Carl Pei Thinks the Phone of the Future Will Only Have One App

What does creativity mean to you?

Creativity is not only about design, fashion, or art, but about solving problems.

Humans have a remarkable ability to connect different pieces of information to solve new problems. I think software engineers can be extremely creative. Now, in the age of AI, human creativity is even more important. In the long term, when humanity becomes a civilization that expands into space, it’s creativity that’s going to make us more competitive in the universe.

That is why we want to make technology “fun” again, to help inspire human creativity. 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.

But now the creative companies of the past have become very big and very corporate, and they’re no longer very creative. They’re no longer inspirational for the younger generation. So we are trying to bring that back.

We’re also trying to be very transparent and human in our business efforts. For example, if you watch our YouTube videos, you’ll see that we try to introduce the Nothing team, like our designers and software developers, so that you can get to know them.

This is our way of doing things and our way of thinking. We hope it will encourage more young people to express their creativity.

Is your strategy working? How’s business?

Looking back on the last four and a half years, I think it is working. We face a lot of problems on a daily basis, but we cannot survive in this industry if we follow the same strategies as other companies. We have to be different.

And the business is growing rapidly. Last year, we grew about 150 percent. However, we still only reached about 0.1% share of the global market, so there is plenty more to do.