Nothing’s Carl Pei on Building a $1B Smartphone Company and Why He Thinks About Death Every Week

Life is finite. I just had a really tough time grappling with that idea. I still think about it quite a lot actually.

When I think about Nothing, and I think when a lot of people think about Nothing, they think about the transparent design. You guys have really become synonymous with this beautiful design language of the earbuds, the phones, tech products are becoming more and more homogeneous, less and less dynamic. Every generation is pretty similar to its predecessor.

People historically have maybe been keen to categorize you. You know, first you were sort of like they make earbuds, now it's maybe smartphones. But I sense that you think of what you're doing in a more capacious way.

If we think about like a more longer term future, say 20 year time horizon, we want to make tech fun to inspire human creativity. Longer term, I don't know how many years it'll take or if we're going to see it in our lifetimes, we should be able to discover other types of intelligent life. And hopefully by then, humans are pretty competitive with whoever else is out there. And I think that creative muscle is the key to unlocking that.

What smartphone do you use? An iPhone, perhaps? Maybe a Samsung or a Google Pixel? For a growing number of consumers, the answer is Nothing. That's the name of the Londonbased startup founded by today's guest, Carl Pei.

In our conversation, Carl and I explore what it takes to build an Apple Challenger in 2025, how Nothing's transparent designs have helped it to break through in such a hyper competitive market, and why Nothing's products have found such a strong customer base in India. We also talk about Nothing's multiple near-death moments on its way to a billion dollar plus valuation, Genghaskhan's managerial prowess, and why building AI specific devices is so difficult.

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Carl, I'm super excited to have you here and to chat about you and be here. There's so many places that I've thought about starting this conversation, but one thing that came up for me was when I think about Nothing, and I think when a lot of people think about Nothing, they think about the transparent design. You guys have really become sort of synonymous with this really beautiful design language of the earbuds, the phones, and you also talk a lot about technology sort of being fun again.

When I was researching your background, one of the things that I came across was that your first company was like building a website for Pokemon Game Boy walkthroughs. And I imagine at the age you were when you were writing that like the Game Boy was the translucent Game Boy. Is that where that like sense of fun comes from in the design language?

So first of all, it wasn't a company because I was 12. I didn't really know what a company was. I just learned to build websites about things I was passionate about and Pokémon was definitely one of those things. And actually all our products today internal code names are all Pokemon.

Oh, that's a Pokédex. But my first Game Boy was actually the translucent purple one. I didn't make that connection until now. So maybe it impacted me as in some subconscious way, but we never thought about it that way.

Okay. That's really interesting. Well, maybe the a good place to start is what Nothing is. Because I've heard you say in some other interviews that, you know, people historically have maybe been keen to categorize you. You know, first you were sort of like, hey, they they make earbuds. Now it's maybe smartphones, but I sense that what you're doing in a more capacious way.

I think it all depends on what time horizon we talk about. It's super fine to be misunderstood as long as you keep progressing and evolving. And it's not other people's fault that you're misunderstood. It's basically they look at what you do and therefore you are this thing and so it's normal. So we don't have any problems around that.

But I think if we think about like a more longer term future say 20 year time horizon we want to make tech fun to inspire human creativity and make tech fun part is kind of clear for people like tech products are becoming more and more homogeneous. Less and less dynamic. Every generation is pretty similar to its predecessor.

The inspired creativity part might still be a little bit confusing or vague to people. The way I see it is that as humans, one of our superpowers is creativity. Like both on an individual level, but also on like a species level. And by creativity, I mean the ability to solve problems.

We would love to create products that are not only fun but help this creative process. But it's not just kind of writing or art or design. It's solving problems on a broader sense. Like I see our software engineers as creatives as well because they're solving problems in novel ways through code.

If we're able to do this, I think that has a net benefit on society because if people can exercise and manifest their ideas in a in a better way, it should be a net positive longer term.

I don't know how many years it'll take or if we're going to see it in our lifetimes, we should be able to discover other types of intelligent life. And hopefully by then, humans are pretty competitive with whoever else is out there. And I think that creative muscle is the key to unlocking that.

