Vol.191 Exclusive Interview with 裴宇: The $1.3B Smart-Hardware “Survivor” Who Only Started Making Phones in 2022

Summary

• Nothing closed a $200M financing round at a $1.3B valuation. But 裴宇 admits that “a lot of people simply couldn’t understand why we were making phones again in 2025, and we were often misunderstood.” His core thesis: in the AI era, the smartphone remains the most important endpoint and distribution gateway, with “both scale and data”—roughly 5B active devices globally and 1.2B units sold annually, versus only single-digit millions for new devices such as glasses. “The next platform will still emerge on the phone first.”
• The first battle has already been lost to the platforms. Brand OEMs operate at 15-25-point gross margins, while Apple and Google monetize iOS services and search advertising. “The platforms won; everyone else is contributing users and engagement to them.” Nothing’s endgame is to reach the platform layer in the next reshuffle—“we can’t work hard for another 10 years and still end up as a hardware maker,” or “our value will be reduced by multiples.”
• Three types of players qualify to build the next platform: social-media companies, foundation-model companies—OpenAI is the only competitor with a To C business—and phone makers. The filter is “breadth of scale plus depth of data.” Incumbents are trapped by the innovator’s dilemma: Apple is “very slow” on AI and “internally very anxious”; its boss is also a professional manager reporting quarterly results. Nothing sees itself in the middle ecosystem position: capable, funded and branded, but without the transformation baggage of a giant.
• Capital discipline comes before ambition. A large part of the $200M “is insurance”; “the first step is to get safely ashore, and once we’re profitable, we can breathe easier” before investing aggressively in a future OS and new devices. Nothing will not make foldables: global annual sales are “only 17M,” the business audience does not match its youth positioning, and “the return on investment is too low for us.”
• Hardware is brutally difficult for new entrants. Suppliers have been burned by previous startups: “Unless you can wire the money 4 months in advance and still let me earn a decent margin, I’m not touching your business.” Nothing had to persuade channel partners to prepay 4 months early to build its first phone. 裴宇’s unusually blunt advice: “I genuinely don’t recommend that anyone get involved in this sector again.”
• The market map: bet on India, walk away from the US and China. Nothing will not make phones for the US, where Apple has 60% share and 90% among under-18s, or China, where rivals believe “hardware doesn’t make money; software does,” while Nothing’s comparable configurations cost about 20% more. The company is focusing on India, where it expects roughly 2% share this year, then Southeast Asia; China is only an audio-market test bed.
• Organization is strategy: London for creativity, Shenzhen for engineering, and the US in the future—“absorbing the advantages of every region.” From an office above a wet market, Foxconn’s rejection and a first batch that sold for $3,000 on StockX, to a community round selling out in 54 seconds and users joining the board as independent directors, “staying alive” is itself embedded in the company’s values.

Deep dive

1. Making Phones Again in 2025: Three Pools of Capital, Three Temperaments

• The financing closed in Q1 after 3-4 months, at a $1.3B valuation. 裴宇 says it “could have gone more smoothly”: “A lot of people simply couldn’t understand why we were making phones again in 2025.” That is an area where Nothing’s “strategic communications could have been better.”
• US investors want world-changing businesses capable of delivering venture-scale returns, but hardware scares them. Juicero—puncture a juice pouch, add water, and drink—“raised several hundred million dollars,” as did Peloton. “A lot of the hardware funded in the US over the past 10 or 20 years has failed.”
• European capital is “very rational,” focused on this year’s, next year’s and the following year’s results, IPO timing, gross margin and profitability. The new Indian capital sits between the two and also considers sectors encouraged by domestic policy.

2. The First Battle Is Over; the Next One Is Still on the Same Screen

• His persuasion framework starts with the value chain: brand OEMs have only 15-25-point gross margins, while iOS software services and Google search advertising generate extremely high margins. “They ultimately became platforms and won. Everyone else is contributing users and engagement to them. That battle is over.”
• Devices may not change. There are roughly 5B active phones globally and 1.2B units sold annually; new categories such as glasses sell only in the single-digit millions. “The next platform will still emerge on the phone first, or at least the phone will be a core part of it.”
• To investors who do not buy the narrative, he offers an earnings backstop: “No other phone company has emerged in 10 years,” and he has never seen a consumer-electronics company grow this quickly. Scale is the prerequisite for everything: “The supply chain is highly integrated. Without scale, you have no bargaining power.”

