed in that school because I was like, hey, this is the best business school. One of the best in Sweden, one of the best in Europe, one of the best in the world. If I study here, I'll be well equipped to face the future. And back then, the three big trends that I saw in business was the rise of e-commerce. This was 2007, 2008, 2008. E-commerce was growing. 2008, I think it was 10% of total retail already.
23:08 Speaker 00 And you could see like a pretty high CAGR, high growth rate. The second thing was the rise of tech companies. Because back then, if you looked at the inner brand, top highest value brands in the world, top 50, top 100.
23:22 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
23:23 Speaker 00 All the new companies on that list were tech companies like Amazon and Google.
23:28 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
23:29 Speaker 00 So I felt like that was, you know, a major trend. And then was the Chinese economy because I had just spent a year there.
23:35 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
23:35 Speaker 00 I could see it firsthand, you know, things were happening. I expected to learn something about these three topics, but three years later, we didn't touch upon them at all. So I was like, hey, aren't you supposed to set up young people for a good future? Your business school, we should become business people. These are the main trends like. But instead, we learned like very old things like. I think still good foundations like statistics, macroeconomics, microeconomics. But what about the future?
24:07 Mario Gabriele? Yeah. It was interesting to me that you spent sort of three years going through that program. And then you you seem to drop out like almost at the very last moment before you would get your degree. And it made me wonder. You know, are you? Do you consider yourself a really stubborn person in some way? Or was there some principle that you sort of felt like? You know, this wasn't valuable to me, so I I almost don't want to get the diploma almost for the sake of it. Because pragmatically at that point, almost you're like, well, I've I've. You know, there's almost some amount of sunk cost. I should just finish it out, but something about that didn't make sense to you.
24:42 Speaker 00 I I haven't found the right words like, is it arrogance? Is it self belief? Is it?
24:47 Mario Gabriele? It may be both, right? Maybe people.
24:50 Speaker 00 You know, it echoes back to when I was in middle school, like not really respecting the system.
24:57 Speaker 00 University was also like. I I just always believed that things would work out sooner or later. Why do I need this? And then the arrogance part was like. If I become famous. The school shouldn't get credit because you didn't teach me anything. So like I it shouldn't say that I graduated from this school. And then also laziness. I played a lot of League of Legends during uni, missed a lot of class. And I told myself, you know, if the school didn't teach me anything, they shouldn't get credit. But I was actually just playing computer games.
25:32 Mario Gabriele? After university, you sort of have this seven year spell at at OnePlus, which we sort of briefly touched on. And, you know, it's such a, I'm sure, formative experience. Put you in the the world of smartphones and and consumer hardware. When you look back on that period, what were sort of the most? I don't know, formative lessons that you then had to bring into nothing?
25:53 Speaker 00 I was a really bad people manager.
25:56 Mario Gabriele? Really? Why?
25:58 Speaker 00 I mean, I had never done it before. And as the team grew, it just became more and more difficult for me to navigate. And I gave myself a lot of shit for it. Like, why are you so bad at management? Why are you so? Why don't you know how to do this? But I think in hindsight, it's fine. Like you're twenty, you're twenty-four, twenty-five. Of course, you're gonna be a bad manager. You need to pick up. These are like real skills you need to pick up over time and you need training, you need to learn. I think that was like the big thing for me. I always beat myself up for being a bad manager. I think another thing we really cared about was the product.
26:34 Speaker 00 Because we were also known back then for like being great at marketing. And because we had like a system where you had to be invited to buy the phone. And that that got viral. We generated like a billion dollars in sales just through, you know, uh, user to user invitations.
26:51 Mario Gabriele? Wow, crazy.
26:52 Speaker 00 But we always reminded ourselves that it's all about the product. Like if you're, if you create all these high expectations and you hype it up and you don't deliver, then nobody's gonna trust you anymore. Where are you gonna get, you know, the future growth from? I think that's something that's uh, stuck with me since then.
27:11 Mario Gabriele? On the management piece, clearly there is so much that, you know, is a skill to be learned from that. What were the, the parts of it that, I don't know, weren't obvious to you back then, but that have become more so over time?
27:25 Speaker 00 There's so many things, but I think um, maybe one core concept has been situational management. There's no one size fits all solution. It always depends on the situation. It depends on your situation of where you are in the company lifecycle. Early stage, mid-stage, late-stage.
27:42 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
27:43 Speaker 00 Very different. It's industry-dependent. If we run a software company, maybe we would shape it in a very different way. More flexibility, more freedom, higher talent density. But also, more importantly, like every person should be managed differently. One style doesn't really fit all, but when you're a beginner, you just try and just take what you learn from the books and just implement.
28:06 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, interesting. Um, you've, you've said that you quit on or around your thirty-first birthday, sort of as a gift to yourself. What was the gift?
28:18 Speaker 00 I thought the gift would be like freedom.
28:21 Mario Gabriele? Freedom.
28:22 Speaker 00 You know, you worked hard in your twenties.
28:26 Speaker 00 Thirties is a new chapter. And take some time off. Have a think.
28:32 Mario Gabriele? And time off for you was those 10 days before it got too boring. At that point, when you're, you know, I don't know where you went, Greece, Sardinia, you know, Italy, whatever. I imagine a sort of, you know, White Lotus like stint. And, and.
28:48 Mario Gabriele? Did you know, hey, I'm going to go back to smartphones, consumer electronics? Or was it just like, I can't, you know, I can't do this. I need to be building.
28:56 Speaker 00 Didn't really know what I wanted to do. Thought about a lot of different things. And so after that 10 days, I went back to Sweden. And started talking to entrepreneur friends. And luckily, the community is quite small and also quite friendly. So although I only knew one or two people, but you know, very soon I got to meet almost everybody. I think the only people I didn't meet were the King founders, you know, Candy Crush.
29:24 Mario Gabriele? Oh, yeah.
29:25 Speaker 00 I think they were in, they had moved to London or something.
29:27 Mario Gabriele? Okay.
