 Hi, Carl. How are you today? It's pretty good, I think. It's very cold here in Finland. It's cold in Finland? We're indoors now, so that should be fine. Or maybe I'm just weak. Maybe that's. So, Carl, as you heard, is the founder and CEO of Nothing. He will soon tell you about what Nothing is, but I found this kind of funny. I stole Carl's badge, so obviously the name of his company is Nothing, but I think the organizers here got kind of confused about Carl paying Nothing. So, they just removed it, and there's nothingness under it. That's kind of cool. That's why we named the company Nothing. Good. There will be a lot of funny situations that would arise from it. Logotype is just empty space. But what is Nothing? What is Nothing? I think it's a really funny name, but more seriously, it's also a vision for technology. I think technology in the future, it should be so easy to use and so seamless that it doesn't, it's not in your way anymore. It's everywhere, but nowhere at the same time. That's like long-term, but in the meantime, we're making products. We see some Nothing phones here in the audience. We're making smartphones. We have wireless audio products, and a lot more coming. Beautiful. And I kind of liked Benedict Evans on his speech before. He was talking about how smartphones kind of have entered the boring face. So, in a way, that's what you're combating, and that's the founding insight of Nothing. Exactly. I was super excited about technology when I was younger. I was a big Apple fan. I got the first iPod, the first iPhone, and the entire reason why I'm in this industry, I think it's because of the work that they did. It was super inspiring. And just lately, the last five years, 10 years, all these kind of trailblazing, small companies that were really innovative had gotten huge by now. And it just feels like the innovation is slowing down, it's getting really boring. I don't think it's just me that sees this. I think everybody sees this, Ben included. So, we wanted to do something about it. And if you look at our industry, it's just so tough to break through that there's not a single startup company apart from us. And in a way, it was almost like, hey, if we don't try, then who else is going to try this? And if we don't try, then this industry will remain boring for the foreseeable future. Let's rewind a bit, because you were here, I think, back in 2018, and then you worked for OnePlus, I believe. And you want to talk a bit about that journey? And then, obviously, you left OnePlus to set up Nothing. But let's talk a bit about the past, the OnePlus. Yeah, I think actually, this time in Helsinki, I met a lot of people who still use OnePlus. I think it became really popular here in Finland. I helped create the global side of that business, so everything international. I was really lucky because I got a chance to be a part of that journey starting from when I was just 24 years old. So, I learned so much being a part of that journey. But I think it got to a point where the company got really big and I just, I had a different vision for what the future would be like and there was no way of really influencing a larger company. So, in 2020, late 2020, we started a new company called Nothing. And, yeah, a slightly different vision of the future, but maybe the first couple of years still look quite similar. And what, I mean, when you left OnePlus, how many years did you spend at? Seven years. Seven years. Yeah. So, when you left OnePlus, you had the opportunity, I mean, you helped turn that company into huge success, obviously. And after that, you could have done whatever you wanted. And you decided to kind of go into the consumer electronics business. Yeah. I mean, I thought that I wanted to do some soul searching. I was planning a half a year kind of vacation because I had never taken time off. It was really hard to take time off when I was a part of OnePlus. But actually after a week, I couldn't take it anymore because I was just in really fancy hotels. You went to monastery for a week to find yourself. I went to south of Europe for a week, yeah. And then I went back to Sweden and just started raising money. And in the beginning, the pitch wasn't very clear. But over time, what we wanted to build got a lot clearer. And I, you know, we're still developing our strategies. We're still iterating. And, you know, here we are. It's beautiful. Should we look at some pictures? I mean, here's obviously a picture of you. What do we see here? This is me early days of nothing at the Teenage Engineering Office in Stockholm. And who are Teenage Engineering? Teenage Engineering is one of our co-founders. It's a bit strange. They're a company. They're not a human, but they're one of our co-founders. They've set the creative direction for the brand design, not just the products, but also the overall feel of the brand, including our something as simple as our retail experience. It's all, we want just one vision across all of it. The guy that runs Teenage Engineering, Jesper, I think he's like a generational creative talent. Like I've never worked with such a strong creative before. I think you also worked with him in your past career. Yeah. So really lucky to be on this journey together with them. We have another picture here. What are we seeing here? These are three of our products, the Ear 2, active noise-canceling wireless earbuds, phone 2, our latest flagship smartphone, and the ear stick. Wireless earbuds with a really interesting twist-to-open mechanism. And let's stay on this picture for a while and talk a bit about the consumer electronics or smartphone industry. New entrant, obviously. Some very, very big companies. A lot of startups have failed. What's different about nothing? I think you have to be hyper-pragmatic in this industry. It's very easy to get carried away. And when you get carried away and make a mistake, the consequences are almost irrecoverable. They're very expensive. So a lot of media would also ask us, hey, what's so special about your product? Is it just transparent? Did you just put some lights on the back of your phone? You know, in a way, being a startup company in the tech industry, you don't start off with