True Ventures co-founder John Callaghan doesn’t think we’ll be using smartphones in five years the way we do now – and probably not at all in 10 years.
For a venture capitalist whose company has found some big winners in its two decades — from consumer brands like Fitbit, Ring and Peloton to enterprise software makers HashiCorp and Duo Security — this is more than armchair theory; This is a thesis that True Ventures is actively betting on.
True didn’t get here by following the crowd. The Bay Area firm has operated largely under the radar despite managing about $6 billion across 12 core seed funds and four “selective” opportunity-style funds, which it has used to inject more capital into portfolio companies that are gaining momentum. While other VCs have become more promotional – building personal brands on social media and podcasts to attract founders and drive deal flow – True has gone in the opposite direction, quietly building a strong network of repeat founders. The strategy appears to be working: According to Callaghan, the company boasts 63 exits and seven IPOs with profits among the portfolio of nearly 300 companies it has amassed over its 20-year history.
Callaghan says three of True’s four recent exits in the fourth quarter of 2025 involved re-founders who came back to work with the firm after previous successes. Still, it’s Callaghan’s thinking about the future of human-computer interaction that really stands out in the sea of AI hype and mega-rounds.
“We won’t be using iPhones in 10 years,” Callaghan says bluntly. “I don’t think we’ll be using them in five years – or let’s say there’s something different that’s a little bit safer – we’re just going to be using them in very different ways.”
Their argument is simple: Our phones are poor at being interfaces between humans and intelligence. “The way we get them out now is to send a text or send you some message or write an email to confirm it – [that’s] very unskilled, [and] It’s not a great interface,” he explains.[They’re] possibility of error, possibility of interference [of] Our normal life.”
He’s so convinced 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 on Fitbit before wearables were even obvious, to invest in Peloton after hundreds of other VCs said ‘no thanks’, and to back Ring when founder Jamie Siminoff ran out of money and even the “Shark Tank” judges rejected him. Each time, Callaghan says, the stakes seemed questionable. Each time, the stake was on a new way for humans to interact with technology that felt more natural than before.
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The latest manifestation of this thesis is the 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 sole purpose: to capture and organize your thoughts through voice notes. It’s not trying to be another humanoid AI pin or compete with Ora’s health tracking. “It does one thing really well,” says Callaghan. “But that one thing is a basic human behavioral need that’s missing from technology today.”
The idea is not to passively record ambient audio, but to be there when an idea comes, acting as a kind of thought partner. It’s linked to an app, takes advantage of AI, and, according to Callaghan, represents a very different philosophy about how we should interact with intelligence.
However, what attracted Sandbar founders Mina Fahmy and Kirak Hong wasn’t just the product. “When we met Mina, we had exactly the same vision,” recalls Callaghan. True’s team had already been thinking about alternative interfaces for years, making targeted investments around that possibility. As a result, they met with dozens of founders. But the approach of Fahmy and Hong — who previously worked together on neural interfaces at CTRL-Labs, a startup acquired by Meta in 2019 — stood out. “What is this about [the ring] make capable. It’s about the behavior it enables that we will soon realize we can’t live without.
Here’s an echo of Callaghan’s old line about Peloton: “It’s not about the bike.” For some people, the bike – even its early version – was attractive. But Peloton was really about the behavior it enabled and the community it built; The bike was just a plane.
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 emphasizes that he’s been able to stick to what he does best, which is writing seed checks of $3 million to $6 million for the 15% to 20% ownership in startups that often get to see it first.
Callaghan says True would like to raise more money for the work it is doing, but he is not interested in raising billions of dollars. “Like, why? You don’t need this to create 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 it the most powerful compute wave we’ve seen, Callaghan sees warning signs in his $5 trillion in circular financing deals supporting hyperscalers and projected CapEx spending on data centers and chips. “We are in a very serious part of the cycle, and that is worrying,” he said.
He is optimistic about where the real opportunities lie, he said. Callaghan believes the greatest value creation lies 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 to most people: “It must be scary and lonely and you’ll be called crazy,” Callaghan says of the right early-stage investment. “And it has to be really blurry and vague, but you have to be with a team that you really trust.” After five to ten years, he says, you’ll know whether you were on to something or not.
Either way, based on True’s track record of betting on hardware that many others missed — fitness trackers, connected bikes, smart doorbells, and now the thought-capturing ring — it’s worth noting when Callaghan says the phone’s days are numbered. Being quick is the whole point – and trend lines support their thesis: The smartphone market is effectively saturated, growing at barely 2% a year, while wearables – smartwatches, rings and voice-enabled devices – are expanding at double-digit rates.
There’s something changing in how we want to interact with technology, and True is making its bets accordingly.
Pictured above, the sandbar’s stream ring. For more from our conversation with Callaghan, tune into next week’s StrictlyVC Download Podcast; New episodes arrive every Tuesday.