29:28 Speaker 00 And Karna. I don't know, just never, never got around to getting the intro or something. But I met everybody else, basically. And I was like, just asking people, how do you start a startup? Because OnePlus, we didn't have to raise our own money. And raising money was so strange to me. It seemed so strange, like, why would people give you a million bucks or like a couple million dollars? What if you lose all their money? Why would anybody take a risk like that? It just seemed very foreign. And this was 2020, five years ago.
30:01 Speaker 00 But after speaking to all the Swedish founders and communities, that's kind of how I started to get a feel of how, how things work and how we structure, how we face, face things. And I remember that being a very confusing time as well, because all of a sudden. I worked in a more or less structured environment before. You kind of knew what you had to do, but like raising money, there were so many ways of thinking about it. Everybody had their own strategy. Depending on what kind of company they were building and how they, what kind of values they had. So it was very confusing, a lot of new information, like contradicting information. The first two weeks were like. Kind of brain fried feeling, you know?
30:44 Speaker 00 Um, but eventually I found a strategy that works in our context and raised the seed round during during my time there.
30:50 Mario Gabriele? I definitely want to hear about that strategy, but there was something um when I was reading about this where in a in a bunch of places you were like, people told me that my deck was bad and my deck really was bad. What was so bad about it?
31:04 Speaker 00 It's like, looks like a high school, high school student made it.
31:07 Mario Gabriele? Really?
31:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, I wouldn't show it anymore.
31:09 Mario Gabriele? Oh, you should, you should release it.
31:11 Speaker 00 I had a friend who said, hey, look, just go and speak, don't show the deck. You will get a better outcome. Like, I'm very, I like people are direct when it comes from a good place. So really appreciate that feedback. And that's how we uh kind of went about it.
31:24 Mario Gabriele? Hmm. When, when nothing IPOs or something like that, you should release that deck and and see how far you've come. So what was the strategy that made sense for you? Because it is a category that on the one hand is, you know, the biggest or one of the biggest consumer categories in the world, but on the other is all this competition. A lot of people maybe think there's not as much room for for an insurgent. So how did you sort of like put that those pieces together?
31:52 Speaker 00 For the fundraising?
31:52 Mario Gabriele? Mm hmm.
31:53 Speaker 00 Um, one thing we did was we only took founder money in the seed stage. Because my assumption was that this was going to be a very tough journey. And I wanted people who had done similar or other things, complementary things before. So that when things get hard in the future, I could call them up and get some advice. Another thing we did was a uh pretty controversial, we did an uncapped note.
32:21 Mario Gabriele? Hmm. Wow, really?
32:23 Speaker 00 Because this is hardware, hardware is very capital intensive. And I didn't want to dilute me and the team to like nothing.
32:33 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
32:33 Speaker 00 And like very quickly.
32:34 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
32:35 Speaker 00 So that got some pushback.
32:38 Mario Gabriele? I bet.
32:38 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I guess those were the things, but I think now in a, you know, in a more mature stage um or growth stage. It's not something we're actively thinking about, but some of my friends are thinking about like a
32:54 Speaker 00 new structures, like what if they have this company, but they want to start another company in parallel? How should you do it? Like, one key decision you make is whether you clone the cap table or not, right? If you clone the cap table, you lose out a lot of the equity.
33:08 Mario Gabriele? Yep.
33:09 Speaker 00 But it's a very fair thing to do because
33:12 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
33:13 Speaker 00 you're gonna probably leverage some resource and your own time, plus some resource from the previous company. But that's what I mean by like philosophical or values driven answers.
33:25 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, totally. You decided to build nothing in Europe and specifically in London. Why did that feel like the right place for this company? When Europe has really not created many great consumer hardware companies in recent memory.
33:44 Speaker 00 So I spent 10 years in China. I saw firsthand how strong the supply chain and hardware engineering had gotten. And actually, a lot of credit should go to Apple because, I don't know if you read the book, Apple in China?
33:57 Mario Gabriele? No, I haven't.
33:57 Speaker 00 Because they were manufacturing there and they had to bring up the capabilities of the ecosystem. So a lot of that, you know, what I saw back then was
34:08 Speaker 00 was work that Apple had done, basically, to level everything up. It was tough to get talent when it came to creative fields. So I wanted a change of scenery. Europe seemed like a good place because in hindsight, it's more like comfort because I know Europe a little bit better than the States.
34:27 Speaker 00 So the assumption was, you know, there should be a lot of creative talent in Europe that we couldn't find when I was living in China. And if we find these people and we add the Chinese supply chain efficiency to the equation. It will be a tough company to compete against. It would be hard for a purely, you know, Silicon Valley company to get the same efficiency. And we're seeing that, by the way. And it's hard for a Chinese company to create a brand. They're more efficiency focused, so. That's how we thought about it in the beginning, and then over time. I think London has also risen up as a, you know, good hub for AI. There's some great, great AI talent. Later on, we, we saw that, you know, London is also a global financial hub. So there's, you know, good finance talent.
35:14 Speaker 00 But the core idea is the same, like, how do we find? For the things that we're about to do or are currently doing, where do we find the best talent irrespective of where they are in the world? And that's a bit like the Genghis Khan example, like, I think that's what, what was really special about, uh, about how, how he went on his entrepreneurship journey.
35:35 Mario Gabriele? He was a good talent scout?
35:36 Speaker 00 He was a very, he was very open minded in terms of culture because, uh, back in the day, the Mongolian culture was very tribal. You only trusted your own tribe. You didn't even, you didn't even trust other Mongolians.
35:48 Mario Gabriele? Yes.
35:49 Speaker 00 But as they were conquering, so first of all, he united Mongolia.
35:53 Mario Gabriele? The steppes.
35:54 Speaker 00 Uh, the steppes. And as they were conquering new lands, they saw that the conquered people were good at different things. So for instance, back then, I think the Arab countries and Chinese, I don't know if it was different countries or not, but.
36:10 Mario Gabriele? Empires of that point, yeah, the different sort of civilizations.
