At 1%, against the giants: Carl Pei’s long bet on hunger

“You’re invited.”

That was how it began.

A white card suspended in negative space. The Apple logo glowing in yellow-green above the words. An invitation to join, in person, for a special Apple Experience in London. March 4. 2 p.m. GMT. The invite was clinical: sparse typography, disciplined layout, and an anticipation engineered with restraint.

The industry knew the rhythm. Another iPhone—widely expected to be the 17e—preparing to step onto a stage perfected over decades.

Then Carl Pei entered the frame.

He crashed the invite. Across the logo, in thick pink strokes that looked almost wet, he wrote a single word: NOTHING. The letters dripped. They ignored the grid. They sat over the glow. Across the lower half, slicing through the typography, Pei stamped a new date: 5 MARCH.

In one stroke, Pei inserted his launch into Apple’s moment. The gap—just a day—was close enough to force a glance sideways.

And yet, when Pei—co-founder and CEO of consumer tech brand Nothing—speaks about Tim Cook, the tone shifts.

He describes Cook’s tenure as phenomenal. “He has done a great job during his run as a CEO,” he says in an exclusive interaction with Fortune India. “If you look at Apple’s share price, they have done phenomenally well,” says Pei who was recently in India to open its first flagship store in in Indiranagar, Bengaluru. He then acknowledges Apple’s clout. “They’re definitely delivering value to a lot of users or else they wouldn’t have those numbers,” he explains.

Pei’s language, unmistakably, is measured. Almost generous.

That restraint, though, has a short shelf life.

A few months earlier, when a key Nothing executive announced his move to Apple, Pei congratulated him publicly. Wished him well. Then added a line that lingered—if Apple needed product help, they could reach out.

The sarcasm was not lost. But Pei never burns the bridge. He taps it, tests it, and lets the vibration carry.

Sample this: Every company, he argues, moves through lifecycle stages. “When you’re younger, you’re more innovative,” he says. As firms grow larger, more mature, and more profitable, their risk appetite narrows.

Now, set that beside the spray paint and the nudge and the picture sharpens. Pei is circling a simple idea: scale dulls daring, comfort softens hunger, and dominance tightens posture.

This isn’t theory from the outside.

The man who has been there before

Pei is not a conventional chief executive running a safe play. He has already built once at scale. At OnePlus, he helped carve space in a market that looked sealed shut. He has seen supply chains snap, margins squeeze, hype spike, and expectations harden.

Now, he stands outside the machine again and swings.

Nothing is not an accident. It is a second act powered by memory and ambition. Pei carries the scars of one ascent and the impatience of someone who believes the industry has grown cautious.

That’s what makes him dangerous.

The tech graveyard is full of companies that lunged at Apple, promised disruption, unveiled gleaming hardware under blinding lights—and then disappeared. The script rarely changed: headlines flared, ambition swelled, and expectations outran reality.

Still, every few years, someone steps forward convinced that design—not discounts, not specs—can tilt the field.

That conviction once had a face.

Steve Jobs didn’t sell specifications. He rewired taste. The first iPod didn’t win because it stored more songs. The first iPhone didn’t dominate because it checked more boxes. They felt inevitable, cultural, and alive.

Pei grew up inside that moment. “Personally, I was very inspired by Apple when I was younger—the first iPod, the first iPhone—that’s the reason I’m in this industry,” he once said in an interview to a global tech publication. 

Then comes the rupture. “But now the creative companies of the past have become very big and very corporate, and they’re no longer very creative,” he says.

Admiration hasn’t vanished. It has curdled. “But Cook doesn’t have to work as hard as in the early days of Apple on innovation anymore.” It’s not the scale that troubles him. It’s what scale does.

Numbers, though, don’t unsettle Pei. The drift does. Restoring hunger to a market that rewards stability isn’t a marketing exercise. It demands taste, timing, nerve, capital, and discipline.

So, he starts where drift begins—with design.

Designing with no time to fear

Pei talks about design as a spearhead and not as polish. Transparent shells, distinctive interfaces, a brand that courts believers instead of chasing everyone, and hardware that feels intentional again.

It sounds simple. It isn’t. Ambition like that rarely survives contact with scale. Because scale has gravity. Who looks at gravity and calls it boredom?

So, who is Pei in this equation? Is he another bright flare destined to burn out against Cupertino’s dominance? Or is he building something sturdier—a design-led insurgency that understands scale well enough to survive it?

To answer that, you don’t start with product specs. You start with fear. For a founder carving space in a market ruled by giants, fear should be constant. And risk is three-pronged: capital, reputational, and irrelevance.

Pei, however, shrugs. “I don’t know what to fear apart from having limited time,” he says. “You just got to do things. Then you don’t have to be afraid. Just do it.”

