Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: “If you think you should punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.”
That’s a typical assessment from a veteran investor, and one born from watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeating 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 that has engulfed Silicon Valley. While other VCs are chasing funding for the next smart glasses or AI pendant, Rose is taking a decidedly different approach.
“A lot of it is just like, ‘Let’s listen to the whole conversation,'” Rose said of the current crop of AI wearables. “And to me, it breaks down these social constructs that people have around privacy.”
Rose speaks from experience. He was on the board of Oura, which now controls 80% of the smart ring market, and witnessed firsthand what separates successful wearables from failures. The difference is not just technical ability; It’s emotional resonance and social acceptance.
“As an investor, you don’t just have to say, OK, great technology, sure, but emotionally, how does this make me feel? And how does this make others around me feel?” He explained last week on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. “And for me, a lot of that is lost in all the AI stuff, where it’s always on, always listening, trying to be the smartest person in the room. And that’s not healthy.”
He himself has admitted to using various AI wearables, including the failed Human AI pendant that briefly caught the world’s attention a year ago. But the breaking point comes during an argument with his wife. “I was like, I know I didn’t say that. And I was actually trying to use that to win an argument,” he recalled. “That was the last time I wore that thing. You don’t want to go back and see your AI pin logs and win a battle. 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 the Photos app that lets you remove people from the background. “I had a friend who removed a gate behind him to make the picture look better. I thought, ‘That’s your yard! Your kids will see it and be like, ‘Didn’t we have a gate there?'”
Rose worries that we’re in a “first day of social media” moment with AI — making decisions that seem harmless now but will come back to haunt us later. “We’ll look back and be like, ‘Wow, that was weird. We slapped AI on everything, and thought it was a good idea,’ which was in the early days of social.”
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She is experiencing this tension firsthand with her young children. Using OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora to create videos of tiny Labradoodles, her kids asked where they could find these puppies. “I’m like, that’s not really dad there. How do you have this conversation? Very awkward,” he said. His solution, he said, is treating AI like movie magic, explaining that just as actors aren’t really flying on screen, dad’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.
“Entrepreneurs’ barriers to entry are shrinking every day,” observed Rose. He describes a colleague who had never used an AI coding tool before building and deploying an entire app during a drive from LA to San Francisco. Six months ago, the same task took ten times as long and dozens of errors had to be navigated.
“In three months, when [Google’s] Gemini 3 comes to market, there will be zero errors or next to it,” Rose predicts. “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 in some random high school. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.”
These developments completely change the VC equation, Rose said. Entrepreneurs can now delay raising funds until they absolutely need them, or potentially avoid raising outside funds altogether. “This is 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 hires many developers as investors. But Rose doesn’t think that’s the answer. Instead, he believes the value proposition for VCs shifts to something more fundamental. “At the end of the day, the entrepreneur is going to have problems that are not technical,” he argued. “These are very emotional issues. And so I think that the VCs with the highest EQ who can look best to founders as their long-term partners—the ones who have been with the companies and aren’t walking around, who aren’t just overnight VCs, but have gone around and seen these issues at scale—will be sought out.”
So what does Rose look for when investing? He goes back to Larry Page a few years ago when Rose was at Google Ventures, his first institutional investment job after co-founding social news platform Digg and before joining True Ventures in 2017.
“We want founders who aren’t just sanding off the rough edges, but who are swinging for the fences with really 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 happily support you a second time.”