36:13 Speaker 00 They were more like agricultural societies and they had already developed tax, tax collection systems. So when the Mongolians conquered them, they just, they were super open minded, even with money, right? Like, you trust outsiders to handle your money. And they reallocated these people to, to all over the world, helped them collect tax. And later on, um, I think Genghis Khan converted to Buddhism after discovering Buddhism. Super open minded, daring to work with different cultures, finding things to, to, to learn from, from different cultures.
36:48 Mario Gabriele? It's funny, I've had this week, two conversations about the Mongolian empire with founders. And both, both are really around how, you know, almost it's an underrated empire, let's, let's say, where it was just this tiny tribe, right? Like in a really inhospitable part of the world that manages to stretch across Eurasia.
37:10 Mario Gabriele? Have you read the Conqueror series?
37:12 Speaker 00 No.
37:13 Mario Gabriele? Apparently that's, I haven't read it either. It's now on my list after talking with this other person that it's apparently just amazing historical fiction retelling of like the entire.
37:21 Speaker 00 It's fiction or?
37:23 Mario Gabriele? It's historical fiction, so it's written like a story, but you know, it's really based on the facts of it. It's apparently.
37:28 Speaker 00 I have a big book on Caesar that I haven't started.
37:32 Mario Gabriele? Okay, so that's sort of next.
37:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
37:34 Mario Gabriele? The thing I always think of Genghis Khan, and I haven't read these books, so probably I'll know more things is that apparently he was born clutching a blood clot and that was part of his mythology. Is that like?
37:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm not sure.
37:47 Mario Gabriele? Really powerful.
37:47 Speaker 00 I'm not sure how true that is, but.
37:49 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, yeah, who knows, right? But you always, I feel like these leaders, there's always this sort of mythology that gets, that's created around them.
37:56 Speaker 00 You create stories to help you govern, I think.
37:59 Mario Gabriele? Hmm.
37:59 Speaker 00 At least in the past.
38:00 Mario Gabriele? Yes. No, but totally today too, right? Every founder's story gets in each retelling a little bit more mythology, right? Don't you think Elon's stories at this point are maybe half true, half mythology?
38:14 Speaker 00 Don't know. I never met him, but he seems like a very smart guy.
38:17 Mario Gabriele? Not even his retelling. I mean, like even the reporting on these things, like everything. I think that's just human nature that.
38:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
38:23 Mario Gabriele? We always amplify.
38:25 Speaker 00 Maybe, yeah. But I think sometimes it's by design, right?
38:28 Mario Gabriele? Yes.
38:29 Speaker 00 In Elon's case, I'm not sure it's by design.
38:31 Mario Gabriele? I see what you're saying. Yes, I think that's fair. I think sometimes people are more overtly mythologizing themselves in those ways, right? Coming back to, to nothing. And one of the things that I've come to really strongly believe is that every legendary company has at least one near death moment. And you had one really early, right?
38:52 Speaker 00 A lot, yeah. A lot of near death moments, especially in the beginning. The one that comes to mind now is our first product, the ear one, earbuds. So first of all, everybody rejected us in the supply chain for making phones. They were like, hey, there's been a bunch of these, you kind of, you guys like startups. In the last 10 years, we worked with a few, they all failed, we all lost money. We're not going to work with startups anymore. We're going to work with like big customers like Apple.
39:17 Mario Gabriele? Mm hmm.
39:18 Speaker 00 So go away.
39:19 Mario Gabriele? Not worth it for us.
39:20 Speaker 00 Not, not worth it. And then we're like, okay, let's make earbuds, then it should be more possible. It's cheaper to make and then we got rejected by every earbuds factory as well. And they were like, hey, there's 3,000 no name earbud brands on Amazon. What's the difference here? And so we ended up working with, um, there was only one factory that was willing to work with us. And that factory was, um, they didn't have any other customer. That's why they wanted to work with us because they were on the blacklist of the major customers for having had product failures in the past. So we worked with them out of necessity to create this very strong launch momentum.
40:02 Speaker 00 And as we're shipping out the products, there was like an 80% defect rate. That felt like a near death moment, right? We, we raised money, uh, really up the expectations on us and then just couldn't deliver on the product. We quickly rented apartments next to the factory. But our own engineers, like we only had, I don't know, five or 10 people. And they became, uh, factory managers to manage each step of the production line. And that got the quality up. We replaced all the defect units and we were shipping a lot of like free replacements back then to, because they, these early consumers took a big chance on us.
40:43 Speaker 00 We just like soft them out and, um, recovered from that, that moment. But the profit and loss statement didn't look as good as we had planned.
40:52 Mario Gabriele? Yes. What was the, maybe the most recent moment? Or, you know, uh, yeah, one in your later history where you still felt like, hey, this could all, this could all go away, like, you know, these are still the stakes here.
41:08 Speaker 00 Every day is like a roller coaster ride or maybe every week. Every week is like a roller coaster ride, but I think the big one was, uh, probably
41:17 Speaker 00 series, uh, B in 2022, maybe 2022 or 23. I, I forget.
41:26 Mario Gabriele? Something somewhere in that, yeah.
41:28 Speaker 00 It was when the market was beginning to cool down a little bit.
41:30 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
41:30 Speaker 00 Couldn't raise, um, had my calendar filled with investor meetings every day. And that was my only job.
41:41 Speaker 00 And every meeting was very challenging, like I would get challenged on the strategy, like what if, what about this, what about that, what about this? I try my best to answer all the questions, but after two months of like, constant questioning, I also lose confidence.
41:55 Mario Gabriele? Yes.
41:55 Speaker 00 No term sheets, constant questions, and it just felt like it just got worse and worse because I lost confidence, the meetings got worse, and that felt like a near death moment, because I started having nightmares, like waking up at four AM and not being able to fall asleep again. And the nightmares would be about shutting down the company, like all hands. Sorry, guys, it's over, like that kind of dream. Then I called up a few friends and we went to, we went partying for a weekend and I guess then I got to step out from the day to day negativity. And I just got really tired, like too tired to be depressed. And kind of snapped out of it and the round actually quickly came together after that.
