How I Built This with Guy Raz - When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Most of us are dependent on our smartphones. In fact, Americans spend an average of three hours a day on these devices — devices that only came into existence relatively recently. Designers Kai Tang and Joe Hollier have long believed that it’s not normal for humans to be so attached to their phones. So they launched their own company in 2014 to create an alternative...called the Light Phone.This week on How I Built This Lab, Kai and Joe talk about their work to build a simpler mobile phone - without apps or tracking of personal data - which has been adopted by users across generations. Plus, the duo discuss the impact of society’s growing reliance on tech and their hopes for a less-connected future.This episode was produced by Casey Herman with editing by John Isabella, research by Kerry Thompson, and music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I do it, I'm embarrassed to say. In fact, a recent study found that on average, American adults spend almost three hours a day, three hours staring at their smartphones. Of course, smartphones are amazing. They've brought massive convenience to our everyday lives. But they've also let tech companies access intimate details of our private lives for advertising. They've also allowed our work to creep into our personal time off. And, of course, smartphone use has been linked to an increase in anxiety and depression, especially in children and teens. Well, Kai Tang and Joe Hollier looked at these problems and they thought, what if there was a different kind of phone?

And so they set out to design a phone that would give people a set of useful functions without the endless stream of social media content and other distractions. They called it the light phone, and it has calling. and texting, but it also lets you do things like play music or podcasts and get directions. You can take notes on it and set up a hotspot, but no apps. And it doesn't track users for advertising, it doesn't sell their personal data, it's not designed to keep us glued to the screen. It's actually quite the opposite.

The company's tagline is a phone for humans. Anyway, before they started work on the light phone together in 2014, Kai worked in product development on some major cell phone brands, including Nokia, Blackberry, and Motorola. So he had experience with actually making cell phone hardware. Joe worked as a filmmaker, animator, and illustrator after college. And because both Kai and Joe had design backgrounds, they met while attending a 30-week incubator program for designers that was put on by Google in New York.

The premise was that each of us might come up with an idea. idea for a new sort of technology company, a smartphone app specifically, and that if a designer could make the vision of such a product seem real, that would entice investors or developers and engineers that could help bring that to life because that's something Google kind of was doing internally. And they wanted to see if that was something that they could multiply externally. And presumably, like most of the people in this program are like, okay, what kind of app can we bill that can attract attention and presumably can make money. I would imagine that's how most people are thinking, right? Well, there's a kind of like golden metric that was really what was

most important, and that was how many hours a day someone spent with a product. So if you could make something that was sticky, you know, that people would use for hours a day, there didn't really need to be an inherent business model because you could start collecting all sorts of data and selling advertising, and that was sort of the kind of business model that so many smartphone apps in particular had already embraced. This was like the height of that kind of thinking. I think after Facebook kind of just blew up, people are like, don't worry about how you're going to monetize, just focus on signing up users, and then we can make money off them in different ways. Exactly.

So what about this was, in 2014, was troubling to you, to either of you, if at all? Yeah, I think that's exactly why we decided to do something different. It was almost nerve-wracking, watching people use their smartphones in public, you know, in the park, in a train station, a restaurant. If you just look up, it's almost bizarre that everyone is touching and staring a little screen instead of, you know, enjoy the conversation, making eye contact, or actually pay attention to your kids. That's the reason we feel like the goal.

to maximize people's time, attention, and data, it's just not fair. The reason I quit the job is just because I don't understand why we need to make a new phone every two months, every three months. You quit your job as a phone designer because you felt like why are we making a new phone every few months when this last one's perfectly good. Yeah, like just because there was a slightly better camera, that's making a new phone, or because we could rotate a phone this way, that way. And I was like, but who needs that? And does anyone actually look at how people use it? Like, I remember this feeling that my smartphone is the source of anxiety when I look at it. Because I know if someone calls me after 10 p.m., there's something bad happening in the other side of the world, right?

Yeah. So I just remember this feeling that smartphone being the source of anxiety. Yeah. So you guys are in this incubator program for Google. And at what point, Joe, did you start to think, hang on, maybe there's something else to think about here. And how did you find Kai, who clearly agreed with you? Yeah, I think it was, you know, in the program, we were doing user research and asking people about their relationships with their smartphones. And no one was saying, I wish I spent two more hours on my smartphone.

