MEMO

The Thing Nobody Wants to Admit

We're all addicts. Not by choice, but by design.

The average American touches their phone 2,617 times per day. That's not a typo. Your brain releases dopamine – the same chemical triggered by cocaine – every time you see a notification. Big Tech hired neuroscientists specifically to make their products impossible to put down.

And it worked.

76% of Gen Z know they spend too much time on screens. 64% of all users desperately want to reduce screen time. But here's the kicker: every solution has failed. Screen timers? Ignored. Dumb phones? Abandoned within weeks. Deleting apps? You just reinstall them. Why? Because smartphones aren't just addictive – they're essential. You can't function in modern society without one.

What Your Brain Actually Wants

Here's what neuroscience tells us: Your brain processes around 90% of all information through just two channels – vision (80%) and hearing (10%). Our senses gather vast amounts of data (~1 billion bits/sec), with vision and hearing providing most of it, but the conscious brain only processes about 10-20 bits/sec. Evolution spent millions of years perfecting these systems. Your auditory cortex can process speech in just 200 milliseconds. Your visual cortex takes up 30% of your brain's processing power.

But screens hijack vision, demanding your constant attention. They turn your most powerful sense into a trap. What if we could free vision entirely and use your second-most powerful sense, hearing, the way nature intended?

The Window Is Closing (Like, Right Now)

OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for Jony Ive's wearable startup. Amazon bought a wearable AI company. Meta and Google are developing their own wearables and acquiring small startups in the space. The smartest companies on Earth are not debating whether wearables will replace smartphones. That debate is over. They're racing to be first. And here's what should make your heart race: When OpenAI releases its device, it will be a ChatGPT moment for wearables. What do you think other LLM builders will do? Will Google run Gemini on OpenAI's hardware? Will Anthropic license Claude to a competitor's device? Will Meta accept being a software layer on someone else's platform? Absolutely not. They'll rush to build their own. The market will explode overnight.

Why Most Competitors Are Building the Wrong Thing

There are two types of AI wearable companies emerging:

Type 1: Pure AI Recorders – These are single-function devices that only record conversations and run speech-to-text models. They have no core utility beyond recording. If the AI feature disappoints or the novelty wears off, the device becomes useless.

Type 2: AI on Existing Core Utility – Companies building AI features on top of products that already serve essential functions – for example, smart glasses that are first and foremost glasses, or rings that primarily function as ornaments and then track wellness. The AI is supplementary.

We're Type 2, and we believe we chose the right foundation.

Why Earbuds + Wellness, etc. = The Perfect Foundation

We're building on top of two core utilities: AR audio and wellness tracking. Why? Two reasons.

Reason #1: Focus on What Won't Change. A well-known business figure famously said, "Focus on what won't change in the next 10 years." People's need for high-quality audio – to listen to music, podcasts, calls – won't disappear. In fact, the TWS earbuds market is expected to reach $563 billion by 2030. Wellness tracking won't become less valuable. These are stable, proven needs that will exist regardless of AI trends. If the wearables division of a certain fruit-named company (let’s call it iCompany for the sake of argument) were to become its own company, it would likely land in the S&P 500 and the Fortune 100. You don't bet your company on AI hype. You bet on human needs that AI can enhance.

Reason #2: True Behavioral Understanding. Here's where it gets fascinating: Biometric data + voice + context = genuine understanding. When someone speaks, their heart rate, body temperature, and micro-movements reveal their true emotional state. Are they stressed? Excited? Lying? Confident? Our device captures all of this simultaneously. This creates something unprecedented: A personal AI that understands you at a biological level. It doesn't just hear your words – it reads your physiology. It learns your patterns. Over time, it predicts your needs before you express them, reducing the friction between thought and action. We're on the track of achieving brain-machine interface speed through sensors, not scalpels.

Every individual gets an AI that truly knows them, learns them, and anticipates them. That's not hype – that's the convergence of biometrics, AI, and continuous context.

The Product: Mushroom

To tackle the addiction problem we started with, we're taking an unconventional approach. Our first product is called Mushroom (ironically) & it is designed to help you break free from the screens. We are not competing with smartphones (our product works with them). We're building something people actually want to use.

Mushroom comes with three interchangeable pieces with three functions:

• Use it as earbuds

• Use it as a wristband

• Use it as an AI recorder

  
  

You can use all three at once, two pieces together, or just a single piece, depending on your needs. This modular design gives you complete control – wear what you need, when you need it. The flexibility is intentional: Start with just earbuds for music. Add the wristband when you want wellness tracking. Activate the AI recorder when you need hands-free assistance. Or combine everything for the full experience. It grows with you, not against you.

We are not (only) a Hardware Company

Every person wearing our device is passively generating behavioral and physiological data worth thousands per year. But here's our ethical breakthrough: Users control their data completely. They choose to earn from it through our data marketplace or delete it entirely. No corporate overlords. No privacy violations. No creepy data harvesting. You own your data. We just provide the infrastructure.

The Clock Is Ticking

Voice AI just became good enough to replace app-based interfaces. New chips make our vision technically possible for the first time. Manufacturing is trying to move back to the US due to policy shifts. Every condition needed for this revolution is happening simultaneously, and it won't last. But we have a 12-18 month window before the giants fully mobilize. After that, the market gets crowded, patents get filed, and being first becomes impossible.

Think about it: Building hardware takes considerable time. There are high barriers to entry – supply chains, manufacturing, certifications, iterations. Once OpenAI releases its device and the ChatGPT moment happens, you'll already be too late to start.

What This Means for You

You can join this wave now – before the ChatGPT moment for wearables – become an early investor and visionary, or join later at staggeringly high valuations. The downside is capped, while the upside is unlimited. The choice is simple but time-sensitive.

The Simple Truth

Ten years from now, pulling out a phone to check something will seem as absurd as carrying a desktop computer in your backpack. The future interface is invisible. It is a voice. It's ambient. It understands you biologically, not just linguistically. Every great shift in computing, from mainframes to PCs to smartphones, looked obvious in hindsight. But only the people who moved when the window opened captured the value.

The window is open.

The clock is ticking.

It’s time to build!