42:36 Mario Gabriele? Wow. What was the domino like? Did you just find someone finally who just got the pitch or got you in some way and?
42:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, we had then like a few months, a few weeks later, we had two term sheets. Uh, maybe because I was in a better mood. And not no longer in this like negative spiral anymore.
42:53 Mario Gabriele? Yeah. Ah, so interesting how those things can can happen. Uh, it seems from the outside, like the sort of first maybe real breakout hit was the two A phone. Is that sort of how you think about it or like what were the big inflection points in Nothing's journey?
43:09 Speaker 00 I think our first earbud, despite the early quality issues that we fixed, um, we sold almost six hundred thousand of those units. Yeah. So, and this was also in the middle of COVID where the supply chain was uh uncertain. And component costs increased mid life cycle of the product and we increased the price from ninety nine to one forty nine dollars. Uh, but it still kept its momentum. So that was like. A good proof point, I think. The phone one, like a brand new design that nobody had seen before, got a lot of attention. From a revenue perspective, 2A was a great product.
43:47 Mario Gabriele? Okay.
43:49 Speaker 00 It's a good product, but it wasn't as like fresh as the phone one.
43:53 Mario Gabriele? Okay.
43:54 Speaker 00 That was the first time the world had seen anything like that.
43:57 Mario Gabriele? Yes, that makes sense. A big part of of the differentiation comes from from the design. And you've talked about how design is sort of like, you know, maybe the easiest or the best first form of differentiation. When did you sort of like realize that? Because it's maybe obvious when you look at nothing today that that maybe is the philosophy. But I don't think that's a conclusion that a lot of other people would would make when they think of consumer hardware automatically, right?
44:21 Speaker 00 It was very clear for us in the beginning. This is how we should do it. I think the context is like, are you in a mature category or a nascent category? When you're in a nascent category, your main goal is EMF, like find product market fit, build something that people actually want. But in a mature category, in our context, there was already a billion smartphones sold every year. So we knew that there was EMF for this form factor. Then the question becomes, how do you differentiate and carve out and wedge yourselves in? Carve out a piece of the market for yourself. And then for us, design was the fastest way to do it. And other people are sometimes looking at us and maybe also copying the transparent design language.
45:03 Speaker 00 But they're in a nascent product category. They should just think about whether they're copying the right move or not.
45:12 Mario Gabriele? Yeah. So if you're coming up with a, I don't know, some special AI device that no one knows if anyone's ever actually going to use that, deciding to make it look like nothing, you're sort of missing the point.
45:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, just make it useful.
45:26 Mario Gabriele? A big part of the way that Nothing seems to approach design also comes from this sort of relationship and partnership you have with teenage engineering, which independently of always being interested in what Nothing was doing, I always thought, wow, whatever teenage engineering is doing is so interesting. It's this, you know, for folks that, listeners that haven't heard of it, it's this Swedish company that makes like really beautiful audio products and other things. But there's a really distinctive sort of playful design in everything they do. How did that connection come together and how did it become? I guess such a deep relationship.
46:02 Speaker 00 Earlier on in twenty eighteen or nineteen, a Swedish friend wanted to introduce us. And I kind of brushed it off. I'm like, what's that? Like, we are still a growing brand. We need to work with more established, more credible brands. Like, why don't you introduce us to Dior or Gucci? Like, why this kind of super niche thing? It's not gonna help. But I got convinced to still take the meeting and it was just a different vibe. Like, they were so creative and the designs were so cool. And that's when the relationship started. And when I had the idea to start Nothing,
46:41 Speaker 00 I met Jesper, the CEO of Teenage Engineering. And it was just like a really chill conversation. Forty minutes, shook hands. We figured out the deal a bit later, but-
46:52 Mario Gabriele? Forty minutes shook hands on like, we should do something together?
46:54 Speaker 00 We just shook hands and then we figured out the commercial structure. But it wasn't that hard to get to common ground because we had already aligned. We just wanted to do something at scale. And I didn't know it at the time. But in hindsight, Jesper has been quite influential on my life. Because he used to be a advertising director, like a commercial director. So some of the best advertising that I grew up with, that was constantly on TV, I still remember to today, were envisioned by him.
47:31 Mario Gabriele? What were the ads?
47:32 Speaker 00 So this will only make sense to people who grew up in Sweden. But there's like a painkiller ad with a little guy who like sings about the properties of the painkiller. Super like, you just remember it because it's so catchy. There's a Swedish beer brand that's all about the feeling of Swedish summer. Because Sweden has a big archipelago, very beautiful during the summer.
47:53 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
47:54 Speaker 00 Like sailing and drinking beer with friends, barbecue. That kind of feeling to sell a beer. Not selling the product, but selling like the feeling. Those were two really iconic ads that he did.
48:07 Mario Gabriele? How do you work with Teenage Engineering today? And yeah, what are the feelings that maybe they've brought into the way that you think of Nothing?
48:16 Speaker 00 When we started, we built the brand universe together. Like, our first product was not a hardware product, it was a book, like a brand book. And we had this kind of thought exercise of, you know, imagine if Apple didn't exist. What would the leading tech company, consumer tech company, look like? Because it's too easy to be sucked into their vortex because they're the biggest and whatever they do something, all the other brands kind of just follow. In a way, I think, you know, here we have a Dyson store opposite of Selfridges. It's kind of like an Apple store, but in all black. We just wanted to get away from that type of thinking, like be influenced.
48:57 Speaker 00 So stepping out, taking, building a mood board from different creative fields outside of electronics, like movies, architecture, art, and finding our universe through that. So the book, the first part of the book is like a mood board and the second part of the book are design explorations for future Nothing products. So that's kind of what we built together in the beginning. That set the tone for the product design and the, and the brand design.
