Sandbar's Stream ring records voice notes and controls music with a touchpad — shipping to consumers in summer 2026

the product, some of the trade-offs, and then we'll go into go to market and how everything's playing together. And first, I have to tell you, I saw the domain sandbar. com available at some point back in the day, and I was just thinking to myself, that is such a good domain.

So, uh as a domain enthusiast, I'm I'm happy that I'm happy that you picked it up and are and are doing it justice. Appreciate that. It's got sand. It's got a bar. It's got everything you could want. It's got a nice It's got a nice It's got a nice feeling. You know, I have positive feelings about Sandbars. Yeah.

Growing up in California. Uh but yeah, would love a introduction on yourself and the company and and how you got to building Sandbar. Totally. Uh so I'm Mina. I'm one of the co-founders at Sandbar.

Uh I originally met my co-founder Kurac at a startup called control labs that was developing these wristworn neural interfaces and uh we got acquired into meta and were working on a lot of devices there and in parallel I started exploring a ton with LMS and started trying to think about what it would take to have a more effortless interaction with these new speaking thinking machines.

So we started to explore a lot of different forms and that eventually led us uh to two products uh that I guess we're announcing together uh that we call stream and the stream ring. Mhm. And stream is as we say a self extension for talking through ideas and capturing them into notes.

We have this uh very sandy uh app that has a log of interactions you've discussed, notes that you've asked Stream to save, as well as the ability to zoom out of interactions and see what you've been discussing over time.

And especially if you're on the go, uh your phone is in your pocket and you want to perhaps talk about an idea or save something into a note. Uh, that's where you can use the stream ring. So, you just hold this touchpad, whisper into the top, and then release.

And if I do something like that, I can say, "Hey, can you um, can you give me your hottest take on AI wearables? " [music] Sure. The hottest take. Most AI wearables chase novelty instead of intimacy. They brag about features, but the real frontier is emotional calibration.

[laughter] You know, why don't you uh start a list with some some of those hot takes [music] and it'll scurry away and save those away. There you go. Sure. For when you need a list of hot takes. [laughter] Uh I love I I I loved I love the live demo.

uh uh it's always risky but the but yeah that's so so what so the the key like the value that you're delivering to users is not you're not trying to say I'm going to be this personal assistant that's going to do everything in your life simply like it you're just trying to build that interface with effectively just building this new surface area for a mobile device that people are already using and a new way to just input input ideas and thoughts into a computer and have them be organized.

Is that generally right? Exactly. We're really focused on letting you talk through ideas and save thoughts into notes. And normally I wouldn't have my phone out. I would have it in my pocket and maybe I would have earbuds in. And already so much of our thinking either happens in the go or lives in Apple notes.

And it's this beautiful mess of grocery lists and you know letters to a parent and career plans. And we see stream as the most effortless way to either build those ideas through conversation or save them away. Very cool. What uh what's the timeline till you guys are shipping the product?

I know you're doing pre-orders now. Totally. So, we've been building now for around uh 2 years, and it's good to be coming out of the cave. Uh we are uh actually right now kicking off our next build with our manufacturing partner in Taiwan, and then we'll be fully ramped to mass production in summer of 26.

So, that's when we'll start shipping. Very cool. Amazing. Very cool. Uh what what are your hottest takes on wearables? Obviously, it sounds like you maybe trained your your uh your app your your internal model to here's here's one. Do you do you think like how confident can you be in predicting success of a wearable?

Because it feels like it's something where you need to just run a lot of tests and the speed of each test is a little bit slow because you have to iterate on the actual hardware. Um, and you might oneshot it, but that might be a lot of luck. How much luck is it?

or do you think that there is a way to empirically know that you have a hit on your hand before you go to market? Yeah, I mean we definitely didn't start with this.

We've worked on a lot of different devices, a lot of different use cases and now we've been living with some form of stream for the last call it year and a half.

And Karac and I wanted to get to a point where we felt like it was useful in our daily life and then the people who were having test the device, our friends and our family who we've given units to are themselves finding it valuable.

And you know we have a marketing professor who will be driving to work and she'll talk about her lesson plan and then she'll watch her kids in the playground playing and she'll be able to keep her eyes up as she uh you know takes notes on what she wants to improve for the next day.

We have a bodywork coach who will walk her dog and be talking about clients and also riffing on eastern versus western medicine. And after enough time living with it, we got to this just really high degree of confidence that it was super useful in our lives.

And we're, you know, exploring other forms and other use cases, but they always have to hit that bar.

And I would say having, you know, built always in New York where we get to, you know, wear devices easily outside and not be noticed and also be in touch with people outside of tech has helped really ground us and something that we think will be useful for everybody. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

I I was laughing thinking about a future where the average human has exactly 10 rings. I was thinking the same thing. The ring is so popular. It's like this is my thinking ring. Well, then you get into the gauntlets. and the Yeah. Yeah.

Big and the chains, bracelets, and the you pierce both of your ears for the wearables and eyeglasses and headphones, all these things. Yeah. Well, I'm super I'm super excited about this. I John knows that I have a hilarious way of like keeping track of the thoughts in my mind, which is texting myself.

I'm constantly texting myself like stream of consciousness, things that I need to remember, do or whatever. So, I'm excited to try this out. Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks a ton. Thanks to me talk.

Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest is Aleandro Cheser from Dynasty. Let's bring him in. You take the intro. Aleandro, welcome. Thanks for having me.

Uh it was so fun having I think your