Sélim Benayat: 2x exited founder and now building AI Hardware at Nothing Technology ​

0:00Sélim Benayat:All right, welcome. We are here at Local Globe Open House. I'm Seb from Scaling Europe and I'm joined here with Salim from Nothing. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Can you just give us a quick introduction to who you are? Yeah, so I'm Salim, currently working as the lead of AI product at Nothing. Before that, I was a founder myself, founded two companies. One was called Rosy Reality in the early days of augmented reality, hence the name. And the other one was Bento, Bento.me, which was sort of a revival of MySpace. And both had successful exits. They were, you know, I think you're being modest a bit.

0:40Sélim Benayat:You know, you had founded two great companies and had great results. Yeah. What has brought you back into, you know, stop being an entrepreneur, but now building and a startup? Yeah. Good question, almost a philosophical question. Because I believe as a founder, it's very difficult to step into a company that is not your own. Yeah. And I had that experience. For instance, Bento, we got acquired by Linktree. And sort of operating within Linktree, that was not 100 % DNA that I forged myself. It was not the teams that I hired. Was challenging. Luckily, I got to work with the two founders, so this was really fun.

1:25But then at one point, I just noticed I hit sort of a culture that I'm not too comfortable with. And so I thought to found something myself again. So I took a step back and was thinking of what to do next in that age of AI. But then I got a call from Carl, Carl, the founder of Nothing. And I always had tremendous respect for him as a person. He's almost the same age as me, founded two unicorns by now. I'm like, whoa, he's legit. So I then started to sort of get to know him. And then I saw he's that type of founder who wants to work with other founders because he believes in that entrepreneurial power inside of a company.

2:09And then smartly, he gives you sort of the, let's say, the reign over a bigger part of the business that as a founder, you feel comfortable.

2:19Sélim Benayat:So you've got the autonomy to kind of do your own thing. Yeah. His mandate was join nothing and build a software company inside of nothing. And that was really enticing because that's something I did before. And he stayed honest and true to his word. That's what I'm doing today. And it's been six months? Yes. How's it been the first six months? Blur. But it was, it's fun. Fun, intense, creative, innovative. So it's all the good parts of being in a fastly scaling, by now, unicorn. And we're here at OpenCourt. The theme of the evening is all about hardware, AI, software. I guess, what are you doing here?

3:00Sélim Benayat:What role are you going to play this evening? Yeah, this evening I'm going to be speaking about how we try to marry software, in our case, AI-specific software, with hardware, be it phones or earbuds or watches or any new form factor that might come out. And can you talk a bit about that? Kind of give a sneak peek to what you'll be talking about later. I will be able to talk about phones and earbuds and watches, but not so much about the next device. Yeah, of course. But can you talk about it now? Can you talk about, like, what does that mean, implementing kind of AI software in a phone or kind of AI?

3:35Yeah, I mean, implementing it in a phone, I think, or just generally hardware, I think you need to start to design for capability drift in a way where the software starts to expand its capabilities very dynamically over time. It's very adaptive to the environment, to the user. It can get very personal. And so how do you sort of marry that with a rather static hardware piece, right? And sort of that's a lot of the thinking that we do in the team. And so we try to decouple sort of hardware capabilities with software capabilities. And we try to design more for sort of intent capture in a way. So we try to be where the user intent is.

4:20So if, for instance, you want to search something or you want to order something or call something, we try to be there for you in the moment that sort of intent arises.

4:33Sélim Benayat:Amazing. Okay. And what are some of the challenges that you face by kind of trying to marry the software with the hardware? I mean, there are many. from an organizational perspective, I'm thinking about nothing as an organization. And that's why sort of Carl asked me to build a software company is, as a startup, you keep on repeating what made you successful, especially at the beginning. Because we have to take a step back. Nothing is four and a half-ish years old, even though it looks like a very mature company from the inside, from the outside. From the inside, it's a four and a half-year-old, fast scaling startup.

5:10So there's a lot that breaks, a lot that sort of is not figured out yet. And so you try to hold on to whatever you can, whatever made you successful, and you try to keep on repeating. And so for nothing, that means they build a very strong hardware DNA. They know how to execute on a world-class level on hardware. They created an iconic new phone, the phone one at the time. They are brilliant in executing on audio devices, right? And so they kept on repeating that. And so now all of a sudden, then sort of software becomes much more differentiating factor as well. Now that we have new entrants into the market that try to build software, hardware themselves, previously software companies, we need to pay more attention to software.

5:53And so we need to introduce that idea into the teams. And that brings these challenges of different rhythm, different cadence. If you launch hardware, you measure a hundred times, you cut once. We all know software is the other way around, right? You just start cutting and then you start iterating. Once it's on the market, you're very close to the user. That's sort of the power of software. It's on the opposite side of that spectrum, right? And these are organizational challenges, for instance, that we need to overcome.

6:20Sélim Benayat:And how have you been able to overcome them? Are you trying to build the team based on, you know, kind of the culture that has existed within the hardware company and better kind of apply it to software? Or are you taking a very different approach? Does it need a different mindset? Yeah, I find it needs a way different mindset. And so we're, in a way, just step by step bringing that into the company by, you know, working very closely with marketing that previously was very comfortable with dictating the narrative. Because if you launch hardware, it's a beautiful thing because you can tell a very coherent story and you can manage that story because you have long lead times, right?

