The person who backed Fitbit, Ring and Peloton now thinks your phone is on the clock.
Jon Callaghan, co-founder of True Ventures, doesn’t see us using smartphones the way we do now in five years — and maybe not at all in ten.
“We’re not going to be using iPhones in 10 years,” he says. “I kind of don’t think we’ll be using them in five years… we’re going to be using them in very different ways.”
That’s not a casual hot take. It’s the core thesis behind how True — a Bay Area seed firm that’s stayed unusually quiet while managing roughly $6 billion across 12 core seed funds and four opportunity funds — is placing its next generation of bets.
Phones are bad interfaces for intelligence
Callaghan’s argument is blunt: the smartphone is a terrible front end for the kind of always‑on intelligence AI makes possible.
“The way we take them out right now to send a text… or write an email – [that’s] super inefficient,” he says. They’re error‑prone. They hijack our attention. They pull us out of whatever we’re actually doing.
So True has been spending years looking for something else. Not another phone. A different interface altogether.
It’s the same instinct that pushed the firm into Fitbit before wearables were obvious, into Peloton after “hundreds” of other VCs passed, and into Ring when Jamie Siminoff kept running out of money and even “Shark Tank” judges said no.
Each of those looked weird at the time. Each was really a bet on new behavior, not a shiny gadget.
Meet Sandbar, a ‘thought companion’ on your finger
The latest expression of that thesis: Sandbar, a hardware startup building what Callaghan calls a “thought companion.”
In practice, it’s a voice‑activated ring — the Sandbar Stream — worn on your index finger. It does one thing: capture and organize your thoughts via voice.
It’s not trying to be a Humane AI Pin clone. It’s not an Oura‑style health tracker. It’s deliberately narrow.
“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 ring sits there until you need it. When an idea hits, you talk to it. The companion app and its AI stack do the rest: structure, recall, context. The point isn’t ambient recording, it’s being present at the moment of insight.
True was already combing the market for this kind of interface when it met Sandbar founders Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong. The pair had previously worked together on neural interfaces at CTRL‑Labs, the startup Meta acquired in 2019.
“When we met Mina, we were just absolutely aligned on vision,” Callaghan recalls.
What hooked him wasn’t just the gadget. It was the behavior it might unlock — the same lens he used when backing Peloton. “It’s not about the bike,” he used to say. The bike was just the vessel for a new ritual and a new community.
With Sandbar, the vessel is a ring. The bet is that we’ll soon feel we can’t live without an always‑there partner for our own thoughts.
Betting on behavior, not billion‑dollar seed rounds
That focus on behavior also explains True’s discipline while AI money gets weird.
Even as AI startups raise hundreds of millions of dollars at billion‑dollar valuations from day one, True has stuck to its lane: classic seed rounds. The firm typically writes $3 million to $6 million checks for 15% to 20% ownership — often in companies it sees before anyone else, thanks to a tight network of repeat founders.
Twenty years in, that approach has yielded a portfolio of around 300 companies, 63 exits with gains and seven IPOs, according to Callaghan. Three of the firm’s four exits in Q4 2025 came from founders who had already worked with True once before and came back.
Callaghan says True will add more capital where it’s working, but he has no interest in inflating the fund size into the billions.
“Like, why? You don’t need that to build something amazing today,” he says.
Worried about AI’s capital arms race, bullish on new interfaces
Callaghan is hardly a bear on AI. Asked about OpenAI, he says he can imagine the company being worth a trillion dollars. He calls this moment the most powerful compute wave we’ve seen.
But he’s uncomfortable with how capital‑intensive the infrastructure race has become. He points to the circular financing arrangements propping up the hyperscalers and their projected $5 trillion in data‑center and chip capex.
“We’re in a very capital intense part of the cycle, and that is worrisome,” he notes.
He thinks the real value creation is still ahead, and it won’t be found in the guts of the cloud. It will sit in the application layer — especially where new interfaces spark entirely new behaviors.
That’s where Sandbar, and whatever comes after the smartphone, lives.
The phone’s days as our primary device are numbered
Look at the macro picture and his thesis doesn’t sound so crazy.
The smartphone market is basically saturated, eking out low single‑digit growth — around 2% annually. Wearables, from smartwatches to rings to voice‑enabled devices, are growing at double‑digit rates.
Something is moving. We still carry phones. But we increasingly interact with technology through other things.
That’s the gap True Ventures is trying to get in front of: a future where intelligence is ambient, where we talk and gesture and glance instead of tapping at glass rectangles.
“It should be scary and lonely and you should be called crazy,” Callaghan says of early‑stage investing when it’s 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 from now, we’ll know if he was early to the next interface — or just early to declare the phone dead.
Either way, his bet is clear: the smartphone as we know it is already over. The next big thing might be small enough to sit on your finger.
