Hollier, in particular, felt that his relationship with technology was broken. He recalled the internet of his childhood, when he'd wait 10 minutes for the modem to connect on the computer in his mom's study. There, he was online. It was contained, finite. When he left the study, to hang out with friends or hit the pool on a nice summer's day, he was no longer online. He'd set an away message and tell people where to find him.

Hollier wanted to build something that would bring back the duality of being online when you wanted to be and just being yourself the rest of the time. Tang, who has a background building mobile phones for companies like Motorola, Nokia, and BlackBerry, agreed that the solution might lie in another phone. Just not one that behaved like the phones we've come to know. Something more like a dialup device for the age of the smartphone.

The original Light Phone was small, barely bigger than a credit card, with a light-up dial pad that made the handset look like a calculator. Tang and Hollier are both designers, and the first thing they agreed on is that they should not crib from conventional phone design. A phone is a thing that makes us anxious, something we reach for like a nervous tick. Some research suggests that just seeing one on a table—face down, turned off—makes us distracted and unhappy. So no, this wouldn't be a phone, not the kind you're used to. This would be, as Tang likes to call it, a "tool."

Tang and Hollier blueprinted it in the incubator, then launched it on Kickstarter in June of 2015. It wasn't designed to be a consumer product so much as an experiment. "We were not trying to compete with any smartphone when we started," says Tang. It was more like an artistic statement: Look at how anxious you are without your phone.

Its backers on Kickstarter didn't see it that way. Light Phone raised $400,000 and sold 15,000 units, at $150 each, before Tang and Hollier put a stop on orders. Another 50,000 people joined a waitlist to get their hands on one, while the secondary market for used Light Phones saw them going for triple the original price.

Less Is More

The Light Phone's surprise success proved to its creators that people weren't as interested in what this new gadget could do, but what it couldn't. "Everyone was habitually overwhelmed and craving escape," says Hollier. People told him that the Light Phone made them feel less stressed or that it made them feel better about giving a phone to their kids.

He and Tang also heard that people couldn't "go light" for as long as they'd like to, because of the phone's limitations. It's hard to give up a smartphone when that means giving up Uber and Lyft, listening to music, and text messaging. Plus, the Light Phone could store only nine phone numbers in its address book.

Adding a bunch of new features would make the Light Phone very heavy, more like a dumbed-down smartphone than their artistic invention. But Tang and Hollier sympathized with the idea that people wanted to ditch their smartphones for good. So they set out to build something new—something that Tang says isn't meant to be a temporary escape from your smartphone, but a permanent one.

The Light Phone II doesn't come with many new capabilities out of the box. It now offers text messaging and an alarm clock, and you can import your entire address book. This new version supports 4G connectivity—an upgrade from the 2G Light Phone—and it has a new e-ink screen. But the dream is to design an entirely new operating system, where Light Phone II owners can download a selection of apps from an online dashboard. Ride-sharing, turn-by-turn directions, and a find-my-phone feature are all in the works. "We have some pretty strong philosophical guidelines for how we build them," says Hollier. "We don't want anything that can be infinite. Everything has to have a clear intention. With ride-sharing, it's like, I'm trying to get to this destination. Everything on the phone should be there for a clear reason. No email, no news."