Jonathan Berent and the trouble with a good pitch

Jonathan Berent arrived at X with a skill that had served him well: he could make an idea sound promising. He had run sales teams. He understood enthusiasm. Then someone told him his presentations sounded a little too much like sales presentations. For a former sales leader, this was an awkward performance review. The thing he knew how to do had helped him get into the room. Now it was getting in his way.

His response was to watch how other people presented their work. They gave the shortcomings room to breathe. An unresolved problem could be useful; a polished account that hurried past it could make the room suspicious. Berent began changing his delivery. Later, after leaving X, he encountered the reverse complaint: an investor thought he sounded too technical to build a business. One can imagine a less confusing career than becoming insufficiently commercial by learning to be credible.

That predicament offers a good introduction to Jonathan “JB” Berent, founder and CEO of NextSense. He has spent years crossing between people who build things and people who must be persuaded to back them. Each crossing requires a change of vocabulary. His career asks a practical question: how much of your old expertise should you carry into a new room? The answer, in his case, keeps changing.

“I had no plan B.”

Jonathan Berent, on leaving Google

A philosophy degree, then the sales floor

Berent graduated from Stanford in 1995, having studied philosophy and religious studies. These subjects reward attention to assumptions: what a person believes, why an argument works, where a definition begins to break down. They also make an interesting starting point for someone who would eventually lead a hardware company. His route into technology went through commercial work rather than a conventional engineering apprenticeship.

He worked in product management at an early internet company, sales and marketing at a venture-backed startup, and inside-sales management at Oracle. At Google, he joined Offers, the company's answer to Groupon, and later led a team in Kickstart, a program serving small and medium-sized businesses. The work gave him reasons to feel useful and accomplished. It also eventually left him restless.

Asked what set the next chapter in motion, he supplied the pleasingly unceremonious answer: “boredom.” There is something refreshing about a founder allowing that word into the story. Career changes tend to acquire noble explanations once they have happened. Boredom is a less presentable motive, but an intelligible one. You can be good at a job and still begin to suspect that you have become too comfortable in its questions.

He had interests that exceeded his job description. Philosophy remained part of his life after university. The humanities graduate had entered a commercial career without surrendering the habit of asking broader questions. An employer can give someone a title, a team and a set of quarterly targets. It has a harder time deciding what that person will find interesting for the next twenty years.

The first answer was no

In 2017, Berent saw an opening inside Google: employees, including non-engineers, could propose business ideas. He teamed up with a firmware engineer and a researcher with a doctorate. Their proposal was turned down. It was a hardware idea, which the program had not expected. The rejection came with a referral to X, Google's moonshot operation. A closed door had, unusually, supplied directions.

The distinction mattered. A rejection can mean that an idea has failed a test, or that it has arrived at the wrong desk. Founders do not always get a helpful explanation of which has happened. Berent had an opportunity to keep going, although moving into X meant moving into a different professional culture. His commercial experience would buy him neither automatic agreement nor an exemption from learning.

There is a familiar fantasy about corporate incubation: a large company supplies the money, specialists appear, and ambition proceeds on schedule. Berent's experience was more demanding. X's engineers had considerable choice about which projects to join. An idea still had to attract willing collaborators. Even inside a well-resourced institution, a person proposing something new could find himself doing the small, unglamorous work of making it tangible.

He has described immersing himself in conferences, books and the research behind the project. The revealing part is the verb: immersing. A change in title can happen in a meeting. Acquiring enough understanding to earn a technical team's confidence takes longer. For Berent, the transition required spending time with unfamiliar material and accepting that the next useful question might expose something he did not yet understand.

A company begins where the salary ends

There had already been a rehearsal. In 2016, while employed at Google, Berent tried to build Lucid Reality. He later described giving it only part of his attention and spending roughly $60,000 to $70,000 of his own and relatives' money. The venture went nowhere. In retrospect, he treated the experience as an expensive education in the difference between being interested in a company and being available to run it.

When he left Google in September 2020 to pursue NextSense, the conditions were different. There was no continuing corporate salary to make the experiment comfortable. His description was blunt: “I had no plan B.” He needed funding, a way to pay himself and a way to pay other people. The arithmetic arrived immediately, before any satisfying account of personal reinvention could be written.

