Watch the latest episode of CRED Curious

People ‌start companies to pursue ambitions and leverage newer opportunities. Well Carl Pei has a better reason - he was not entertained! Did you know that the famous OnePlus tagline “Never Settle” is Pei’s brainchild? 

In the latest episode, of CRED Curious Kunal Shah and Carl Pei talk about what entrepreneurship looks like in the roaring 20s, building high-performing teams in startups, what makes powerful brands, and choosing the right problem to solve.

But how simple is it to launch a business in an already competitive environment? How can our ideas be original and what does it take to make the perfect team? If you too have pondered over building your own company from scratch, the new episode of CRED curious will answer all your queries.

From Nokia to Nothing phone and from a college dropout to Forbes 30 under 30, Carl Pei has vast knowledge of the world of tech and what it takes to be an entrepreneur.Nothing Phone, launched amidst the peak of the pandemic, is taking on the mobile giants with almost no marketing budgets. Less than two-year-old London-based smartphone manufacturer founded by the 32-year-old is on a mission to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future.  

Here are the excerpts from the episode -

1. The Story behind the name “Nothing”

While coming up with a long list of names for the phone,  Pei’s sister kept rejecting every possible title and that's how the name ‘Nothing’ was decided. Reminiscing back, he shares, “My teammates and I were brainstorming many names and my little sister hated them all. In  her early 20s, she belonged to a different generation altogether. So at one point, I just kept rambling names, and she kept on calling them cringe. That's when I thought - Okay, I'm just gonna call it Nothing. How about that?”

2. When asked whether not starting with a phone was a conscious strategy or a spontaneous business decision?

In this segment, the duo dive into the genesis behind important decisions. Kunal asks Carl why he did not start with a phone, but rather with headphones that belonged to a lower price point?

Carl Pei opined, “I think we realized where we are. A lot of us came from enormous companies with a lot of resources not just in terms of money, but also supply-chain resources which are very important for  creating hardware products. If we consider this a jungle analogy, a lot of us were lions. But now we were starting from scratch and it was important to acknowledge that we're not lions anymore. We are now ants, who need to start from the bottom of the food chain. So if we tried to create something really complicated from day one, it would have been really hard and would not have gotten very far.”

He also added, “In the past 10 years, everybody who tried to make a phone failed. For instance, you had a Razor Phone, you had an expert, Andy Rubin, raising $330 million, but failed to gain  traction. There was also a supply chain crunch for semiconductors because of COVID. Hence, we realized that we have to start from the bottom and then do the right thing for a desired end. So we chose to start with headphones, as it was a fast-growing category and much more simple to make.”

3. The initial phases of the Nothing phone and what Carl Pei is most afraid of!

Carl Pei mentions the pressure of creating hit products. A lot goes on in the mind of the Nothing creator as he says, “Every product we build has to be a hit because that's how our industry functions.  I think Nothing phone has gotten a tremendous amount of buzz all over the world. We were at Flipkart earlier today and broke a lot of their records as well.  We received tons of searches, and that feels great. But the actual test is the first couple of weeks when you initially ship the product and people start receiving it. When you have roughly 1000s of consumers using the product and we await feedback. We can’t help but ask, Do they love the product? If they love the product, will they tell their friends about it? Are we in the safe zone sales wise? But now that we have reached a middle period, there’s a lot of excitement. A lot of people have bought our product and a lot of phones are still on the way to the customer. So internally, within the company, we're collecting a lot of feedback, especially on the software. We keep pushing updates and keep wishing the phone can be something consumers will come to love.”

4. A take on rationality and life philosophy 

Carl Pei expresses his metrics to life hacks and control over his emotions.  He says, “I have been so busy working that I haven't given philosophy much of a thought. However, one school of thought that's helped me tremendously is stoicism. It's important to not avoid emotions, but learn to remain rational in order to enjoy life much more. The things that can affect you, impact them, the things that you can't forget about them.” Adding an example to his belief, he further shares, if most of our pain in life comes from other people, we need to accept that as a fact, and choose not to be annoyed by them. Likewise, when you're walking on the street and a dog barks, you're not going to be annoyed at the dog because it's in the dog's nature to bark. Similarly, it's in many people's nature to be annoying and we need to just accept that.”

The CRED Curious series aims to bring insights from the best minds to the viewers ‌to enable a better life. CRED Curious has previously featured personalities from various fields of work, including, Nithin Kamath (founder Zerodha), Anand Gandhi (filmmaker and entrepreneur), Paras Chopra (founder and Chairman - Wingify). Subscribe to the CRED YouTube channel for upcoming sessions.