Somewhat flippantly: they bought the domain name. The investment is in a hardware/software services brand with a founder with expert experience of the field - t

Somewhat flippantly: they bought the domain name. The investment is in a hardware/software services brand with a founder with expert experience of the field - the phone is a 0.1 product for the company. The wider vision will be an (assuming) quick roll out of assorted smart home/business tech built around the "Essential" brand, with a nice proprietary software layer linking it all up. With his experience, I highly doubt anything he creates at this point would be acquired for much less than $300m (in this day and age, a $300m acquihire doesn't seem so out of reach...), so if they have participation preferred, might not even lose out.