This week on StrictlyVC Download, we share conversations from an event in Palo Alto. There, TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin spoke with Mina Fahmi, founder and CEO of Sandbar, and Toni Schneider of True Ventures.
Mina Fahmi is the CEO and co-founder of Sandbar. Sandbar is a startup building the Stream Ring, an AI wearable designed to capture whispered thoughts. Toni Schneider is a partner at True Ventures, which has backed Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, and was initially skeptical of AI wearables until she saw the Sandbar demo. And to be clear, Schneider says he's seen a lot of demos. In this conversation, we uncover what it takes to build hardware people actually want to wear, why “self-augmentation” trumps AI companions, and how privacy through a whisper could change everything. We also discuss OpenAI's rumored competition with Jony Ive, why a device needs to do one thing well before it can do ten things well, and what Sandbar learned from two years of prototyping to get interaction models right.