If you’re looking for an uncommon thinker, how about a tech industry veteran developing and selling landline phones in 2025 — and selling out of them in the process?

Chet Kittleson is the co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, a Seattle startup making Wi-Fi enabled landline phones designed to let kids talk to friends and family with just their voices. No screens, no AI. 

GeekWire recognized Kittleson as one of our Uncommon Thinkers for 2025, a program presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners honoring inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs transforming their industries in unexpected ways.

In this episode, he talks about the moment at school pickup that sparked the idea, why his own kids don’t own devices, what happened when they eliminated screens on family road trips, and the $12 million seed round led by Greylock that will fuel the company’s next chapter.

Listen below, subscribe wherever you listen, and keep reading for takeaways and highlights.

It’s a “connection factory,” not a nostalgia play. Kittleson pushes back on the idea that Tin Can is primarily about retro appeal.

“People always ask us about nostalgia and retro. … I don’t think it’s about that. I think it’s about connection,” he said. “We found a form factor that is familiar, and that’s certainly been beneficial. And people love nostalgia. … But we feel like we’re more of a connection factory than we are bringing back the bell bottoms.”

The landline was kids’ first social network — we just forgot. Kittleson grew up in La Conner, Wash., using the family phone to organize roller hockey games and playdates.

“As a social network, the landline had 100% penetration. Everybody had one,” he said. “I think we all forgot that we were major beneficiaries of that as kids.” When he mentioned this to other parents at school pickup, they all started reciting their childhood best friends’ phone numbers from memory.

Texting isn’t connection — it’s just communication. Kittleson cited a study in which stressed kids were split into three groups: one texted their mom, one called their mom, one saw their mom in person.

The kids who called or saw their mothers released oxytocin and calmed down. The texting group? “There was no chemical effect. It was like nothing happened,” Kittleson said. “It’s not connection. You are communicating, but that’s not the same thing as connecting.”

The new funding brings hardware expertise to the table. The $12 million round was led by Greylock and includes participation from David Shuman, chairman of the board at Oura, the smart ring company.

“We are a bunch of technologists with very little hardware experience,” Kittleson said. Shuman, he said, is contributing an immense amount of knowledge on supply chain, manufacturing, and cash flow.

His mom made him an uncommon thinker. When Kittleson was a kid, he wrote terrible songs. His uncle gently told him he wasn’t a great singer. His mom supported him, no matter what.

“Whatever you want to do, if you work hard enough, if you believe, if you’ve got the guts, you can do it,” she told him. That, Kittleson said, made him “more inclined to be open to the idea that I could be the reason something like the landline comes back.”

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Audio editing by Curt Milton

LAS VEGAS — Matt Garman remembers sitting in an Amazon leadership meeting six or seven years ago, thinking about the future, when he identified what he considered a looming crisis.

Garman, who has since become the Amazon Web Services CEO, calculated that the company would eventually need to hire a million developers to deliver on its product roadmap. The demand was so great that he considered the shortage of software development engineers (SDEs) the company’s biggest constraint.

With the rise of AI, he no longer thinks that’s the case.

Speaking with Acquired podcast hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal at the AWS re:Invent conference Thursday afternoon, Garman told the story in response to Gilbert’s closing question about what belief he held firmly in the past that he has since completely reversed.

“Before, we had way more ideas than we could possibly get to,” he said. Now, “because you can deliver things so fast, your constraint is going to be great ideas and great things that you want to go after. And I would never have guessed that 10 years ago.”

He was careful to point out that Amazon still needs great software engineers. But earlier in the conversation, he noted that massive technical projects that once required “dozens, if not hundreds” of people might now be delivered by teams of five or 10, thanks to AI and agents.

Garman was the closing speaker at the two-hour event with the hosts of the hit podcast, following conversations with Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters, J.P. Morgan Payments Global Co-Head Max Neukirchen, and Perplexity Co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas.

A few more highlights from Garman’s comments:

Generative AI, including Bedrock, represents a multi-billion dollar business for Amazon. Asked to quantify how much of AWS is now AI-related, Garman said it’s getting harder to say, as AI becomes embedded in everything. 

Speaking off-the-cuff, he told the Acquired hosts that Bedrock is a multi-billion dollar business. Amazon clarified later that he was referring to the revenue run rate for generative AI overall. That includes Bedrock, which is Amazon’s managed service that offers access to AI models for building apps and services. [This has been updated since publication.]

How AWS thinks about its product strategy. Garman described a multi-layered approach to explain where AWS builds and where it leaves room for partners. At the bottom are core building blocks like compute and storage. AWS will always be there, he said.

In the middle are databases, analytics engines, and AI models, where AWS offers its own products and services alongside partners. At the top are millions of applications, where AWS builds selectively and only when it believes it has differentiated expertise.

Amazon is “particularly bad” at copying competitors. Garman was surprisingly blunt about what Amazon doesn’t do well. “One of the things that Amazon is particularly bad at is being a fast follower,” he said. “When we try to copy someone, we’re just bad at it.” 

The better formula, he said, is to think from first principles about solving a customer problem, only when it believes it has differentiated expertise, not simply to copy existing products.