- Big Players
- Posts
- Is The Next Gold Rush on Your Face?
Is The Next Gold Rush on Your Face?
The playbook for building on virgin platforms

Meta just dropped AI glasses with built-in displays for well under a grand.
NEWS: Meta has officially unveiled its $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display AI glasses.
• Color 600-by-600-pixel resolution
• 20-degree field of view
• 5,000 nits of max brightness
• 2% light leakage, making it hard for other people to see that there is a display
• Gesture control— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt)
2:05 AM • Sep 18, 2025
But a bigger deal (for you) is that the SDK launches this year.
You can now start building apps for AI Glasses using the new Wearables Device Access Toolkit (DAT)!
— Jake Steinerman (@jasteinerman)
5:38 PM • Sep 18, 2025
That means your product can be on millions of faces by early next year, with little to no competition.
As growth obsessed operators, we’re looking for a moment like Facebook ads 2012, an arbitrage window where first movers scale huge empires while attention costs nothing.
Meta is pouring over $10 billion into smart glasses, already moving millions of units and proving there's real demand. Microsoft and Twitch are jumping in as strategic partners.
The market's set to explore, projected to grow 10x to $93 billion by 2030.
And the big rumor floating around certain circles is that Apple will launch their first smart glasses product in 2026. If it’s anything like the Airpods or Apple Watch, we could be witnessing the birth of a new category.
A new report from Bloomberg revealed Apple's future roadmap for AI-powered smart glasses.
The glasses will aim to compete with Meta's new AI Ray-Bans, being able to play audio and use AI + cameras to identify things in the world.
Almost feels like a lite Vision pro.
— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung)
5:15 AM • Feb 27, 2024
In this article, I break down:
The SDK limitation that creates your competitive advantage
What Meta's internal documents reveal about their smart glasses strategy
Four specific plays generating results before the masses arrive
The broader arbitrage playbook for platform-first thinking
Here's how you capture this window before it slams shut.
But first, let's address the elephant in the room.