Kevin Rose has a gut rule for evaluating investments in AI hardware: “If you feel like you should punch someone in the face for using it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.”
It’s a typically candid assessment from a veteran investor, and it comes 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 consumed Silicon Valley. While other venture capitalists rush to fund the next smart glasses or AI pendant, Rose is taking a decidedly different approach.
“A lot of this is like, ‘Let’s listen to the whole conversation,'” Rose says of the current crop of AI-enabled wearables. “And to me, that breaks a lot of these social constructs that we have with humans around privacy.”
Rose speaks from experience. He was on the board of directors of Oura, which now controls 80% of the smart ring market, and witnessed firsthand what separates successful wearables from failed ones. The difference is not only technical capacity; it is emotional resonance and social acceptability.
“As an investor, you not only have to say, okay, cool technology, sure, but also emotionally, how does it make me feel? And how does it make others 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 several wearable AI devices, 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 thought, I know I didn’t say that. And I was trying to use it to win an argument,” he recalled. “That was the last time I used that thing. You don’t want to win a battle by going back and looking at your AI pin logs. That doesn’t work.”
The tourist use case (asking your glasses what monument you’re looking at) isn’t good enough, Rose said. “We tend to throw AI into everything and that’s ruining the world,” he said, pointing to features like photography apps that let you erase people from the background. “I had a friend who erased a gate behind him to make the picture look better. I said, ‘That’s your yard! Your kids will look at that and say, ‘Didn’t we have a gate there?'”
Rose worries that we are in a moment of “the early days of social media” with AI: making decisions that seem harmless now but will haunt us later. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was weird. We just put AI into everything and thought it was a good idea,’ similar to what happened in the early days of social media. We look back a decade or two later and think, ‘I wish I’d done it differently.'”
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You are experiencing these tensions firsthand with your young children. Using Sora, OpenAI’s video generation tool, to create videos of little Labradoodles, her kids asked where they could get those puppies. “I think that’s not really dad. How do you have that conversation? Very awkward,” he says. His solution, he said, is to treat AI as movie magic, explaining that just as actors don’t fly on screen, daddy’s puppies aren’t 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.
“The barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are lowering with each passing day,” Rose observed. He told a colleague that he had never used AI coding tools before creating and deploying an entire application during a trip from Los Angeles 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 hits the market, there will be no bugs or close to it,” Rose predicted. “High school coding classes aren’t coding classes anymore, they’re vibe coding classes and they will build the next billion dollar business that launches in some random high school. It will happen. “It’s just a matter of time.”
These developments completely change the venture capital equation, Rose said. Entrepreneurs can now delay fundraising until they absolutely need it, or potentially skip external fundraising altogether. “It’s really going to change the world of venture capital, 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 venture capitalists is shifting toward 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 problems. That’s why I think the VCs with the highest EQ who can best show up for founders as their long-term partners—who have been in companies and aren’t jumping around, who aren’t just overnight VCs, but who have been around and seen these problems at scale—will be sought out.”
So what does Rose look for when making investments? It comes 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 joining True Ventures in 2017. “The important thing is to seek a healthy disdain for the impossible.”
“We want founders who are not just sanding the rough edges, but really swinging 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 appeals to me. Because even if it doesn’t work out, we love your mind. We love where you are and we’ll gladly have your back the second time.”