In fact, people were kind of had these, you know, over the top. I almost wish I could just go off the grid forever kind of sentiment. And I found myself as a freelancer checking my email when I was at the beach trying to change a song and seeing some email that I could do nothing about. And I said, you know, why is it that I bring everything with me everywhere? I thought back about, you know, even further AOL Instant Messenger and kind of dial up computers of my childhood. there was only one room in the house that you could access the internet. And there was this very clear distinction between online and offline time.

And I think the smartphones became so ubiquitous that we almost forgot we have the agency to actually sign off from time to time. And when I talked to Kai about the idea, he immediately resonated. And it was, you know, kind of felt like something we might be able to do together with his background. Yeah, tell me about. The idea. I mean, you said to him, hey, let's forget about working on an app. Let's build a phone that doesn't distract you. Is that what you said? I mean, it was basically like instead of making an app to keep people on their smartphones, well, if we make a phone to get people off their smartphones. Right. Almost taking the app into the physical sense. And, you know, Guy's first reaction was it's really, really hard to make a cell phone. You don't want to make a cell phone.

But we started talking about what this might look like and pitching it to peers in the program with us. And we got a really deep polarizing reaction. Yeah, what did they, Kai, what do they say? Well, it's really interesting. As some of them would say, this is going to change my life. And some other group of people who are like, this is, why do I ever need that? My smartphone is perfect. It does everything for me.

There's nothing wrong with my smartphone, right? But I think everyone had a reaction. You either love it or you hate it. And I think that's every designer's goal just to create something that actually relate to the individuals. All right. So you guys decide to partner up and see if you could create a phone that didn't distract you. Once you agreed to kind of work on this, what was your first step? What did you, did you guys start to sketch it?

out on paper what it might look like? What did you start to do? Her first step was really actually trying to test the hypothesis that people might enjoy taking a break from their smartphone. So we actually got a couple flip phones and we set up call forwarding for about two dozen people over the course of a couple weeks. And whether it was either a weekend or just an evening would ask them to leave their smartphone, calls would forward to this new flip phone, but they would only have access to nine contacts. What we saw from that was pretty amazing, kind of described this initial anxiety, like tapping your pocket, checking the flip phone a couple of times every few minutes, but after, you know, a certain point, there's this kind of magical moment where you are present,

and it's incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating. And, you know, they described feeling ready to come back to work with a clearer head. And then when we actually looked at the flip phones, We realized that no one used them at all. It was really this kind of peace of mind that, God forbid, there was an emergency, my mom, my cat, you know, partner, whatever, I was reachable. But that the actual value that we brought them wasn't in any one feature, but actually in the lack of features. And both of you obviously have design backgrounds. And Kai, you literally designed smartphone. So you basically knew how you could do this.

but you guys decided let's do a Kickstarter because that's a good way to raise money. You need money to do this. So you launched Kickstarter and you got $400,000. You get $3,000 people back this project. And with that money, what were you able to do? Because I'm thinking, you've got to send 3,000 phones to people. Wow, that seems like a lot more than $400,000.

Yeah, there's not even enough. not even a freshen that we needed to build the device. So what did you do? Well, a big part of the Kickstarter wasn't just the money, but actually the traction that could be used to, you know, inspire partners or investors to see the value in this that people were willing to contribute at such an early stage. And that was a huge momentum push for us.

We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Joe and Kai can confront some big challenges creating what they call a phone away from phone. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. One more thing before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's May of 2015, and Joe and Kai's light phone has generated a lot of interest. and backing on Kickstarter. And with that support,

it's time for them to take their design from the drawing board and figure out how to make it real. Yeah, so we, I think we started by just getting phones from Amazon or Alibaba and break it apart and try to, you know, Frankstand build a phone that looks like what we're trying to do

so that we have a physical prototype we could show suppliers as well as our investments. And the crowdfunding campaign was really helpful for our suppliers to understand what we're trying to do and how many people or is there a market for this kind of product. You know, suppliers was like investor. Yeah. You know, they could build any other product with their capacity, but they have to decide, okay, I'm going to, you know, take a shot with life. So getting the first couple of suppliers on board were really critical for the part of manufacturing.

