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

34:55They'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 good hub for AI. There's some great AI talent. Later on, we saw that London is also a global financial hub. So there's good finance talent. But the core idea is the same. 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. I think that's what was really special about how he went on his entrepreneurship journey.

35:35He was a good talent scout? He was very open-minded in terms of culture because back in the day, the Mongolian culture was very tribal. You only trusted your own tribe. You didn't even trust other Mongolians. But as they were conquering... So first of all, he united Mongolia. The steppes. 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... Empires at that point. Yeah, the different sort of civilizations. They were more like agricultural societies, and they had already developed tax collection systems.

36:19So when the Mongolians conquered them, they were super open-minded, even with money, right? You trust outsiders to handle your money. And they reallocated these people to all over the world, helped them collect tax. And later on, I think Yungis Khan converted to Buddhism after discovering Buddhism. Super open-minded, daring to work with different cultures, finding things to learn from different cultures. It's funny. I've had this week two conversations about the Mongolian empire with founders, and both are really around how almost it's an underrated empire, let's say, where it was just this tiny tribe, right?

37:03Like in a really inhospitable part of the world that manages to stretch across Eurasia. Have you read the Conqueror series? No. Oh, 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 an amazing historical fiction retelling of like the entire. It's fiction or? It's historical fiction. So it's written like a story, but you know, it's really based on the facts of it. That's apparently. I have a big book on Caesar that I haven't started. Okay. So that's sort of next. Yeah. 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.

37:45Is that like this really powerful person? I'm not sure how true that is, but it sounds good. Yeah, yeah, who knows, right? But you always, I feel like these leaders, there's always this sort of mythology that's created around them. You create stories to help you govern, I think, at least in the past. Yes. No, but totally today too, right? every founder 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 don't know i never met him but he seems like a very smart guy not even his retelling i mean like even the reporting on these things like everything i think that's just human nature that yeah we always amplify maybe yeah i think sometimes it's by design right yes in elon's case i'm not sure it's by design 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 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 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.

39:00So 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 guys, like startups, in the last 10 years. We've 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 big customers like Apple. So go away. Not worth it for us. 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 we then we got rejected by every earbuds factory as well and they were like hey there's uh 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.

39:54So we work with them out of necessity to create this very strong launch momentum. And as we're shipping out the products, there was like a 80 % defect rate. That felt like a near-death moment, right? We raised money, really upped the expectations on us and then just couldn't deliver on the product. We quickly rented apartments next to the factory. put our own engineers like we only had i don't know five or ten 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 we just like swapped them out and um recovered from that moment.

40:49But the profit and loss statement didn't look as good as we had planned. Yes. What was maybe the most recent moment or one in your later history where you still felt like, hey, this could all go away. These are still the stakes here. Every day is like a roller coaster ride or maybe every week. Every week is like a roller coaster be in 2022, maybe? 22 or 23. I forget. Somewhere in that, yeah. It was when the market was beginning to cool down a little bit. Yeah. Couldn't raise. Had my calendar filled with investor meetings every day. And that was my only job. And every meeting was very challenging.

41:43Like I would get challenged on the strategy. Like 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. 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 4am 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 uh 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 the round actually quickly came together after that wow what was the domino like did you just find someone finally who just got the pitch or got you in some way.

42:43Yeah, we had then like a few weeks later, we had two term sheets. Maybe because I was in a better mood and no longer in this negative spiral anymore. Yeah. So interesting how those things can happen. It seems from the outside, like the sort of first maybe real breakout hit was the 2A phone. Is that sort of how you think about it? Or like what were the big inflection points in Nothing's Journey? I think our first earbud, despite the early quality issues that we fixed, we sold almost 600 ,000 of those units. And this was also in the middle of COVID where the supply chain was uncertain and component costs increased mid-life cycle of the product.

43:30And we increased the price from$99 to$149, but it still kept its momentum. So that was like a good proof point, I think. The Phone 1, like brand new design that nobody had seen before, got a lot of attention. From a revenue perspective, 2A was a great product. It's a good product, but it wasn't as like fresh as the Phone 1. That was the first time the world had seen anything like that. Yes, that makes sense. A big part of the differentiation comes 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?

44:11Because 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 make when they think of consumer hardware automatically, right? 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, but they're in a nascent product category.

45:08They should just think about whether they're copying the right move or not. 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. Yeah. Just make it useful. 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.