49:24 Speaker 00 And we're also like, let's make a product company that people will be proud of. So one of the, the graphics that really resonated was, um, there used to be a Sony museum in Tokyo, where they showcased all the products on the wall and on the tables. And they would take guests there, uh, when they were visiting the Sony HQ to proudly showcase everything they built. So we were like, hey, hopefully in 10 years from now, we'll also have like a big wall with products that we're proud of having made. And let's make them all look like they came from the same company. It's, it sounds simple, but a lot of companies operate in big silos. Like each product might look beautiful, but there wasn't a consistency across the, the brand. And that's what we really wanted to create for, for Nothing.
50:08 Speaker 00 So now I think we've kind of done that. You know, if you look at our products and you don't see the logo. And you put a couple of Nothing products together.
50:16 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
50:17 Speaker 00 Kind of, you can tell immediately that it's the same.
50:19 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, there's a signature, a DNA somehow.
50:21 Speaker 00 And today, the, you know, we set the brand, today we work on more like we review designs together every now and then. And we have some special projects on the side.
50:31 Mario Gabriele? When you were doing that exercise, and maybe still today, like, where are the places that you took inspiration? You say films, like, were there particular films or particular objects that?
50:42 Speaker 00 I think the movie scene I remember is a scene from Space Odyssey.
50:47 Speaker 00 Furniture, and there's so much inspiration.
50:51 Speaker 00 Furniture from like those 60s, 70s, 80s. We wanted to create something fresh, that always felt fresh. And to create something fresh, you can't follow the current thing. Because the current thing has a stamp in time. So if we were to copy like a 2025 Apple product, in 27 it will feel old because you remember this came from 25. So by detaching ourselves from current things, finding inspiration from past things, that's how we believed we could build a design language that always felt fresh.
51:25 Mario Gabriele? What was the Space Odyssey scene? Do you remember?
51:27 Speaker 00 Okay, there's two, I think. One with the astronauts in the, in the corridor.
51:30 Mario Gabriele? Uh huh, yeah.
51:31 Speaker 00 And one with hell.
51:33 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
51:33 Speaker 00 Hell 9000?
51:34 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, Hell 9000, right? Yeah, I just watched that movie. There was a, an interesting hire that Nothing made recently, which is I think you just got a chief branding officer from Lowe, which is, you know, a luxury brand, sort of, I think probably best known for its leather goods and things like that. It was an interesting hire and sort of maybe hints at like the way that you're positioning yourself, like, what are the lessons from, from maybe luxury or apparel that like you, you're sort of trying to bring into the way that you think about marketing and branding?
52:03 Speaker 00 Well, we always wanted to get away from traditional consumer electronics marketing because that felt kind of stale and uncool. Training somebody at Best Buy to sell your product and it felt like we could create something better than that. I think, so this guy Charlie that we recently recruited, he's done a lot of the things we were about to do or have plan, or have plans to do in the next couple of years. I think what he did also really fits our DNA, like we're very design first as a company. And so is the luxury fashion industry. Culturally, we are quite intense because we're ambitious. And in Europe, the luxury fashion industry is also a very competitive space, even the internal culture.
52:47 Speaker 00 Because it's a very competitive industry and Europe is world leading in that industry. We care a lot about recruiting Gen Z customers into our brand. And Loewe is the de facto like choice for Gen Z. When you get your first big bonus or paycheck, you go buy their bag. So that requires us to be like, understand the market very well, understand the consumer very well. And also speak to them on channels where they are. Like they're very much on TikTok these days. So Loewe was really good at TikTok. We care a lot about TikTok. So there was just so many synergies. And so I'm very much looking forward to see what we do together.
53:31 Mario Gabriele? You can tell how ignorant I am of luxury brands that I thought it was Lo rather than Loewe. But
53:38 Speaker 00 Who knows what it is? It's a hard, hard to pronounce name.
53:42 Mario Gabriele? Yeah. You've said that marketing is about, you know, pure efficiency and finding these ways to sort of fight unfair. And especially when you're going up against Apple and Samsung and whoever else. That feels especially important to find those ways. What have been the sort of strategies or the channels or heuristics that have been useful for you in fighting that way?
54:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think, you know, at its core, business is about arbitrage. So marketing is a part of business. Marketing should therefore also be about arbitrage or efficiency. You get arbitrage from innovation, I think, right? Because if you know something that nobody else knows, then there's less competition here. And therefore you get a lower cost for whatever you're trying to do. I remember when I was building websites as a kid, all of a sudden there was this new product called Facebook Ads. And the first companies that learned to use Facebook ads all made a lot of money because there wasn't a lot of competition bidding for the inventory. But now it's like really hard to make money because it's a very well-known tactic to everybody, from small companies to big companies.
54:52 Speaker 00 So I think that's what marketers should be, marketers should be looking for. What is the next opportunity? Because if I can spend the same amount of money and get a 2X higher output, I think that just compounds really aggressively over time and it becomes a strong competitive advantage. A lot of people say they like the old Apple ads. I think those strategies were very good in that time context. People talk about the 1984 Super Bowl ad. If you were to release the same thing or a similar thing now, it wouldn't get the breakthrough because Super Bowl has also become the place where like all the companies showcase their best creatives, right? So the competition is very different from before.
55:35 Speaker 00 So it's no longer an arbitrage opportunity. For us, we start off with written media, digital media.
55:45 Speaker 00 Digital media was pretty big 15 years ago, not as big today, but we knew how to work with digital media through PR pretty well. So whenever we had a product, there was a lot of coverage about the product. Over time, we've gotten better at social because that's where people are moving. I think there's still a lot to do in social. We talked a little bit about content before we started recording, but I think there's still a lot more value to find in social. And then I think you just gotta keep doing more and more difficult things. So yeah, our marketing has to evolve.
56:18 Speaker 00 We have to, I think creative will be key in the next stage. Because if you only think about it from a pure ROI perspective, the brand will look kind of cheap over time. But we're trying to also build the image and the perception of the brand. Yes.
56:35 Speaker 00 Creative plays a big role. And the 1984 thing is also about the creative, right? Because the ad spot, the media spot was, a lot of companies had it, but only one company had the breakthrough creative to really make an impact. So hopefully in the next couple of years, creative is where we really break through on marketing.
