‘If this isn't addiction, I don't know what is’: Light Phone's founders get real about screen time and building for the anti-smartphone generation

0:00Amanda Silberling: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups. I'm Amanda Silberling, in for Rebecca Balan, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. On the show, we're often talking to founders that are trying to use tech to remove friction from our lives. But today we're joined by a pair of founders who are exploring the value of simplicity in our relationship to technology. With the Light Phone, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier have been working toward this mission for over a decade, partnering along the way with players like Andrew Yang, Kendrick Lamar, and Pete Davidson.

0:40Amanda Silberling: Kaiwei, Joe, welcome to the show.

0:43Kaiwei Tang: Oh, thanks for having us. I appreciate it.

0:45Joe Hollier: Yeah, thank you.

0:46Amanda Silberling: Yeah, to get started, what is Light? Explain the company.

0:50Joe Hollier: So Kai and I met back in 2014, actually inside of an experimental incubator for designers where they wanted us to think about smartphone apps. And we really quickly learned that the business models behind so many of these platforms that we use every day on our smartphones and all of our devices are built around the attention economy. And Kai and I said, we want to build a company that prioritizes utility, intentional living, and consciously choosing when to go online and how to connect in these different ways. So we built Light as an alternative to big tech, you know, things that are fighting ever more aggressively for our time and our attention.

1:28Joe Hollier: And so we build tools, phones particularly, and they're all based around what we call the Light OS. And really, it's about an intentionally simple phone that lets you connect with those that you need through the simple essential tools that you might expect of a phone in 2026, but without the distractions and vulnerabilities that come with an entire app store and all of the abundance of that entire industry.

1:53Kaiwei Tang: It's really not about going back in time. We're not anti-technology. We're always trying to clarify that. we're trying to design technology like joe just said as hammer you're a school driver your tools that you know you have them that give you peace of mind you know when you want to like hammer nails you get your hammers out you do that thing and you put it back so that tool disappeared in your life in your day you don't swipe your hammer for five hours so your hammer company can make money so that's what we're trying to remove from all the tools you have in your phone but keep just the essential.

2:29Kaiwei Tang: I mean, you know, when was the last time anyone ever say, oh, I spent two hours on swiping my TikTok, Instagram, I feel so good about myself. I loved it. I'm going to do it again right away. We all just snap out of it and you feel horrible and we keep doing it. I think we don't, we just don't think this is about self-control anymore, right? This industry are investing in billions, every app, every free social media and emails are trying to maximize your time, attention, and data so they could make money. We want to offer everyone different options. You could still have all these central modern technology, but just without the civilian attention economy built in.

3:10Amanda Silberling: And so you guys have been working on the light phone for about 10 years, but at least from my perspective, it feels like in the last year or so, there's been a stronger push toward people realizing that maybe they don't like the relationship they have to their phone. Maybe they realize that they're spending a lot of time on their iPhone doing things that don't feel like they're adding value to their lives. So how has reception to the company changed over that period of time?

3:44Kaiwei Tang: Using live phone is not, we realize from our customers the last decades of experience. Using light phone is not a magic solution, right? Your addiction, if we all agree, this is addiction, your behavior on social media, on your smartphone is addiction. You don't go over that addiction, get over that addiction overnight. And we learned a lot the last 10 years, knowing that this experience of breaking away from your smartphone and social media is difficult. It's like trying to eat healthier trying to exercise more often but you have to plan for it right you go buy the right outfit you go get the right shoes you set aside time and you go exercise or you cook healthier and you go back to your regular food or your regular life using light phone using a different device like light phone is similar to that lifestyle when we're trying to promote you know show um um the public show everyone that hey using light phone you don't have to listen to us we have decades of uh customers using light phone and telling us that hey they feel less anxious they feel less stressed out they get more time back during the day they feel you know they sleep better they have better relationship with families and friends they feel more creative and productive like it is to us is such a no-brainer things to do it this doesn't mean you have to give up technology and that's what we're trying to keep saying now hey you could use you could still have your smartphone you could still have your social media but you can use the right tool at the right time like how we know when to put on what shoes right you could we still have our laptop and ipad we do emails we do our company's social media on it we're here now yeah i'd say

5:31Joe Hollier: we've seen the movement grow i mean when kai and i first started talking about the light phone we launched our kickstarter in 2015 and there was a wave of people that really understood where we were coming from but there was a lot of people who kind of said why would i want a phone that does less on purpose and you know it was really interesting to see them kind of turn with that question over the next six months and few years and come around and go oh my god i totally get it and now when i tell someone about the light phone no one questions why i think everyone is feeling overwhelmed from, you know, constantly hyper connection that we are feeling from, you know, just scrolling and all of this noise.