Do you think a lot about the far frontiers of the world, space, intelligent life?

Both like very far but also like very in the present like minute things that are so minute that it annoys my team. I feel like I can zoom in and out quite easily. I was talking about these kind of things like very far things even in middle school and people around me couldn't really have a conversation with me. They just kind of wanted to talk about Pokemon or Naruto or whatever.

Where did that come from for you? Was that like, I don't know, science fiction a thing that fed into that? Just something that seemed to come naturally?

I don't know. I had a very hard time sleeping as a kid. I was always thinking about what else like what's beyond like I'm in this apartment or house in my room, but like then you have countries, then you have Earth, then you have planets. Is there an end to how much you can zoom out? I kept thinking about that.

Well, this is great because I actually do want to talk about some of your origins. I always think it's really interesting to hear how really impressive founders and entrepreneurs sort of the things that influenced them from early on that are maybe obvious and not obvious. Both of your parents were Alzheimer's researchers, right?

In this Twitter sort of you did like one of those things where you're you know I'm bored on a flight ask me anything question. You talked about I think what motivates you and the answer you came up with was death. And something that I've noticed with a lot of entrepreneurs is this like really acute sense of their own mortality.

I sort of wondered if having two parents that are actually like constantly thinking about degeneration of some kind like created that sensibility in you. Like where does that acute awareness come from?

I was like six or seven and I kept thinking about both from a space perspective like what's beyond but also from a time perspective what's beyond and it was very clear that life is finite. So, I just had a really tough time grappling with that idea.

And I even one time told my mom, "Hey, what like why did you give birth to me? Like now I have to die." Like that kind of stuff. But and I imagine like what if I could be a rock? A rock can't live for forever or actually not forever because once the universe explodes then it's not there anymore. But I think none of that really makes sense as a grown-up. But I guess my mind was very active.

Then there was this Steve Jobs speech at Stanford where he talks about death as being the best dimension of life and looking himself in the mirror every day to ask himself, you know, if this was the last day I would be alive, would I still do these things that I'm about to do today? I still think about it quite a lot actually. Like a couple times a week I wake up in the middle of the night and be like, "Wow, life is finite. I'm already, you know, 36."

Me, too. Oh, nice. Yeah, time is it's taking and like, oh, I still got to do all these things and how much time do I have left? So, it keeps coming up.

36. Do you feel like you're at par of what you expect for yourself? You know a little behind where you where you want to be given what you expect you know further than you you know have you made better use than you'd hoped or or not yet?

I think I'm pretty at peace with where things are and I think maybe that's a theme for people in their 30s. I don't know what your experience is. Yeah, I think that's right. But when I was younger, when I was 17, I told myself I need to be able to retire by 25. So that didn't happen.

Or you maybe realized like actually retirement would be like totally miserable and you would just do exactly what you're doing.

I also say that to comfort myself like if I retired I would still do the same thing cuz now it's I'm having fun and just like traveling going to luxury hotels and resorts and eating you know Michelin star restaurant food and drinking great wine that will get boring pretty quickly.

I think I remember actually this was this was from researching you. You did sort of try and do that for like 10 days after leaving the company before Nothing, right?

I worked there for 7 years and I was only 24 when I started. That was like my 20s and just kind of gone in work and we worked like six days a week for most of the time. I felt like I had done a lot career-wise, work-wise, but what if I could to take like half a year off, travel the world?

It sounded like a really good idea, but it just got really boring after a while. Like after a week, I was like, "Wow, this is the same thing over and over again." Like wake up, figure out where to have dinner, go to the pool, read a book. And I felt this I felt super stressed actually. Being in that environment. It's like time is ticking and I'm just doing nothing. So for me it's it's it's more relaxing to work than to be on an extended holiday. I didn't know it at the time, but a week later I I found out.

I understand that. I think I can do I could probably do it longer than 10 days. I I suspect, but not that much longer. I think once you do a few days by the pool, you do sort of hit a point where you're like, "Okay, you know, what's next?"