56:51 Mario Gabriele? India is such an interesting part of your story. I think nothing is, you know, obviously an underdog relative to Apple, but I think I read that it's you're sort of on track to do a billion in in sales this year. You've sold many millions of of products. And it's a it's a really made a real dent already in many respects. Maybe you're only, you know, less than a percent of where you want to be. But 70% of the sales are coming from India.
57:22 Speaker 00 I think it's maybe 55.
57:24 Mario Gabriele? OK, so that's changed, or maybe the reporting was off.
57:27 Speaker 00 I think we tried to correct the reporting, but not sure what happened there.
57:31 Mario Gabriele? OK, so.
57:31 Speaker 00 It's still a significant part of the business.
57:34 Mario Gabriele? And and so how did that? Was that like something that you foresaw in some way when you were starting the brand? Or was it like purely emergent that you were noticing? Hey, for some reason, this is really taking off in this geography.
57:47 Speaker 00 So India is doing really well for our smartphone portfolio. And the US is doing really well for our audio portfolio. It's not 100% overlapping. But for smartphones, India is a great opportunity. We saw that from day one because you look at the Android market share. It's like 90%, whereas in the US, it's like 40%. Everybody's already on Android. It's way easier to convert an Android user than a iPhone user.
58:12 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
58:13 Speaker 00 And what changed in the last couple of years is that the economy has grown to a stage where the middle class is really becoming important. And I think as a country's economy grows, you kind of move up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the past, it might have been about functional benefits. Hey, my flat is really hot. I have AC. You don't have AC, therefore I have a more comfortable life. And I think it has to do a lot with the status. Also, people really care about status. So, you know, in the past, an air conditioner will give you status in society. And then over time, as the economy develops, it kind of shifts to emotional benefits. Like, hey, I have a big logo on my chest.
58:57 Speaker 00 You don't have it, therefore I have higher status. And then over time, it shifts to like more kind of self-actualization. Hey, I care about these social issues that are quite avant garde. You don't know about them. Therefore, I'm superior, like I'm better.
59:13 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
59:13 Speaker 00 That's the underlying logic, even if people don't want to admit to it. I think that's the underlying logic driving it. I think India is in a very interesting space. It's going from functional to emotional. And if we started with this strategy of being design led earlier, it wouldn't have worked. But it just happens to be that the capabilities that we have in hardware industrial design and also software design and brand is becoming really important in this market. That's why we're able to do what we've done.
59:48 Mario Gabriele? You've created sort of a, I don't know if you'd call it a sub-brand or a separate brand that sort of leverages some of the same DMA called CMF. Why did it make sense to sort of create a quasi subsidiary rather than just remaining, just having everything flow through nothing?
1:00:06 Speaker 00 There's a business reason and also the opportunity. The business reason is because in the smartphone industry, you need scale. Bigger companies ship 100 to 200 million units a year. We ship a couple million. There's no way we can be price competitive on the cost side because they just procure more, they have more bargaining power. So if we want our products to get better, to have more money to invest in the technology, we need to increase our bargaining power with suppliers and therefore we have this other brand. But it's also quite common, like in the automobile industry, having a house of brands for different types of consumers where you all share the same platform and the same economies of scale. I think it's very common, also in like CPG, right?
1:00:51 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, totally.
1:00:52 Speaker 00 So in consumer categories, we see this a lot. But the opportunity that we saw was in our industry, when it came to smartphones, companies don't really care about their mid or lower tier phones. So they put their best team on the so-called flagship, the premium tier, and they kind of just outsource the work on the low tier. The products were not great, but we thought, you know, if we put the same amount of energy into all our tiers and work a little bit harder, you know, we can provide a much better product to consumers, even when the price is not that high.
1:01:25 Mario Gabriele? So CMF effectively allows you to sort of be really competitive at that part of the market, but retains nothing's feel of like being a more flagship premium brand, but then also grows the volume such that you have more of that bargaining power across the entire portfolio?
1:01:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's more complicated to have two brands, but I think if you want to have a smartphone business, this is probably the only way.
1:01:50 Mario Gabriele? Would you ever do a version of a, you know, say another brand that's even more, more high-end, for example?
1:01:56 Speaker 00 Not in the next couple of years. We have a lot of other things to do. But in a steady state, if there was no new technology, yeah, I think we would kind of trend towards like a CPG house or a hotel conglomerate.
1:02:11 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, that actually, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What has it been like working in India? And I know there's this sort of made in India initiative that you guys have really leaned into. I imagine that's brought, you know, some really amazing opportunities, but also complexities and challenges that maybe weren't foreseeable when you sort of first thought about it.
1:02:29 Speaker 00 The energy is very good. Like I moved to China in 2011. I think the energy in India right now feels very similar. I think we're going to see the same movie play again. So I'm very bullish on India. And I think if there's any kind of young person out there who's willing to move there for 10 years now, it will be hard to fail, like because the entire momentum, it's hard to not be impacted by the momentum that's happening there. But it is developing, right? So not, things are far from perfect. When it comes to manufacturing, for instance, we have these transparent designs. In our early manufacturing, we really struggled with dust.
1:03:14 Speaker 00 If you have dust on your, inside of your iPhone, it doesn't really matter because the consumer wouldn't care. They wouldn't see it.
1:03:19 Mario Gabriele? They won't know.
1:03:20 Speaker 00 But for us, you know, that was hard to control.
1:03:23 Mario Gabriele? Yes.
1:03:24 Speaker 00 We built some very... Advanced manufacturing techniques now in India to so the the products are dust free.
1:03:32 Mario Gabriele? Another sort of development, it feels like over the past year, maybe even six months, has been the way that you have leaned into AI and the way that should interface with sort of people's personal computing environment. How did you sort of like think about the right way to start playing with this new set of like technological primitives?