6:12Joe Hollier: And so I hear much more often, oh my God, I wish I could, but. So I still think there's some hurdles and some mental, you know, hangups from actually switching to going light. But over the last decade, we've seen things like the announcement of screen time feature where people could actually see tangible metrics of, I don't really think I'm an addict. And then you see five, six hours a day and you have to kind of confront that. And on an industry level, you know, that really validated what we were doing. The Apple CEO, Tim Cook, was saying, you know, I'm using my phone too much. These things are not just 100 % inherently good.

6:50Joe Hollier: There is side effects to using these things. And I think, you know, as Kai kind of alluded to, like people aren't having as much fun, you know, as social media has turned into like hyper targeted ads. and less and less about you and your close friends. It's just not nearly as fun. And I think we're seeing even more so right now, a big, big backlash, especially from the younger generation. Last week in New York City, there was this really amazing series of events called the Summer of Ludd. And it's these attention activists. We've gotten to know a lot of them over the years. Some are light phone users, some are flip phone users.

7:25Joe Hollier: They've really inspired us clearly, but it's so amazing to see their energy and they're really passionate about pushing back on the big tech agenda, on pushing AI in every single aspect of our lives. And so I think more and more we're seeing, I'm even seeing it in my personal life, the amount of people that have texted me in the last week and being like, you know, I think I'm ready, Joe. How does the light phone work again? And so they've heard me talk about this for 10 years.

7:54Kaiwei Tang: In the opening ceremony of the Summer of Love, They put on performance promoting a real life experience. And I was in the crowd and people are watching the show and there's a woman putting out a smartphone and try to record a show. And all of a sudden everyone's booing her and booing her using a smartphone. And I think you just feel that attitude is so different among young people versus if you just watch the big tech news, the AI, you know, everywhere. But the younger generation, from my opinion, is not subscribing to whatever the big tech are selling. Yeah.

8:34Amanda Silberling: And also the two of you are coming at being tech founders more from a design, more from an artistic perspective. You're based in New York rather than Silicon Valley. And I wonder how coming from that different background and being a bit more removed from the tech bubble impacts how you develop products and how you see tech moving.

9:00Joe Hollier: It's very simple. I think Kai and I have always worked really organically together. Kai comes from a human-centered background, and we are building products that we want. And I think we're really thinking about the use case and the lifestyle that these things support, rather than just getting excited about some technological advancement and trying to make a product out of it because we can or because there's a business model. You know, we really didn't come in as, you know, that lens of we're going to try to make a billion dollars and flip some startup and get people spending one more hour on their phone every day.

9:36Joe Hollier: We were like, everyone we talked to is having this problem. I'm, you know, I was freelance before this, struggling with checking client emails while out at dinner. And so just wanting to set boundaries in my own life and, you know, creating the products that we want to use. And naturally that resonates with others.

9:54Kaiwei Tang: We're not special. Like we personally really want those phones. I hated advertisement. I don't want to see any advertisement. I don't want people to know where I am all the time. I don't want to be tracked. You know, and there's no one making a phone like this. And all the smartphone has app stores that millions, millions of attention economy built in. So we build a phone for ourselves and naturally there's millions, millions of people just like us feeling the same way. And on the other hand, I came from a product design background. I used to build Modula Nokia phones back in the day, 20 years ago.

10:31Kaiwei Tang: We see the excitement of those simple phones amongst young people right now, similar to what I see 20 years ago, that people are excited about simpler phone that just is not a social media machine. It's pretty exciting to see our next generation feeling differently with this technology.

10:51Joe Hollier: And like all technology, not just phones, we're seeing a resurgence in, you know, dedicated music players, whether that's iPods or vinyl records, digital cameras, things that are designed to do one thing well. And that's a design philosophy we've always ascribed to even before the light phone ourselves.

11:09Amanda Silberling: Yeah, no, it's a really fascinating cultural moment seeing things like wired headphones are trendy again and just the simplicity of plugging something in.

11:21Joe Hollier: We have a headphone jack.

11:23Amanda Silberling: the simplicity of plugging something in is really novel to people or even you have people that have grown up always having access to spotify and are becoming more interested in what if i just buy a cd at the store and then i listen to the cd front to back and like thinking about the experience of experiencing music in the form of an album is something that is so old, but it feels new again. It's so natural, so human, isn't it?

