YouSaid · the spoken record

Kai Tang and Joe Hollier

lines on the record: 28
first: 2023-08-10
most recent: 2023-08-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's Kaitang and Joe Hollier, co founders of the company Light and Creators of the Light Phone. 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.wonderie.com. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with editing by John Isabella, researched by Alex Chung, and music by Rumtin Era Bluey. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Carla Estevez, JC 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.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talked about how you launch this phone, and the idea came in 2014 when this problem, this sort of attention economy was clearly a problem. But very few people were thinking about it at the time. And 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 there sort of be a groundswell of action by Gen Ziers who are like, no, we're not taking this anymore. We want our tension back and we're going to not buy smartphones?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there a world where the next iteration 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?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where do you see the most potential for growth? I mean, I know that there was 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?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell me about, you know, I know you've raised up to, I think, about $11 million in total. Is that right? Tell me where the company is now. I mean, it took Tesla 15 years to get profitability. So Arivian and some of these other electric car companies won't hit profitability for another 10 years probably. I have to assume that you're not yet profitable.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To memorize every street in London. I remember in the 90s you get in a cabin, 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”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Ros, and you're listening to how I built this lab Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross. 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. It's called the light phone. This is now, I'm sure, lots of people listening 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.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the one hand ten, twenty 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”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of the things I struggle with, because obviously 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, I think about yesterday, I went to San Francisco to have lunch with a friend and hailed an Uber, and then I looked at a map app to see how long it would take me to get there. Then I got to the restaurant a few minutes early, so I checked my Gmail, quickly answered a couple 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.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 are going to use these things.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, tell me a little bit about building a phone company. It's 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 a sort of a focus. You had to raise more money to make these phones, right?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 2. And in 2018, you launched another campaign, this is 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?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That four hundred thousand dollars 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”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 two, three times a price.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when you finally delivered these phones, I mean, there was mixed reaction to them, right? Because it was in a 2G network originally, and there were some challenges with it, right?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Joe and Kai 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”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both of you obviously have design backgrounds, and Kai, you literally designed smartphones. 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. 3,000 people back this project. And with that money, what were you able to do? I mean, because I'm thinking, you got to send 3,000 phones to people. Wow, that seems like a lot more than $400,000”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, 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? Did you guys start to sketch it out on paper, what it might look like? What did you start to do?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet 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?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? How did you find Kai, who clearly agreed with you?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And presumably, like most of the people in this program are like, okay, what kind of app can we build that can attract attention and presumably can make money? I would imagine that's how most people are thinking, right?”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Joe worked as a filmmaker, animator, illustrator after college. And because both Kai and Joe had designed backgrounds, they met while attending a 30-week incubator program for designers that was put on by Google in New York.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Rise. So imagine you're waiting somewhere, right? Maybe you're in the checkout line at the grocery store or at a restaurant and just waiting for the bathroom to open up. And while you wait for a few minutes, what are you doing? I bet there's a high chance that you take out your smartphone and just start scrolling. 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 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, depression, especially in children and teens. Well, Kaitang and Joe Hollier looked at these problems and they thought, what if there was a different”
2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2023-08-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT