For those who’re searching for an unusual thinker, how a few tech trade veteran creating and promoting landline telephones in 2025 — and promoting out of them within the course of?
Chet Kittleson is the co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, a Seattle startup making Wi-Fi enabled landline telephones designed to let children discuss to family and friends with simply their voices. No screens, no AI.
GeekWire acknowledged Kittleson as certainly one of our Unusual Thinkers for 2025, a program introduced in partnership with Better Seattle Companions honoring inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs remodeling their industries in surprising methods.
On this episode, he talks concerning the second in school pickup that sparked the concept, why his personal children don’t personal units, what occurred after they eradicated screens on household highway journeys, and the $12 million seed spherical led by Greylock that may gasoline the corporate’s subsequent chapter.
Hear under, subscribe wherever you pay attention, and preserve studying for takeaways and highlights.
It’s a “connection manufacturing unit,” not a nostalgia play. Kittleson pushes again on the concept that Tin Can is primarily about retro attraction.
“Folks at all times ask us about nostalgia and retro. … I don’t assume it’s about that. I believe it’s about connection,” he mentioned. “We discovered a kind issue that’s acquainted, and that’s actually been useful. And other people love nostalgia. … However we really feel like we’re extra of a connection manufacturing unit than we’re bringing again the bell bottoms.”
The landline was children’ first social community — we simply forgot. Kittleson grew up in La Conner, Wash., utilizing the household telephone to prepare curler hockey video games and playdates.
“As a social community, the landline had 100% penetration. All people had one,” he mentioned. “I believe all of us forgot that we had been main beneficiaries of that as children.” When he talked about this to different mother and father in school pickup, all of them began reciting their childhood finest associates’ telephone numbers from reminiscence.
Texting isn’t connection — it’s simply communication. Kittleson cited a examine by which careworn children had been cut up into three teams: one texted their mother, one referred to as their mother, one noticed their mother in individual.
The children who referred to as or noticed their moms launched oxytocin and calmed down. The texting group? “There was no chemical impact. It was like nothing occurred,” Kittleson mentioned. “It’s not connection. You’re speaking, however that’s not the identical factor as connecting.”
The brand new funding brings {hardware} experience to the desk. The $12 million spherical was led by Greylock and consists of participation from David Shuman, chairman of the board at Oura, the good ring firm.
“We’re a bunch of technologists with little or no {hardware} expertise,” Kittleson mentioned. Shuman, he mentioned, is contributing an immense quantity of data on provide chain, manufacturing, and money move.
His mother made him an unusual thinker. When Kittleson was a child, he wrote horrible songs. His uncle gently instructed him he wasn’t a terrific singer. His mother supported him, it doesn’t matter what.
“No matter you need to do, when you work laborious sufficient, when you consider, when you’ve bought the heart, you are able to do it,” she instructed him. That, Kittleson mentioned, made him “extra inclined to be open to the concept that I might be the rationale one thing just like the landline comes again.”
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Audio modifying by Curt Milton
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