As I like to say, my Apple iPhone is the remote control to my life.
We made our phones smarter, faster, but harder to put down; wwe tethred to it. Sleke’s co-founders are asking what happens when we optimize technology for something else.
What a strange contradiction to modern life.
Our technology has never been more robust. Our phones can operate businesses, move money, navigate cities, and connect us to almost anyone.
And now AI promises to accelerate every digital interaction at hyperspeed.
Yet it has never felt harder to simply separate ourselves from our phone.
That tension is at the center of my conversation with Austin and Brennan, co-founders of Sleke.
They aren’t anti-technology. They’re asking a more interesting question:
What if our mobile technology did what we needed and then got out of the way?
Connection without the obsession
The idea for Sleke originated while Austin and Brennan were living abroad.
They used Instagram and Facebook to stay in touch with people back home. But those same platforms continually pulled their attention away from the life happening directly in front of them.
They wanted the utility of a smartphone without being glued to it.
When they couldn’t find that middle ground between an everything-phone and a “dumb phone,” they decided to build it themselves.
Their product philosophy can essentially be reduced to:
Complete the task. Get off the phone.
That’s a provocative idea in an economy that has spent years optimizing for the opposite.
More sessions. More clicks. More notifications. More time spent.
But this conversation isn’t only about how Sleke is building a phone.
It’s about the choices companies make when designing technology and the choices the rest of us make when using it.
For founders and leaders: Is more engagement actually success?
Through hundreds of early customer conversations, Sleke boiled down what people actually needed from their phones into five categories:
Messaging. Money. Maps. Music. Life management.
Their filter for additional functionality is simple: Does this help someone solve a real-world problem, or does it encourage them to stay on the device?
That question is worth borrowing.
If you’re a founder, CEO or senior executive, consider what your organization is actually optimizing for.
A banking customer doesn’t want to spend more time in a banking app. Someone making a reservation doesn’t want a 20-minute experience. And an employee using AI doesn’t need another platform demanding attention—they need it to remove work.
So what?
The metrics we’ve traditionally associated with successful technology, time spent, sessions and engagement- aren’t automatically synonymous with customer value.
Sometimes a great product should make itself temporarily unnecessary.
Now what?
Look at one important customer journey in your business and ask:
What is the customer actually trying to accomplish, and how quickly can we help them accomplish it?
Then examine every additional click, notification, feature, and prompt between those two points.
Some may generate value.
Others may simply create engagement.
That distinction will become increasingly important as AI gives companies the ability to insert more technology into virtually every interaction.
For the rest of us: Stop treating all screen time the same
Sleke originally focused heavily on reducing screen time.
Then its users complicated the thesis.
What about reading a book? Learning a language? Using a fitness app?
Those activities can increase screen time while still contributing something meaningful to someone’s life.
Brennan described users wanting to “choose their own adventures,” deciding which digital activities deserve a place on their device rather than treating everything on a screen as equally problematic.
So what?
The goal probably shouldn’t be to use technology as little as possible.
It should be to use it intentionally.
Twenty minutes of reading isn’t necessarily equivalent to twenty minutes of scrolling an infinite feed.
The more useful question becomes:
Did I choose to do this or did the technology choose for me?
Now what?
Try auditing your phone by purpose rather than screen time.
When you reach for it, notice whether you’re there to communicate, accomplish, learn or consume.
Then identify the apps where you routinely enter with one intention and emerge 20 minutes later doing something completely different.
Those are probably better candidates for intervention than your total daily screen-time number.
For founders: Your earliest customers can be your product team
There’s another lesson in Sleke’s story that has almost nothing to do with phones.
When the company began selling in 2024, Austin and Brennan intentionally kept marketing limited.
They wanted customers with what Austin called the “hair on fire problem”—people frustrated enough by their existing smartphones to tolerate an early product and actively help improve it.
For roughly the first six months, they spoke with every user every week. As a bootstrapped company, those conversations helped determine where limited resources should go.
So what?
Early-stage growth can create the illusion of validation.
Deep customer understanding creates something more useful: direction.
Now what?
Before spending more to acquire your next thousand customers, ask what you’ve learned from your first hundred.
Who feels the problem most intensely?
What workaround are they already using?
What do they repeatedly ask you to fix?
And are you building from those signals—or from assumptions?
For all of us: Where does the technology ultimately send you?
Toward the end of our conversation, Austin made an important point.
Getting people off their phones isn’t enough.
There will always be another screen.
The bigger question is what happens after we put it down.
Technology can help facilitate community, relationships and real-world experiences rather than replace them. As Austin put it, intention ultimately determines much of technology’s benefit or downside.
That leaves two very different questions coming out of this conversation.
For the people building and leading companies:
Are you designing technology to capture more of someone’s attention—or to give some of it back?
For the people using it:
Is technology helping you do what you intended to do or quietly deciding what you’ll do next?
We’ve spent decades asking what else technology can do.
Maybe the more interesting question in 2026 is:
What can better technology give back?
Time. Attention. Focus. Connection.
For founders, that’s a product opportunity.
For the rest of us, it’s a choice.
And increasingly, I think both matter.