This week on StrictlyVC Download, we’re sharing a conversation from our event in Palo Alto, where TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin spoke with Mina Fahmi, the founder and CEO of Sandbar, and Toni Schneider of True Ventures.  

Mina Fahmi is the CEO and co-founder of Sandbar, a startup building the Stream ring—an AI wearable designed to capture your whispered thoughts. Toni Schneider is a partner at True Ventures who backed Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, and was initially skeptical of AI wearables until he saw Sandbar’s demo – and to be clear, Schneider says he’d seen a whole lot of demos. In this conversation, they unpack what it takes to build hardware that people actually want to wear, why “self-extension” beats AI companions, and how privacy through whispering changes everything. They also discuss competing with OpenAI’s rumored device with Jony Ive, why devices must do one thing brilliantly before doing ten things adequately, and what Sandbar learned from two years of prototyping to get the interaction model right.