Describe that first light phone. I mean, what was the promise? What would it do? We called it your phone away from phone. Right. Okay. And the idea was that it wasn't necessarily trying to replace your smartphone, but to just say, hey, for, you know, a couple of hours a day or maybe for a weekend or, you know, while working on a certain project, you might want to go light. What that actually meant was that the original light phone

was a simple 2G cell phone that had its own SIM card, and we made software that would kind of make it seamlessly feel like it was an extension of your smartphone number. Your calls would forward to the light phone, and when you called so on, it would display as if the call was coming from you, and it would allow you to leave your smartphone behind and just take the phone aspect out of the phone. Okay, so you start working on it, and this is not, I mean, this ends up taking quite a long time. Did it take longer than you had anticipated to actually develop it and then deliver it to

the Kickstarter backers? Yeah, for sure. I think we estimated a year and a half. I feel like it took us almost two years to actually get the product out, which we appreciated that people were being very patient with us. mostly. And so when you finally delivered these phones, I mean, there was mixed reaction to them, right? Because it was on a 2G network originally, and there was some challenges with it, right?

Definitely. I mean, aside from any technical challenges, it's quite the ask for the end user. So I think what we saw a lot of was almost like a gym membership where someone wants to go light, but is struggling to actually integrate that kind of experience into their day-to-day life. So this phone comes out in 2017, January of 2017, and you ship, I think, about 15,000 units before you had to kind of put a stop to it. And there was a waiting list. Like, people were actually even selling some of these on the secondary market for like two, three times of price. Yeah, and that whole time we were taking pre-orders, which was, you know, help keeping our lights.

on and we were incredibly grateful that people would be willing to spend money for a phone that might not be delivered for one to three months depending on where we were in that kind of timing. And that $400,000 that you raised, I mean, did that take you all through this period of time or did you have to seek other sources of financing? It took us to the first stage, which is paying our suppliers to do the design work and getting samples built. I think we needed two million more

just to actually go through the process. So we raised money from the mission-aligned investors along the way to help us deliver. And clearly, this was going to be just the first iteration. I mean, you clearly had an ambition to make a more sophisticated phone, and that would be the light phone too. And in 2018, you launched another campaign, this I'm on Indiegogo for the Light Phone 2.

And that one raised about $3.5 million. What did the Light Phone 2? What was that phone going to be able to do? Well, I think we learned so much from the first light phone. Our users were telling us that they wanted to go light more often, meaning use Lightphone more often. But they don't have Uber. They want text message. They want this one or two more things.

to make that experience more enjoyable or have that peace of mind knowing to have those tools. I think that's when we started to revisit our philosophy saying that, hey, you know, the goal originally was trying to give people that peace of mind so it could break away even just from time to time. So what if we offer our users, a couple more utility tool,

if that enables millions or more people try life phone. That's what we wanted to do. So tell me about what this phone does, the light phone tool. It has phone call. You can send text message. You can write text message. Now we have music,

MP3 player, podcast. You can get simple direction. We have hotspot as well as calendar and notes. You could take text notes or voice memo. And so I guess eventually you'll be able to like hail an Uber with it.

Hopefully lift a right sharing tool is something that we're trying to do. But that requires, you know, the right share company to collaborate with us. So tell me a little bit about, I mean, building a phone company, it's not, this is not easy. This is a huge challenge.

And you are basically saying to people, look, smartphones have taken over our lives. We're losing our time and our attention to these devices. And so you've got to convince, you know, a certain number of people to adopt the product, but you have to build them too, which requires a lot of money. And I guess over time, that became sort of a focus. You had to raise more money to make these phones, right? Yeah, yeah, we got to raise a lot more money than we originally planned it just to make the iPhone too. So when you told investors about this idea, how did you convince them to back you?

I mean, presumably some of them were like, well, I don't think people. people are going to use these things. I mean, there's definitely the concern about, is this just a niche product? Is this, you know, does there any actual mass market adoption? I think anyone that's been interested in investing in the Lightphone does feel morally. There's something really beautiful going on with Lightphone and that we have this sort of honest and transparent business model that's so kind of unique. As a matter of fact, one of our investors from Foxcombe, the company that's,

make iPhone and Samsung. So we were in the meetings explaining what Lyfton is, what Lyfton is trying to do. One of the executive from Faskan was saying, guys, I need this phone. My families are torn apart by smartphone. My kids don't talk to me. You know, we're all on our phone on a dining table. You know, I need this phone. And I think that emotional connection drove a lot of investors to us.

because of the business model that every app, every social media are deploying. Doesn't matter what you do. Doesn't matter what product you're trying to create. As long as you're making money from advertisement or user's data, there's no way out. You will have to maximize their attention and time. You know, one of the things I struggle with because obviously, you know, for people who feel like their phones have kind of come to control them, and I think a lot of people listening feel that,

and I certainly have days where I feel like that. But on the flip side, like, I just, I think about yesterday. I went to San Francisco to have lunch with a friend, and I hailed an Uber, and then I looked at a map app to see how long it would take me to get there. And I got to the restaurant a few minutes early, so I checked my Gmail, quickly answered a couple of emails, so it was, like, time-efficient.

