GoKawiilStartups building consumer electronics will have a better shot at becoming the next Apple in Shenzhen than in Silicon Valley, said Will Wang, CEO of China's smart-glasses startup and the country's newest unicorn Even Realities.
"If we wanted to create a future around consumer electronics — if we wanted to really build possibly the next Apple — we need to be at the center of hardware, which is Shenzhen," Wang told CNBC's Chery Kang on Wednesday, citing the city's deep engineering talent pool and supply chain dominance.
The Shenzhen-based company said Monday it had raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, with investors including Meituan and Tencent. Wang, who worked at Apple from 2016 to 2018 on the development and mass production of the Apple Watch and iPhone, is eyeing the AI wearables market dominated by Meta Platforms.
Wang said that Silicon Valley has lost some of its appetite for founders who build hardware products, shunning the longer development cycles and less return upside, compared with AI applications, as well as inevitable supply chain hurdles.
"Silicon Valley seems to not really reward hardware people that much anymore," he said, with talent and capital "intensively" flowing instead into AI and software agents. "You started to see less and less consumer electronics startups, or talents, around Silicon Valley."