You grew up sort of between Sweden, the US, and were you were you born in China?

I was born in China, left when I was four, moved to the States for two years, and then to Sweden. And the two years in the States sounded like they were like quite formative in a way. And maybe maybe in hindsight. So, we lived in Staten Island. I didn't know that it was not the best place when I was a kid, but now as I've grown up, people have told me, "Wow, that's a really rough place." But I don't have a lot of bad memories.

I remember the only bad memory is like an American kid maybe two years older than me. It's like very big. It was sitting and he was sitting on me. That's kind of the only thing I remember.

Oh gosh, that was bad. Yeah, that doesn't sound great. Yeah. And I imagine also probably you're an unusual kid in in almost any environment given the things that you were thinking about, but I imagine if I had to pick a few places on Earth that maybe especially might not be filled with young kids who are thinking about the far future, Staten Island might be a good choice.

Maybe. But actually, my personality was very different. I was very talkative and very extroverted. Oh, really? So my parents had to go to school and sit with the with a teacher and hear about how talkative I was disruptive I was in class. But then when we moved to Sweden maybe because I was like moving around too much and I didn't know the language back then I became more quiet.

And that sort of stayed with you or now do you find yourself somewhere in between?

I'm in between now. I'm like this what is called MBTI. Oh, the Myers breaks. Yeah. I'm kind of in between on introverted and extroverted. It changes depending on the day.

Oh, really? Okay. I think last time I did it, I was an INTJ. Yeah, I'm I think I'm I or ENTJ as well. Oh, nice. Yeah. I can't I can never tell how much I should put stock in it at all, but it is sort of interesting to like push against, right?

There was a few articles when I was reading about your background where they talk about how you as a child were like very aware of the atmosphere you're growing up in Sweden but also like the amount of growth and yeah the speed of of sort of economic growth in China and the way these articles are written it almost presents it as if that's like a totally normal thing for a kid to be aware of. I'm curious like how that actually was on your radar that you were sort of like, hey, something's very different happening in China that is not part of my world here in Sweden.

I think you would see it in the press. Like I went to school every day and on my way to school, we had this free newspaper that we can read during the commute and you would see news about the growth of economies around the world. So back then, China came up pretty often. And then, you know, we would speak about it at the dinner table. So, it was always kind of a theme like, hey, there's a lot of growth happening. And I just got really curious about it.

Were you going back to China to see family in the summers or not really?

Like maybe once every 2 3 years. Yeah. But that was in a very kind of controlled environment going going from the airport to the to whoever relative we were visiting and I didn't really get to explore it on my own.

Then it sounded like you probably missed a you jumped through a few years of school because you left high school at 15.

I left high school at maybe se maybe 17 Okay. Yeah. So or 16 something like was that when you went you sort of then went to go live in China for a period of time to sort of understand what was happening there economically.

So back then so after that Pokemon website when I was 12. I just kept making a lot of websites. That's where I really wanted to learn how to make money online.

Was that the first way you made money online? The Pokemon site didn't make any money but it got some traffic. But I created a bunch of other websites as well. And the big the first like real money I made looking back it's not a lot but I sold Naruto like another anime website for $4.2,000.

Oh wow. For like a 15-year-old that was a lot of money. Totally. And back then money was worth more than now. So I was always really interested in business and you know having heard all the news about the Chinese economy growing I just wanted to go and see it for myself. Like really see it for myself. explore without my parents being there. They were super worried like what's your plan? Like do you have a 12-month plan? Where are you going to be every month? What are you going to do? But I I didn't know how to make a plan. Like I'm just going to go and explore. You know, I haven't been there. So, how can I make a plan? So, I didn't make a plan. I just went and met people and started doing stuff.

So you arrive in GuangDong when you were se 17 or so with just, hey, I'm gonna see what this is like on the ground and and what I can do being

And there in the city I was in back then, Bel Juhai. It's not a big city. There was a electronics mall. So I just kind of went to the mall every day to see what what the new gadgets were and started haggling on the price. I bought a few for myself to test them out. Then I started selling them, like exporting them.

