How Nothing CEO Carl Pei is breaking barriers
Carl Pei, CEO and co-founder of consumer electronics company Nothing, doesn’t believe in labels. “I don’t like people who say that they are an ‘entrepreneur’ or a ‘disruptor’. I think your work should speak for itself," he says.
At 34, the Chinese-Swedish Pei is one of the most recognisable “entrepreneurs" in the world of consumer technology—the brains behind brands such as OnePlus, and more recently Nothing, which has sold millions of devices worldwide since its launch in 2021, thanks to an innovative design approach. We are meeting in Gurugram, Haryana, ahead of the launch of the company’s latest smartphone, the Nothing Phone 2a. Sitting across the table in a conference room in the Nothing office—at a WeWork co-working office space—Pei is dressed casually in denim jeans, a black T-shirt, a thin track jacket and white sneakers.
It’s a look you could call the modern-day CEO uniform. Instead of the usual tea-coffee, we opt for a fizzy drink, after which he describes how he went from creating websites on Pokémon games to running a business of exporting phones from China to the US and Europe, and dropping out of college to building two of the most coveted smartphone brands in the world. In a short span of three years, the London-based company has achieved significant milestones.
In its first two years, Nothing shipped 1 million products worldwide. In year three alone, according to an official Nothing Community post from November 2023, the company doubled this number to 2 million products. On 12 March, Nothing sold 60,000 units of the Phone 2a in the first 60 minutes after it went on sale in India.
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