45:43It's this, you know, for folks that, listeners that haven't heard of it, it's this Swedish company that makes 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? it earlier on in 2018 or 19 a swedish friend wanted to introduce us and i kind of brushed 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 why this kind of super niche thing it's not going to 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 i um i met jesper the ceo of teenage engineering and it was just like a really chill conversation uh 40 minutes shook hands we figured out the deal a bit later but 40 minutes shook hands on like we should do something together We just shook hands and then we figured out the commercial structure.

47:00But 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 an 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. What were the ads? 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.

47:41Super 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 yeah like sailing and drinking beer with friends barbecue that kind of feeling to sell a beer not selling the product but selling like the the feeling those were two really iconic ads that he did how do you uh work with teenage engineering today and and yeah what are what are the the feelings that maybe they've brought into the way that you think of of nothing 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 have 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 whenever they do something, all the other brands kind of just follow.

48:46In 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. So stepping out, building a mood board from different creative fields outside of electronics like movies, architecture, art and finding our universe through that so 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 brand design and we're also like let's make a product company that people will be proud of so one of the graphics that really resonated was there used to be a Sony museum in Tokyo where they showcase all the products on the wall and on the tables and they would take guests there when they were visiting the Sony HQ to proudly showcase everything they built.

49:45So 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 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 brand. And that's what we really wanted to create for nothing. 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, you can tell immediately that it's the same.

50:19Yeah, there's a signature, a DNA somehow. 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. When you were doing that exercise, and maybe still today, where are the places that you took inspiration? You say films. Were there particular films or particular objects? I think the movie scene I remember is a scene from Space Odyssey. Furniture, there's so much inspiration. Furniture from the 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.

51:01Because the current thing has a stamp in time. So if we were to copy like a 2025 Apple product, in 2027 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. What was the Space Odyssey theme, do you remember? Okay, there's two, I think. One with the astronauts in the corridor. And one with Hell. Hell 9000. Yeah, Hell 9000, right? Yeah, I just watched that movie. There was an interesting hire that Nothing made recently, which is I think you just got a chief branding officer from Lowe, which is a luxury brand, I think probably best known for its leather goods and things like that.

51:48It was an interesting hire and sort of maybe hints at the way that you're positioning yourself. What are the lessons from maybe luxury or apparel that you're sort of trying to bring into the way that you think about marketing and branding? 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're about to do 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 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 choice for Gen Z when you get your first big bonus or paycheck you go buy their bag so that requires us to understand the market very well understand the consumer very well and also speak to them on channels where they are.

53:18They'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. I mean, you can tell how ignorant I am of luxury brands that I thought it was low rather than Loewe, but... Who knows what it is? It's a hard to pronounce name. Yeah. 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.

53:59What have been the sort of strategies or the channels or heuristics that have been useful for you in fighting that way? yeah i think you know at its core business is about arbitrage um 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 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.

54:44But 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. So I think that's what marketers should be, marketeers 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 all the companies showcase their best creatives, right?

55:32So the competition is very different from before. So it's no longer an arbitrage opportunity. For us, we start off with written media, digital media. 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.

56:10And then I think you just got to keep doing more and more difficult things. So yeah, our marketing has to evolve. We have to, I think creative will be key in the next stage because 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. So 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.

56:51India is such an interesting part of your story, I think. nothing is obviously an underdog relative to Apple, but I think I read that you're sort of on track to do a billion in sales this year. You've sold many millions of products, and it's really made a real dent already in many respects. Maybe you're only less than a percent of where you want to be, but 70 % of the sales are coming from India. I think it's maybe 55. Okay, so that's changed, or maybe the reporting was off. I think we tried to correct the reporting, but not sure what happened there. Okay, so... It's still a significant part of the business.

57:34And 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? So India is doing really well for our smartphone portfolio. And the US is doing really well for our audio portfolio. It was 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 an iPhone user.

58:13And 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. I think it has to do a lot with status. Also, people really care about status. In the past, an air condition will give you status in society. And then over time, as the economy develops, it kind of shifts to emotional benefits like uh hey i have a big logo on my chest 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 uh these social issues that are quite avant-garde you don't know about them therefore i'm superior like i'm better so yeah 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.

59:21It'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. 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?

1:00:06there's a business reason and also of 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.

1:00:47I think it's very common. Also in like CPG, right? Yeah, totally. 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 outsourced 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.

1:01:25So 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. 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. Would you ever do a version of a, you know, say another brand that's even more and more high-end, for example? 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.

1:02:10Yeah, 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 some really amazing opportunities, but also complexities and challenges that maybe weren't foreseeable when you sort of first thought about it. The energy is very good. 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'll be hard to fail because the entire momentum it's hard to not be impacted by the momentum that's happening there but it is developing so 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.