I didn't know how to make a start a company. I didn't know how to do international bank transfers. I literally went to the ATM with my Swedish bank card and withdrew a bunch of cash. So, I was wearing shorts cuz it's pretty hot there. You could see me like with a huge bulging pockets full of cash full of money going to the computer market haggling and buying stuff carrying boxes to my apartment.

Then I would shoot videos like like unboxing videos and tutorial videos. This is how the product works like these are all the features and those videos were the main sales material when I was selling them on eBay and later on my own websites.

So, you already sort of had some of that marketing sensibility that, you know, I think you see a lot with Nothing. You sort of were aware that, you know, there's there's going to be these, you know, these different sales collateral that I need to include.

And I guess in hindsight, I really put my money on the line, right? Like if it didn't if I bought all this stuff and I couldn't sell it, then I'm pretty screwed.

As part of this same Twitter AMA, someone I think asked you your favorite entrepreneur and you said Genghaskhan, which I thought was a really interesting answer and speaks to a sort of level of ambition. Were you a really competitive kid?

Maybe even the opposite. Looking back, I'm I was probably quite an annoying kid. I was very dismissive of everything like oh you this this this lesson is very boring. Oh if you want to get good grades all you have to do is raise your hand and ask like two three questions every lesson and then you stand in line after the lesson to pretend to be interested in the class. So I kind of saw the you saw through it saw the game. And I just didn't didn't choose to do it. That was my like thinking back then. It's kind of immature but so not competitive. I didn't really care about my grades and I think in high school my grades were not very good.

In Sweden you have to there's no test like SAT, right? It's it's your every course has a grade and then you average it out over three years. So I was about to graduate. I'm like wow I got to shape my grades up. And I only kind of focused in the last two weeks both by studying hard and trying hard but then there were also like hacks. We took some teachers out for drinks and that gave us a better relationship with the teacher and kind of helped grease the the wheels a little bit.

So I don't know how to summarize it. I'm I was more kind of more arrogant kid I think. And I spent a lot of time doing my own websites and not going to school and playing games. I would kind of So, I would leave first and then my parents would go to work, then I would just circle back home and be on the computer the entire day.

Then that you'd be they'd come home after you were supposed to be back from school anyway, so no one's the wiser, right? That's so funny. What happened while you were in China such that you reached a point where you were like, "Hey, it's fun to export electronics, but actually this isn't going to be my life's work."

My parents didn't like it. They're like, "Hey, you don't have a degree. You don't you're not going to university. What you're doing now is just like a small thing. It doesn't really matter. It's it's not serious. Why don't you go to school?" Just just kept repeating that. And yeah, maybe they're they're right.

So and it just happened that the best business school in Sweden they were open opening up a new course and very few people knew about the course. So my grades wouldn't have gotten me into the main course but it got me into this new course because it was the first year the program ran and there wasn't enough competition.

But in the end, it sort of sounded like it was probably not the right way to spend your time anyway because you didn't seem to think too highly of it as a course, right? It didn't prepare you for the future from the sounds of it.

But I do think it was good to get some structure. Cuz if I had continued just selling stuff online, maybe the ambition level would have kind of plateaued after some time. But getting some structure in like the real world might have been good in hindsight.

I was quite disappointed in in that school cuz I was like, "Hey, this is the the best business school one of the the best in Sweden, one of the best in Europe, one of the best in the world. If I study here, I'll I'll be well equipped to face the future." And back then, my the three big trends that I saw that I saw in business was the rise of e-commerce. This was 2007 2008 2008 e-commerce was growing 2008 I think it was 10% of total retail already and you could see like a pretty high kagger high growth rate the second thing was the rise of tech companies because back then if you looked at the inner brand top highest value brands in the world top 50 top hundreds all the new companies on that list were a tech company like Amazon and Google so I felt like that was, you know, a major trend. And then was the Chinese economy cuz I had just spent a year there. I could see it firsthand. You know, things were happening. I expected to learn something about these three topics, but 3 years later, we didn't touch upon them at all. So, I was like, "Hey, aren't you supposed to set up young people for a good future? Your business school, we should become business people. These are the main trends." Like but instead we learned like very old things like I think still good foundations like statistics, macroeconomics, microeconomics but what about the future?