11:56Kaiwei Tang: When you see a CD, you know exactly what it does. There's no confusion. There's no trick behind it. There's no manipulation. You saw a cassette player, you see it's MP3 player, you know exactly what it does. The object, it's just so powerful if it's designed intentionally for one purpose. We want a light phone to do the same thing. When you look at a light phone, your mind is not attached to social media, to all the things that come inside the phone. Like I'm sure everyone saw the research that even if you put your phone face down, delete your app or using a third-party app to restrict the usage or turn on flame mode, all these things, if it helps you, it's awesome.

12:40Kaiwei Tang: But at the same time, research are showing that as long as you have a smartphone, it doesn't matter what you do with it. As long as you feel it in your pocket, you know you have it. We are constantly distracted 24-7. I mean, you know, not long ago, 20 years ago, you sit down on your computer. That's where online activities happens, right? And you finish your online things, you know, whether or not it's a social media, it's an email. You finish that, you get up, you move away. There's a clear separation between your online activities and presence versus your real life. And we now, we lost that separation right now with smartphone.

13:20Kaiwei Tang: And we're trying to use live phone, giving people a different option to bring that separation back. It's healthy to all to have a balance. Like we go to bed with smartphone, sleep with it, go to toilet with it, eat with it. And if this is not addiction, I don't know what's addiction. If you try to quit smoking, you're not going to bring a cigarette box with you 24-7, just tape over it, put in the bag and carry around a cigarette box with you and trying to quit smoking. You never work.

13:51Amanda Silberling: Yeah. And I mean, I think sometimes people get really caught on the word addiction as it pertains to like social media addiction lawsuits and whatnot. But I feel like that's not really relevant here where whether you call it addiction or not, there's just the matter that most people would say that they want to spend less time on their phones and they have a hard time doing that. And that's a behavioral issue that you're making tools that try to address. Yes. And also, Kai, I wanted to ask you about you were involved in creating the Motorola Razr, which is sort of like when we think of a flip phone, that was the iconic sort of thing that we all feel nostalgic for in a way, like the Motorola Razr.

14:39Amanda Silberling: and now you're making a flip phone again. So the original light phones for people that don't know are more of your standard touchscreen square sort of interface. If you're watching the video, Joe has it up now. And then light phone just announced the first ever flip phone, the light flip. So how do you go from designing the Razer 20 years ago to now? Here's another flip phone.

15:07Kaiwei Tang: Oh, it's really exciting. I mean, I was just a broader team that contributed to the development and making of the original Razr. I mean, I could see, like I said, I see excitement at a time 20 years ago in 2005. Young people are excited about FlipFong, about Razr. And people are crazy about this Razr thing being the tool. It's a phone. It's not entertainment. It's not social media. I think the last two years, especially the last two years, we're seeing the same thing happening on young people who are fascinated about this flip phone that they never have. They were born into social media. They were born into smartphone.

15:45Kaiwei Tang: But they seem to have a better sense of how to manage or what makes them happy or not happy. So they have an easier time to make that choice. We've been interviewing young people. I mean, because I wasn't, you know, when we started, I thought I was done with flip phone, to be honest with you. I never thought we'll come back to the place I started. But it's exciting to hear young people talking about how they don't want to be seen using smartphone. They don't want to be seen texting on a glass of screen. I mean, when we interview those flip phone users, like been using flip phone for five, four, five years.

16:24Kaiwei Tang: like one thing never comes up is AI. One thing never comes up is how many apps you have. Like they don't want, they don't, this is not attractive to them. They want something that is a tool for them and they're proud of this action of flipping down. You know, the technology goes away. So our flip phone has no screen on our side. So when you flip down, we're hoping, yeah, Joe is showing the phone, we're showing you that there's nothing for you to pay attention to other than a notification light uh australite that will now posing to to to notify you that you have incoming calls incoming tax but that's it and this revolution from our customers it's pretty surprising and they actually convince us to build a flip phone um for that generation they want the company to stand behind it they want the company to update a software you know they describe the existing options as ugly as stupid not my word stupid and and easy to break and and they switch like five four or five different flip phone the last few years so we no longer think this is temporary i no longer think this is just a a retro filling you know temporary things for for young people i think announced smartphone is here to stay It doesn't mean it doesn't have, you know, it does not offer the modern technology.

17:47Kaiwei Tang: It just means it does not have all this app stores, attention economy built in. Yeah.

