Starboy is an anti-AI wearable that wants to just "hang out"
The first time I've ever had a podcast guest join from a hot tub. Also: Meta's AI jitters, Elon Musk resets xAI, Travis Kalanick comes for Waymo, and more.
A special hello to all of you who signed up from yesterday’s Anthropic story. I’m headed to Austin, Texas for SXSW and then San Jose for Nvidia GTC on Monday. More on that below.
Daniel Kuntz announced Starboy to the world this week. It’s a CNC-machined, OLED-screened wearable “creature” that clips to your bag, reacts to its environment through a camera, microphone, accelerometer, and temperature sensor, and does not connect to your phone, run an LLM, or promise to improve your life in any measurable way. It ships in September for $249–$439, depending on the finish, with each unit possessing a unique set of eyes drawn from over 5,000 possible variations. The more than 500 animations running on its 400x400 OLED display at 60fps were created by a former Disney animator.
Starboy is the product of Lil Guy, Kuntz’s hardware startup that raised $1.2 million last year and has spent less than half of it on building version one of Starboy. The device is deliberately not an AI companion, not a therapist, and not a utility product. According to Kuntz, it’s a toy for adults. “When people ask me what it does, I say, he mainly just hangs out,” he says. “Computing doesn’t necessarily have to have utility. We’ve reached the pinnacle of utility with smartphones and laptops. There’s this completely unexplored branch where we just have purely aesthetic objects.”
Kuntz is also the first podcast I’ve ever had join a recording while in a hot tub.
Catch the full conversation on this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger:
Kuntz is a 20-something solo founder based mostly in New York who previously co-founded Any Distance, a design-forward fitness tracking app that won an Apple Design Award in 2023 before shutting down due to what he describes as “a fairly common combination of classic startup failure modes,” including co-founder disagreements, leaning too heavily on a Twitter-native audience, and the brutal saturation of the app market.
To build Starboy, he’s assembled a small team of heavy hitters through friend introductions: industrial designer Rama of Ramaworks fame, character designer Ranzeet Qatari (formerly Disney Animation, Google, Netflix), and a creative director — all of whom are working with the kind of budget discipline that would make most hardware founders blush. The presale for Starboy launched this week.
Highlights from the interview:
