Nothing
Nothing’s here.
January 9th, 2007 Macworld convention and Steve Jobs is presenting,
“…smart phones are definitely a little smarter, but they actually are harder to use. They’re really complicated. Just for the basic stuff a hard time figuring out how to use them.
Well, we don’t wanna do either one of these things. What we wanna do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use.
This is what iPhone is. OK?
So, we’re gonna reinvent the phone.”
and they did.
Part I — Tech has become predictable 👀
When Steve Jobs introduced iPhone for the first time at Macworld Keynote address it was “reinventing-the-wheel” moment in tech. I mean… I wasn’t there to see it (I wish) but I could fathom the influence of the moment as it’s so ubiquitous, even today. The original iPhone was said to be a generation-defining-product-that-comes-once-in-a-lifetime. In Pop-culture, videos of this keynote is often quoted as a “culturally-significant-movie” because it didn’t just paint a new picture, it simply flipped the canvas.
But where do we went wrong?
Every year, almost every brand hosts a highly produced, heavily marketed annual event where the top executives take the center stage to announce their so-called “phone-of-the-year”. Slides with minimalist fonts on black background cruise in with vibrant images and jargonistic texts only to be followed by a cinematically shot product film introducing the most-advanced-never-seen-before-faster-than-light-ultra-pro-max-alien-tech-prodigy phone 😏.
But as soon as the rendezvous ends and hype cuts back, you slowly start to realise the phone doesn’t look and feel very different from its precursors. It doesn’t take you much longer to hit that the new phone is pretty much the SAME thing from last year, or even worse because now it looks like a copy, of a copy of a copy (No, we do not talk about Fight Club) for a new soul crushing price tag with little or trivial upgrades. It’s your old phone but with 100 new cameras and filters, petabytes and zettabytes of RAM and Storage, thinner bezels, and a new software update with cute icons. That’s it, that’s your new phone.
Yay! 🤦♂ ️
Yet the most dreadful fact? The phone loses most of its value within weeks of its launch and becomes culturally obsolete because the next upgrade has been announced.
You, after buying the phone on credit with a 36 months EMI plan:
How did we end up here?
Well, that’s a story for another day but now Let’s talk about Nothing. (again, no puns intended)
Part II — Here comes Nothing 🔴
Back in October 2020, when Carl left OnePlus, it was breaking news. Well, at least for TechCrunch.
Soon enough there was buzz around him starting his own venture. Even though it was low key but rumours were he was coming back to tech. Nothing was founded in October 2020 (which I got to know later) but there had been no public announcements yet. So while working in stealth mode, news broke out that Carl Pei has signed up Toney Fadell (the guy who invented iPod) as a seed investor for his next. This came out in December 2020.
But actually in early November, Nothing had raised $7 million in a private seed round from family and friends including Toney Fadell, Steve Huffman (CEO and Co-founder of Reddit), Kevin Lin (Co-founder, Twitch) and Casey Neistat (the OG YouTuber).
Soon enough Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED) made headlines in India for backing OnePlus co-founder’s next start up with an initial investment of undisclosed amount.
Carl had built quite a reputation for himself(since his OnePlus days) and it was evident from the investments that kept pouring in. Until now the team had already started working on the first product but no details went public. However, Pei being a Pokémon fan didn’t stop dropping subtle hints on Twitter about his upcoming start-up.
Trivia: The Pokémon on the left (Aipom) was the code name for the company’s first product.
On January 27, 2021, the company Nothing was officially announced.
and 12 days later,
Alphabet’s (Google’ parent company) VC arm Google Ventures(GV) puts $15 million as part of Series A funding in Nothing.
GV’s announcement created waves across the industry and brought the company into limelight of mainstream media. In another interview by Input Magazine, Carl revealed that the first product from Nothing will be a set of wireless earbuds.
Interesting.
But why would OnePlus’ co-founder go from selling Flagship killers to TWS ear pods?
Well this is just a theory but let’s do some maths(not really but okay). The global wireless audio market was estimated to be around $22 billion in 2019. TWS is one of the fastest-growing category (46 million units in 2018 to 1.2 billion forecasted units by 2024)in consumer tech with Apple leading the segment by a whopping 54.4% of market share in 2019. (source: iMore)
According to a report by Kevin Rooke, AirPods clocked in $12 billion in 2019 for Apple which is like 8% of iPhone’s total revenue. Sounds meh? Think again. That’s 8% annual sales of Apple’s most successful product ever which alone contribute 80% to the total revenue!
