(N11) Prelaunch Industry Board Newsletter: Monthly Innovation & Insights

Dear Industry Board Members,

July was the month companies started shipping the opposite of what they’re known for. Garmin took the screen off. Tesla sold a bike with no motor and no pedals. A brand built on lowering your cortisol launched an energy drink. And Meta shipped a feature that breaks Meta’s camera.

A few things I couldn’t stop thinking about this month:

Key Trends in Consumer Tech

Garmin’s newest wearable has no screen. That’s the pitch ⌚

Everyone else spent five years adding pixels to your wrist. Garmin just removed them.

CIRQA went on sale in July. $199.99, no display, 10 days of battery, and no subscription required to see your own data. Training readiness, VO2 max, sleep, all of it in Garmin Connect. There is an optional $6.99 tier for coaching, but the core works without it.

The real target isn’t Apple. It’s Whoop, whose whole model is a band you don’t own and a membership you keep paying for. CIRQA is the same idea with the meter switched off.

Selling “you already paid for this” as a feature. In wearables, that’s almost radical. 😎

Tesla’s fastest sellout of the year has no motor 🚲

Tesla put a $225 balance bike for 2 to 5-year-olds on its store on July 16. No pedals. No motor. No battery. It sold out in hours.

And you couldn’t buy one unless Tesla could verify you already owned a Tesla. Sign in with the account your car is registered to, or no bike.

Then the resale listings started. Four figures, then five. One eBay ask hit $8,265 for a toddler’s push bike before a single unit had shipped. Most balance bikes cost under $100.

Not a bike anyone needed. Then I looked at the resale asks… and the bike stopped being the product.

Meta shipped an update that kills its own camera 🕶️

Meta pushed a mandatory firmware update in July that permanently disables the camera on Ray-Ban Meta glasses if the little white privacy light is covered or removed.

The reason it exists: a hobbyist was charging $60 to take the light out for you. Meta pulled thousands of listings advertising the service and started threatening legal action.

Then the other half of the month. New York became the first state to ban camera or microphone eyewear from every one of its 1,240+ courthouses, effective July 20. Not aimed at one brand. The whole category.

And while all of that was happening, Meta is reportedly prototyping glasses that photograph your surroundings every few seconds, with no plan to put an indicator light on them at all.

So the privacy light is sacred… right up until the next product doesn’t have one. 🧐

Key Trends in Robotics

The first strike over humanoid robots. They haven’t started working yet 🤖

Workers have fought automation since the loom. Hyundai’s union in Ulsan just did it over a robot that has never worked a shift. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas has not been assigned a single task at any Korean plant. Fifteen rounds of talks collapsed partly over a machine that isn’t there yet.

The union wants hourly workers on fixed salaries so automation can’t quietly shave their hours, and no robot on the floor without a written agreement first. Hyundai’s plan is 25,000+ Atlas units. On July 20, as 35,000 workers escalated to four-hour stoppages, Hyundai closed its buyout of SoftBank’s Boston Dynamics stake for $325 million. Everyone keeps asking when humanoids will change labor. Turns out the announcement is enough.

A $1,100 drone that hunts mosquitoes by sound 🦟

Tornyol, a Y Combinator-backed French startup, built a 40-gram drone that finds mosquitoes by sonar and kills them with its own propellers. 32 ultrasonic emitters, 380 microphones, and an FPGA reading the Doppler shift a wingbeat prints on the returning echo. Every insect has a signature, so it hunts in the dark because it never needs to see.

Then the spec sheet. Three minutes of flight, thirty minutes to recharge, $1,100 to buy or $50 a month to rent. The company claims one unit covers five acres and would beat mosquito nets on malaria mortality. A genetics researcher in Lagos pointed out the obvious in the same article: $50 a month isn’t cheap where malaria actually is, and the drone needs mains power.

Also, the demo everyone shared shows it killing a moth. 😄

Key Trends in Fashion

Nike put a heating element in a slide 🔥

Nike and Hyperice built the Air Zoom Hyperslide: a $250 recovery slide with a magnetic pod in the strap that heats to 117°F and vibrates in 15-minute cycles. App-controlled, out September 29.

Recovery tech has spent a decade as equipment you go to. Boots you strap on, guns you hold, beds you lie in. Nike’s move is to stop making it an appointment.

One hour of battery per charge. And whether heat on the top of your foot does anything a hot shower doesn’t, is not a question Nike answers.

$250 to warm your feet while you sit down… Recovery is officially a lifestyle purchase.

Swatch priced a gold watch at 1969 gold prices 🌙

Swatch and Omega released Mission to the Moon 1969 on the Apollo anniversary. 1,969 numbered pieces in 18-carat gold, priced off what gold cost on 21 July 1969 rather than July 2026. It retails at £520.

And you couldn’t just buy one. Applicants had to sit an Electronic Swatch Timepiece Application: 32 quiz questions on watches and space travel, in 2 hours and 15 minutes, roughly the time Armstrong and Aldrin spent walking on the moon.

A mass-market brand priced gold off a 57-year-old commodity quote, then put an exam at the door. Marketing, obviously. Effective marketing though… 😎

The AI wearable whose whole pitch is that you’d actually wear it

Nirva raised an $8M seed in July led by Lightspeed. Ex-Meta Reality Labs founders, and the product is a necklace.

Lightspeed’s logic, written down plainly: an AI wearable only gets smart if you wear it, because it learns from your context. You won’t wear something you don’t love. So it never gets the data to become useful. Their description of the category so far: a graveyard of pins, clips, and pendants. Hence a jewelry designer as third cofounder, level with the hardware and software leads.

Every other wearable company hired a designer. This one designed the whole thesis. Whether people want their feelings logged is a separate question…

Key Trends in CPG & Health

The anti-cortisol brand just started selling caffeine

Nello built a following on Supercalm, a drink mix whose entire pitch is lowering your stress. The brand’s own tagline is “Cortisol Can Kiss Our Ashwagandha.”

Now it’s selling Nello Energy. 150mg of caffeine from green tea, plus the usual nootropic stack. The Apple Rush flavor is a Target exclusive.

A brand that sold you the antidote to being wired now sells the wire. Same customer… different hours of the day. 😎

The cholesterol shot is finally a pill 💊

Merck got FDA approval on July 16 for the first cholesterol pill in its class. These drugs have existed for over a decade, and every single one of them was an injection.

Bad cholesterol down 56%. $315 a month, roughly half what the injections cost.

Now the catch. Empty stomach, 30-minute wait before you eat anything. This is a category whose problem was never efficacy; it was people not taking the drug. The fix arrived with a new daily rule attached.

And the trial that tells you whether lower cholesterol from this pill actually prevents heart attacks hasn’t been reported yet. Approved on a number, not on an outcome.

Peanut butter and jelly became a protein category 🥜

Welch’s launched Real PB&Js on July 13. 50% bigger than an Uncrustable, 12 grams of protein, $8.87 for a six-pack, exclusive to Walmart until 2027.

It was not alone. Lunchly, the MrBeast and Logan Paul and KSI venture, put out Lil Sammies at 13 grams. Jams, a protein PB&J brand backed by Alex Morgan and C.J. Stroud, signed its own Walmart exclusive. Same aisle, same month, same freezer door.

Every one of them is aiming at Uncrustables, which built the whole category without ever needing a protein claim.

Put a protein number on the most inert product in the store, and it turns into a growth category. Nobody is asking whether a seven-year-old needs 13 grams.

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Until next time,

– Narek