Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating investments in AI hardware: “If you feel like you have to punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.”
It’s a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, and someone who was born watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat mistakes he’s seen before. Rose, a general partner at True Ventures and an early investor in Peloton, Ring and Fitbit, has largely avoided the AI hardware gold rush consuming Silicon Valley. While other VCs are rushing to fund the next smart glasses or AI lockets, Rose is taking a decidedly different approach.
“A lot of it is just like, ‘Let’s hear the whole conversation,'” Rose says of the current crop of wearable AI devices. “And to me, that breaks a lot of these social constructs that we have with people around privacy.”
Rose speaks from experience. He was on the board of Oura, which now has 80% of the smart ring market, and has seen firsthand what separates successful wearables from failures. The difference is not just technical ability. it is emotional appeal and social acceptance.
“As an investor, you have to say not just, okay, good technology, sure, but emotionally, how does it make me feel? And how does it make other people around me feel?” he explained on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. “And to me, a lot of that gets lost in all the AI stuff, where it’s always on, always listening, trying to be the smartest person in the room. And it’s just not healthy.”
He admits to testing various wearable AIs himself, including the failed Humane AI locket that briefly caught the world’s attention a year ago. But the tipping point came during an argument with his wife. “I was like, I know I didn’t say that. And I was trying to use it to actually win an argument,” he recalled. “That was the last time I wore that thing. You don’t want to win a fight by going back and looking at your AI pin stumps. That doesn’t fly.”
The tourist case — asking your glasses which monument you’re looking at — isn’t good enough, Rose said. “We tend to screw AI into everything and that’s ruining the world,” he said, pointing to features like photo apps that let you delete people from the background. “I had a friend who erased a gate behind him to make the picture look better. I’m like, ‘That’s your yard!’ Your kids will see it and say “Didn’t we have a gate there?”
Rose worries that we’re in the “early days of social media” with artificial intelligence — making decisions that seem harmless now but will come back to haunt us later. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was weird.’ We just slapped AI on everything and thought it was a good idea,” similar to what happened in the early days of social networking. You look back a decade or two later, and you say, ‘I wish I had done it differently.'”
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He experiences these tensions firsthand with his young children. Using OpenAI’s video creation tool, Sora, to create videos of tiny Labradoodles, his kids asked where they could get these puppies. “Well, Dad’s not really there. How do you have this conversation? Very awkward,” she says. His solution, he said, is to treat AI like movie magic, explaining that just as actors don’t really fly on screen, daddy’s puppies aren’t real either.
But Rose is no Luddite. He is deeply optimistic about how AI is transforming entrepreneurship itself and by extension the venture capital industry that funds it.
“The barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are just shrinking with each passing day,” observed Rose. He talked about a colleague who had never used AI coding tools before building and developing a full app during a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Six months ago, the same task would have taken ten times longer and required navigating dozens of errors.
“In three months, when [Google’s] Gemini 3 comes to market, there will be zero bugs or next to it,” Rose predicted. “High school coding classes aren’t coding classes anymore — they’re vibe coding classes, and they’re going to create the next billion-dollar business that starts out of some random high school. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.”
These developments are completely changing the VC equation, Rose said. Entrepreneurs can now delay raising capital until they absolutely need it, or possibly skip raising external funding altogether. “It’s really going to change the VC world, and I think for the better,” Rose said.
Many venture firms have responded by hiring armies of engineers—Sequoia Capital, for example, now employs as many developers as investors. But Rose doesn’t think that’s the answer. Instead, he believes the value proposition for VCs is shifting to something more fundamental. “At the end of the day, the entrepreneur will have problems that are not technical,” he argued. “They’re very emotional problems. And so I think the VCs with the highest EQ who can look best to the founders as their long-term partner—who have worked with companies and aren’t jumping in, who aren’t just overnight VCs, but have been around and seen these problems at scale—are going to be in demand.”
So what does Rose look for when making investments? It goes back to something Larry Page told him years ago, when Rose was at Google Ventures, his first institutional investment job after co-founding the social news platform Digg and before he joined True Ventures in 2017. “A healthy contempt for the impossible is what’s important to look for.”
“We want founders who don’t just smooth out the rough edges, but really swing for the fences with big, bold ideas that everyone else says, ‘That’s a horrible idea.’ Why are you doing this?” Rose said. “That’s what attracts me. Because even if it doesn’t work, we love your brain. We love where you are and are happy to support you the second time around.”