And then my wife texted me and needed me to transfer some money in our bank, and I did that for my phone. And on the one hand, 10, 20 years ago, I couldn't do any of that. And maybe probably I stopped to notice things around me more for sure. And I think there are elements of the world we lived in then that were better. But on the other hand, there's incredible efficiency. And so I have to wonder that we've just gotten to a point in human history where these things kind of won.

Well, we're not disagreeing that smartphones is efficient and it's a very helpful computers that help us do things. But at the same time, Joe and I, we're not asking people to give up technology. All we're trying to say is that we should have options. We should have tools that intentionally designed just like Hammer or Schooldriver. You use it, you put it back. and you don't think about your hammer 24-7. You don't hold your screwdriver and swipe your screwdriver for five hours a day. Why can we reimagine the mobile device

that does not have the components of attention economy, but has all the modern utility? When we come back after a short break, more from Joe and Kai about building their minimalist smartphone, the light phone. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today are Kai Tang and Joe Hollier.

They think that we need to redefine our relationships to our smartphones, which is why they built a minimalist version of a smartphone called the Lightphone. There was a, this is now, I'm sure lots of people listening to know about this, but there was a famous study probably 20, 30 years ago. It was a study into memory. and it studied London cab drivers. And you may know about this study. Definitely.

But London cab drivers had remarkable memories. And that's because there was a time where to be a cab driver and maybe even to this day you have to, I don't know, you had to memorize every street in London. I remember in the 90s you'd get in a cab and you would just say a street and the driver would know. And, you know, I drive to, like on the weekends, I go hiking. And I still use my GPS app to tell me.

where to go. And I'm going to the same places. And I thought about this recently, I thought, I can't believe that I'm relying on the GPS. It's kind of scary because I've been there a hundred times. I definitely think we're losing some brain muscles with the technology we have. Like, I don't even remember my parents' phone number or my girlfriend's phone number. I can't remember phone numbers. And we rely on GPS to go everywhere, even just a couple blocks away. You know, maybe it's a good thing. Maybe this boring task that's being replaced by technology. It's a good thing for us that we could live our life better or we could like, you know, actually talking to our friends while the computer is doing those things, right? But that's not what's happening. Kai, do you exclusively use a iPhone?

Yes. Both Joe and I use Lyftphone exclusively. We do have our iPad or computers for everything else. So it's a separate tool for different purpose. If I know I need my iPad to do things that life phone doesn't do, we will carry that tool with us. But other than not, like commuting, taking a walk down the street or having dinners, I'll just bring my life phone. Tell me about, you know, I know you've raised up to, I think, about $11 million in total. Is that, is that right? Yes. Tell me where the company is now. I mean, you know, it took Tesla 15 years to get profitability.

So Rivian and some of these other electric car companies or won't hit profitability for another 10 years probably. I have to assume that you're not yet profitable. We are break-even at the moment with the sales from our website, with the support from our users. We don't do advertisement. So all the sales are water-mouthed.

And it just becomes a such conversational piece to a lot of our users. that if you have it with you, you know, usually people ask, hey, what's that? You know, what's your smartphone? Why don't you use a smartphone? Right. So the whole conversation becomes, why I don't use smartphone? What's the problem? You know, and what's the relationship between us and technology? And in our website sales is sustaining our operation and our R&D at the moment. we do have investors that are supporting us, but we're trying to keep it as private as we can

and stick to our agenda and our value. Where do you see the most potential for growth? I mean, I know that there was like a, there's a school in Massachusetts, I think, that banned phones and then they basically said, okay, everyone can have a light phone. Is there a sector, a category of people in particular who you think, where you see growth for this product? I've been really pleasantly surprised by the wide kind of range of users that have found value in something like the light phone. Yeah. We get a lot of families, not just buying it for their kids, but actually like the parents, maybe they have like a newborn wanting to be more present in a better role model. We have celebrities that are buying the phone as something to kind of keep some separation between them and the internet at large.

