When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light

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2:31American adults spend almost three hours a day, three hours staring at their smartphones. Of course, smartphones are amazing. They've brought massive convenience to our everyday lives. But they've also let tech companies access intimate details of our private lives for advertising. They've also allowed our work to creep into our personal time off. And of course, smartphone use has been linked to an increase in anxiety and depression, especially in children and teens. Well, Kai Tang and Joe Hollier looked at these problems and they thought, what if there was a different kind of phone? And so they set out to design a phone that would give people a set of useful functions without the endless stream of social media content and other distractions.

3:13They called it the light phone and it has calling and texting, but it also lets you do things like play music or podcasts and get directions. You can take notes on it and set up a hotspot, but no apps. And it doesn't track users for advertising. It doesn't sell their personal data. It's not designed to keep us glued to the screen. It's actually quite the opposite. The company's tagline is a phone for humans. Anyway, before they started work on the Light Phone together in 2014, Kai worked in product development on some major cell phone brands, including Nokia, BlackBerry, and Motorola. So he had experience with actually making cell phone hardware.

3:56Joe worked as a filmmaker, animator, and illustrator after college. And because both Kai and Joe had design backgrounds, they met while attending a 30-week incubator program for designers that was put on by Google in New York. The premise was that each of us might come up with an idea for a new sort of technology company, a smartphone app specifically. And that if a designer could make the vision of such a product seem real, that would entice investors or developers and engineers that could help bring that to life because that's something Google kind of was doing internally. And they wanted to see if that was something that they could multiply externally.

4:39And presumably, like most of the people in this program are like, okay, what kind of app can we build that can attract attention and presumably can make money? I would imagine that's how most people are thinking, right? Well, there's a kind of like a golden metric that was really what was most important, and that was how many hours a day someone spent with a product. So if you could make something that was sticky, you know, that people would use for hours a day, there didn't really need to be an inherent business model because you could start collecting all sorts of data and selling advertising.

5:14And that was sort of the kind of business model that so many smartphone apps in particular had already embraced. This was like the height of that kind of thinking. I think after Facebook kind of just blew up, people were like, don't worry about how you're going to monetize. Just focus on signing up users, and then we can make money off them in different ways. Exactly. So what about this was, in 2014, was troubling to you, to either of you, if at all? Yeah, I think that's exactly why we decided to do something different. It was almost nerve-wracking watching people use their smartphones in public, you know, in a park, in a train station, a restaurant.

5:56If you just look up, it's almost bizarre that everyone is touching and staring at a little screen instead of, you know, enjoying the conversation, making eye contact, or actually pay attention to your kids. That's the reason we feel like the goal to maximize people's time, attention, and data is just not fair. The reason I quit the job is just because I don't understand why we need to make a new phone every two months, every three months. You quit your job as a phone designer because you felt like, why are we making a new phone every few months when this last one's perfectly good? Yeah, just because there was a slightly better camera.

6:38Let's make a new phone or because we could rotate the phone this way, that way. And it's like, but who needs that? And does anyone actually look at how people use it? Like, I remember this feeling that my smartphone is the source of anxiety when I look at it. Because I know if someone calls me after 10 p.m., there's something bad happening on the other side of the world, right? So I just remember this feeling that smartphone being the source of anxiety. Yeah. So you guys are in this incubator program for Google. And at what point, Joe, did you start to think, hang on, maybe there's something else to think about here?

7:20And how did you find Kai, who clearly agreed with you? Yeah, I think it was, you know, in the program, we were doing user research and asking people about their relationships with their smartphones. And no one was saying, I wish I spent two more hours on my smartphone. In fact, people were kind of had these, you know, over the top, I almost wish I could just go off the grid forever kind of sentiment. And I found myself as a freelancer checking my email when I was at the beach trying to change a song and seeing some email that I could do nothing about. And I said, you know, why is it that I bring everything with me everywhere?

7:58I thought back about, you know, even further, AOL Instant Messenger and kind of dial up computers of my childhood. There was only one room in the house that you could access the Internet. And there was this very clear distinction between online and offline time. And I think the smartphones became so ubiquitous that we almost forgot we have the agency to actually sign off from time to time. And when I talked to Kai about the idea, he immediately resonated and it was, you know, kind of felt like something we might be able to do together with his background. Yeah, tell me about the idea. I mean, you said to him, hey, let's forget about working on an app.

8:41Let's build a phone that doesn't distract you. Is that what you said? I mean, it was basically like instead of making an app to keep people on their smartphones, what if we make a phone to get people off their smartphones? Right. Almost taking the app into the physical sense. And, you know, Kai's first reaction was it's really, really hard to make a cell phone. You don't want to make a cell phone. but we started talking about what this might look like and pitching it to peers in the program with us and we got a really deep polarizing reaction yeah what did they kai what do they say well it's really interesting because some of them would say this is going to change my life and some other group of people will be like this is why do i ever need that right my smartphone it's perfect it does everything for me there's nothing wrong with my smartphone right but i think everyone had a reaction.