In his universe, everything collapses into one variable: time. Competitors fade, noise fades, and even scale recedes. But the clock doesn’t. “If time is limited, you better spend it well on doing what you like and having fun,” he says. “For me, building a company is fun. It’s that simple.”

Simple doesn’t mean relaxed.

He doesn’t sound hunted. He sounds urgent like a clock that is ticking somewhere, and only he can hear. That urgency bleeds into everything: the spray paint, the second act, and the refusal to sit still.

And once time becomes the only real constraint, fear loses leverage. Candour follows.

That candour shows up in how Pei speaks. He doesn’t rehearse corporate answers. “It’s more chill this way,” he says of his bluntness. Has it landed him in trouble? “Not really. Hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing this.”

Carl bhai doesn't do boring

And the same instinct runs through the company. Transparency isn’t just a design language at Nothing. It’s how he operates.

Interestingly, transparency extends beyond products. Even names aren’t sacred. Pei once changed his display name on X to “Carl Bhai” after a user questioned why Nothing needed a celebrity ambassador. He reposted, joked about growth and revenue, and the internet ran with it. Newspapers picked it up. The name stuck, briefly. “Names are hard to change. So, pick them carefully,” he says.

That same intolerance for casual choices extends to products. Which is why incrementalism irritates him. “Every year there was just a little bit better camera, a little bit more memory, a little bit faster, a little bit bigger battery,” he says, describing an industry that mistook iteration for imagination. “Little bit” doesn’t interest him. “It was boring.”

So, he attacks the experience, not the spec sheet. “Once you start changing the functionality, user experience, and the user behaviour, that’s when things get more interesting,” he explains.

The energy spills beyond hardware. More than a million subscribers follow Nothing on YouTube—not for megapixels, but for momentum.

That momentum hardens into product: Essential Apps. You describe what you need in plain language. The phone builds the widget or mini-app for you. No code. No maze of settings. Just intent translated into function.

Essential lives inside Nothing Playground—a staging ground for users who don’t want to be processed by generic software.

The philosophy is blunt: most apps are designed for everyone, which usually means they fit no one particularly well.

Nothing opts out. Pick your customers. Understand them deeply. Build for them relentlessly. Not for everybody—and never pretending to be. “Nothing is not meant for everybody,” says Pei.

He’s equally clear about who he won’t chase: the buyer hunting the cheapest device with the highest specs. That race ends at the bottom. So, select carefully, deliver precisely, and earn appreciation before scale.

That’s how volumes follow. “Every company should be laser focused on who their products are for,” he says.

That’s the wager. Not louder specs. Not bigger numbers. But individuality, at scale.

You can only copy the shadow

And wagers like that rarely go unnoticed. The shadows begin to move. Transparent backs stop looking rare. Glyph-like lighting flickers elsewhere. The silhouette travels.

Pei doesn’t flinch. He expected this. Copying, he argues, skims the surface—texture, finish, visible cues. What doesn’t get copied is roadmap, conviction, the thinking underneath. “You’re always going to copy the shadow of another company,” he says. “They can only copy the surface.”

A shadow follows form. It never leads it. And that’s precisely why he had signalled, early on, that what people were seeing was incomplete.

In October 2021, on the company’s first anniversary, he wrote: “We’re like an iceberg that’s slowly emerging to the surface.”

At the time, Ear (1) had ripped through the noise. Orders piled up. Supply strained. To most observers, it looked like a sharp audio startup with better branding than muscle.

Pei knew better.

The product was the tip. The real build was submerged—team, capital, supply chain, distribution, and community. An end-to-end machine taking shape beneath a transparent shell. Through that lens, imitation is predictable. Rivals can trace the outline, mimic the glow, but they can’t see the mass underwater.

Design, in Pei’s world, isn’t decoration. It’s structure.

And that view isn’t confined to his boardroom. Design practitioners argue the shift is real. “When was the last time we saw a true design-led shift in tech?” asks Shilpa Wadhwa, an independent communication designer based in New Delhi. The early Apple era felt transformative. Since then, most advances have been incremental, she adds.

Wadhwa sees Nothing’s transparency as intent, not gimmick. “The see-through geometry signals alignment,” she says. “What’s happening inside matters as much as what’s visible outside.”

The glyph interface, she argues, shifts interaction, reduces screen dependence and signals a behavioural decision, not just an aesthetic one.

Scale needs to match ambition

Design indeed can command attention. But attention alone doesn’t build a company.

By September 2025, the submerged mass was visible. Nothing announced $200 million in fresh capital at a valuation of $1.3 billion. The language shifted—value chains, last-mile distribution, end-to-end control. Building something hard to copy.