We have a lot of artists and musicians that see it as a kind of peace of mind space for their own practice. And then, yeah, this recent school has been a really inspiring new angle because we've had dozens of schools in conversation since about promoting a similar kind of policy or at least trying to make it more accessible. And actually the Buxton School was kind of an amazing case study for us. the school in Massachusetts. It's a small private boarding school. And I think what was really amazing was that they banned smartphones for the faculty as well as the students. So that there was this kind of like level playing field. It wasn't just like do as I say, not as I do.

And the school just saw fantastic results, especially when it came to things like meal time. I think, you know, the classroom was pretty expected that, you know, with people being more attentive. but I think the real magic was seeing kids integrate and mingle in mealtime and around the campus. Is there a world where the next iteration is, it has the same features, but maybe adds a camera, not a camera that's going to go to social media, but just a camera to take photos. Yes, I think that's part of our plane. So camera is a great tool to capture a moment to documenting, your life or even just a receipt, right?

I think that's a very useful tool. If we do have a camera in Lifephone, it will be a tool that allows you to capture those moments, but we will not allow sharing or commenting or liking to be part of that experience. Because, you know, if you take a film camera, you take a photo, you don't think about sharing or where to post that photos, right?

That's a great tool. And we, that's kind of inspiration. of how we think a camera might work with my film. Yeah, I think the thing we want to avoid the most is when you see someone at a beautiful monument or an overlook on a trail and they take the photo, but it's almost as if they didn't even see it with their own eyes because now they're looking down, trying to put the right filter, the right caption. And it's one thing to capture that moment for seeing it and remembering it.

But if you're not present when you're taking the photo, I think that's, missing the point. How many people work for the company now? We have around 15 employee. 15. And so you do no marketing at all. It's entirely just word of mouth. We do a lot of projects and initiatives, but what we don't do is spend money on Facebook meta platforms or Google, you know, ads. It's really about things that our users can help spread, making videos or we recently just did a campaign where we made a fake company called the Alliance of Big Tech, and we used that to kind of say, do not buy the light phone for all of these reasons. And we sent about 700 shirts to some of our earliest users, a kind of great grassroots way

to start a lot of conversations about the phone. And I think, as Kai kind of mentioned before, the conversations about the phone, whether or not someone immediately purchases it, it's not just like how does it work, you really start to talk about the internet at large and what it means to be a human in 2023, and they tend to stick with people. So a lot of our new users have heard about the light phone for three or six months or even maybe longer. And so a lot of our marketing is just kind of feeding them more anecdotes, more examples of how other users have fitted into their life to make that less intimidating of a jump. You know, we talked about how you launch his phone and the idea came in 2014 when this problem, this sort of attention economy was

clearly it was already a problem, but very few people were thinking about it at the time. And, you know, over the last few years, movies like The Social Dilemma, documentaries about the attention economy have come out. There's more attention being paid to it, but the problem is worse. So let's sort of fast forward 10 years from now. I mean, do you think that something will change? I mean, will it sort of be a groundswell of action by like Gen Zers who are like, no, we're, you know, we're not taking this anymore. We want our attention back and we're going to not buy smartphones?

It's funny you mentioned Gen Z because that's actually one of the biggest surprise to me. I originally thought that our user will be, you know, older generation or my generation, 35 to 40. But no, it turns out like 75, 80% of a customers are Gen Z, a younger generation who, who are really brave to say no and willing to give a try. And 10 years down the road, I think smartphone is just a glitch. Our behavior with smartphone right now is just not normal. In my opinion, you know, technology needs to be invisible. It shouldn't be the focus of our life every day 24-7,

and wake up with it, sleep with it, go to a bathroom with the smartphone on hand, and ignore your family and friends and the tree, the cloud around us. And I think eventually a lot more people will be looking for a different option. That's Kai Tang and Joe Hollier, co-founders of the company Light and creators of the Lightphone. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please make sure to follow the show wherever you listen on any podcast app.

Usually there's just a follow button right at the top so you don't miss any new episodes. And it is entirely free. If you want to contact our team, our email address is hibt at ID.wondry.com. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with editing by John Isabella, research by Alex Chung and music by Rumptine Everett. of Louie. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Carla Estevez, J.C. Howard, Chris Massini, Liz Metzger, and Sam Paulson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.