The 'Stoic' Startup CEO You've Never Heard Of With $1 Billion In Smartphone Sales
Nothing founder Carl Pei is bringing his industrial-looking phones to the U.S. market. He knows cracking the market will take a historically-inspired approach.
The Upshot
Nothing founder Carl Pei once worried whether the public would like his startup’s smartphones. He doesn’t much anymore – even when reviewer Marques Brownlee tells his 20 million YouTube followers that Nothing’s new flagship phone, the Nothing Phone (3) is “ugly.”
“In the beginning, you take everything personally,” Pei says. “Now, it’s whatever – we know where we’re going.”
Nothing’s path hasn’t been typical. Pei chose to build the nearly five-year-old company in London, not Silicon Valley, in part to battle for talent not with “the next big shiny thing,” but with Dyson, the vacuum maker.
And while Nothing has sold millions of phones and audio devices to date, achieving $1.5 billion in lifetime revenue, most of that has come from India and Europe. When Pei visits the U.S., people guess the startup’s annual sales to be around $30 million, he says. In actuality, this year is projected to reach $1 billion, bigger by 33x.
Nothing’s raised $250 million in venture capital from firms like GV and EQT Ventures, but it’s also bought in users through crowdfunding raises; more than 8,000 shareholders are represented on its board of directors by a community member, a set up that Pei describes as “important” and also “kind of annoying”.
Then there is the founder’s vision for his startup, and the wider smartphone industry, in the age of AI. A longtime fan of Apple and designer Jony Ive, now attached to OpenAI, Pei says he’s excited for new AI “sensors” like wearable devices to hit the market; he’s still betting on the smartphone, however, to be the most important device for personal AI use in 10 years.
Pei draws inspiration from military history and the biographies of conquerors like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. By hyper-focusing on one taste-making target user – young creatives – he believes he has a chance to pull off a major land grab of his own with a generation of consumers not quite so dominated to Apple’s pull.