3. Who Can Build the Next Platform? Giants Trapped by the Innovator’s Dilemma

• His filter is simple: “You need breadth of scale and depth of data.” The candidates are social-media platforms, OpenAI-type foundation-model companies and phone makers.
• Large companies struggle to turn: Apple is “very slow” on AI and “internally very anxious.” Its strategy must account for both the past and the future; “the boss is also a professional manager who has to report results every quarter. It’s genuinely difficult.” Meta has an easier time because “the founder is still the CEO.”
• Nothing sees itself in the middle ecosystem position: it has capability reserves—phones are a complex category—along with capital, brand and a strong team, “but not the decision-making or transformation problems of a giant. So perhaps companies of our type have an opportunity.”

4. No Foldables, Get Profitable First: Capital Discipline at a Small Company

• Three reasons rule out foldables: global annual sales are “only 17M or so,” a tiny fraction of the 1.2B-unit market; the buyers are business professionals while Nothing targets younger users, so “the audiences don’t match”; and development costs exceed those of ordinary models, making “the return on investment too low for us.” On a personal level, he refuses to use one: “I simply can’t accept that crease.”
• The new funding is nominally for “future operating systems and future devices.” AI “may trigger a massive hardware boom”; “this is the time not to be conservative… Why wait for someone else?” After assessing the opportunity, he says: “We should be able to beat the hardware companies in the US, right?”
• The actual pace is much more restrained: “The first step is to get safely ashore. Once we’re profitable, we can breathe easier, and then we can be more aggressive in acquiring resources. We don’t actually need this much money. A large part of it is insurance. Let’s get profitable first.”

5. The London Headquarters Formula: European Creativity × Shenzhen Engineering

• Around 2015, it was difficult to find design, branding and overseas-marketing talent in Shenzhen, while Europe had “many creative minds but not much industry.” So London concentrated creativity and Shenzhen handled engineering and the supply chain—“absorbing the advantages of every region,” allowing Nothing to compete with both Chinese and US startups.
• London was chosen by elimination. Stockholm and Berlin were ruled out by labor law: Sweden’s “last in, first out” rule means new employees must be laid off first, making organizational development impossible. The US was too expensive and too inconvenient across time zones. Cross-border coordination has real costs—friction and translation—but “our assumption is that these communication costs are worth paying, and one plus one should be greater than two.”
• On peers such as 影石’s JK, who run global businesses from Shenzhen, his view is: “If you’re going to do it, you should do it thoroughly.” Overseas executives will ask where decisions are made. Then he immediately qualifies himself: “Their market cap is 10 times ours. I don’t think we have the right to advise anyone yet.”

6. The Moat Starts with Awareness: A Startup Above a Wet Market

• A public letter listed four advantages that are “very hard to replicate”: taking hardware from R&D to launch in months, global operations and delivery, a global co-creation community, and freedom from giant-company baggage. 裴宇 traces them all to one thing: “Everything starts with awareness.” Having built phones, the team understands all 9 links from production to customer service; “if any link in the middle breaks, the whole thing fails.” Software-background founders know the value chain less deeply and make more mistakes, while hardware leaves little room for trial and error: once you invest, “if it doesn’t sell, you lose the money.”
• The early indignities are now part of the mythology. The office was above a wet market, where “you could still smell the leftover meat. Silicon Valley says it started in a garage; we started above a wet market.” Candidates would look around and leave. As the products improved, “recruiting talent has become easier every year.”

7. The First Product Nearly Died: Rejected by Every Supplier

• Foxconn’s rejection was blunt: “We don’t work with startup projects anymore. We worked with several before—high-profile teams, high-profile capital—and we were misled and lost money. Now we only work with big companies, with Apple. Don’t come to me.”
• The earbuds hit the same wall: “There are 3,000 different earbud brands on Amazon. It’s already 2020—why would you have a chance?” Nothing had to use suppliers with weaker capabilities, and the first batch had quality problems. That followed an aggressive launch campaign: the first 100 units were auctioned on StockX, with the first selling for more than $3,000.
• The fix was unglamorous. Nothing’s engineers went into the factory and monitored every workstation; the entire customer-service team worked overtime, and faulty products were replaced without requiring returns. “At the time, it felt like we were about to go under. I was very depressed. Every time we thought we were finished, we somehow made it through.”