17:55Amanda Silberling: And then another aspect of how you're thinking about the attention economy is also just when you're selling a phone, you also have to deal with like, how do you like how much data do you buy the phone carriers, etc. And we had Andrew Yang on this podcast also talking about the relationship between Noble Mobile, which is his mobile carrier that gives you money back if you don't use as much data as a given amount. And then Light collaborated with Andrew Yang on that. And how does this all connect, would you say?

18:35Kaiwei Tang: Yeah, Andrew is a good friend and we've been wanting to make our life more affordable, more accessible. Despite the reality of memory costs, the tariff cost increase, we keep wanting to make life more accessible. And through Noble Mobile's collaboration, we're experimenting our account track offer like any other carriers, right? You don't pay for the phone, you pay for the monthly subscription for the SIM card, the data unplanned. So we are launching LightFlip with our own contract. You could buy a LightFlip at$39 a month, comes with a SIM card, a LightPhone SIM card with one gigabyte data and unlimited talk time.

19:18Kaiwei Tang: So you don't have to put up$500,$600 for your light phones, but you could, using our service plan, in a way to support ongoing software development and supporting a company long-term versus one-off hardware purchase. It also helps us internally to get more resource for software development and the future hardware creations.

19:44Amanda Silberling: And when people do switch to the light phone, what sorts of obstacles do people encounter? Like what sort of positive things are people reporting back? Like what are people telling you about their experience going from using an iPhone to using a light phone?

20:01Joe Hollier: I think, you know, generally, it ends up being an incredibly positive lifestyle change. But that's not to say that it's easy and it doesn't come without friction. I think one of the biggest things we've seen from users, because, you know, we've seen so many users attempt this so many successfully, and others have found themselves scaring back to a smartphone, perhaps. But when you go light for the first time, you're really given a blank piece of paper where, you know, for those four hours after work, you might have found yourself scrolling as a reaction to this as a kind of nervous habit. Now with the light phone, you can do whatever you want.

20:38Joe Hollier: And that can, you know, that requires responsibility of deciding. So we've been thinking a lot about ways to help people in that transition from thinking of a bucket list of things that you want to be doing more of when you get off your smartphone so that when you're confronted with this extra time, you already have everything in front of you, a plan to start reading that book you've been meaning to read or those movies or that hobby that you've been wanting to do or calling those people that you wish you had more time to call. And I think what the beautiful thing that happens is as you invest your time away from social media and these things that are toxic and kind of making us feel bad and eroding our attention span because of how hyper and all over the place they are.

21:17Joe Hollier: And you start investing that time into things that are meaningful and nourish your soul. You stop having this kind of FOMO and you stop even having to like overcome the addiction because you're like, actually, I feel so great. I'm sleeping better. I'm, you know, more connected with my close friends and family rather than fighting with some person on the other side of the world on Twitter about some other thing, you know, like these are the kinds of things. But as I said, you know, it is a lifestyle change, like going on a diet or a gym membership, you know, it requires effort on your part. And I think one thing we're introducing in addition to the light flip phone today is a flip your life program.

21:57Joe Hollier: So starting in August, we're going to start sending a biweekly email. They're going to be really lightweight and it's going to have all sorts of things from like a digital audit to help you try to understand your current relationship to the tech in your life and where things are really helpful and beneficial and where things are a little bit more problematic and could use some work. We'll have all sorts of little challenges so that over the next eight months while you wait for your light flip preorder to be delivered, we're going to help you mentally prepare, technically prepare and give you all sorts of resources, events, other light phone users that you can ask, you know, very honestly, obviously you can ask Kai and I, but ask a mom how she's doing it or an aspiring artist who sees social media as a way to promote themselves.

22:39Joe Hollier: how are they going light and still doing that? Because we have many users that, you know, are still, you know, we run our entire business on the internet. So as Kai keeps saying, it's not about rejecting technology, but finding the balance that works for you. You know, I separate my technology in these ways. Someone else might do it in other ways. Some people get two phones, you know, work phone and a light phone. Some people go full-time, more people go full-time light phone. So there's a lot of ways to fit it into your life. And I think it's not a one size fits all. and we're really excited to help people make that transition as successful as possible.

23:13Kaiwei Tang: The last 10, 11 years, I cannot tell you how many of our potential customers reached out and say, hey, if only you have one more thing, if only you have just have this two more things, whether or not it's 2FA, it's MAP, it's something else, everyone has this couple more things that make them feel comfortable. And we learn from that too. So we released our own open source SDK kit. So external developer could build tools for Light Phone. So if you want to build a field recorder for yourself that share with people, you could do that. If you want to build a, I don't know, a banking app or a timer, a booking tool, you could do that too.

