Carl Pei: Reinventing Consumer Tech At Warp Speed

When he was just 12 years old, Carl Pei, the founder and CEO of Nothing, recalls sitting on his living room couch, eager to open a prized package. His parents had managed to bring home something nearly impossible to get in Sweden at the time: a first-generation Apple iPod MP3 player.

Wide-eyed with anticipation as he tore into the box, it turned out the device wouldn’t connect to his personal computer because Apple’s proprietary cables weren’t compatible. No worries. Undeterred, the young Pei ordered and installed a component to get everything working, and from then on, the experience was nothing short of magical. “I absolutely fell in love with gadgets,” Pei says.

That was also the year Pei learned HTML, began building websites, and sold ads on them once they reached scale. It was his first business venture and an early step on a career path that would lead Pei to co-found premium mobile phone maker OnePlus in 2013, cementing his reputation as a consumer electronics visionary. Seven years later, Pei left OnePlus to found Nothing.

The Beginning of Nothing, Carl Pei’s novel consumer tech brand

A London-based consumer technology startup focused on smartphones and audio products, Nothing is doing things differently in consumer tech, building phones, earbuds, and smartwatches that are hard to miss in a crowded market of look-alike devices. That approach has helped the 800-employee company attract considerable investment, establish offices across Europe, India, and North America, and sell millions of units in its first four years, generating more than $1 billion in revenue.

As part of our series on European startups, we sat down with Pei, now 36, to hear about the experiences that shaped his entrepreneurial spirit, the Nothing vision, and what it’s like building a global consumer tech brand from Europe.

Consumer electronics is dominated by powerful incumbents like Apple and Samsung. What did you think Nothing could bring to the table?

Carl Pei: This is a huge industry with categories that sell hundreds of millions of units a year. Smartphones alone account for about 1.2 billion units annually. But those categories have become increasingly iterative and boring. As consumer tech companies grow, they often focus on protecting themselves from disruption rather than driving innovation. I felt that if no one tried to challenge that, the category would stay boring forever.

What’s Nothing’s guiding vision, and how does it set you apart in consumer tech?

CP: We want to be the most loved technology company for the next generation. Kids who are growing up today don’t really have many technology companies to look up to, as I did. So, our mission statement is to make tech fun. To inspire human creativity.

You’ve said you don’t chase trends for the sake of chasing trends. How do you know when a technology is worth pursuing?

CP: We put the user experience first. It’s easy to build something. But if that thing you built isn’t easy to use, it’s not that valuable.

The big trend right now is AI. Everybody’s talking about it, and you see AI phones and features everywhere. I thought about banning the word AI within the company. Instead, we should be talking about how you can use AI as a tool or a technological ingredient to improve the user experience. How are you helping? Under which scenarios is it better? Or are you just saying you have AI features and taking the easy way out without putting real thought into describing how it creates a superior product experience? Product experience determines if a technology is worth chasing.

You’re building a global consumer brand from Europe. Why Europe?

CP: Europe has a lot of creativity, especially in London. It's very international, and the talents here are very diverse. I worked in China for 10 years in the hardware space, and while the engineering and supply chain talent there is strong, I couldn’t find the creative people I needed, which is why I moved to London.

Five years later, I think that worked. We have one of the best industrial design teams in the world. And we’re now able to attract people from Silicon Valley back to London – British designers who want to move back home.

London’s also a great place for AI talent. This is where DeepMind was founded, and there’s a deep bench of expertise here. As we transition from pure hardware to hardware and software, with AI becoming a vital part of that, being based here in Europe is playing in our favor.

Conversely, what challenges does Europe present for startups like yours?

CP: One is the culture. I think American culture is more optimistic and ambitious. The other challenge is learning from peers. I can’t find as many peers here as I do in the United States. A lot of startups here are smaller, so the topics I might discuss with their founders are often different from the conversations I might have when meeting with friends in the U.S.

As Nothing expands, how do you stay true to your vision in different countries?

CP: People around the world share commonalities. We see that in our global community. We all like products that look great and are easy to use. Of course, there are cultural-, age-, and income-related nuances to consider. For instance, when you talk about age, I grew up when Apple was a beloved brand. For someone growing up now, Apple might seem like a big corporation. They don’t have the same affinity for Apple that I had. So, we focus more on that age group than on people like me. We also operate in different countries with different economic strengths. So, we have different price points to fit budgets in those places. But none of this changes the vision. We try to make product experiences as perfect as possible. Everybody here knows what we’re working toward.

Can you share a leadership lesson that shaped your entrepreneurial approach?

CP: The biggest lesson is that I am responsible and have to keep improving myself at a fast enough pace for the company to succeed. I’ve realized that I’m often the rate limiter for the company (the factor that determines how fast it can move). How well I understand something or how developed my mental model is around a topic, directly affects how far the company can go.

Early on, I had a strong intuition about marketing, which helped us go from zero to one. But going from one to 100 was different, and I learned that I either need to learn quickly or bring in people who could help evolve our thinking.

Looking 10 years ahead, what does success look like for Nothing?

CP: Success would be having the ability to give back to the industry. Today, we make earbuds, headphones, smartphones, and smartwatches. We didn’t invent those categories. They already existed. We’ve applied our own take to them and targeted consumers who connect with our innovations and designs.

So, what I mean by giving back is going further and inventing one or more new product categories ourselves. That means applying technology in novel ways to genuinely improve people’s lives, creating a category that becomes large and meaningful enough to invite participation from others. Doing that would be one of my greatest sources of pride and joy.

Carl Pei is the co-founder and CEO of Nothing, a London-based consumer tech company on a mission to make tech fun and inspire human creativity. GV led Nothing’s Series A financing in 2020, and has participated in their subsequent investment rounds. GV Managing Partner, Tom Hulme, and CEO and Managing Partner, David Krane, are board observers. Today Nothing is the fastest growing smartphone and consumer audio brand globally — and the only new smartphone business to emerge in the last decade.