Andrew Yang has a habit of asking questions that make people uncomfortable. During his 2020 presidential campaign, it was “what happens when AI takes all the jobs?” Now he’s asking another one that Silicon Valley would rather ignore: what if your business model actually gave money back to customers instead of extracting it from them?
The answer, according to Yang, might be the next big startup category.
He’s been inspired by Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, the pharmaceutical startup that simply sells medications at cost plus a flat markup. No mystery, no price signaling games. Just a cleaner deal for the customer. Yang looked at that model and started making a list.
“Housing, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless,” he told TechCrunch on a recent episode of Equity. “The things we all spend money on.”
The list became his blueprint. He picked wireless because, well, everyone needs a phone, and last September launched Noble Mobile, a mobile virtual network operator that charges a fraction of what traditional carriers do and gives customers money back if they use less data.
It sounds almost too simple to be a startup, but that’s kind of the point.
Where most founders see their customers as revenue streams to be optimized, Yang sees them as partners who should share in the upside. Noble Mobile is profitable on a per-customer basis, but instead of pocketing the difference, it splits the margins with subscribers. The pitch is straightforward: use less data, get cash back. Stay longer, watch your bill shrink.
“Forget the customer acquisition costs and the churn,” Yang said. “If you treat people fairly, they stick around and tell their friends.”
The company has grown to “thousands and thousands” of customers and is bringing in “millions in revenue” since launching last fall. Not unicorn territory, sure, but it’s proof that the model works at small scale. Yang also threw out a number that caught my attention: the average customer saves about $50 a month. Invest that consistently over 40 years, and you’re looking at around $24,000. That’s a retirement down payment for simply choosing a cheaper phone plan.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Yang’s real thesis isn’t just cheaper phone bills. He sees these “margin giveback” businesses as a response to something bigger happening in the economy.
“AI is going to suck up a lot of the value and the jobs, and then Americans are going to look up and say, ‘How do I meet basic needs?’” he said. “Meeting people’s needs less expensively is a very rich vein of opportunity.”
There’s aCertain irony here. Yang ran for president advocating for Universal Basic Income, essentially a government check to redistribute AI-generated wealth back to citizens. Now he’s pursuing the same goal through the market instead of policy. Whether that’s a more realistic path or simply a pivot, I think it’s worth watching.
The investors haven’t been easy to convince. Consumer-facing businesses with thin margins and a social mission are a hard sell in an AI funding boom. Yang admitted one investor told him directly: “Love you, Andrew, want to work with you — if you could just make this an AI company, we’ll invest.”
Ouch.
Then again, even the most extractive tech companies eventually need customers who can afford to buy things. Yang pointed out that even wealthy venture capitalists are starting to recognize the problem. “The value being concentrated in the hands of a handful of folks and firms is just bad for everybody,” he said. “There are some folks I know in Silicon Valley who are open to that for a variety of reasons… they just don’t want to have to hire private security.”
It’s a dark joke, but it hints at something real. When you squeeze consumers too hard for too long, the whole system starts to crack. Whether businesses like Noble Mobile can actually move the needle on something as massive as the cost of living, I don’t know. But the experiment is worth paying attention to.
If you’re curious about where this fits into the broader tech landscape, check out more Technology coverage and Business trends shaping what founders are building next.
The phone plan that pays you back might just be the beginning.