It was interesting to me that you spent sort of three years going through that program and then you you seemed to drop out like almost at the very last moment before you would get your degree. And it made me wonder, you know, are you do you consider yourself a really stubborn person in some way or was there some principle that you sort of felt like, you know, this wasn't valuable to me, so I I almost don't want to get the diploma almost for the sake of it because pragmatically at that point almost you're like, well, I've I've, you know, there's almost some amount of sunk cost. I should just finish it out. But something about that didn't make sense to you. I I haven't found the right words. Like, is it arrogance? Is it self-belief?

It maybe both, right? Maybe you know it echoes back to when I was in middle school like not really respecting the system university it was also like I I just always believed that things would work out sooner or later why do I need this and then to the arrogance part was like if I become famous the school shouldn't get credit because you didn't teach me anything so like I it shouldn't say that I graduated from this And then also laziness. I played a lot of League of Legends during uni, missed a lot of class, and I told myself, you know, if the school didn't teach me anything, they shouldn't get credit. But I was actually just playing computer games.

After university, you sort of have this seven-year spell at OnePlus, which we sort of briefly touched on. And, you know, it's such a, I'm sure, formative experience, you know, put you in the the world of smartphones and and consumer hardware. When you look back on that period, what were sort of the most, I don't know, formative lessons that you then had to bring into Nothing?

I was a really bad people manager really. Why? I mean, I had never done it before and as a team grew, it just became more and more difficult for me to navigate and I gave myself a lot of for it. Like, why are you so bad at management? Why are you so why don't you know how to do this? But I think in hindsight, it's fine. Like you're you're 24, 25, of course you're going to be a band manager. You need to pick up. These are like real skills you need to pick up over time and you need training. You need to learn. I think that was like the big thing for me. I I always beat myself up for being a bad manager.

I think another thing we really cared about was the product. Because we were also known back then for like being great at marketing and cuz we had like a system where you had to be invited to buy the phone and that that got viral. We generated like a billion dollars in sales just through you know userto- user imitations. But we always reminded oursel that it's all about the product. Like if you're if you create all these high expectations and you hype it up and you don't deliver, then nobody's going to trust you anymore, where are you going to get, you know, the future growth from? I think that's something that's stuck with me since then.

On the management piece, clearly there is so much that you know is a skill to be learned from that. What were the the parts of it that I don't know weren't obvious to you back then but that have become more so over time?

There's so many things but I think maybe one core concept has been situational management. There's no oneizefits-all solution. It always depends on the situation. It depends on your situation of where you are in the company life cycle. Early stage, mid-stage, late stage very different. It's industry dependent. If we run a software company, maybe we would would shape it in a very different way. More flexibility, more freedom, higher talent density, but also more importantly like every person should be managed differently. One style doesn't really fit all. But when you're a beginner, you just try and just take what you learn from the books and just implement.

You've said that you quit on or around your 31st birthday sort of as a gift to yourself. What was the gift?

I thought the gift would be like some freedom. Freedom. You know, you you worked hard in your 20s. 30s, it's a new chapter and, uh, take some time off. Have a think. And time off for you was was those 10 days before it got too boring.

At that point, when you're, you know, I don't know where you went, Greece, Sardinia, Italy, whatever. I imagine a sort of you know white lotusl like stint and and did you know hey I'm gonna go back to smartphones consumer electronics or was it just like I can't you know I can't do this I I need to be building what I wanted to do thought about a lot of different things and so after that 10 days I went back to Sweden and started talking to entrepreneur friends and luckily the community is quite small and also quite friendly. So although I only knew one or two people but you know very soon I got to meet almost everybody. I think the only people I didn't meet were the King founders Kenny Crush.

