Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: “If you feel like you have to punch someone in the face to wear it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.”
It’s a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, and one born of watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat mistakes he’s 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 has consumed Silicon Valley. While other VCs rush to fund the next smart glasses or AI pendant, Rose takes a completely different approach.
“A lot of it is like, ‘Let’s listen to the whole conversation,'” Rose says of the current crop of AI wearables. “And to me, it breaks a lot of these social constructs that we have with people around privacy.”
Rose speaks from experience. He sat on the board of Oura, which now commands 80% of the smart ring market, and he has seen firsthand what separates successful wearables from failures. The difference is not just technical ability; it is emotional resonance and social acceptance.
“As 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 other people around me feel?” he explained on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. “And to me, a lot of that is lost in all the AI stuff, where it’s just always on, always listening, trying to be the smartest person in the room. And that’s just not healthy.”
He himself admits to having tried various AI wearables, including the failed Humane AI pendant that briefly caught the world’s attention a year ago. But the breaking point came during an argument with his wife. “I was like, I know I didn’t say that. And I was trying to use that 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 the logs on your AI pin. It doesn’t fly.”
The tourist use case — asking your glasses which monument you’re looking at — isn’t good enough, Rose said. “We tend to bolt AI onto everything and it’s destroying the world,” he said, pointing to features like photo apps that let you delete people from the background. “I had a friend who deleted a gate behind him to make the picture look better. I say, ‘That’s your yard! Your kids will look at it and say, ‘Don’t we have a gate there?'”
Rose worries that we’re in an “early days of social media” moment with AI — making decisions that seem harmless now but will come back to haunt us later. “We’re going to look back and think, ‘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 work. We look back a decade or two later and you think, ‘I wish I would have done it differently.’
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He experiences these tensions firsthand with his young children. Using OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora to make videos of tiny Labradoodles, his children asked where they could get the puppies. “I’m like, that’s not really Dad there. How do you have that conversation? Very awkward,” he says. His solution, he said, is to treat artificial intelligence like movie magic, explaining that just as actors don’t really fly on screen, daddy’s puppies aren’t real either.
But Rose is not a Luddite. He is deeply optimistic about how artificial intelligence is transforming entrepreneurship itself and, by extension, the venture capital industry that funds it.
“The barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are just getting smaller every day,” noted Rose. He told 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.
“In three months, when [Google’s] Gemini 3 is coming 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 build the next billion-dollar company launched out of some random high school. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.”
This development completely changes the VC equation, Rose said. Entrepreneurs can now delay fundraising until they absolutely need to, or potentially 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 issues. And so I think the VCs with the highest EQ who can show up best for the founders as their long-term partner—who have been at firms and aren’t jumping around, who aren’t just fly-by-night VCs but have been around and seen these issues at scale—they’re going to be sought after.”
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 investment job after founding the social news platform Digg and before joining True Ventures in 2017. “A healthy disregard for the impossible is what’s important to look for.”
“We want founders who don’t just grind down the rough edges, but really swing for the fences with big, bold ideas that everyone else says, ‘That’s a terrible idea. Why are you doing this?'” Rose said. “That’s what I’m drawn to. Because even if it doesn’t work, we love your mind. We love where you’re at, and we’ll back you up the second time.”