If you happen to’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 speak to family and friends with simply their voices. No screens, no AI.
GeekWire acknowledged Kittleson as one in every of our Unusual Thinkers for 2025, a program introduced in partnership with Larger Seattle Companions honoring inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs reworking 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 gadgets, what occurred after they eradicated screens on household highway journeys, and the $12 million seed spherical led by Greylock that can gas the corporate’s subsequent chapter.
Hear beneath, subscribe wherever you hear, and preserve studying for takeaways and highlights.
It’s a “connection manufacturing unit,” not a nostalgia play. Kittleson pushes again on the concept Tin Can is primarily about retro attraction.
“Individuals at all times ask us about nostalgia and retro. … I don’t suppose it’s about that. I feel it’s about connection,” he mentioned. “We discovered a type issue that’s acquainted, and that’s actually been helpful. And folks 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 arrange curler hockey video games and playdates.
“As a social community, the landline had 100% penetration. Everyone had one,” he mentioned. “I feel all of us forgot that we have been main beneficiaries of that as children.” When he talked about this to different dad and mom in school pickup, all of them began reciting their childhood greatest mates’ telephone numbers from reminiscence.
Texting isn’t connection — it’s simply communication. Kittleson cited a examine wherein harassed children have been break 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 information on provide chain, manufacturing, and money circulation.
His mother made him an unusual thinker. When Kittleson was a child, he wrote horrible songs. His uncle gently informed him he wasn’t an incredible singer. His mother supported him, it doesn’t matter what.
“No matter you wish to do, for those who work arduous sufficient, for those who imagine, for those who’ve received the center, you are able to do it,” she informed him. That, Kittleson mentioned, made him “extra inclined to be open to the concept I might be the explanation one thing just like the landline comes again.”
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Audio modifying by Curt Milton