8. Fundraising Nightmares and Shanghai Nightclubs: A Founder’s Emotional-Regulation Case Study

• The environment reversed at the end of 2022. The market inflated by pandemic-era money had been falling since the second half of 2022, and late 2023 was equally painful. He scheduled 3-5 investor meetings a day, repeated the same content, endured months of questioning and received no term sheet. “I started having nightmares. In them, I rehearsed telling the whole team, ‘We’re going to dissolve. I’m sorry, everyone.’ Then I’d sit bolt upright, drenched in sweat, and see that it was 4 a.m.” His daytime performance deteriorated, creating a vicious cycle.
• The solution was unexpectedly effective: he created a WeChat group and invited friends from across China to Shanghai to “go clubbing for 2 days.” He was so exhausted that he could no longer think about work. After disconnecting, “I performed much better and came up with more creative ideas about how to raise money,” and the round closed soon afterward.

9. From “Why Would Anyone Give You Millions?” to a $7M Seed Round

• At the start, he and his co-founder seriously asked: “Why would anyone be willing to give you several million dollars? They’re taking a real risk that they won’t get the money back. It’s an unbelievable thing.”
• The method was exhaustive outreach. They had planned to take 6 months off, but started again after little more than a week. Within 2 weeks, they had spoken to “every Swedish founder and entrepreneur.” “Everyone gave different advice. That period was extremely mentally taxing.” After “maybe 2 months,” they raised a $7M seed round.

10. A $3M Angel Check from an MSN Contact

• The backdrop was a Swedish-Chinese child’s drive to prove himself: “I always felt I might be different from other people. Maybe I felt inadequate, so I wanted to make money from a young age.” He learned HTML at 12 and, at 15 around 2004, wrote a blog about “how to make money on the internet.”
• Through his blog roll, he met a British boy 2 years younger who was making more money. They chatted on MSN after school every day about how to make money. In 2011, the friend became “the youngest entrepreneur in YC history,” prompting 裴宇 to say, “Holy shit, I have to go to YC too.” The friend later became an investor; one call brought Nothing “more than $3M” for its angel round—the largest check in the $7M total.

11. Only Founders’ Money in the Angel Round; Tony Fadell’s Lesson Still Unlearned

• The structure was deliberate: “The seed round was easy to raise, and many institutions were looking for us, but we didn’t want institutional money. We only wanted founders’ money, because we knew there would be problems later that fell outside our cognitive boundaries.” The list included Reddit co-founder and Nest founder Tony Fadell, among other prominent entrepreneurs.
• Fadell’s advice came with unusually candid self-criticism from 裴宇: “Don’t do research. Don’t make something generic. Picture one specific person in your mind, and make every move in a way that gets that person to pay.” “I feel a bit guilty. He kept trying to teach me, but I still haven’t learned. I can’t picture what this person looks like, and I don’t understand them deeply enough.”

12. Manufacturing Scarcity and Retail-Investor Logic: GV Takes the Round, the Community Sells Out in 54 Seconds, and a User Joins the Board

• Institutions were kept out of the angel round: “Demand was high and supply was scarce.” After Fadell sold Nest to Google, he introduced Nothing to GV, saying, “I made GV a lot of money.” GV replied, “Give us the whole round,” and took the entire $15M round, manufacturing scarcity once again.
• Musk was 裴宇’s reference point: ordinary people invest based on whether they believe in the founder. “It’s not as rational, but it’s actually another form of rationality.” Nothing offered 10% of the round, or $1.5M, to its community; it sold out in 54 seconds, allowing consumers “not only to be our fans, but also to participate in the appreciation of the stock.”
• To prevent the company from getting carried away, the community elects one user each year to join the board as an independent director and provide a reality check. “It’s actually pretty awkward. You have all these major investors, and the user exposes the problems: you promised these things but didn’t deliver, the experience is poor, or there’s a service issue in that region.” The mechanism remains in place.