Berent has described an arrangement in which he would raise outside money and Google would transfer the technology into the independent business for equity. Ascension Ventures agreed to invest $5 million. In his account, the technology transfer followed in February 2021. That sequence is useful because it makes the risk legible. The prospective founder had to persuade a new backer before the corporate project could become the company's foundation.

A successful pitch was now attached to obligations with names and invoices. Building a business required choices about colleagues, spending and priorities that could no longer be referred upward through a large organization. The former manager had gained authority, along with an unusually efficient system for discovering the limits of authority: other people still had to agree to join, invest, buy and return.

The ear does not care about the presentation

NextSense's work eventually took the shape of Smartbuds, earbuds that combine audio with sensing technology. Berent's argument for the form is grounded in something mundane: people already wear earbuds. A new product has an advantage when it fits an existing habit. Even an unfamiliar capability has to live inside an object someone is prepared to put in a pocket, charge and use again tomorrow.

In a September 2026 conversation with Chay Carter, he emphasized ordinary audio expectations: calls, podcasts and sound quality. These are stern requirements for a founder with an unusual technical proposition. Customers bring the expectations formed by devices they already own. An additional capability does not persuade them to forgive an object that fails at its everyday job.

He also discussed manufacturing, having produced around 5,000 devices and ordered another 10,000. Those figures describe a different kind of encounter with reality from a presentation. A prototype can be adjusted by people who understand its peculiarities. Thousands of units must work for strangers. Manufacturing turns each design decision into something that can be repeated, shipped and, when necessary, explained to a disappointed customer.

Berent has described the earlier prototypes as involving a box and a wire between the earbuds, before the move to a wireless consumer product. The shrinking of the object enlarged the job around it. Engineering, industrial design, production and customer expectations had to meet inside the same small case. An elegant slide has plenty of room. An earbud has considerably less.

Who gets to stay in the room?

His view of hiring has changed along with the product. He once put heavy emphasis on brilliance and passion. Experience taught him that talented, intensely committed people could still damage a team when they lacked alignment and emotional intelligence. He began placing more weight on humility and less ego. This is a less glamorous hiring brief than assembling a collection of geniuses. It is also easier to imagine surviving a difficult Tuesday.

One memory he singles out concerns Richa Gujarati, who joined after working at Apple. At a company offsite, she noticed a different atmosphere. When Berent asked her to describe it in a word, her answer was “empowering.” He remembered the exchange. For a leader who had himself needed permission to move beyond a familiar role, that response carries a particular resonance.

There is another measure of the company's present concerns. In a recent public recruitment post, Berent sought a product manager focused on retention. He wanted to understand customers who engaged with the product and then went quiet. The question moved beyond attracting attention to earning repeated use. A founder can explain his intentions indefinitely. The customer's decision to return supplies a much shorter verdict.

The manuscript on the hard drive

Alongside the company, Berent had another unfinished piece of work. He says he wrote a spy novel as a birthday gift for his wife, then stored it on a hard drive while he built the business. The manuscript waited for roughly a decade. A startup can be very persuasive about its claim on a founder's time; other ambitions can spend years politely accepting the appointment has been postponed.

Clandestine Games: Junior Recruit appeared in July 2026. Its plot follows Stanford students through an underground puzzle competition that conceals an intelligence-agency recruiting exercise. The setting carries him back to his university years, though the characters and espionage are fictional. The book extends from campus to Las Vegas. There is, at least on the page, room for more than product meetings.

A sequel, Clandestine Games: White Terror, is in progress. The return to fiction gives his story a welcome complication. Berent has argued against letting an inherited label restrict what someone attempts. Publishing a novel applies that argument to his own calendar. The former philosophy student, sales leader and corporate project director has added another occupation without resolving the others into a tidy sequence.

A pitch promises that something will exist. A company, a pair of earbuds and a published book make that promise available for inspection. People can use them, question them, put them aside or come back. Berent has become more familiar with all of those responses. He is still explaining his ideas. Increasingly, the interesting part of the story begins after someone has heard him out.