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
Carl Pei is the founder of Nothing, the consumer electronics company known for its distinctive transparent design language across smartphones and audio products. Before launching Nothing in 2020, Carl co-founded OnePlus, where he spent seven years helping build it into a major smartphone brand. But Carl’s instincts as a builder showed up much earlier. As a teenager, he taught himself to code by building Pokémon fan sites, all while moving between China, the U.S., and Sweden. That combination of early creation and constant change shaped a founder comfortable with uncertainty—and deeply motivated by questions bigger than products. Carl thinks often about time and mortality, is skeptical of early retirement, and believes creativity is humanity’s real advantage.
- Uploaded
- Uploaded May 26, 2026
- Queried
- Queried 0 times
Speaker A: You know, life is finite, so I just had a really tough time grappling with that idea. I still think about it quite a lot, actually. Speaker B: 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. Speaker A: Tech products are becoming more and more homogeneous, less and less dynamic. Every generation is pretty similar to its predecessor. Speaker B: 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. Speaker A: 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 whatever, whoever else is out there.
And I think that creative muscle is the key to unlocking that. Speaker C: 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 London-based 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 hypercompetitive market, and why Nothing's products have found such a strong customer base in India.
Want to learn more?
Ask a question