13. How the Name Was Born: “Then Why Don’t We Call It Nothing?”

• The first choice was Essential. Nothing approached Android co-founder Andy Rubin to “ask” him to sell the trademark; he liked the dream and agreed at a good price. 裴宇 later changed his mind: “This is someone else’s legacy, not ours. If we succeed, people might say we did it using someone else’s name.”
• The final name came out of frustration. Walking in Stockholm with his sister, he suggested names and watched each one get dismissed as tacky or terrible. “When I was angry, I said, ‘Then why don’t we call it Nothing?’ And then—hey, that’s pretty good.” The lawyer said a word that generic could never be registered. It was registered anyway.

14. Why Enter Phones in 2020: Enthusiast Instinct and Toothpaste-Tube Innovation

• The evidence chain was personal: he was the first student in his school to buy an iPod—the first generation reportedly sold only “around 400,000” units globally, used FireWire and required an adapter card—and the first in his social circle to own an iPhone. He had a US friend queue for the AT&T-exclusive device, paid a $450 contract-break fee, shipped it to Sweden and unlocked it. Earlier, he had participated in Motorola and Sony Ericsson communities and organized theme-design contests.
• The decision itself was instinctive. After he entered the industry, “the pace of innovation slowed. Every year the battery got a little bigger and the camera a little better.” It was “toothpaste-tube innovation.” “Other people must have felt this too, right? It was mostly intuition. I didn’t do much analysis.”
• The structural rationale came later: in a 1.2B-unit market, giants serve the mainstream while “nobody was meeting niche needs.” Phones have high stickiness and long usage times. “If you build scale, there will definitely be other opportunities. I didn’t know what those opportunities would be then. We decided to do it first and figure it out later.”

15. Prove Yourself with Earbuds, Then Practice with a Sub-Brand

• Nothing wanted to make phones first, but “nobody wanted to help us.” It chose another major category—true wireless earbuds, with nearly 300M units sold globally each year—to prove itself: “If we could quickly deliver results and differentiation in another major category, that should prove our point.” The first earbuds sold “around 600,000 units.” Suppliers who had previously refused came back, and the phone supply chain and investors began to believe.
• To protect Nothing’s premium positioning, it created the lower-end CMF sub-brand. The debate reached the board: “You have so few resources. You can’t even do one brand well—why do you want to do two?” 裴宇 followed the multi-brand logic of hotel and auto groups serving different customer segments and proceeded anyway. Watches stayed within CMF as a training ground; after 3 generations, “our capabilities were more or less there,” and the team could move on to the Nothing brand.

16. Choose Design over Technology for Differentiation: A Co-Founder Recruited in 45 Minutes

• The logic was speed and risk. Betting on technology requires years of R&D before testing market acceptance: “What if people don’t like the technology? The company might die.” Design, by contrast, “can at least create differentiation quickly,” followed by differentiation in software experience.
• The design capability came from a chance encounter. In Sweden, 裴宇 met Teenage Engineering, a maker of high-end DJ equipment whose CEO came from Acne Studios. “We talked for 45 minutes, shook hands, and decided to have them join as co-founders.” Their proposal was “many times better than ours,” so Nothing scrapped a design that was ready for production, spent several more months reworking it and swallowed the sunk cost.

17. Technical Warmth: What If the Soviet Union Had Won the Cold War?

• The brand methodology began as a thought experiment: “We live in Apple’s world. Apple does something and everyone follows.” So the team asked: what would the Soviet Union’s most advanced technology company look like if the Soviet Union had won? That evolved into “technical warmth”: transparent designs make hard-core engineering visible, transparent communication conveys humanity—employees appear in marketing and YouTube videos discuss shortcomings—and products retain playful interactions. The indentation on the first earbuds stabilized them in the ear and made them fun to use.
• 裴宇 believes Apple’s path can be run again: start with a small, glamorous group of creative professionals through tools such as Adobe integrations, iMovie and GarageBand, then reach the mass audience that wants to “feel creative.” A glowing logo in a coffee shop becomes an identity marker. Once Apple scaled, “it was no longer our Apple; it became everyone’s Apple. That path can be run again, creating a new opportunity.”

