Kevin Rose’s Simple Test for AIs: Would you like to punch someone in the face?

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

It’s a typically frank assessment from the seasoned investor, one born after watching the current wave of AI 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 capitalists rush to fund the next smart glasses or AI necklace, Rose takes a completely different approach.

“A lot of it is like saying, ‘Let’s listen to the whole conversation,’” Rose says of the current crop of wearable AI devices. “And to me, that breaks down a lot of these social constructs that we have with humans around privacy.”

Rose speaks from experience. He’s been on the board of Oura, which now controls 80% of the smart ring market, and has seen firsthand what separates successful wearables from duds. The difference is not just in technical ability; It’s emotional resonance and social acceptability.

“As an investor, you have to not only say, ‘Okay, great technology, sure,’ but emotionally, ‘How does it make me feel? And how does it make other people around me feel?’ He explained on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. “And for me, a lot of that has been lost in all of AI, where it’s always on, always listening, trying to be the smartest person in the room. And that’s not healthy.”

He admits to trying out several wearable AI devices himself, including the failed Humane AI necklace 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 that to win the 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’s pin logs. It doesn’t fly.”

The tourist use case — like asking your glasses which trail you’re looking at — isn’t good enough, Rose said. “We tend to install AI in everything and it’s destroying the world,” he said, pointing to features like photo apps that let you erase people from the background. “I had a friend who erased the gate behind him to make the photo look better. I said to him, ‘This is your garden!’ Your kids will look at that and say, “Didn’t we have a gate there?”

Rose worries that we’re in the “early days of social media” with AI — where we make decisions that seem harmless now but will haunt us later. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was weird.’ “We applied AI to everything, and we thought it was a good idea,” similar to what happened in the early days of social networking. We look back a decade or two later and say, “I wish I had done that differently.”

He experiences these tensions firsthand with his young children. Using OpenAI’s Sora video generator to create videos of tiny Labradoodles, he asked his kids where they could get those puppies. “I’m like, ‘That’s not really my dad over there. How are you having this conversation? Very awkward,'” he says. He said his solution was to treat artificial intelligence like movie magic, explaining that just as actors don’t appear on screen, daddy’s puppies aren’t real either.

But Rose is not from the category of light. He is very optimistic about how AI will transform entrepreneurship itself, and by extension, the venture capital industry that funds it.

“The barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are getting smaller with each passing day,” Rose noted. He recounted a colleague who had never used AI coding tools before creating an entire application and deploying it while driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Six months ago, the same task would have taken ten times as long and required navigating through dozens of errors.

“Within three months, when Google’s Gemini 3 hits the market, there won’t be any bugs or glitches next to it,” Rose predicted. “High school coding classes are no longer programming classes — they’re live-action programming classes, and you’re going to be building the next billion-dollar business that’s going to be launched from some random high school. It’s going to 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 need it most, or perhaps skip external fundraising altogether. “This is really going to change the world of venture capital, and I think for the better,” Rose said.

Many investment firms have responded by hiring armies of engineers – for example, Sequoia Capital now employs as many developers as investors. But Rose doesn’t think that’s the answer. Instead, he believes the value proposition of venture capital firms is shifting into something more fundamental. “Ultimately, the entrepreneur will face non-technical problems,” he said. “They’re very emotional issues. And so I think venture capital funds that have the highest emotional equivalence can best show up to founders as their long-term partner — who have been with the companies and aren’t flying around, who aren’t just fly-by-night VCs but have been around and seen these problems at scale — will be sought out.”

So what does Rose look for when making investments? It goes back to something Larry Page told him years ago when Rose was at Google Ventures, his first institutional investing job after he co-founded the social news platform Digg and before joining True Ventures in 2017. “A healthy disregard for the impossible is what to look for.”

“We want founders who don’t just iron out the tough stuff, but actually rock the boat with big, bold ideas that everyone says, ‘That’s a terrible idea,'” Rose said. Why are you doing this?” “That’s what I’m drawn to. Because even if it doesn’t work out, we love your brain. We love where you are and would love to support you the second time around.”