The ambition widened.

When Nothing started, the thesis was simple: build a smartphone business at scale, own last-mile distribution in consumer tech, and be ready for the next shift.

Now he sees the opening. AI—not glued onto the edge of the phone, not dressed up as a camera trick, but built into the core. A system that learns its user. In short: A billion operating systems rendered for a billion lives.

Pei doesn’t speak about AI as a feature. He speaks about collapse. The first wave, he says, will hit software engineering. Once engineering becomes AI-native, the product stack shifts, roles blur, and silos crack. A human working alongside an agent can build end to end.

Then he turns to devices. “They’re pretty dumb.” There’s context everywhere—data, behaviour, patterns—and yet the experience remains mechanical: Tap, swipe, search, and repeat.

The unlock is context. If a device knows what you’re doing, where you are, what you need next, it stops reacting and starts executing. Interfaces adapt. Agents act once you confirm.

Then he drops a word most founders avoid: lazy. If the system handles the non-essential, we can afford to be lazier. Or more focussed. The clutter fades. What remains is attention directed where it matters.

When asked how much he sleeps, Pei doesn’t brag about four-hour nights. Eight hours, he says, gives him a 10-point IQ boost. On average, he gets seven.

Pei isn’t trying to out-hustle the market. He’s trying to out-think it. Reimagining the operating system in an AI arms race is an audacious bet. Giants with entrenched ecosystems are already pushing at this layer. Billions of devices and billions of users locked in.

Can 1% make a bigger dent?

Nothing holds roughly 1% of the global smartphone market. Apple commands 19.7%—nearly 248 million units shipped in 2025, according to IDC. Samsung sits at 19.1%, shipping over 241 million devices. Xiaomi controls 13.1%. vivo and Oppo hover just above 8%.

The gap between ambition and share is vast.

In smartphones, volume isn’t vanity. It’s oxygen. Without it, the math turns hostile.

“Going from buzz to meaningful volumes is the real test,” says Tarun Pathak, Research Director at Counterpoint.

Nothing has proved it can generate attention. The next proof is muscle. If your procurement volume is a fraction of the incumbents, components cost more, margins tighten, and pricing flexibility shrinks. 

Pei doesn’t romanticise this. “If you just look at these numbers all the time, it’s never going to lead anywhere,” he says. When you’re small, you won’t win the best-value race. You don’t have the leverage. So, you deliver value differently.

Agrees Pathak. “Pei understands how to build cultural relevance, not just products,” he says. First, he reads Gen Z like a live feed. This is a tribe that backs conviction, craves originality, and lives online. Pei doesn’t just market to them—he performs in their arena. “Transparent, opinionated, chronically plugged in. He speaks their language without sounding like a brand manual,” says Pathak, adding that the biggest challenge for Nothing is scale. “Hype is easy, but volume is brutal,” he adds.

For Pei, though, volumes are the outcome and not the starting point. “We’re fighting our own,” he says. “The biggest competitor we have is ourselves.”

In the early days, the threats were existential: Suppliers, manufacturing partners, working capital and credibility. One bad move could have ended it.

Now the pressure is different. It’s more structural: about positioning, infrastructure, and long-term relevance. “If we mess something up, that hurts us way more than what anybody else does in the industry,” he confesses.

The climb hasn’t eased. It has changed gradient. It’s steeper, slower, and deliberate.

AI wearables have already flashed and faded—big launches, louder demos, quick exits. Pei watches the wreckage, studies it, waits. “Studying them will help us sharpen our strategy,” he says.

Patience, though, doesn’t mean passivity. Pei needles giants without living in their shadow. He talks moonshots, audits failures, builds plumbing, courts individuality, and counts units.

Provocation, for him, isn’t limited to product. Pei once remarked that Indian food in London is better than anywhere in India. It sparked backlash. He didn’t retract. He explained: many of the best Indian chefs moved abroad, where their craft is better rewarded. And if proven wrong? “I’m happy to change my mind,” he smiles.

It’s not really about food. It’s about appetite.

But up there, ambition alone won’t hold. Altitude strips pretence. It tests hunger. And hunger has a habit of thinning with height.

Pei is betting his won’t. But what matters now is conversion. Can 1% become leverage before the market closes ranks or before he becomes the very thing he warns against?

The ascent continues. What happens when the air thins?

Look again at the pink slash across Apple’s invite. It was a small mark in finite space.

Pei understands the distance, the math, the gravity of scale and its limits. “There’s a high chance that the universe is infinitely large, and is getting bigger and bigger,” he says. “You can’t be everything. And you don’t intend to be everything. So, there is room for all.”

He isn’t trying to own the universe. For now, he’s carving space inside it. And holding ground.