18. Why Phones Had to Be Attempted: DJI and Insta360 Are Great, but Apple Is a Trillion-Dollar Company

• 李翔’s challenge was that DJI, 拓竹 and Insta360 had all avoided phones while reaching valuations above $10B. 裴宇’s answer turned on one sentence: “But Apple is a trillion-dollar company.”
• AirPods were the proof point. When they launched, they “immediately knocked traditional audio companies down.” Once a company controls the core entry point, selling adjacent products becomes almost effortless; the deeper the ecosystem lock-in, the greater the advantage. “Using an Apple phone with Apple earbuds is simply the best experience.” The industry consensus at the time was that phones were unavoidable for a smart-hardware ecosystem; only some US companies, such as Meta with its metaverse bet, thought otherwise.

19. The Pioneers Made the Path Worse: An Industry That Demands Cash 4 Months Upfront

• Slowing innovation is bad news for new entrants: “It means there are only giants. You have no pricing power, no bargaining power. It’s extremely painful.” Earlier phone startups enjoyed favorable Foxconn terms and could leave inventory at the contract manufacturer without tying up capital. After suppliers learned from their losses, the rule became: “Unless you can wire the money 4 months in advance and still let me earn a decent margin, I’m not touching your business.”
• The breakthrough came through channel financing. Nothing persuaded partners to pay 4 months early: “We could only sell them a dream: you put up the money, and we’ll give you exclusivity.” Xiaomi’s success made the supply chain willing to bet on “the next Xiaomi”; later failures closed the path again. “I genuinely don’t recommend that anyone get involved. Your time may earn a much higher return in another sector.”
• Nothing also tried bringing suppliers in as shareholders. Foxconn had invested in several such companies, all of which failed: “We don’t do this kind of thing anymore.” After 郭台铭 retired, professional managers were even less willing to touch the business.

20. The Market Map: Bet on India, Walk Away from the US and China

• Nothing selects phone markets inversely to Apple penetration. In the US, Apple’s share is already 60%, and “90% of young people under 18” use it. For a youth-oriented brand, “it’s basically impossible.” Apple share also correlates strongly with per-capita GDP, so Nothing started with developing markets: India, where it expects roughly 2% share this year, followed by Southeast Asia.
• The India timing thesis is straightforward. The economy is growing around 6% a year, and consumers are shifting from functional needs toward social identity: “air conditioning, then logos, then ideas.” Nothing cannot beat competitors functionally, but it is investing in design and brand, which fit the shift in consumer demand; competitors remain oriented toward supply-chain capability.
• In China, Nothing makes audio products but not phones. Domestic phones “don’t make money on hardware; they make money on software.” Nothing’s comparable configurations cost about 20% more, and it has no software monetization, making the business “a pure money-loser… a bit of vicious competition.” Audio has a lower barrier and requires less investment. After roughly a year, Headphone One sold several times the previous model’s volume, albeit from a small base. Europe is broadly doubling but remains fragmented; India is currently the company’s largest market.

21. The Three-Region Advantage and Genghis Khan on the Desk

• The regional capability map is clear: Europe has creative design talent, with dense pools in luxury and finance, plus top universities, but graduates can be corrupted by joining “laid-back dinosaur companies.” His answer is to recruit Europe’s most ambitious students from campus and train them internally, potentially creating a talent moat in 10 years: “If you want to coast, join another company. If you want to create the future, join Nothing.” China provides engineering, manufacturing and supply chain; “10 years from now, nobody will be able to outproduce China.” The US provides innovation, capital and the world’s largest consumer market. “OpenAI and Meta are competing for talent, and they’re all Chinese.”
• The organizational philosophy comes from a Ben Horowitz book and Genghis Khan: nomadic rulers openly recruited Han Chinese to collect taxes, Arabs to run commerce, and Europeans for military technology. “Could we also integrate the best qualities of every region more openly?” A statue of Genghis Khan still sits on his desk. 裴宇 now spends only around 10% of his time in China; teams are spread across London, Shenzhen, Delhi—more than 100 people—Dubai and Tokyo.
• The US office remains a difficult question. Silicon Valley is full of B2B SaaS talent but lacks consumer-marketing talent, while compensation is the most expensive globally. Los Angeles and New York are better for brand-building; Walmart, Target and Best Buy are scattered across the country. “Where to put the US team is extremely difficult, but it has to be there.” For now, the US has only 2 employees.