9:36You either love it or you hate it. And I think that's every designer's goal, just to create something that actually relates to the individuals. All right. So you guys decide to partner up and see if you could create a phone that didn't distract you. Once you agreed to kind of work on this, what was your first step? Did you guys start to sketch it out on paper, what it might look like? What did you start to do? Our first step was really actually trying to test the hypothesis that people might enjoy taking a break from their smartphone. So we actually got a couple flip phones, and we set up call forwarding for about two dozen people over the course of a couple weeks.

10:23And whether it was either a weekend or just an evening, would ask them to leave their smartphone, calls would forward to this new flip phone, but they would only have access to nine contacts. What we saw from that was pretty amazing, kind of described this initial anxiety, like tapping your pocket, checking the flip phone a couple of times every few minutes. But after, you know, a certain point, there's this kind of magical moment where you are present and it's incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating. And, you know, they described feeling ready to come back to work with a clear head. And then when we actually looked at the flip phones, we realized that no one used them at all.

11:05It was really this kind of peace of mind that, God forbid, there was an emergency, my mom, my cat, you know, partner, whatever, I was reachable, but that the actual value that we brought them wasn't in any one feature, but actually in the lack of features. And both of you obviously have design backgrounds and Kai, you literally designed smartphone. So you basically knew how you could do this. But you guys decided, let's do Kickstarter, because that's a good way to raise money. You need money to do this. So you launched Kickstarter, and you got$400 ,000, you get 3000 people back this project. And with that money, what were you able to do?

11:48Because I'm thinking, you gotta send 3000 phones to people. Wow, that that seems like a lot more than$400 ,000. Yeah, that's not even enough. Not even the friction that we needed to build the device. So what did you do? Well, a big part of the Kickstarter wasn't just the money, but actually the traction that could be used to, you know, inspire partners or investors to see the value in this, that people were willing to contribute at such an early stage. And that was a huge momentum push for us. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Joe and Kai confront some big challenges creating what they call a phone away from phone.

12:35Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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16:57Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's May of 2015, and Joe and Kai's Light Phone has generated a lot of interest and backing on Kickstarter. And with that support, it's time for them to take their design from the drawing board and figure out how to make it real. Yeah, so we, I think we started by just getting phones from Amazon or Alibaba and break it apart and try to, you know, Frankenstein build a phone. that looks like what we're trying to do so that we have a physical prototype we could show suppliers as well as our investors. And the crowdfunding campaign was really helpful for our suppliers to understand what we're trying to do and how many people, or is there a market for this kind of product?

17:51Suppliers was like investor. You know, they could build any other product with their capacity, but they have to decide, okay, I'm going to, you know, take a shot with Light Phone. So getting the first couple of suppliers on board were really critical for the part of manufacturing. Describe that first Light Phone. I mean, what was the promise? What would it do? We called it your phone away from phone. Right, okay. And the idea was that it wasn't necessarily trying to replace your smartphone, but to just say, hey, for, you know, a couple of hours a day or maybe for a weekend or, you know, while working on a certain project, you might want to go light.

18:33What that actually meant was that the original Lite phone was a simple 2G cell phone that had its own SIM card, and we made software that would kind of make it seamlessly feel like it was an extension of your smartphone number. Your calls would forward to the Lite phone, and when you called someone, it would display as if the call was coming from you. And it would allow you to leave your smartphone behind and just take the phone aspect out of the phone. Okay, so you start working on it, and this ends up taking quite a long time. Did it take longer than you had anticipated to actually develop it and then deliver it to the Kickstarter backers?

19:18Yeah, for sure. I think we estimated a year and a half. I feel like it took us almost two years to actually get the product out, which we appreciated that people were being very patient with us. Mostly. And so when you finally delivered these phones, I mean, there was mixed reaction to them, right? Because it was on a 2G network originally, and there were some challenges with it, right? Definitely. I mean, aside from any technical challenges, it's quite the ask for the end user. So I think what we saw a lot of was almost like a gym membership where someone wants to go light, but is struggling to actually integrate that kind of experience into their day to day life.

20:04So this phone comes out in 2017, January of 2017, and you ship, I think, about 15 ,000 units before you had to kind of put a stop to it. And there was a waiting list. Like people were actually even selling some of these on the secondary market for like two, three times the price. Yeah. And that whole time we were taking pre-orders, which was, you know, help keeping our lights on. And we were incredibly grateful that people would be willing to spend money for a phone that might not be delivered for one to three months, depending on where we were in that kind of timing. And that$400 ,000 that you raised, I mean, did that take you all through this period of time?

