Lead
Jon Callaghan, co-founder of True Ventures, told TechCrunch on December 30, 2025, that the smartphone as we use it today is likely to be eclipsed within five to ten years. True Ventures — a Bay Area firm managing roughly $6 billion across 12 core seed funds and four select funds — is backing that view with capital and active founder support. The firm’s recent investments and exits, including bets on wearables and behavior-first hardware, illustrate a thesis that human–computer interaction will shift away from phones toward new interfaces. That shift is the practical rationale behind True’s current support for projects such as Sandbar, a voice-activated ring designed to capture and organize ideas.
Key Takeaways
- True Ventures manages about $6 billion across 12 core seed funds and four select funds, and has invested in roughly 300 companies over 20 years.
- The firm reports 63 exits with gains and seven IPOs in its portfolio history, underscoring its track record in early-stage bets.
- Callaghan predicts smartphones won’t serve as primary interfaces in five to ten years and says they are a poor conduit between people and intelligence.
- True writes typical seed checks of $3 million–$6 million for roughly 15%–20% ownership and prefers disciplined fund sizes over raising massive pools of capital.
- Sandbar, a voice-activated ring, exemplifies the firm’s focus: a single-purpose wearable aimed at capturing spontaneous thoughts and organizing them with AI.
- Market signals cited: smartphone market growth at roughly 2% annually versus double-digit growth in wearables (smartwatches, rings, voice devices).
- Callaghan warns of a capital-intensive cycle driven by hyperscalers and cites a projected $5 trillion CapEx build for data centers and chips as a systemic risk.
Background
True Ventures has cultivated a low-profile, founder-focused strategy for two decades, leaning on repeat relationships rather than publicity-driven deal-sourcing. The firm backed early consumer and enterprise companies that became category leaders — Fitbit, Ring, Peloton, HashiCorp and Duo Security among them — often making contrarian bets when the path to product-market fit was unclear. That history underpins its current thesis: invest in interfaces that enable new, repeatable human behaviors rather than in one-off gadgets.
The broader market context helps explain the timing. Global smartphone penetration has matured in many regions, yielding single-digit growth rates (TechCrunch cites roughly 2% annual growth), while wearables and ambient interfaces are expanding faster as vendors and developers explore always-on, low-friction interactions. Parallel to that device-level shift is an AI compute wave: new models and chips create opportunity, but also concentrate capital and buildout among hyperscalers that are committing trillions in infrastructure spending.
Main Event
In the TechCrunch conversation, Callaghan was candid: phones are inefficient intermediaries for many everyday cognitive tasks. He argued that taking out a phone to record a fleeting idea, send a quick note or fetch context is disruptive and error-prone — a poor match for spontaneous thought. That critique drives True’s appetite for alternatives that reduce friction and embed intelligence into more natural behaviors.
True’s most visible expression of this conviction is Sandbar, a hardware product Callaghan describes as a “thought companion.” The device is a small ring, worn on the index finger, that is voice-activated and pairs with an app and AI services to capture and organize voice notes when ideas strike. Sandbar’s founders, Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, previously worked together on neural-interface research at CTRL-Labs, which Meta acquired in 2019; that pedigree was an important factor in True’s decision to invest.
Callaghan emphasizes that Sandbar is not trying to be a catch-all device; it focuses narrowly on the behavioral need to capture fleeting mental notes. He compares the bet to True’s earlier decisions to back Fitbit and Peloton — investments that were less about the hardware itself and more about the new daily practices they enabled. For True, the product’s promise is measured by the habitual behavior it creates, not by feature breadth.
Analysis & Implications
If Callaghan is correct, the economic winners will be the teams that translate new interfaces into durable behaviors and services, not the firms that merely build more powerful phones or more capacious clouds. That implies a shift in where value is captured: from infrastructure and chip-heavy pockets to application layers and experience design that lock in user habits. True sees the largest long-term upside in this application layer where new interfaces create fresh, monetizable behaviors.
There are countervailing forces. The current AI and data-center expansion is intensely capital hungry; Callaghan highlights a projected $5 trillion CapEx cycle tied to hyperscalers as a systemic drag that could distort valuations and financing terms. If capital becomes misallocated to infrastructure over consumer-facing applications, the market could suffer cyclic dislocation and slower returns for some investors.
For founders, the takeaway is strategic: focus on a single, core behavior that can become habitual, and design a durable experience around it. For investors, it means placing concentrated, early-stage bets and avoiding the temptation to chase headline-sized funds. True’s model — $3M–$6M seed checks for meaningful ownership stakes — reflects that discipline and the belief that smaller, well-chosen bets on behavior can outperform large, broadly distributed allocations.
Comparison & Data
| Metric | Smartphones | Wearables / Alternative Interfaces |
|---|---|---|
| Growth (approx.) | ~2% annual | Double-digit annual growth |
| Representative products | iPhone, Android handsets | Smartwatches, smart rings, voice devices |
| True Ventures historic bets | — | Fitbit, Ring, Peloton, Sandbar |
The table highlights a central data point cited in Callaghan’s argument: a saturated smartphone market with low single-digit growth versus faster adoption rates for wearables and voice-enabled devices. That divergence supports a strategic reallocation of investor attention toward form factors and interfaces that lower friction and enable new habits.
Reactions & Quotes
Callaghan’s prediction about smartphones prompted both curiosity and skepticism among investors and founders we spoke with. He framed the comment as a projection based on behavior change rather than as a categorical dismissal of phone hardware.
“We’re not going to be using iPhones in 10 years,”
Jon Callaghan, True Ventures
True’s portfolio view reinforces the behavioral argument: when a product enables a pattern people keep returning to, the hardware is secondary to the habit it creates. That was Callaghan’s defense of early bets like Peloton and Fitbit.
“It’s not about the bike,”
Jon Callaghan, reflecting on Peloton
On the macro side, Callaghan acknowledged both the promise of AI platforms and the risks in the capital run-up supporting them. He noted OpenAI’s potential and warned about the concentration of CapEx behind a handful of infrastructure players.
“We’re in a very capital intense part of the cycle, and that is worrisome,”
Jon Callaghan, on the AI buildout
Unconfirmed
- The exact timetable for smartphones to lose primary-interface status remains speculative; five- and ten-year horizons are projections, not certainties.
- Specific market-share trajectories for Sandbar or similar single-purpose wearables are not yet verifiable; early commercial performance data is not public.
- Any singular valuation outcome for OpenAI or other major AI firms within a short time frame is uncertain and contingent on market, regulatory and competitive variables.
Bottom Line
True Ventures’ thesis is straightforward and actionable: invest in interfaces that enable repeatable behavior, not merely in more powerful handheld computers. The firm’s history of early hardware bets—Fitbit, Ring, Peloton—serves as both precedent and proof of concept for this playbook. Sandbar, the voice-activated ring, is a concrete expression of that strategy, designed to capture fleeting human thoughts and fold them into AI-backed workflows.
Whether phones will truly cede primacy in five to ten years depends on adoption curves, product execution, and how quickly AI can be embedded into low-friction form factors. For founders and investors, the immediate implication is to prioritize behavioral defensibility and to be cautious about following capital-heavy infrastructure fads. If behavior changes as Callaghan forecasts, the next decade will reward companies that make interaction feel invisible, immediate and indispensable.