Carl Pei
Carl Pei is a Beijing-born entrepreneur raised in Sweden who co-founded the smartphone brand OnePlus with Pete Lau in 2013 and, after leaving it in October 2020, founded the consumer electronics company Nothing.
Contents6 sections
Key facts
Early Life: Beijing, the United States and Sweden
Pei was born in Beijing in September 1989, moved to the United States at the age of four and then to Sweden, where he grew up. After high school, drawn by China’s development, he spent a year there, going “to China just to see what was going on.”[1]
2010–2012Nokia, Meizu and OPPO
Pei worked at Nokia from 2010, moved to Meizu in 2011 and joined OPPO in 2012, spending his whole career in smartphones.[2]
He had run an online forum for Meizu’s international fans and was recruited by the company in 2011 to help with its international rollout, dropping out of the Stockholm School of Economics the same year.[1]
2013–2020Co-founding OnePlus
In 2013 Pei co-founded OnePlus with Pete Lau, then a vice president at OPPO. OnePlus’s first phone, launched in 2014, was sold only online and by invitation; the company later opened physical stores and dropped the invitation system.[2]
In 2019 Pei, aged 29, was named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list as co-founder of OnePlus; at the time the China-headquartered company sold phones in 38 regions including the United States, and the OnePlus 7 generated $144 million in sales within one minute of its release in China.[2]
Pei became OnePlus’s international face and helped build its community; after about seven years with the company, he left in October 2020.[1]
From 2021Founding Nothing
About three months after leaving OnePlus, Pei unveiled Nothing Technology, whose mission is “to remove barriers between people and technology,” with teams in London, Shenzhen and Taipei; its first product was the Ear (1) earbuds, followed by the Nothing Phone (1).[1]
April 6, 2023Appearance on the a16z Podcast
On April 6, 2023, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry published the a16z Podcast episode “Building Hardware and Taking on the Phone Giants,” in which host Steph Smith interviewed Pei, founder of Nothing and co-founder of OnePlus. The episode covered the hardware market, breaking into the phone market, securing factories and stakeholders, product differentiation, hardware design, strengthening the software proposition, marketing and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry, manufacturing and supply chains, remote work and the future of hardware.[3]
The video “Building Hardware and Taking on the Phone Giants with Carl Pei,” uploaded to the a16z YouTube channel the same day, describes the difficulty of building a phone company during a global pandemic with unpredictable supply chains and markets, and states that Nothing had sold over 1 million units and had a team of over 400 people.[4]