1:03:53 Speaker 00 We're still struggling on a topic, which is whether we should mention AI at all. There's pros and cons to both, but fundamentally, I believe technology doesn't matter as much as the user experience. And if we're not user experience led, our technology also wouldn't be successful in the market. So I see it more as an ingredient to help us create better products that ultimately help people in some way that's beneficial to them. So we tried to kind of tone down the hype hype talk and focus more on user scenarios where we could be helpful. So we've only taken the kind of some baby steps. We have a we added this key on the side of our phones. You can use it for recording any idea you have.
1:04:38 Speaker 00 Just tap to record, release to save. It can be a voice, it could be a screenshot of what you're looking at, it could be a web link from your browser into this space. And then it helps you summarize and organize. It helps set up to do list, Google Calendar syncing, meeting note recordings, like it's just like very utility first. And we have a high percentage of creative professionals using our products. So making it a tool to organize their thoughts and hopefully in the future also help with their creative workflows. So that's one product. Another product is something we call Essential Search. Basically, on phones, you can search for contacts, for files, for for apps. We just added answers as well.
1:05:22 Speaker 00 Me and my fiance, we always kind of try and prove that we are right. But then now I just kind of use this and just show it, show the answer to her immediately without having to go and Google it. Because going to Google is like browser, search box, search, and then try and decipher all the information. This this just gives you the answer. And I think OS native integration is always more convenient for the end user.
1:05:49 Mario Gabriele? Yes.
1:05:49 Speaker 00 And then on Playground or the Essential Apps, it's more like. Envisioning a different future where software is truly personal. It's today, if you think about the operating systems. Like, there's a billion users for iOS and three billion for Android.
1:06:08 Speaker 00 It's basically kind of one product for a lot of people. Surely, then you have to kind of just generalize the product requirements. So it fits everybody. But with where software is going, I think it's gonna be. In a few years, it'll be one for one. Every software will be one for one, even the operating system. So if that's the future, then what is the first step we can take? And that was the thinking behind Essential Apps.
1:06:34 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, and for folks that haven't seen it, it's almost like a mini lovable that just fits exactly already into your device and sort of seems to draw on nothing's existing design language and stuff like that, such that it, I don't know, it looks really beautiful, the version.
1:06:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, so the common, everybody with an idea can create a mini app, basically, just using natural language.
1:06:56 Mario Gabriele? And have it sit on your home screen in the way that you want it.
1:06:59 Speaker 00 That's kind of magical for me as a non-coder. Like, you write something, you click deploy, and it shows up on your phone.
1:07:06 Mario Gabriele? One of the other things that seems to have come up recently is that you've been experimenting with doing like small ads on the home screen and some pre-installed apps. And it seems like, you know, some folks don't love that. How do you think about like making these trade-offs in different moments? And when it's the right time to experiment with something like that? Given that, you know, I think especially for a company like yours, it can be difficult because it's in such direct contact with consumers and is so community-driven that like anytime you do anything, I imagine you hear a lot, which is a strength and can also be hard, I imagine.
1:07:46 Speaker 00 It's a constant balancing act. On one hand, this is common practice in the industry. So if we already have to pay a lot more for the hardware, and we cannot make the margin that they make on the software, that just puts us in an even tougher competitive position.
1:08:04 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, your cost structure is just worse, essentially.
1:08:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, even worse.
1:08:07 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, even worse.
1:08:08 Speaker 00 Right. Before it was just hardware, but now the software is also worse. But on the other hand, we have a very passionate community. And I think, you know, even when they're complaining about us, it comes from a... Place where they want to see us be successful. That's why they want to give us these suggestions. In this recent case, I think we went, it's a balancing act, but I think we went a little bit overboard on the pre-installed software, so we're gonna be turning it back a little bit. It's just always finding the balance.
1:08:36 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, and you have to sort of, you know, you can totally understand why, on the one hand, people react to these things and, you know, have their opinions about it. On the other hand, you know, from the business's perspective, you need to sort of also be able to run these experiments, right? And see.
1:08:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, and we can just be honest about it. Hey, we, we made a bad call. We're reverting some of that. And I think that could also help us earn some goodwill back from the people that are upset right now.
1:09:04 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, totally. You guys have been an uncommonly, in a way, community-driven company, like you've invited the community to invest at various points at the same, you know, valuations as professional investors, as the folks that have led your different rounds. You've had a sort of rotating community board member. Why has that been something that, you know, has been important to you? And how have you sort of managed to make it work? Because there's a version, especially of the community board member, that I could imagine being a total nightmare. And there's a version that I could imagine being really productive.
1:09:37 Speaker 00 I think it's also, it's about believing in the long term. I think things get clear when you think about the long term, about something, then the short term becomes quite clear on what to do. And even if you're making mistakes, short term, you're kind of like, you know where the North Star is and you can correct your course. But I do think the biggest change that we've seen in our lives has been the rise of the consumer internet. Like now, you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to be an expert about a field in technology anymore. You could. Live on a remote island, even if you're young, and you know, take these open courses and connect to people and communities and you write code and contribute to GitHub, make friends.
1:10:21 Speaker 00 Like you could become a near expert at anything from anywhere. So if this is true, then in the future, companies will probably be organized differently. You will find talent from everywhere and also the boundaries of what a internal team member is and what a community member is will also blur. So that's the long term and we want to keep experimenting and getting closer to that. So not only the board board stuff, but also recently, well, today, we started selling the phone three A community edition that the community co created with us.
1:10:56 Mario Gabriele? Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of community members that would also be better to have on a board than your average venture capitalist. So.
1:11:03 Speaker 00 Uh, it's very helpful, actually, because I think also it's easy to become, to think too highly of yourself, especially when things are going well. But always having the voice of the consumer in the room checking us. Hey, you promised this thing, but you actually didn't deliver. This is what the community thinks about it. Keeps you humble and keeps you more true to your mission.
1:11:24 Mario Gabriele? What are some other devices beyond, you know, those that nothing makes that you sort of deeply admire? Or think there's something really interesting or or creative about?
1:11:35 Speaker 00 I like Porsches.
1:11:36 Mario Gabriele? Yeah?
