Kevin Rose has a visceral rule of thumb for evaluating hardware investments: “If you feel like you have to punch someone in the face, you might as well not invest.”
This is a candidate assessment mostly from veteran investors, and something born from watching the current wave of AI hardware undo mistakes made before. Rose, a general partner in True Ventures and an early investor in peloton, ring, and Fitbit, has largely avoided the AI hardware AI that is taking Silicon Valley by storm. While other VCS rush to finance the next smart glass or AI, rose takes a different approach.
“A lot of it was like, ‘Let’s listen to all these conversations,'” Rose said of the clip that was used. “And to me, that takes away a lot of the sociality that we have with the humans around us.”
Rose speaks from experience. He’s on the board of Oura, which now commands 80% of the smart ring market, and he’s witnessed first-hand what separates something that succeeds from something that fails. The difference is not just technical ability; it is emotional resonance and social postability.
“As an investor, you have to not only say, okay, the technology is cool, but emotionally, how does it make me feel?” He explained it on stage at TechCrunch last week. “And to me, a lot of that is lost in all the AI stuff, where it’s always, always listening, trying to be the smartest person in the room. And that’s just not healthy.”
He admits to experimenting with various Ai’s that he wears himself, including the failed Hamane Ai Failure Pendant that caught the world’s attention last year. But the breaking point was during the questioning with his wife. “I was like, I don’t know. And I tried to use it to win an argument,” he recalled. “That’s the last time I wear that stuff. You don’t want to win a battle by rolling a log and seeing your AI pin log.”
The tourist use case — asking your page what monument you’re looking at — isn’t enough, Rose said. “We tend to bolt to everything and destroy the world,” he says, pointing to features like photo apps that let you remove people from the background. “I had a friend who removed the gate from the back, so the picture would look better. I was like, ‘Your yard! Are your kids going to look like that?’
The Rose Rose Moment We’re in the “early days of social media” with AI – making decisions that are harmless now, but will go a long way later. “We’ll look back and be like, ‘wow, that’s weird. We just turned off AI on everything, and think about what happened at the beginning of the day. We look back a decade or so later, and you wish you’d done it differently.'”
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He experienced these tensions in childhood. Using Openai’s video generation tool to create a video of the little labradoodles, the kids asked where they could get the puppies. “I was like, that’s not the father there. How to have that conversation? His solution, he said, is to treat the AI like Magic Film, explaining like an actor can’t fly on the screen, father’s children are not real.
But rose is no luddite. He is more optimistic about how AI is transforming entrepreneurship, and by extension, the venture capital industry that funds it.
“The barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are shrinking every day that goes by,” said Rose. He told a friend who had never used Ai coding tools before to build and install a full application 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) Gemini 3 hits the market, there will be zero errors or next to it,” Rose scouts. “High school coding classes aren’t coding classes anymore — they’re vibe coding classes, and they’re going to build the next billion-dollar business launched from some random high school. That’s just a problem.”
The development carefully changes the venture capital formula, says rose. Entrepreneurs can now postpone fundraising until they need it, or they can launch external financing. “It’s really going to change the VC world, and I think for the better,” Rose said.
Many venture companies have responded to the army of machine engineers—Sequoia, for example, now has many developers as investors. But Rose didn’t think that was the answer. However, he believes the value proposition for VCS is changing to something more fundamental. “At the end of the day, entrepreneurs are going to have non-technical problems,” he said. “He is an emotional problem. And I think VCS with the highest EQ can show the best for the founders as a long-term partner
So, what do you see when it comes to investing? He circled back to the original last year when rose in Google Ventures, the first platform institution work after joining the social platform in 2017.
“We want founders who don’t just go down hard corners, but they really swing for the fences with big, bold ideas. Why are you doing this?'” Rose said. “That’s what I’m doing for. Because even if it doesn’t work, we love your thoughts. We love where you are, and we love it twice as much.”