Kevin Rose’s simple test for AI hardware — would you want to punch someone in the face who’s wearing it?

Kevin Rose has a deep-rooted rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: “If you feel like you have to punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.”

It’s a typically candid assessment from the seasoned investor, and one that comes from watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat 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 capital firms rush to fund the next smart glasses or AI pendant, Rose is taking a decidedly 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, that breaks a lot of these social constructs that we have with people around privacy.”

Roos speaks from experience. He served on the board of Oura, which now has 80% of the smart ring market, and he has seen firsthand what separates successful wearables from failed wearables. The difference is not only in the technical possibilities; it is emotional resonance and social acceptability.

“As an investor you have to say not just, OK, cool technology, sure, but emotionally, how does that make me feel? And how do others feel around me?” 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 and trying to be the smartest person in the room. And it’s just not healthy.”

He admits that he has tried several AI wearables himself, including the failed Humane AI pendant that briefly captured 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 tried to use it to actually win an argument,” he recalls. “That was the last time I wore that thing. You don’t want to win a fight by going back and looking at your AI pin logs. That doesn’t fly.”

The tourism use case — asking your glasses which monument you’re looking at — isn’t good enough, Rose said. “We tend to apply AI to everything and that’s ruining the world,” he said, pointing to features like photo apps that let you erase people from the background. “I had a friend who swept away a fence behind him to make the photo look better. I thought, ‘That’s your yard! Your kids will look at that and say, ‘Didn’t we have a fence there?'”

Rose worries that we are in the early days of social media with AI: making decisions that seem harmless now but will come back to haunt us later. “We’re going to look back and say, ‘Wow, that was weird. We just applied AI to everything and thought it was a good idea,’ similar to what happened in the early days of social media. We’ll look back a decade or two later and you’ll say, ‘I wish I would have done that differently.'”

He experiences these tensions firsthand with his young children. Using OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora to create videos of tiny Labradoodles, his kids asked where they could get those puppies. “I thought: that’s not really dad there. How do you have that conversation? Very awkward,” he says. His solution, he said, is to treat AI like movie magic, explaining that just as actors don’t really fly on screen, daddy’s puppies aren’t real either.

But Rose is no Luddite. He is very 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 closing every day,” Rose noted. He talked about a colleague who had never used AI coding tools before building and deploying a complete app while driving from LA to San Francisco. Six months ago, the same task would have taken ten times as long and involved dozens of errors.

‘Three months from now, when [Google’s] Gemini 3 comes to market, there will be no bugs or almost none,” Rose predicted. “High school coding classes are no longer coding classes — they’re vibe coding classes, and they will build the next billion-dollar company launched out of any high school. It will happen. It’s only a matter of time.”

These developments are completely changing the venture capital relationship, according to Rose. Entrepreneurs can now delay fundraising until they absolutely need it, or potentially avoid raising external financing altogether. “It’s really going to change the world of VC, and I think for the better,” Rose said.

Many venture capital 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 capital is shifting to something more fundamental. “Ultimately, the entrepreneur will have problems that are not technical in nature,” he argued. “They’re very emotional issues. And so I think the VCs with the highest EQ who can best show up for the founders as their long-term partners — who have been at companies and not hopping around, who are not just fly-by-night VCs but have been there and seen these problems at scale — they will be sought after.”

What does Rose look for when making investments? He returns to something Larry Page told him years ago when Rose was working at Google Ventures, his first job with institutional investors after co-founding social news platform Digg and before joining True Ventures in 2017. “A healthy disregard for the impossible is what is important to look for.”

“We want founders who don’t just sand off the rough edges, but who really go for the fences with big, bold ideas that make everyone say, ‘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 spirit. We love where you are, and we’re happy to support you a second time.”