1:11:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's just beautiful, iconic. Even though the design language evolves over time, it's still very distinctively them. I feel like in consumer electronics, we're kind of in a bad era. There's not much that I like right now.
1:11:54 Mario Gabriele? There's been such a struggle, I think, with so many of the, let's say, AI hardware companies that, you know, have come and and already passed in many cases, humane, limitless, you know, Rabbit and Friend are still out there and maybe a few others and stuff like that. Why do you think that has been a category that? Is having such a hard time because in theory it feels like there should have been real, really new life breathed into this possibility, but we haven't really seen it shake out that way yet.
1:12:27 Speaker 00 Um, I think these companies are all very courageous. And if I were in their shoes and had to invent something different that the world had never seen before. I think, you know, there's also a high, high chance of failure. So it's great that people are out there trying things. And I think, you know, a lot more companies are going to try in the next couple of years with AI being so hot right now. Everybody wants to see what the future of these categories can be. But I think most products will fail because we're all like this part of the industry is all about discovering PMF. And when you're in the discovery stage, it's like when you're in a lab doing research, a lot of your experiments will, will fail. But let's see them as experiments. Um, so we're also going to be on this journey.
1:13:09 Speaker 00 But when you do an experiment, how can you control the cost of each experiment? And also control the time to market for each experiment. So you can do a couple of them quickly and quickly learn. I think that's maybe where I think a little bit differently versus having one idea. And just like believing this will definitely always work. And then putting all the chips on that. And if it doesn't work, it becomes quite hard to turn things around.
1:13:37 Mario Gabriele? Do you see the smartphone as, you know, still likely to be our dominant piece of consumer electronics in 10 years from now? Or does that feel like roughly the time where we start switching to glasses or to something else or?
1:13:52 Speaker 00 I think the kind of the big steps along the way. So I think ultimately it'll be a brain computer interface. That will be the replacement of the smartphone. And then along the way, I don't know how long the BCI will take, 20, 30, 40 years. Along the way, there will be two other big categories. One is the EV and one is humanoid robotics. But I think my personal timeline is also less optimistic, especially on humanoids than some of the startups out there. In between humanoid and smartphone, there will be a few larger new form factors as well. And that's, you know, I'm excited to explore some of that. I don't really know what it will be.
1:14:37 Speaker 00 We'll take like a research approach.
1:14:39 Mario Gabriele? Mm hmm. You said humanoids and EVs?
1:14:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:14:43 Mario Gabriele? You feel like there's still a lot more to be done in that category that we haven't seen yet?
1:14:46 Speaker 00 I think EV is more mature than humanoids. The thing that remains to be done is around autonomous driving, uh, robot taxis.
1:14:55 Mario Gabriele? Yes.
1:14:56 Speaker 00 And also the integration of the operating system between all the devices, including the phone and the car. Right now, they're all different ecosystems apart from CarPlay and Android Auto. But kind of a, it's not a seamless experience yet.
1:15:09 Mario Gabriele? Yes. And so if you sort of graduate through the steps like Genghis Khan, you'll go through, through maybe some, some glasses, an EV, a robot and a BCI.
1:15:23 Speaker 00 Maybe based on, based on what I know today. But as I learn, maybe the idea changes, roadmap changes.
1:15:31 Mario Gabriele? One of your investors said that you are really influenced by Eastern philosophy and Zen. And I wondered, yeah, where that came from for you? And, and how maybe that influences how you think about what you're building?
1:15:45 Speaker 00 In periods of my life when I was down, I, I took to philosophy quite a lot, both. I think Stoicism had a big impact on me. And then I also, um, I think in, I think there was a book that Steve Jobs read on Zen Buddhism. Uh, read that book. It was pretty interesting. So I guess it's the, the common thread is more just to be more relaxed about things and.
1:16:13 Speaker 00 See the bright side in things and don't try and control what you can't control and control what you can control. So if there's something that doesn't work and you have no ability to influence, just let it go.
1:16:26 Mario Gabriele? Well, let's wrap up with maybe two sort of philosophical or thought experimenty questions.
1:16:32 Speaker 00 Oh, by the way, in middle school, philosophy was the class where I paid the most attention.
1:16:39 Mario Gabriele? Ah, interesting. That's great that your middle school had philosophy.
1:16:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:16:43 Mario Gabriele? I think that's a great idea. If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what's an experiment you would really like to run?
1:16:52 Speaker 00 If that was the case, we would just do all the products we talked about just now and then have the operating system integrate all of them. And spend a lot of resource on building a great brand that people love and increasing our retail distribution.
1:17:07 Mario Gabriele? If you could assign a book to everyone on earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign?
1:17:13 Speaker 00 Philosophically, I don't really like to force people to learn because I think it's like, it's okay to not learn.
1:17:21 Mario Gabriele? Yeah.
1:17:21 Speaker 00 You're not a better person just because you learn stuff. But it's also your own responsibility to learn, even if somebody really pushes you hard. And you kind of don't want to do it, like it's up to you.
1:17:32 Mario Gabriele? You think learning is totally morally neutral?
1:17:34 Speaker 00 It's a morally positive thing, but forcing people to do it is not a good thing. And everybody has their own responsibility to learn and get better. So for instance, when it comes to talent, I believe that talent is selected and not taught. You know what I mean? Like the people who learn, they're always going to learn irrespective of where they are and we just select them, promote them. If you don't want to learn, even if I, you know, buy a very expensive course for you, you're still not going to learn.
1:18:02 Mario Gabriele? Yes.
1:18:03 Speaker 00 So I don't know, what book should people read? Whatever makes you happy. I read a book on Provence, like Living the Good Life in Provence. That was pretty relaxing.
1:18:13 Mario Gabriele? Yeah?
1:18:13 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:18:14 Mario Gabriele? Amazing. Well, that feels like a great place to end. I'm really glad we had this chance to chat and I think what you're building is extremely cool. And I can't wait to watch what happens next.
1:18:26 Speaker 00 Awesome. Thank you for the opportunity.
1:18:29 Mario Gabriele? That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.
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