When Andy Kleinman, CEO of the startup Wonder, called the famous industrial designer Yves Behar to solicit his services, Behar offered a warning. "You don't realize how hard it is to do this stuff," Behar said. He asked Kleinman to remember, in a year, when everything would seem impossible, that Behar had told him this. Kleinman, a long-time gaming software executive with companies like Zynga and Disney, said he was up for it. And he had a big idea: to build a smartphone made just gamers.

Kleinman, a wavy-haired Argentinian with seemingly boundless knowledge of politics, pop culture, and gaming, knows his target users. They're the kind of people who dissect the latest Game of Thrones and search for hacks in PUBG. They love music and movies, obsess over their favorite athletes and YouTubers, game anywhere and everywhere. Kleinman has been building products for them for more than a decade; he's one of them. And he's confident that at least a few others like him are tired of what he calls "the sea of sameness," the iPhones and Galaxies that all have the same features and blur together. Andy Rubin saw that group and created Essential to capture the cool kids. Kleinman built Wonder for the geeks.

So far, the company has raised $14 million from a wide group of investors. Some of them are the standard Silicon Valley money-pourers, like Greycroft Partners and TCL, but Kleinman's investor slide also includes Shakira, Kevin Spacey, and Neymar, along with Atari inventor Nolan Bushnell and former Sega CEO Hayao Nakayama. Wonder needs fans and followers, and these folks have cachet to spare.

"The biggest task for Wonder is building a brand that's recognized by the community of gamers as a brand that speaks their language," says Emmanuel Seuge, a longtime marketing exec and another of Wonder's early investors. "If you do it right, they’ll be very welcoming. They’ll make the product and the brand better." It's a tough balance, though: Gamers can be brand-friendly to anyone helping grow the community, but smell cynicism a mile away.

Long before Wonder launched a product or even revealed itself fully to the world—which it's only doing now—the company opened up signups for a mysterious Alpha program. Thousands of people signed up. Those early users are now in forums, where they talk about TV and gaming and the other things that unite them. They also investigate and follow the nature of this mysterious company. Kleinman took this approach from Elon Musk, who opened forums for Tesla owners before anyone owned a Tesla. "It's about making sure that the community is engaged," Kleinman says. "Then we can start giving them something that they want, but also getting feedback, so we can improve this product over the next few years."

Ultimately, Kleinman's vision for Wonder goes far beyond smartphones. He hopes to build a massive new tech brand, for a particular kind of user. Kleinman and his team looked at virtual-reality hardware, augmented-reality hardware, tablets, wearables, everything. But first, they have to make this phone work.

Trial and Error

The "phone for gamers" has been made many times before, but all have failed. Sony's Xperia Play debuted to much excitement and little success. Ditto Nokia's N-Gage. Kleinman says he's spoken to people who worked on the Xbox Phone at Microsoft and the Playstation Phone at Sony, and believes both companies regret letting those devices spin into mainstream flops. More recently, PGS raised big bucks on Kickstarter by promising a high-end smartphone on top of a fantastic game controller. And almost immediately, PGS realized it couldn't make the device it promised.

If Kleinman and his team want to succeed, they'll have to learn from this long line of failures. One early lesson: You can't build a phone that looks like a toy. "We want something that looks very geeky-entertainment-gaming-focused, but it can't be a Game Boy," Kleinman says. "You need to be able to go to work with it."