Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: \u201cIf you feel like you should punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn\u2019t invest in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, and one born from watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat mistakes he\u2019s seen before. Rose, a general partner at True Ventures and early investor in Peloton, Ring, and Fitbit, has largely avoided the AI hardware gold rush that\u2019s consumed Silicon Valley. While other VCs rush to fund the next smart glasses or AI pendant, Rose is taking a decidedly different approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of it is just like, \u2018Let\u2019s listen to the entire conversation,\u2019\u201d Rose says of the current crop of AI wearables. \u201cAnd to me, that breaks a lot of these social constructs that we have with humans around privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rose speaks from experience. He was on the board of Oura, which now commands 80% of the smart ring market, and he\u2019s witnessed firsthand what separates successful wearables from failed ones. The difference isn\u2019t just technical capability; it\u2019s emotional resonance and social acceptability.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs an investor, you kind of have to not only say, okay, cool tech, sure, but emotionally, how does it make me feel? And how does it make others feel around me?\u201d he explained on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. \u201cAnd for me, a lot of that is lost in all the AI stuff, where it\u2019s just always on, always listening, trying to be the smartest person in the room. And it\u2019s just not healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n
He admits to trying various AI wearables himself, including the failed Humane AI pendant that briefly caught the world\u2019s attention a year ago. But the breaking point came during an argument with his wife. \u201cI was like, I know I didn\u2019t say that. And I was trying to use it to actually win an argument,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThat was the last time I wore that thing. You do not want to win a battle by going back and looking at the logs of your AI pin. That doesn\u2019t fly.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tourist use case \u2014 asking your glasses what monument you\u2019re looking at \u2014 isn\u2019t good enough, Rose said. \u201cWe tend to bolt AI onto everything and it\u2019s ruining the world,\u201d he said, pointing to features like photo apps that let you erase people from the background. \u201cI had a friend who erased a gate from behind him to make the picture look better. I\u2019m like, \u2018That\u2019s your yard! Your kids are gonna look at that and be like, \u2018Didn\u2019t we have a gate there?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Rose worries we\u2019re in an \u201cearly days of social media\u201d moment with AI \u2014 making decisions that seem harmless now but will haunt us later. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna look back and be like, \u2018Wow, that was weird. We just slapped AI on everything, and thought it was a good idea,\u2019 similar to what happened in the early days of social. We look back a decade or two later, and you\u2019re like, \u2018I wish I would have done that differently.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
He\u2019s experiencing these tensions firsthand with his young children. Using OpenAI\u2019s video generation tool Sora to create videos of tiny Labradoodles, his kids asked where they could get those puppies. \u201cI\u2019m like, that\u2019s not really Dad there. How do you have that conversation? Very awkward,\u201d he says. His solution, he said, is treating AI like movie magic, explaining that just as actors aren\u2019t really flying on screen, Dad\u2019s puppies aren\u2019t real either.<\/p>\n
But Rose isn\u2019t a Luddite. He\u2019s deeply optimistic about how AI is transforming entrepreneurship itself, and by extension, the venture capital industry that funds it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are just shrinking with every day that goes by,\u201d Rose observed. He recounted a colleague who had never used AI coding tools before building and deploying a complete app during a drive from LA to San Francisco. Six months ago, the same task would have taken ten times as long and required navigating dozens of errors.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn three months, when [Google\u2019s] Gemini 3 hits the market, there\u2019s going to be zero errors or next to it,\u201d Rose predicted. \u201cHigh school coding classes are no longer coding classes \u2014 they\u2019re vibe coding classes, and they will build the next billion-dollar business launched out of some random high school. It will happen. It\u2019s just a matter of time.\u201d<\/p>\n
These developments utterly change the venture capital equation, Rose said. Entrepreneurs can now delay fundraising until they absolutely need it, or potentially skip raising outside funding altogether. \u201cIt\u2019s really going to change the world of VC, and I think for the better,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n
Many venture firms have responded by hiring armies of engineers\u2014Sequoia Capital, for instance, now employs as many developers as investors. But Rose doesn\u2019t think that\u2019s the answer. Instead, he believes the value proposition for VCs shifts to something more fundamental. \u201cAt the end of the day, the entrepreneur is going to have issues that are not technical,\u201d he argued. \u201cThey\u2019re very emotional problems. And so I think the VCs with the highest EQ that can show up best for the founders as their long term partner \u2014 that have been with firms and aren\u2019t hopping around, that aren\u2019t just fly-by-night VCs but have been around and seen these problems at scale \u2014 they\u2019re going to be sought after.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what does Rose look for when making investments? He circles back to something Larry Page told him years ago when Rose was at Google Ventures, his first institutional investing job after co-founding the social news platform Digg and before joining True Ventures in 2017. \u201cA healthy disregard for the impossible is what\u2019s important to look for.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want founders that aren\u2019t just sanding down the rough edges, but they\u2019re really swinging for the fences with big, bold ideas that everyone else says, \u2018That is a horrible idea. Why are you doing this?\u2019\u201d Rose said. \u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019m drawn to. Because even if it doesn\u2019t work, we love your mind. We love where you are, and we gladly back you the second time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: \u201cIf you feel like you should punch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,81894,111,139,69,15169,47740,145,81895],"class_list":{"0":"post-114931","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-kevin-rose","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-oura","16":"tag-peloton","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-true-ventures"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}