Nothing
company on 7 shows · 23 statements across 7 episodes · said 62 times in 13 episodes since 2022
the a16z Podcast 24 
WTF is with Nikhil Kamath 13 
20VC 11 
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 9 
TBPN 3 
Cheeky Pint 1 
the Neon Show 1
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 24WTF is with Nikhil Kamath 1320VC 11the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 9TBPN 3the Neon Show 1Cheeky Pint 1
2026 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2025 11 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Weekly Recap: Mark Cuban, Kanye’s Wild Mansion Makeover, China Heads to the Moon, Money in Clipping
- Ep #23 | WTF are Consumer Electronics? | Nikhil ft. Carl Pei, Rahul Sharma & Amit Khatri · Nikhil Kamath
- Tom Hulme & Stan Boland: Lessons from Jensen Huang & How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Humanoids Cost as Much as an SUV Now | Nikhil Kamath x Brett Adcock | WTF Online Ep 2 · Nikhil Kamath
- 20Product: Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely | How Does Product Design Change Most in a World of AI | How Do Monzo Build Product Today: What Works, What Does Not | Why Most Product Sucks and What Makes Truly Great Product
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 11 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just 2 Years · Y Combinator
- Tom Hulme: Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 275x on Robinhood & Making Billions on Uber |E1150 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dear Indians, Watch This Before Moving To America - Varun Mayya’s Brutally Honest Career Advice
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 24 mentions in 1 episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
23 statements about Nothing, every show
Kamath: Nothing's revenue grew from $500M to about $900M
“The sales look great. I think they went from 500 mil last year to about 900 mil this year.”
Kamath: Invested in Nothing expecting an AI company buyout
“Hence actually the nothing bet, because I always thought AI company will come in and buy them out at some point.”
Pei: Smartphone Startups Only Need a Niche Fanbase Given Market Size
“We don't have to have everybody love us. It's okay if 90% of people don't care about us or hate us, as long as we get a niche group of consumers who really love us. That works in our industry because it's so big. Maybe it doesn't work for smaller categories.”
Pei: Design Differentiation Is Much Faster for Hardware Startups Than Tech
“So for us, we chose to differentiate through design because it was the fastest way to differentiate. If we picked, you know, technology, it would take years to play out. A lot of investment, a lot of years.”
Pei: US tariffs on China hit Nothing's earbud business by 20%
“So now the most direct way is Trump had new tariffs for manufacturing from China. So we manufacture the earbuds in China. And that's like a 20% hit on our import business plans for the US market.”
Pei: Factories refused to build smartphones for Nothing when it launched
“And when we started this new company, nothing, we wanted to make phones. Nobody wanted to make phones for us.”
Pei: Nothing manufactured its first earbuds with a blacklisted Chinese factory
“We went to the worst factory. Like the factory, if they didn't take us on as a client, they would go out of business immediately. In China, because they were on the blacklist of a lot of other people for quality issues.”
Pei: Hardware founders should work for an existing company first
“Like instead of starting your own company, work for somebody else. If there's so many mistakes you can make in our industry. If I didn't do it like once before, the chances of failure would have been way higher.”
Pei: Voice-Generated AI Apps Will Allow Smaller OSs to Challenge iOS
“In the future, you can just speak what app you want into the phone and that app shows up. So then that gives a smaller company like us the ability to compete with iOS, which has, I don't know, a 1,000,002 million apps already, but we can empower every normal p…”
Hulme: GV invested in Nothing, which has 7 million active devices
“This is one of the things, reasons we invested in nothing. We believe they've got seven million devices out there that are potentially conduits for their AI.”
Pei: 90% of Nothing's first 5,000 Ear (1) units had charging defects
“For the first batch of year ones 90% of them couldn't charge properly. And at that time, I think we had shipped like 5000 units”
Pei: Nothing sold approximately 600,000 Ear (1) units in year one
“So we ended up selling about 600,000 Units for year one.”
Pei: Nothing's cult reputation simply reflects low brand awareness
“I think it simply just means that our brand awareness is too low.”
Pei: Products should have a defining feature sketchable after two seconds
“For every product you make imagine if a user sees it for like two seconds, and then has to sketch a defining feature of the product. So we try and build each product with something iconic that people can immediately remember and attach themselves to.”
Pei: Hardware startups must sequence products to build manufacturing credibility
“If you want to do it, I think you should go ahead, but maybe think about like the sequencing of things. Like in our example, like we had to get the earbuds to sell really well before going into the phone. Like how can we build credibility to the next thing?”
Hulme: Nothing will reach $600M revenue in 2024
“I think they'll do six hundred million dollars revenue this year. They've sold three, three million devices so far”
Carl Pei: Nothing will expand beyond smartphone and audio hardware
“But I think over time we will reveal more and more as our team gets stronger, as our capabilities get stronger. I think ultimately we cannot be a smartphone company and we cannot be an audio company. We need to push into the future.”
Carl Pei: Mass-market hardware brands cannot risk bold design choices
“But I think, when you're a niche player, you can be more differentiated in your hardware design. But when you're a mess, you gotta sell to everybody, from the youngest person to the oldest person, Types of different professions. So you cannot take a lot of ris…”
Pei: Nothing has a stronger position in AI than pure software startups
“We're in a lot stronger position than a lot of startups that are pure software in this space, but we just need to be patient and find the right product market fit before we go all in.”
Carl Pei: Nothing achieved four YouTube videos with over 1M views
“So on the topic of YouTube that's just something we've been experimenting with for the last three months. I think now we have four videos over a million views.”
Nothing integrated community members as shareholders and elected board observer
“We allowed our community to also become shareholders in our company, and our community has an elected board observer on our board to keep us honest and give us feedback from the users.”
Pei commits Nothing to inventing a new product category within 10 years
“It doesn't have to be this year or next year or the following couple of years, but in the next 10 years we have to create a breakthrough category, and I would love to spend more time there as well.”