OnePlus

OnePlus is a smartphone brand founded in Shenzhen in late 2013 by Pete Lau (刘作虎), which launched its first phone in 2014 and merged into OPPO in 2021, where it now operates as an online-focused sub-brand . The picture comes largely from a Linear Capital-hosted talk by Gong Yin, a founding-team executive and former VP of its platform center, who described an early playbook built on the "不将就" ("Never Settle") ethos and a community-first, no-offline-channel internet brand model that gathered seed users before any product existed . By around mid-2021 it had roughly 14 million active users across North America, India, Europe and China, about 2,000 employees in 27 countries, and at its peak ranked first in India's premium segment (ahead of Apple and Samsung) and held over 50% of the Nordic Android market . In elsewhere's view, the interesting part of the story is less the hardware than the sequencing — brand philosophy and forum community first, product second — which is what let a small team punch into the global flagship tier.