technology. You need time and money, and you need to develop unique things for yourself. But in the beginning, it's true. Design is a really quick way to differentiate. And you need to be different from everybody else. Because where else? Why would you even be allowed to exist? Why would consumers even care about you if you're making the exact same product as everybody else? So I think our difference between us and the people in the last 10 years who have tried is that we're way more pragmatic about things. We do have a big dream. We do have a grand ambition and a vision to change the face of the tech world and how we use computers. But we also have a very detailed step-by-step plan. And not all the steps are super sexy or interesting. But we need to take that approach to eventually get to the bigger dream. And what do you think is next? Again, back to Benedict Evans' presentation just before this, talking about next frontiers and interacting with technology and so forth. What's your take? I mean, right now and in the future, and what are the steps that we need to take to go there? I think, so a lot of media would always ask, what's next? Is it VR? Is it a new form factor? And I've actually changed my mind because I've always said that the smartphone is going to be the dominant form of computing for the foreseeable future. But in the last three or four months, I think I changed my mind. I think there's a new computer on the horizon. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like or what it's going to be, but I think we've all felt that what's going on in the world of AI is going to change the world in fundamental ways. And I think one of the most important products that's going to come out of this revolution is the new primary computer that humans use. It went from mainframes to a PC on everybody's desk, to a computer in everybody's pocket. But I think something else is coming in the horizon. And I've been thinking about very deeply about how we can be a part of this and also not fail. How can we really win? I think one approach is to just decide right now what is it going to be and go make it, spend four years R&Ding it and then releasing it onto the market. But I think that's a too high risk of approach, too high chance of failure. I think for us it begins with building strength. We were three years old now and today we're a lot stronger as a company than we were before. And the strength is in the team. We have a lot more engineers than we had before. So a lot more of our engineering can be done in-house versus outsourced to others. It's in the supply chain. Supply chain is really tough for this industry. Now we're working with some of the best suppliers and the cost gap between us and larger companies is steadily decreasing. The cash flow gap, like the payment terms are steadily improving. So what are all the capabilities that we can keep on getting stronger at whilst we explore internally what that new form factor could be? In business there's a concept called late mover advantage. So we're trying to lay out the different pieces to then be able to leverage a late mover advantage. And between now and when we do so, there will be a lot of teams out there who throw their products on the wall to see if they stick. And a lot of respect to them, but we're going to be watching and learning from that to see what works and what doesn't. And as soon as we find a feeling of something that might work, we can go all in. So you're building the foundation to create the future anyway? That's probably what I would... Or somebody told me last night at dinner, it's like we're playing checkers, or we're playing Go and not chess. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I don't know how to play Go, but I'm just nodding. I don't know either. Great, great quote though. So the foundation to create the future, let's talk a bit more about sort of what you have built. You launched phone one, was that last year? That was 21, I think. 21. And then phone two, this year. No, that was 22. Phone one was 22 and phone two this year. Exactly. And also ear two that we see here. So how's this going? Like were you based? How many are you? How many price have you sold? We're headquartered in London, but we're quite international. Our theory is that there's great people everywhere in the world and people in different pockets around the world are good at different things. So when we built OnePlus, we were based in Shenzhen. And we had a great time building hardware out of Shenzhen, but we had immense problems to try and design really cool products and build brands out of Shenzhen because there wasn't the talent available. So this time around, we put some of the other functions like design, like our branding, like our finance in parts of Europe. And in the future, as we build our, we have more emphasis on our software, we might look to other parts of the world. So it's quite an international team. How many are you roughly? We're 530-ish people now. It sounds very big, but it's actually very small compared to our peer companies. But I think these things are just hiring people and having a team. That's just the function of spending money. I think the most exciting part is having the products into the hands of consumers. And now in total, we've done almost 500 million in revenue, shipping our products across 37 countries. I think that's probably the metric that I'm most happy about. It's pretty darn impressive. I'm in a company that is so young. I think we have another picture here. It's a queue. It's a line here. What do we see? Yeah, this is in London. We have a flagship store in London. It's kind of, it's not that clear, but you can see it on the right side. And this is for one of our product launches. So we're really happy that we're not just building a tech product, but we're building more like a cult brand that people really feel belonging to. So nowadays, even for Apple launches, the lines are getting smaller and smaller. And sometimes they're not even there. So it's really encouraging to see our community come out and support us when we have a new product launch. It's beautiful. So if you're in, this is in Soho in London. In Soho just next to the Supreme