7:01With software, not so much. You launch it on Twitter or on social and then you're going to see what happens in a way. obviously you can tell the story but it's much more um you get feedback quick yeah yeah and so being very close to marketing obviously helps making them understand showing them the product stock fooding them the product over and over again right and so they have an understanding of what they're actually supposed to communicate um so yeah we're taking sort of a grounds up

7:24Sélim Benayat:approach and is there a certain type of person that you're looking for who has got software experience in a hardware company or are you taking people from different backgrounds I think to be innovative, you need a diverse group of people. And so, yeah, we're looking across the spectrum. Interesting. And you mentioned earlier about being a unicorn. Yeah. I think that was last week, the week before. It was like officially announced. I think it raised$200 million. It's just over a billion dollar valuation. What was that like within the company? Within the company? Just another Tuesday. Really? Literally.

7:59Literally. I think that's sort of if you're playing the game, I think these things happened way before.

8:07Sélim Benayat:Yeah, yeah. And so once they hit public or once they sort of hit the general public, for you it's done and dusted, right? Sort of a bit also the curse of a founder in a way. It's tough to be happy in these moments because you're already thinking about the challenges that come with that announcement, right? So you're already in the future. Yeah, okay. But yeah, probably we should take more time to celebrate these things because it's also good for the teams. Yeah, it was an amazing achievement. And, you know, yeah, it's rare. There aren't that many, especially consumer hardware businesses across Europe that have seen the success of nothing.

8:39Sélim Benayat:They've seen, I think, millions of devices that have been sold. So it's a phenomenal achievement. What was the public reaction? Did you get a sense of how customers or public people reacted to the news?

8:54So the reaction from the public was nice, was gratifying.

8:59Sélim Benayat:Yeah. Yeah. It sort of gave you the sense that you're doing something that is worth putting in the energy. Yeah. Because there were a lot of nothing community members that were really happy. They were celebrating sort of this end of one company in a way. So yeah, it was a nice moment to browse social and sort of get that or, you know, the messages you get on WhatsApp. And so that was nice. And it sort of established this feeling that we all have that nothing really is an end of one. So it's sort of a unique company in Europe in the sense that we have a strong design presence in Europe, a strong ethos, how we want to sort of deliver these products.

9:38And then we have a strong team in Shenzhen that is able to help us manufacture that and be very quick about it, be cost efficient about it. And sort of marrying these two sides of the globe and really, you know, one plus one in that case is more than two. I think it's unique.

9:53Sélim Benayat:Yeah, amazing. I wanted to ask about, you know, because I guess with the fundraising announcement, you're moving to a more, you're talking about AI much more as a company and tying AI towards hardware. But I wanted to ask about AI usage within the company. Is the internal culture within nothing to be like, okay, there's a new tool out. We have to upskill. We have to use it. What's it like inside nothing? Yeah, definitely. I think it's a gradient, as you might imagine, where peak adoption is engineering teams or product teams, design teams. That's peak adoption, right? We throw that subscription money to anything that kind of looks cool, which sort of helps with market, popping up the market, right?

10:34But it's also, it's nice to sort of, you know, experiment with software that helps you be more efficient, helps you be more creative, helps you be more collaborative. I think that's a big one as well. And then you sort of scale through the company. You go to marketing. I think they're also very AI native by now. They need it a lot for communication, I guess. And then you go down to maybe HR who starts to believe in AI. So yeah, I think that sort of that gradient would reflect sort of reality right now.

11:04Sélim Benayat:And what about you personally? Are you using AI tools in your personal life? Are there bits of hardware that you've already got? Which of AI elements that you particularly like or excited by? Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think I couldn't spend my day without many, many AI apps. And when we talk about hardware, I'm a sucker for all of these little gadgets, AI gadgets that come out, be it from Europe, US or from China. I buy them up and I test them. Sometimes I'm the guy walking around with odd looking glasses or a little pin here that records voice and video. And yeah, I like to experiment for sure.

11:41Part of the job.

11:42Sélim Benayat:Yeah, what's been your favorite? I think a lot of the glasses concepts out there, obviously, meta glasses, but then also glasses from the East, they're also kind of cool. Oh, really? Yeah. Some look very futuristic. They only have like one sort of glass. Some have cameras on the front and on the side. Super hearing, bone conductivity stuff. Wow, really cool. Yeah. So I kind of believe in that form factor. Really interesting. and what about like do you use things like like ai software are you using those in your day-to-day life whether it's basic open ai or voice tools anything like that yeah so i'm a big believer in audio ai so ai for audio so we do a lot with sort of what can we how can we get more efficient with sort of transforming voice input in a way so i'm i wrote my little apps for instance for myself that sort of just helped me be more efficient by just talking.

12:43And then I have little cues that then sort of, they know exactly what I mean and then write an entire paragraph, for instance, just to be quicker in collaboration. Because bread and butter of, you know, leading product across a fast-scaling company is level-setting everyone, making them understand, like, what are we trying to go for and what will launch, you know, soon. And so, yeah, I try to have my little tools for CoLab.

13:10Sélim Benayat:And you've been brought in to build this team. How big is the team now?

13:20The team right now, I haven't counted. It must be like 30-ish by now, if we take everything into account.

13:31Sélim Benayat:Were you brought in to build the team, or was there already a team that you came into? there was part of the team there already and now basically we try to I mean it's weird to talk about numbers hack count because I think we should more look into sort of the outputs that the outcomes that we generate right but yeah it's sort of probably 30 to 45 by Q1 next year and then we we need to keep on scaling because there's a lot to build yeah that's super exciting well look I think we're out of time but thank you so much it's been an amazing chat and I'm really looking forward to seeing your talk out there.

14:06Thank you.