Cuz I think they were in they had moved to London or something. And Clara I don't know just never never got around to to getting the intro or something but I met everybody else basically and I I was like just asking people how do you start a startup? Because OnePlus we didn't have to raise our own money and raising money was so strange to me. It seemed so strange like why would people give you a million bucks or like a couple million dollars. What if you lose all their money? Why would anybody take a risk like that? It just seemed very foreign. And this was 2020 5 years ago. But after speaking to all the Swedish founders communities, that's kind of how I started to get a feel of how how things work and how we structure how we face face things. And it was I remember that being a very confusing time as well because all of a sudden I worked in a more or less structured environment before. You kind of knew what you had to do but like raising money there were so many ways of thinking about it. Everybody had their own strategy depending on what kind of company they were building and how they what kind of values they had. So it's very confusing. A lot of new information like contradicting information. The first two weeks were like kind of brain fried feeling, you know. But eventually I found a strategy that works in our context and raise the seed round during during my time there.

I definitely want to hear about that strategy. But there was something when I was reading about this where in a in a bunch of places you were like people told me that my deck was bad and my deck really was bad. What was so bad about it?

It's like looks like a high school high school student made it. Really? Yeah. I wouldn't show it anymore. Oh, you should you should release it. I had a friend who said, "Hey, look, just go and speak. Don't show the deck. You'll get a better outcome." Like, I'm very I like people are direct when it comes from a good place. So, really appreciate that feedback. And that's how we kind of went about it. When when nothing IPOs or something like that, you should release that deck and and see how far you've come.

So, what was the strategy that made sense for you? Because it is a category that on the one hand is, you know, the biggest or one of the biggest consumer categories in the world, but on the other is all this competition. A lot of people maybe think there's not as much room for a for an insurgent. So, how did you sort of like put that those pieces together for the fundraising?

One thing we did was we only took founder money in the seed stage because my assumption was that this was going to be a very tough journey and I wanted people who had done similar or other things, complimentary things before so that when things get hard in the future, I could call them up and get some advice. Another thing we did was pretty controversial. We did a uncapped note. Really because this is hardware. Hardware is very capital intensive and I didn't want to dilute me and the team to like nothing. And like very quickly. So that got some push back. So I guess those were the things.

But I think now in a you know when we're in a more mature stage or growth stage it's not something we're actively thinking about but some of my friends are thinking about like uh new structures like what if they have this company but they want to start another company in parallel how should you do it like one key decision you make is whether you clone the cap table or not right if you clone the cap table you lose out a lot of the the equity y but it's a very fair thing to do because yeah, you're you're going to probably leverage some resource and your your own time plus some resource from the previous company. That's what I mean by like philosophical or values driven answers.

You decided to build Nothing in Europe and specifically in London. Why did that feel like the right place for this company when Europe has really not created many great consumer hardware companies in recent memory?

I spent 10 years in China. I saw firsthand how strong the supply chain and hardware engineering had gotten and actually a lot of credit should go to Apple because I don't know if you read the book Apple in China. Because they were manufacturing there and they had to bring up the capabilities of the ecosystem. So a lot of that, you know, what I saw back then was was work that Apple had done basically to level everything up. It was tough to get talent when it came to creative fields. So I wanted a change of scenery. Europe seemed to seem like a good place because in hindsight it's more like comfort because I know Europe a little bit better than the States. So the assumption was you know there should be a lot of creative talent in Europe that we couldn't find when I was living in China and if we find these people and we add the Chinese supply chain efficiency to the equation it would be a tough company to compete against it would be hard for a purely you know Silicon Valley company to get the same efficiency and we're seeing that by the way and it's hard for a Chinese company to create a and they'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 you know good hub for AI. There's some great great AI talent. Later on we we saw that you know London is also a global financial hub so there's you know good finance talent. But the core idea is the same like 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 Jenghis Khan example like I think that's what what was really special about about how how he went on his entrepreneurship journey. He was a good talent scout. He was very he was very open-minded in terms of culture because back in the day the Mongolian culture was very tribal. So you only trusted your own tribe. You didn't you didn't even