22. The Fate of the Value Chain: Without a Platform, 10 Years of Work Still Leaves You Making Toasters

• The awareness existed from day one: “We work for everyone. We have the lowest gross margin.” Chips and software platforms capture the highest margins; hardware-only OEMs capture the lowest. “The first battle is over. We’ll accept that fact for now, build capabilities and eventually make a platform—we at least have to try. We can’t work hard for another 10 years and still end up as a hardware maker. Our value would be reduced by multiples.” 李翔 added the management cliché: every hardware company eventually becomes a toaster maker.
• His vision for an eyewear platform is to start with its own devices, then make Ray-Ban collaboration devices, multi-brand collaboration devices and its own branded devices, before opening the platform to other hardware makers. Google has also launched an Android version for glasses. “The core question is: when all the giants have these initiatives, what path do we have to becoming an ecosystem?”
• He is betting on historical reshuffling: HP was once a formidable company and is now “a company working for others.” “Large technological shifts reshuffle the deck. I believe that.” Overseas candidates include ByteDance, Meta, Google, Apple and OpenAI—the only competitor with a To C business—along with “players we don’t know about. Perhaps they will win too.”

23. The Teenager Flipping Devices in Zhuhai: RMB50,000 a Month in 2007

• His view of Chinese manufacturing changed when an iPod failed a week after its warranty expired and a Swedish distributor refused to repair it. On a trip to Beijing, he bought a Meizu M6 in Zhongguancun: “Aren’t Chinese-made products supposed to be terrible? This is even smaller than the iPod.” He went home and built a global Meizu fan community.
• After high school, he spent a year in Zhuhai trading for export. He withdrew stacks of cash from an ICBC ATM, swept the computer malls for inventory, filmed product explainers in his dorm and sold them online. In 2007, he made RMB50,000 a month—“the equivalent of RMB150,000 today.” His parents thought it was too unreliable; even bringing in a Swedish classmate to handle customer service did not help, and they eventually sent him back to Sweden to study.

24. The Truth About Dropping Out: Three Trends School Never Taught—and League of Legends

• He spent 3 years at Sweden’s top business school, entering through a lottery after scoring 17.5 out of 20 in a relatively obscure new program. He identified 3 trends—China’s economy, technology companies as the most valuable brands, and e-commerce, which then accounted for roughly 10% of global retail—and found none of them in the curriculum. “I studied for 3 years, and the school never mentioned any of these major trends. What kind of business school is that?” He completed the courses, skipped the thesis and left. “I didn’t even want to say I graduated from that school.”
• His self-indictment: “But there was another side to it: I was playing League of Legends the whole time and barely attending class. The arrogance was probably just an excuse that allowed me to play games.”
• After dropping out, he became more disciplined. He made daily checklists to learn programming—“I regret studying business. I can think about things, but I can’t build anything”—as well as guitar, Chinese and fitness, with the goal of applying to YC independently. When friends told him to “just find a job,” he could not understand it: “You only live a few years. If you just take any job, you’re wasting your life.”
• There was also a circle back. He applied to iZettle, founded by an older schoolmate, for the only customer-service role that did not require experience. In the interview, he admitted: “I don’t actually like customer service. I want to start a company too. I’m here to learn how you built yours.” He was rejected. The founder later invested in Nothing—“and invested quite a lot.”

