Carl Pei, who co-founded OnePlus with Pete Lau, is leaving the company to launch a new venture, TechCrunch reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. Pei was in his 20s when he started OnePlus, reaching out to Lau in 2012 through social media. The company began life one year later, in December 2013.
Pei was created original marketing to sell OnePlus devices in the early years, such as selling by invitation, or through fun gimmicks. At the time, he lived almost exclusively in low-cost hotels in China and India, to better understand the market and to easily move to new cities. "We didn’t have proper product management. What we lacked in experience, we made up in hours,” he said in an earlier interview. Once he publicly asked Samsung to hire him so that he could learn more about overseeing operations and logistics. That is not his destination now though, the sources said.
Before OnePlus, Pei sold white-labeled MP3 players in China.
