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Tag: True Ventures

  • The phone is dead. Long live . . . what exactly? | TechCrunch

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    True Ventures co-founder Jon Callaghan doesn’t think we’ll be using smartphones the way we do now in five years — and maybe not at all in 10.

    For a venture capitalist whose firm has had some big winners over its two decades – from consumer brands like Fitbit, Ring, and Peloton, to enterprise software makers HashiCorp and Duo Security – that’s more than armchair theorizing; it’s a thesis on which True Ventures is actively betting.

    True hasn’t gotten this far by following the crowd. The Bay Area firm has largely operated under the radar despite managing roughly $6 billion across 12 core seed funds and four “select,” opportunity-style funds that it has used to pour more capital into portfolio companies that are gaining momentum. While other VCs have grown more promotional – building personal brands on social media and podcasts to attract founders and deal flow – True has gone in the opposite direction, quietly cultivating a tight network of repeat founders. The strategy seems to be working: according to Callaghan, the firm boasts 63 exits with gains and seven IPOs amid a portfolio of some 300 companies assembled over its 20-year history.

    Three of True’s four recent exits in the fourth quarter of 2025 involved repeat founders who came back to work with the firm again after previous successes, says Callaghan. Still, it’s Callaghan’s thinking about the future of human-computer interaction that really stands out in a sea of AI hype and mega-rounds.

    “We’re not going to be using iPhones in 10 years,” Callaghan says flatly. “I kind of don’t think we’ll be using them in five years – or let’s say something different that’s a little safer – we’re going to be using them in very different ways.”

    His argument is simple: our phones are lousy at being the interface between humans and intelligence. “The way we take them out right now to send a text to confirm this or send you some message or write an email – [that’s] super inefficient, [and] not a great interface,” he explains. “[They’re] prone to error, prone to disruption [of] our normal lives.”

    So sure is he of this that True has been spending years exploring alternative interfaces – software-based, hardware-based, everything in between. It’s the same instinct that led True to bet early on Fitbit before wearables were obvious, to invest in Peloton after hundreds of other VCs said ‘no thanks,’ and to back Ring when founder Jamie Siminoff kept running out of money and even the judges on “Shark Tank” turned him away. Each time, the bet looked questionable, says Callaghan. Each time, the bet was on a new way for humans to interact with technology that felt more natural than what came before.

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    The latest manifestation of this thesis is Sandbar, a hardware device that Callaghan describes as a “thought companion” — or, in more mundane terms, a voice-activated ring worn on the index finger. Its singular purpose: capturing and organizing your thoughts through voice notes. It’s not trying to be another Humane AI Pin or compete with Oura’s health tracking. “It does one thing really well,” Callaghan says. “But that one thing is a fundamental human behavioral need that is missing from technology today.”

    The idea isn’t to passively record ambient audio but to be there when an idea strikes, serving as a kind of thought partner. It’s attached to an app, leverages AI, and, according to Callaghan, represents a very different philosophy about how we should interact with intelligence.

    What drew True to Sandbar founders Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong wasn’t just the product, though. “When we met Mina, we were just absolutely aligned on vision,” Callaghan recalls. True’s team had already been thinking for years about alternative interfaces, making targeted investments around that possibility. They’d met with dozens of founders, as a result. But the approach of Fahmi and Hong – who previously worked together on neural interfaces at CTRL-Labs, a startup acquired by Meta in 2019 – stood out. “It’s about what [the ring] enables. It’s about the behavior it enables that we will very soon realize we can’t live without.”

    There’s an echo here of Callaghan’s old line about Peloton: “It’s not about the bike.” To some, the bike – even its earliest iteration – was compelling. But Peloton was really about the behavior it enabled and the community it created; the bike was just the vessel.

    This philosophy of betting on new behaviors — not just new gadgets — also explains how True has managed to stay disciplined about capital. Even as AI startups raise hundreds of millions at billion-dollar valuations out of the gate, True insists that it’s able to stick to what it does best, which is to write seed checks of $3 million to $6 million for 15% to 20% ownership in startups that it often gets to see first.

    Callaghan says True will raise more money to fund what’s working, but he’s not interested in raising billions of dollars. “Like, why? You don’t need that to build something amazing today.”

    That same measured approach colors his view of the broader AI boom. While he says (when asked) that he believes OpenAI could soon be worth a trillion dollars, and while he calls this the most powerful compute wave we’ve seen, Callaghan sees warning signs in the circular financing deals backing hyperscalers and their $5 trillion in projected CapEx spending on data centers and chips. “We’re in a very capital intense part of the cycle, and that is worrisome,” he notes.

    That said, he’s optimistic about where the real opportunities lie. Callaghan thinks the greatest value creation is ahead of us – not in the infrastructure layer but in the application layer, where new interfaces will enable entirely new behaviors.

    It all comes back to his core investing philosophy, which sounds almost romantic — the kind of pitch-perfect VC wisdom that would ring hollow from most people: “It should be scary and lonely and you should be called crazy,” Callaghan says about early-stage investing done right. “And it should be really blurry and ambiguous, but you should be with a team that you really believe in.” Five to ten years later, he says, you’ll know if you were on to something.

    Either way, based on True’s track record of betting on hardware that many others missed – fitness trackers, connected bikes, smart doorbells, and now thought-capturing rings – it’s worth paying attention when Callaghan says the phone’s days are numbered. Being early is the whole point — and the trend lines support his thesis: the smartphone market is effectively saturated, growing at barely 2% annually, while wearables — smartwatches, rings, and voice-enabled devices — are expanding at double-digit rates.

    Something’s shifting in how we want to interact with technology, and True is placing its bets accordingly.