23:57Kaiwei Tang: So eventually we envision an app library that built by the third party developers that could be shared with all iPhone users. They will follow the same principle that we have. No advertisement, no infinite feeds. And every action that user take has a clear ending. Meaning that you want to get a direction from A to B. We'll give you a direction from A to B and this action ends. So this tool library we envision is going to be opposite to the app stores that Google, Apple has. It was just all the utility tools. In a way, we're trying to utilize our community to address that feedback that, hey, everyone has this one more thing.

24:37Kaiwei Tang: We cannot build a Spanish keyboard quickly, but someone that speaks the language will do that easily for us. Not for us, for themselves and for the community. We launched our SDK kit two weeks ago. We already seen people working on a Chinese keyboard, a Japanese keyboard, and all kinds of tinkering and building around Light Phone's toolbox, which is very, very exciting to us. All the tools that developers build will be free at the moment. This is not a business model we are relying on to be sustainable. We don't use advertisement. We don't pay social media to promote Light Phone. All the last decade's growth are all just organic from users talking about Light Phone, word of mouth, press, talking about it.

25:32Kaiwei Tang: We also have celebrities that are helping us promoting the world of using Light Phone, including Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad, Ed Sharon, the artist from UK, Okay, P. Davison and those influencers or ambassadors have been really helpful.

25:54Joe Hollier: I mean, yeah, we made a collab film with Kendrick. Oh, yes. That was awesome with PG Lang. Back in the days with PG Lang. I think, yeah, to that point, it's been amazing to see the way that our users lead by example. Like our users are out at the bar, at the diner, at the cafe, and they have a light phone and someone goes, what is that thing? Is that a phone? And then it opens up a whole conversation, not about tech specs, but about what it means to be a human in relation to technology. So I feel like the ethos and the values that someone has are, you know, shared with this product. And that's why people feel proud to have a flip phone, because it represents their feelings towards big tech and their love of quality time with their friends and their family and themselves, you know, solitude.

26:37Yeah.

26:38Amanda Silberling: And maybe to wrap things up, what do you think would be the ideal relationship between humans and technology?

26:46Kaiwei Tang: Yeah, I think I always talk about our technology should be tools, should stay behind the thing. You know, shouldn't be presence or overpower us, our personality, what I wanted to do, make me happy instead of taking my time and attention away. So I think the ideal, to answer your question, the ideal technology should be invisible in the background and only shows up when I need it. Otherwise, go away. I don't need to see all the advertisement now you want to sell me. I just want to use a hammer. That's the ideal scenario for myself.

27:22Joe Hollier: I would add a little bit of quirk to that answer that I wholeheartedly agree with, which is that I think technology can also be fun and that we can have a special relationship the way that I remember my first car fondly or my record player or my favorite cameras. And, you know, they can be tools in that way. But when they do one thing well and they respect you, you make a relationship. And that's why I think people think so fondly of their Motorola Razr, which came out 20 years ago, because at that time, the phone. What did it allow you to do? It allowed you to call someone to meet up with them.

27:56Joe Hollier: It allowed you to text someone. And that's about it. You know, it didn't have maps on it. It didn't have things. People weren't. Well, I can't do banking on the go because we just went to the bank. So I think it can have a personal relationship as well. But I think ultimately, yeah, it should serve you and not the other way around. And right now, technology is just tracking so far in the opposite direction. And we're excited to be leading an alternative to that.

28:25Amanda Silberling: Yeah, for sure. And we're just about out of time now, but where can our listeners connect with you or find Light Phone online?

28:33Joe Hollier: We're at thelightphone.com, L-I-G-H-T phone. And yeah, come check out our new flip phone. It's really exciting. We still have the Light Phone 3, of course. And I think, you know, whether it's buying our phone or trying something just really small today and leaving your phone at home for 20 minutes, I think questioning your relationship with technology is something we can all benefit from, whether it's as extreme as a Light Phone or not. Great.

28:58Amanda Silberling: Well, thanks so much for joining the show. And to our listeners, you can find me on BlueSky at at Amanda.omg.lol. That is a real URL. And Equity at EquityPod. Talk to you next time.

29:12Kaiwei Tang: Thanks so much. Thank you for having us. Thank you.

29:27Amanda Silberling: events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.