Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments. He says that if you feel like you should punch someone in the face for wearing a device, you probably should not invest in it. This is a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, born from watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat mistakes he has seen before. Rose, a general partner at True Ventures and an early investor in companies like Peloton, Ring, and Fitbit, has largely avoided the AI hardware gold rush that has consumed Silicon Valley. While other venture capitalists rush to fund the next smart glasses or AI pendant, Rose is taking a decidedly different approach.
He observes that a lot of current AI wearables are focused on listening to entire conversations. To him, this breaks many of the social constructs humans have around privacy. Rose speaks from experience. He was on the board of Oura, which now commands eighty percent of the smart ring market, and he has witnessed firsthand what separates successful wearables from failed ones. He believes the difference is not just technical capability but also emotional resonance and social acceptability.
As an investor, you have to not only evaluate the cool technology but also ask how the device makes you feel emotionally and how it makes others feel around you. He explained on stage at a TechCrunch event that for him, a lot of that emotional consideration is lost in AI products, where the technology is always on, always listening, and trying to be the smartest person in the room. He finds this dynamic unhealthy.
He admits to trying various AI wearables himself, including the failed Humane AI pendant that briefly caught the world’s attention a year ago. His breaking point came during an argument with his wife. He recalled trying to use the device to win the argument by proving what was said. That was the last time he wore it. He believes you do not want to win a battle by going back and looking at the logs from your AI pin. That approach does not fly.
He also said the tourist use case, such as asking your glasses what monument you are looking at, is not a good enough reason for these devices. He thinks we tend to bolt AI onto everything and it is ruining the world. He pointed to features in photo apps that let you erase people from the background as an example. He had a friend who erased a gate from behind him to make a picture look better. Rose questioned this, noting that the gate was part of his friend’s yard and that his kids would later look at the photo and wonder what happened to it.
Rose worries we are in an early days of social media moment with AI, making decisions that seem harmless now but will haunt us later. He predicts we will look back and think it was weird that we just slapped AI on everything and thought it was a good idea, similar to how we now view the early days of social media. He believes we will wish we had done things differently.
He is experiencing these tensions firsthand with his young children. After using OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora to create videos of tiny Labradoodles, his kids asked where they could get those puppies. He found it very awkward to explain that the puppies were not real and that it was not really Dad creating them. His solution is to treat AI like movie magic, explaining that just as actors are not really flying on screen, Dad’s AI puppies are not real either.
But Rose is not a Luddite. He is deeply optimistic about how AI is transforming entrepreneurship itself, and by extension, the venture capital industry that funds it. He observed that the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are shrinking with every day that goes by. He recounted a story of a colleague who had never used AI coding tools but managed to build and deploy a complete app during a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He noted that six months ago, the same task would have taken ten times as long and required navigating dozens of errors.
He predicted that in three months, when Google’s Gemini 3 hits the market, there will be zero errors or next to it. He believes high school coding classes are no longer just coding classes but vibe coding classes, and that students will build the next billion-dollar business launched from some random high school. He says it will happen and it is just a matter of time.
These developments utterly change the venture capital equation, according to Rose. Entrepreneurs can now delay fundraising until they absolutely need it, or potentially skip raising outside funding altogether. He thinks this is really going to change the world of venture capital, and for the better.
Many venture firms have responded by hiring armies of engineers. For instance, Sequoia Capital now employs as many developers as investors. But Rose does not think that is the answer. Instead, he believes the value proposition for venture capitalists shifts to something more fundamental. He argues that at the end of the day, the entrepreneur is going to have issues that are not technical but are very emotional problems. He thinks the venture capitalists with the highest emotional intelligence, who can show up best for the founders as their long term partner, will be sought after. These are the ones who have been with firms and are not hopping around, who are not fly-by-night venture capitalists but have been around and seen these problems at scale.
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. Page said that a healthy disregard for the impossible is what is important to look for. Rose wants founders who are not just sanding down the rough edges but are really swinging for the fences with big, bold ideas that everyone else says is a horrible idea. He is drawn to those founders because even if the idea does not work, he loves their mindset and will gladly back them a second time.