A Conversation with Nothing's CEO and Co-Founder Carl Pei

Carl Pei, CEO and co-founder of Nothing, sat down with Axios reporter Nicole Cobbler at SXSW 2026 for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of consumer technology, Nothing's mission, and where the industry is heading. Pei opened by tracing his motivation: he grew up inspired by iconic hardware like the Sony Walkman, the first iPod, and the first iPhone, and became increasingly disheartened as the industry consolidated into a handful of giants whose defensive strategies produced incremental, predictable updates. "Every year the battery gets a little bit better and the camera gets a little bit better," he said, arguing that creativity left the industry when small, risk-taking companies gave way to dominant platforms. Nothing launched in late 2020 with a mission to "make tech fun again" and to inspire the next generation of creatives — but only after being rejected by every contract manufacturer when it tried to build a smartphone first. The company pivoted to wireless earbuds (300 million units sold globally per year), shipped 600,000 units of its first product, earned supply-chain trust, and used that track record to enter the smartphone market.

A major theme of the conversation was Nothing's design philosophy and marketing strategy. Pei described partnering with Teenage Engineering — a Swedish creative studio whose co-founder Jesper also directed much of the TV advertising Pei watched as a child — as the unlikely creative foundation that allowed Nothing to build a world-class internal design team, including the former head of design at Dyson and, more recently, British Apple designers. The company created a design book — part mood board, part prototype — before building any products, explicitly rejecting the internal design-competition model in favor of a shared creative language. The result: surveys consistently show design is the number one reason customers choose Nothing. On marketing, Pei framed the challenge as arbitrage — finding more efficient channels than Apple and Samsung before they flood them. Early success came from systematic briefing of tech reviewers; as tech media traffic declined, Nothing shifted to short-form video and generated approximately 800 million organic views in 2024. He recently hired Charlie Smith, former CMO of Loewe (the LVMH-revived Spanish luxury brand that grew from €400 million to €1.8 billion in six years), as Chief Brand Officer, citing alignment on Gen Z targeting, design-forward identity, and TikTok expertise. Nothing's average user age is 26, the youngest in the consumer hardware industry.

Pei offered pointed views on AI in hardware. He criticized companies that add AI as a badge rather than an ingredient: "Saying the phone has AI is like saying it has a display. What are you actually doing with it?" Nothing's concrete AI bets include Essential Apps — a platform where users describe an app in natural language, AI generates it, and it deploys instantly to the phone, democratizing software creation — and Essential Space, an AI-organized personal capture layer triggered by a dedicated physical key. Pei envisions a future where the app paradigm itself disappears, replaced by an OS that understands long-term user intentions and proactively executes them. He argued that today's interaction model — lock screens, home screens, siloed apps — is essentially unchanged from Palm Pilots and PDAs, despite massive underlying technology advances. He also made a concrete claim about interface futures: voice input paired with structured screen output (not audio output) will be the dominant modality, since humans read faster than they listen.

On the US market and Nothing's broader expansion, Pei was candid about current limitations. The US team currently has just two employees, and Nothing has deliberately avoided US carrier negotiations for years. His US strategy leans on audio products (already the company's largest market by revenue, mostly paired with iPhones) as a beachhead before tackling smartphones — where Apple holds roughly 60% overall market share and approximately 90% among users 18 and under. Nothing is scouting retail locations in New York (with additional planned openings in Tokyo, London, and India) and is redefining the store KPI: rather than sales conversion, the target metric is the percentage of visitors who take and share a photo. A store opening in Bangalore drew a queue of 2,000 people. On the longer horizon, Pei said Nothing aims to be IPO-ready by end of 2028 but is not committed to going public — it is simply a financial optionality exercise. His stated north star is building "legendary products" and defining how humans and computers interact, potentially including novel AI-native form factors and a reinvented operating system that renders the current app paradigm obsolete.