Still not impressed? Look at this chart 👇
To quote Kevin here, “AirPods make as much money as Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify *combined*.” 🤯
That’s like only one product from Apple Inc., just one.
The point is TWS is a huge market (estimated 80% CAGR from 2019 to 2022) with a sole market leader that too in a premium price segment. With no better options at competitive prices in the budget tier what else could be the best market to disrupt when you want to make a dent on the universe.
Makes sense? Great.
No? Well, I will leave it for you to decide. Now back to Nothing.
The next big development in the story came with Teenage Engineering — The popular Swedish company known for its unique consumer electronics especially in sound and music.
On February 24th, Nothing unveiled Teenage Engineering as its founding partner, with Tom Howard (Head of Design) and Jesper Kouthoofd (Founder & CEO) at Teenage Engineering as the visionaries behind Nothing’s product designs.
This was around the same time when I stumbled upon this video on YouTube:
“No notes, no blueprints, no maps to find our way back…, A giant reset button for all things innovation…We rethought everything and came up with — Nothing.”
I got curious.
Part III — Investing in Nothing 💵
Since I wasn’t(am not) very active on my socials I felt like I completely missed the band wagon on most of the developments until now but apparently, I wasn’t very late.
In early February 2021, Nothing website went live with a pre-registration window for early access to people who wish to be an investor in Nothing.
Atypical of a tech start-up this came out as a surprise, though crowdfunding is not a new concept and is quite popular in European start-ups but
why would a company, backed by such a stellar line up of investors go for crowdfunding when it can literally raise millions more from VC firms and institutions easily?
To build a strong community? 🤔 Maybe but I wasn’t very convinced. I was fairly impressed by the vision of the brand yet I didn’t want to jump the gun, I wanted to dig more.
I zoomed thorough all the, articles, blogs, tweets, even memes on Nothing but my first conviction came with a series of tweets on the community funding round.
Second time was when news broke that Nothing has acquired Andy Rubin’s(Creator of Android) Essential brand.
Essential was one of the brands I was looking up to in 2017 when PH 1 phone had just come into the market. It was different than others, looked promising but due to some unforeseen reasons the PH 2 follow up never came and eventually the brand tanked leading to its shutdown.
Now an intellectual property of Nothing, things look optimistic again for Essential core team.
NOTHING — /ˈnʌθɪŋ/
pronoun (not anything; no single thing.)
As quirky and silly it sounds to name a tech company ‘Nothing’, in this case it makes sense. When Nothing was announced, the vision was to create tech that looks, feels and lives like nothing. Instead of scaling up, the brand aimed at scaling down to be left with Nothing but Essentials (illuminati theme intensifies* 🔺 👁, hehe sorry). It wanted to clear the clutter and build products that improve lives without getting in the way of it.
We are living in a culture of excess. More devices, more screens piling up around us make our lives overwhelming, but as we slowly learn we realise that there is power in owning less. I have been hugely influenced by minimalism lately(thanks to Joshua & Ryan). It’s something that has changed a few courses in my life and when I think about tech, I believe it should blend in our lives seamlessly without adding much physical and mental weights.
Nothing aspires to find that perfect balance between art and technology where every gram and every byte live with purpose, and that should be the norm. We shouldn’t just buy things only to replace them with “upgrades” every year. We should own things that feel timeless, last longer and offer us value for yonks.
On March 2nd, 2021 I signed up as an investor in Nothing.
I was part of the community investment round on Crowdcube who processed the investment for Nothing UK.
The funding round set a new record for Crowdcube as Nothing became the fastest project to surpass $1 million via crowdfunding in Europe.
Sooner next week, Nothing announced its design principles, introducing “Concept 1”.
Concept 1 was a first expression of Nothing’s design principle showcasing the brand’s iconic transparent design that embodied its vision for tech that integrates efficiently and fades into background like nothing.
Inspired from a grandmother’s tobacco pipe, Concept 1 laid foundations for the Nothing’s first ever product: Ear (1)
On May 11th, 2021 Ear(1) was announced.
and 2 months later on July 27 2021, Ear(1) was officially launched via livestream on Unbox Therapy’s YouTube channel.
While a lot has been said and done, Ear(1) stands out as one of a kind product(from early reviews) that fortunately looks like Nothing.
Ear(1) goes live for general public on August 17th 2021 in 45 countries.
Till then, keep doing Nothing. 👋