20:45Or did you have to seek other sources of financing? It took us to the first stage, which is paying our suppliers to do the design work and getting samples built. I think we needed$2 million more just to actually go through the process. So we raised money from the Mission Aligned investors along the way to help us deliver. And clearly, this was going to be just the first iteration. I mean, you clearly had an ambition to make a more sophisticated phone, and that would be the Light Phone 2. and in 2018 you launched another campaign this time on indiegogo for the light phone 2 and that one raised about three and a half million dollars what did what did the light phone 2 what was that phone going to be able to do well i think we learned so much from the first light phone our users were telling us that they wanted to go light more often meaning use light phone more often but they don't have uber they want text message they want this one or two more things to make that experience more enjoyable or have that peace of mind knowing they have those tools i think that's when we started to revisit our philosophy saying that hey you know the goal originally was trying to give people that peace of mind so it could break away even just from time to time.

22:13So what if we offer our users a couple more utility tools? If that enables millions or more people to try Light Phone, that's what we wanted to do. So tell me about what this phone does, the Light Phone 2. It has phone call. You can send text message. You can write a text message. Now we have music, MP3 player, podcast. You can get simple direction. We have hotspot as well as calendar and notes. You could take text notes or a voice memo. And so I guess eventually you'll be able to like hail an Uber with it. Hopefully Lyft, a ride-sharing tool, is something that we're trying to do. But that requires the ride-sharing company to collaborate with us.

23:03So tell me a little bit about, I mean, building a phone company. It's not, this is not easy. This is a huge challenge. And you are basically saying to people, look, smartphones have taken over our lives. We're losing our time and our attention to these devices. And so you've got to convince, you know, a certain number of people to adopt the product, but you have to build them too, which requires a lot of money. And I guess over time, that was became an sort of a focus. You had to raise more money to make these phones, right? Yeah. Yeah. We got to raise a lot more money than we originally planned it just to make the Light Phone 2.

23:42So when you told investors about this idea, how did you convince them to back you? I mean, presumably some of them were like, well, I don't think people are going to use these things. I mean, there's definitely the concern about, is this just a niche product? Is there any actual mass market adoption? I think anyone that's been interested in investing in the Light Phone does feel morally there's something really beautiful going on with Light Phone and that we have this sort of honest and transparent business model that's so kind of unique. As a matter of fact, one of our investors from Foxconn, the company that makes iPhone and Samsung, so we were in the meetings explaining what Light Phone is, what Light Phone is trying to do.

24:28one of the executives from FastCount was saying, guys, I need this phone. My families are torn apart by a smartphone. My kids don't talk to me. We're all on our phone on a dining table. I need this phone. And I think that emotional connection drove a lot of investors to us because of the business model that every app, every social media are deploying. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter what product you're trying to create. As long as you're making money from advertisement or users' data, there's no way out. You will have to maximize their attention and time. You know, one of the things I struggle with, because obviously, you know, for people who feel like their phones have kind of come to control them, and I think a lot of people listening feel that, and I certainly have days where I feel like that.

25:24But on the flip side, like I just I think about yesterday, I went to San Francisco to have lunch with a friend and hailed an Uber. And then I looked at a map app to see how long it would take me to get there. I got to the restaurant a few minutes early. So I checked my Gmail, quickly answered a couple emails. So it was like time efficient. And then I did my wife texted me and needed me to transfer some money in our bank. And I did that for my phone. And on the one hand, 10, 20 years ago, I couldn't do any of that. And maybe, probably, I stopped to notice things around me more, for sure. And I think there are elements of the world we lived in then that were better.

26:07But on the other hand, there's incredible efficiency. And so I have to wonder that we've just gotten to a point in human history where these things kind of won. Well, we're not disagreeing that smartphones is efficient and it's a very helpful computers that help us do things. But at the same time, Joe and I, we're not asking people to give up technology. All we're trying to say is that we should have options. We should have tools that intentionally design just like Hammer or screwdriver. You use it, you put it back, and you don't think about your hammer 24-7. You don't hold your screwdriver and swipe your screwdriver for five hours a day.

26:56Why can we reimagine the mobile device that does not have the components of attention economy, but has all the modern utility? When we come back after a short break, more from Joe and Kai about building their minimalist smartphone, the light phone. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

27:34Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guests today are Kai Tang and Joe Hollier. They think that we need to redefine our relationships to our smartphones, which is why they built a minimalist version of a smartphone called the light phone. There was a – this is now I'm sure lots of people listening know about this, but there was a famous study probably 20, 30 years ago. It was a study into memory, and it studied London cab drivers. And you may know about this study. Definitely. But London cab drivers had remarkable memories. And that's because there was a time where to be a cab driver, and maybe even to this day, you have to, I don't know, you to memorize every street in London.

28:17I remember in the 90s, you'd get in a cab and you would just say a street and the driver would know. And, you know, I drive to, like on the weekends, I go hiking. And I still use my GPS app to tell me where to go. And I'm going to the same places. And I thought about this recently. I thought, I can't believe that I'm relying on the GPS. It's kind of scary because I've been there a hundred times. I definitely think we're losing some brain muscles with the technology we have. I don't even remember my parents' phone number or my girlfriend's phone number. I can't remember phone numbers. and we rely on GPS to go everywhere, even just a couple blocks away.