1:03:14If 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. They won't know. But for us, you know, that was hard to control. Yes. We built some very advanced manufacturing techniques now in India. So the products are dust free. Another sort of development, it feels like over the past year, maybe even six month has been the way that you have leaned into AI and the way that should interface with 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?

1:03:53We'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 try to kind of tone down the hype talk and focus more on user scenarios where we could be helpful. So we've only taken kind of some baby steps. We added this key on the side of our phones.

1:04:36You can use it for recording any idea you have. 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 lists, Google Calendar syncing, meeting note recordings. It's just 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.

1:05:14Basically on phones you can search for contacts, for files, for apps. We just added answers as well. Me and my fiancee will always kind of try and prove that we are right. But then now I just can I use this and just 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 just gives you the answer. And I think OS native integration is always more convenient for the end user. Yes. And then on Playground or the essential apps, it's more like envisioning a different future where software is truly personal.

1:05:58because today if you think about the operating systems, like there's a billion users for iOS and three billion for Android, 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 going to be, in a few years, it will 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. Yeah, and for folks that haven't seen it, it's almost like a mini lovable that just, you know, 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.

1:06:51Yeah, so the common, everybody with an idea can create a mini app, basically, just using natural language. and have it sit on your home screen in the way that you want. 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. 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 making these trade-offs in different moments and when it's the right time to experiment with something like that, given that 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 anytime you do anything, I imagine you hear a lot, which is a strength and can also be hard, I imagine.

1:07:46It'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. Yeah, your cost structure is just worse, essentially. Yeah, even worse. Yeah, even worse. 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 there 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 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.

1:08:45And 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. Yeah, and we can just be honest about it. Hey, 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. 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.

1:09:34And there's a version that I could imagine being really productive. I think it's about believing in the long term. I think things get clearer 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 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. 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 take these open courses and connect to people on communities and write code and contribute to GitHub, make friends.

1:10:21You 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 stuff but also recently today we started selling the phone 3A community edition that the community co-created with us. 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.

1:11:03It'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. What are some other devices beyond those that nothing makes that you sort of deeply admire or think there's something really interesting or creative about? I like Porsches. Yeah? Yeah. It's just beautiful, iconic. Even though the design language evolves over time, it's still very distinctively them.

1:11:45I feel like in consumer electronics, we're kind of in a bad era. There's not much that I like. right now. 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 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 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 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.

1:12:50But 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 fail. But let's see them as experiments. So we're also going to be on this journey. 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 believing this will definitely always work and then putting all the chips on that.

1:13:32And if it doesn't work, it becomes quite hard to turn things around. Do you see the smartphone as 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 the glasses or to something else? 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.

1:14:16But 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 I'm excited to explore some of that. I don't really know what it will be. We'll take a research approach. You said humanoids and EVs? Yeah. Do you feel like there's still a lot more to be done in that category that we haven't seen yet? I think EV is more mature than humanoids. The thing that remains to be done is around autonomous driving, robotaxis, and also the integration of the operating system between all the devices, including the phone and the car.

1:15:01Right now, they're all different ecosystems, apart from CarPlay and Android Auto, but it's not a seamless experience yet. Yes. And so if you sort of graduate through the steps like Genghis Khan, you'll go through maybe some glasses, an EV, a robot, and a BCI. Maybe, based on what I know today. But as I learn, maybe the idea changes, roadmap changes. 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 how maybe that influences how you think about what you're building. In periods of my life when I was down, I took to philosophy quite a lot.

1:15:51Both, I think Stoicism had a big impact on me. And then I also, I think there was a book that Steve Jobs read on Zen Buddhism. I read that book. It was pretty interesting. So I guess the common thread is more just to be more relaxed about things and 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. Well, let's wrap up with maybe two sort of philosophical or thought experimenty questions. Oh, by the way, in middle school, philosophy was the class where I paid the most attention.

1:16:39Ah, interesting. That's great that your middle school had philosophy. 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? 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. If you could assign a book to everyone on earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign? Philosophically, I don't really like to force people to learn because I think it's okay to not learn.

1:17:21You'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 don't want to do it like it's up to you you think learning is totally morally neutral 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 even if i you know buy a very expensive course for you you're still not going to learn yes so i don't know what book um should people read whatever makes you happy i read a book on provence like living the good life in provence that was pretty relaxing yeah yeah amazing well uh that feels like a great place to end i'm really glad we had this chance to chat and i think what your building is extremely cool.

1:18:23And I can't wait to watch what happens next. Awesome. Thank you for the opportunity. 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.