    Pictured above, Sandbar’s Stream ring. For much more from our conversation with Callaghan, tune in to the StrictlyVC Download podcast next week; new episodes drop every Tuesday.

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    Connie Loizos

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  • The future will be explained to you in Palo Alto | TechCrunch

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    On Wednesday evening at PlayGround Global in Palo Alto, some very smart people who are building things you don’t understand yet will explain what’s coming. This is the final StrictlyVC event of 2025, and truly, the lineup is ridiculous.

    The series has bounced around the globe under the auspices of TechCrunch. Steve Case rented a theater in D.C.; we talked to Greece’s prime minister in Athens; and Kirsten Green hosted us at the Presidio in San Francisco. The concept is always the same, though: get people who are working on genuinely important developments in a room before everyone else figures out they’re important.

    Our favorite moment? In 2019, Sam Altman told a StrictlyVC crowd that OpenAI’s monetization strategy was basically “build AGI, then ask it how to make money.” Everyone laughed. He wasn’t joking.

    This time we’ve got Nicholas Kelez, a particle accelerator physicist who spent 20 years at the Department of Energy building things that shouldn’t be possible. Now he’s tackling semiconductor manufacturing’s biggest problem: every advanced chip depends on $400 million machines that use lasers only one Dutch company knows how to make. (More galling to some: Americans invented the technology, then sold it to Europe.) Kelez is building the next generation in America using particle accelerator tech. It’s as nerdy as it sounds but more important than you might imagine.

    Then there’s Mina Fahmi, who’s made a ring that captures your whispered thoughts and turns them into text. Before you roll your eyes, know that he and cofounder Kirak Hong spent years at Meta working on this stuff after their company was acquired. The Stream Ring isn’t trying to be your friend, by the way — it’s trying to extend your brain. Backed by Toni Schneider, an operator who scaled WordPress to a billion visitors, Sandbar just emerged from stealth and might well be onto something. (Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, whose other hardware bets have included Peloton, Ring, and Fitbit; he’s also coming to Palo Alto next week.)

    We have Max Hodak — Science Corp founder, Time magazine cover subject, and, earlier, Neuralink cofounder — who has already restored vision to dozens of blind people with retinal implants. Now he’s working on “biohybrid” brain-computer interfaces where chips seeded with stem cells grow into your brain tissue so paralyzed people can control devices with their thoughts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Hodak views it. In fact, he thinks 2035 is going to look wildly different from today, and he’s happy to share how.

    Finally, we’re thrilled to welcome Chi-Hua Chien and Elizabeth Weil, two VCs who’ve backed Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Slack, SpaceX, Figma, and Coinbase before they were household names. Chien runs Goodwater Capital and thinks Silicon Valley is completely misreading the AI moment while everyone piles into enterprise AI. Weil founded Scribble Ventures after stints at Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter, made 100+ angel investments, and has a first fund showing 4x returns. Her network is so good it’s annoying. Both think the best consumer tech opportunities are the ones everyone’s ignoring, and they’ll explain why.

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    PlayGround Global is hosting, along with general partner Pat Gelsinger, the former CEO of Intel. There will be drinks, delicious food, and merriment; seating is limited, so if you want to come, act fast.

    If you want to partner with the series in 2026, get in touch.

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    Connie Loizos

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

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

    It’s a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, and one born from 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’s consumed Silicon Valley. While other VCs rush to fund 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 entire 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 humans around privacy.”

    Rose speaks from experience. He was on the board of Oura, which now commands 80% of the smart ring market, and he’s witnessed firsthand what separates successful wearables from failed ones. The difference isn’t just technical capability; it’s emotional resonance and social acceptability.

    “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 others feel around me?” he explained on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. “And for 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 it’s just not healthy.”

    He admits to trying various AI wearables himself, 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 it to actually win an argument,” he recalled. “That was the last time I wore that thing. You do not want to win a battle by going back and looking at the logs of your AI pin. That doesn’t fly.”

    The tourist use case — asking your glasses what monument you’re looking at — isn’t good enough, Rose said. “We tend to bolt AI onto everything and it’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 erased a gate from behind him to make the picture look better. I’m like, ‘That’s your yard! Your kids are gonna look at that and be like, ‘Didn’t we have a gate there?’”

    Rose worries we’re in an “early days of social media” moment with AI — making decisions that seem harmless now but will haunt us later. “We’re gonna look back and be like, ‘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. We look back a decade or two later, and you’re like, ‘I wish I would have done that differently.’”

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    He’s experiencing 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’m like, that’s not really Dad there. How do you have that conversation? Very awkward,” he says. 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 isn’t a Luddite. He’s 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 just shrinking with every day that goes by,” Rose observed. He recounted 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 hits the market, there’s going to be zero errors or next to it,” Rose predicted. “High school coding classes are no longer coding classes — they’re vibe coding classes, and they will build the next billion-dollar business launched out of some random high school. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.”

    These developments utterly change the venture capital equation, Rose said. Entrepreneurs can now delay fundraising until they absolutely need it, or potentially skip raising outside funding altogether. “It’s really going to change the world of VC, and I think for the better,” Rose said.

    Many venture firms have responded by hiring armies of engineers—Sequoia Capital, for instance, now employs as 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 issues that are not technical,” he argued. “They’re very emotional problems. And so I think the VCs with the highest EQ that can show up best for the founders as their long term partner — that have been with firms and aren’t hopping around, that aren’t just fly-by-night VCs but have been around and seen these problems 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 investing job after co-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 that aren’t just sanding down the rough edges, but they’re really swinging for the fences with big, bold ideas that everyone else says, ‘That is a horrible 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 are, and we gladly back you the second time.”

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    Connie Loizos

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