Store. So two lines going in two directions. On this day, there was only one line, and that was for us. It's beautiful. One thing that you clearly doubled down on early on was design, and I would say branding. Here's another picture that you could talk a bit to. But what's your take on it? And how do you do that in 2022, 2023, and 2024, which is coming up soon? Yeah, I think marketing, in a way, it's all about arbitrage. You just got to find the opportunities that you can leverage, where you have an advantage against other people. I'll give you one example. You know, when Facebook ads just came out, whoever were first to learn how to use Facebook ads made a lot of money because there was no competition. The bigger companies didn't know how to use Facebook ads. And then everybody learned. So now it's expensive. It's just like TV, just like out of home. So I think marketing is all about finding, at this given time, and your company and your situation, what can you exploit to your advantage? And we have so many disadvantages being a small company. We have to pay more for our components. We have fewer engineers. So how can we make some of these disadvantages into advantages? I think one of the areas that we've identified is why don't we just become a YouTube creator? Like a big brand like Samsung, they cannot be very real on YouTube. But we can. We don't have anything to lose. So over the last year, we've been launching YouTube content, not as a brand speaking to you like this is who we are and this is our product, but more like a native creator. I love, for instance, that you are in a very honest way, reviewing other smartphones, other audio products, even nothing knockoffs. That's one of my favorite ones when you're like listening to knockoff of your audio products and maybe not getting inspired, but at least commenting on it. I just wanted to know how could they sell the product for that cheap? Because we can't even build it for that price. But it's actually very bad inside. It's beautiful. So what are we seeing in this picture? So on the left side is Casey Neistat. He's the first guy that started to do vlogging on YouTube. And this is a screen capture from the Phone 2 launch. This is our launch event. It wasn't on stage. It was native YouTube content. And I went to New York to ask Casey, how do you do vlogging? Because I want to vlog the launch of the Phone 2. Can you teach me? You're like the OG of vlogging, so teach me how to vlog. So in this video, he teaches me how to vlog, and then I end up vlogging the launch of the product. And in this video clip, him and your team also forced you to go into Rollercoaster, which apparently you don't like. So that's some good YouTube content there if you want to see someone being scared for real. Yeah, that was, yeah. Let's forget about that. It's all coming back now, I think. I can sense. With a few minutes left, we have a lot of founders in the audience here. You've obviously been part of building OnePlus into what it is, seven years there. Now you're a few years into the nothing journey. And it tips to founders here who are thinking about building companies, maybe involving or including hardware. Yeah, when friends ask me, I kind of jokingly tell them that don't do it, if you're going to think about... It's a good piece of advice. If you're thinking about making a hardware startup, just don't do it. But it's only half joking because it is very challenging and there's very little margin for error. But I think if you're going to do it, then first of all, be really pragmatic about it. Don't take too much risk. One of the most common mistakes that people who make hardware make is that they overorder on the inventory. And I think it's way better to have less inventory and way more demand in the market. It looks like a very popular product versus having too much, having to discount, eventually losing money. I think more companies in hardware have died because of themselves ordering too much inventory than what their competitors did. I've invested in a few other hardware companies, Vario based here in Helsinki, for instance. But one thing that continues to amaze me is how complex it is to work with a supply chain, in many cases in other parts of the world. I think one of the things that you've done really well is to get into the supply chain and get top-notch, top-tier suppliers. How did you do that as a very young company? We were just very realistic about it. Like, why would suppliers work with you? You can kind of trick them with a pitch. But if they trust you and you don't deliver on the volumes, then they're not going to trust you again. And it was extra challenging for us because a lot of people had tricked them already. You had, you know, five or six different startups making smartphones with a big vision and big, great founders and great backers. And the factories were like, hey, we heard the story so many times. We supported these companies. We lost so much money. Like, why are you different? So I think we were just very realistic about it. We have to deliver volume. Like, when we built the year one, the first earbuds, we knew we had to ship this volume or else we couldn't get the support or the trust from the suppliers to make the next product. And now when we're in phones, we need to deliver volume. We need to scale up. Because we're still a tiny ant in the industry, right? Even if we do a million, two million a year, other people are doing 100 plus millions a year. Like, we're nobody to the suppliers. They're not going to make anything. You're nothing to the suppliers. We're nothing to the suppliers. They're not going to make money on us. So we need to show them a path of how we become 100 million plus annual shipment company and we need to actually deliver on those numbers. There's no shortcut in supply chain, I think. So the last question. You were here in 2018. Now you're here in 2023. When you're back here in five years in 2028, where are you then? What are you talking about then? That's a tough question. Five years is a long time. Hopefully we would have taken a good stab at the next computer. Looking forward to that. And that's a blinking zero. Thank you. Give it up for Colt A.