How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just 2 Years | Main Function

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Today, on The Main Function, we're hanging out with Carl Pei, the founder of Nothing. He built a smartphone company that launched two years ago and in those two years, they've gotten to $600 million in annualized revenue. So we're going to talk about that and a whole lot more. Let's get started.
So, why don't we start right at the top? For someone who runs a smartphone company, you're really young, actually. What was your journey into tech and into making smartphones specifically?

**Carl Pei** (0:48)
I was a big gadget fan when I was a kid. I think I was probably one of the first people in Sweden to have the iPod. And I was definitely the first among my friends to get the iPhone. And back then, the iPhone was a US exclusive with AT&T, and I had to get a US friend to buy it for me and pay a cancellation fee to AT&T, ship it to me, I had to jailbreak it to be able to use it.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:10)
How old were you when you first held the iPhone 1?

**Carl Pei** (1:13)
First iPhone was probably 18, maybe.
And those early Apple products were super inspiring for me. And unfortunately, the iPod that I got broke just a week after the warranty ended. And I was very young at that time, so I couldn't really afford another iPod. And I got kind of pissed off because like after one year and it broke. So one time when I was visiting relatives in China, we went to the electronics market and we bought a MP3 player from a brand called Meizu. I'm like, wow, this is really cool. Like I didn't know China could produce good quality electronics. So I got that. Sound quality was great. The design was beautiful. And I created a fan community around this brand. We were profiled a couple of years later in Los Angeles Times. And then the company was really happy because there was this kid in Sweden being their spokesperson. And so they recruited me after uni.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:10)
Through the magic of the Internet.

**Carl Pei** (2:12)
Through the magic of the Internet. I was actually thinking about applying to YC at that time. So I was like, waying, okay, do I have to? Back then it was all about consumer Internet, right? Like it was a Facebook era. And I was like, should I write a pitch for YC or should I take this offer in China to be a part of the beginning of the smartphone kind of industry there? To be honest, I was just too lazy to write the pitch.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
Wow, there's only 12 questions.

**Carl Pei** (2:37)
So I took the offer that I had and I flew to China in 2011 and stayed there for 11 years. That's where I learned how to make hardware.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:47)
So how did you get in touch with OnePlus and you started off, I mean, from this experience of creating a brand and creating a community, it translated very directly.

**Carl Pei** (2:59)
I went to this company and I love their products, but their founder was kind of depressed because their competitors were doing better than them. So for the year I was there, he never showed up to work. He was still working, like doing some UI design at home, but he never showed up to the company. So I lost a lot of respect, if I'm honest. I'm like, this guy's probably not gonna make it if he can't handle setbacks. So I started looking and talking to other companies, and back then, OPPO was another company that I reached out to since I was already in the region. So I got recruited into OPPO, but then quickly, I heard that they wanted to create a new brand to target the online market, because OPPO was very offline. Offline distribution, offline sales channels.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:44)
I owned one of their DVD player slash karaoke machines before. Very cool.

**Carl Pei** (3:49)
There were new companies selling products online. They were really disrupting via D2C. So that was the original vision for OnePlus. How can we take the OPPO supply chain advantages, huge scale, low cost, good quality, and sell products online and be really disruptive? And initially, they were really focused on China. They built a management team around China. And I was a 24-year-old kid. So I was like, hey, I don't want to do this old thing anymore. I don't want to do this new thing. And don't worry about like China. Like I'll take care of everything outside of China. You don't have any team for that anyway. And they were like, yeah, OK, whatever. Like we're going to be focused on the China market.