25. The Meizu Lesson: Headquarters Matter, as Does a Fivefold Salary

• In 2011, Meizu CEO 老白 invited him to lead global marketing, after the fan community he built gained significant traffic and coverage in the Los Angeles Times. “Looking back, it was laziness again”—YC still required an application, while this was an offer in hand. He remains grateful: “If he hadn’t invited me back to China, none of what followed would have happened.” He never met 黄章, who “may have worked from home.”
• His postmortem on Meizu’s failure to go the distance: “The main problem was that the information input was too limited.” Zhuhai was highly isolated. “Everyone was smart, but the amount of information was different. Where headquarters is located matters enormously.”
• The trigger for leaving was a transfer to China-market work, followed years later by discovering that he was paid 5 times more than colleagues. “I didn’t understand the China market. That wasn’t reasonable.” His options then included Smartisan—he could not reach 罗永浩—Xiaomi, where 洪锋 interviewed him but had no overseas phone plans, and OPPO, where 刘作虎 interviewed him and did have overseas ambitions. Years later, 罗永浩 explained in a financial interview why Smartisan never pursued overseas markets: “Because we didn’t have anyone on the team who knew how.”

26. 8 Years at OnePlus: Smash-Your-Phone Events and Low-Cost Marketing

• Gratitude is the underlying theme. At 24, he was entrusted with overseas business: “If a 24-year-old joined us today, I would be very cautious about giving them that opportunity. The cost of mistakes is high. You need opportunities to make mistakes and learn.”
• The marketing peak came from watching Fight Club with the team and setting a tone of disruption and rebellion. The first event required Apple, Samsung and Sony users to smash their phones before they could buy OnePlus: 100 slots, 140,000 applicants, and a flood of criticism—“Who do you think you are? It’s not environmentally friendly.” But it broke through overnight. The invitation system that followed borrowed Xiaomi’s F-code and made reserved tech enthusiasts feel “like everyone was asking me.” The result: “We may have done $200M in revenue in the first year and spent $400 on advertising.”
• His current self-awareness is self-deprecating: “If someone pitched me something like that now, I’d definitely reject it.” In his younger years, inspiration meant high risk and high reward. Now he is responsible to employees, investors and consumers, and must use logic and strategic thinking to compensate for having less raw inspiration than before.

27. The Benfen Culture and Three Routes to Premiumization

• He interprets OPPO’s “benfen” as doing the right thing: “If the direction is wrong, doing more just wastes time.” The influence is concrete: Nothing’s salary and equity package is “much better for employees than those of modern startups.” He did not leave OnePlus because of its reintegration into the parent company; “what I wanted to do in the future required more freedom.” An entrepreneurial brand ultimately has to serve the group’s strategy.
• He sees 3 paths for Chinese brands moving upmarket: legacy brands can sell history—LVMH revived old labels, and “Louis Vuitton was the bag used by Napoleon’s wife; nobody can replicate that history”; Huawei can take a technology-driven route—“If not for what happened in 2019, Huawei would already be the world’s number-one company”; or brands can enter through users. Nothing chose the third path, but “to ultimately become a premium brand, technology is unquestionably necessary.”

28. Michelin Anxiety, “Staying Alive” as a Value, and Tim Cook

• After leaving OnePlus, he planned to travel for 6 months: a wedding in Greece, southern Italy, Michelin restaurants and good wine. Instead, he became “more anxious than when I was working,” feeling he was wasting time and had too much to do in a short life. He returned to prepare the startup, and only settled on phones while writing the business plan. The founding team came from OnePlus, realme and Coolpad. He personally interviewed the first 100 software engineers; the only candidate he wanted was poached by a better offer on day 3. “Not even the worst engineer wanted to stay with us.”
• His perspective reversed after founding a company: “The things I used to hate—strategy, process and organization—I now do every day. They’re all important. My old boss may have been right; I just didn’t understand it then.”
• The company has 4 values: be a force for change, embrace diversity, take pride in the product—“Apple has so many fans simply because its products used to be good”—and stay alive. “The company may have big dreams, but it has to do many things that look schizophrenic and deliberately take detours. If you’re too idealistic, you can go under very quickly.”
• Beyond Jobs, the hardware leader he most admires is Tim Cook: “At its core, a CEO’s job is to make the stock price rise, and he has done that extremely well. Apple’s position means it can move much more slowly than others and still win.” The younger generation often talks about Insta360’s JK; 裴宇 has also recently enrolled in an entrepreneurship course, where “there’s a lot to learn.”