Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure(ir.allbirds.com) |
Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure(ir.allbirds.com) |
Allbirds announces pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes 175%
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai...
What?!
This is the height of ridiculousness.
I guess if there are "second chances" in American capitalism (and 3rd, 4th, 5th,...) then literally any pivot makes sense ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess then nobody should complain that everybody and their grandmas pivot to doing vibe coding, either. And if they produce AI slop, so be it...
As others have noted, this is like the crypto pivot that many companies did a few years ago
Invest now! This is the lowest AI stocks will ever be.
But that was a bubble, but AI is not a bubble! It is a revolution in the way we work! That's why your leaders have made AI-embracement metrics a critical part of your performance evaluation.
Smells the same to me.
allbirds: ok
me: i'd also like to buy compute capacity to run AI inference on the cheap lol do u know where i can find a good one
allbirds: ur not gonna believe this
Nintendo was a much more gradual product shift that makes sense in retrospect: playing cards -> tabletop games and toys -> video games.
Or another gradual example was Tandy Corporation, which went from making leather crafts -> general crafting/DIY to electronics crafting -> Radio Shack and Tandy computers. That one's funny because the original leather business was spun out and still exists.
But abruptly going from shoes to AI datacenters, or iced tea to blockchain, etc I really wonder if there's any non-scam precedent of that abrupt shift actually working for a major known brand?
Oh, there was a certain pair of Ohio bike shop owners who pivoted to powered flight some time back.
Toyota started as a company to produce looms. It’s now mostly known as an automotive company.
Allbirds should've rebranded itself as AIbirds.
>Sneakernet is coming back.The cloud is expensive. The network is slow. Your feet are already trained. Why pay millions for GPUs when you can just walk the data to the next room? AIIbirds: making physical movement cool again
I had some of those wool runners for a while and had a mid-twenties lady in the train sitting right next to me one rainy autumn day, and she looked at me until we had eye contact and said, "Sir, don’t take this personally, but your shoes smell like wet dog, it’s awful.” She was right. I bought her coffee on the way out to apologize. Last time I bought Allbirds.
What on earth qualifies this guy or this company to build out GPU as a service infrastructure?
The CTO is at least, as should be expected of any CTO, an actual engineer with a technical background, but he's been working in engineering leadership for Allbirds for the past 9 years, and as far as I'm aware, at no point in that duration did they own or operate data centers.
Skills can't seriously be that fungible that a complete lack of any domain-relevant experience means nothing. I have no idea how reputable "Chardan" is as an investment bank, but how on earth did they sell this to investors and who did they sell to? What on earth is a "convertible financing facility?" If I web search that, every result is a press release about Allbirds. Did this bank invent some new form of finance that only Allbirds has ever used?
I have no proof of this, but if I were a gambling man, I’d bet this is a pump and dump opportunity for insiders who are stuck with large volumes of stock that has bottomed to almost nothing since the IPO.
In short, the allbirds financiers are taking a slightly reduced interest payment in exchange for the option to capture stock price appreciation if the gamble finds a greater fool.
Random semi-related memory unlocked:
I briefly worked at Technicolor along with most of the people who were at Chumby Industries when it imploded.
As part of the wind-down of Chumby a deal was struck for Technicolor to take on most of the employees to help build MediaNavi, a Netflix-competitor streaming service. We Chumby hires were mostly focused on working on client-side technology to build the streaming service into early "Smart TVs".
It was a complete disaster and I only lasted there about 3 months. Almost everyone I know that made the transition had left within 6-8 months.
I'm pretty sure this is a few years before Technicolor tried the social media thing.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/20/2963003/chumby-broken-up-...
But, no, it’s actually the same company.
And a failed shoe company at that… I beleive they sold out for around $40M, which isn’t zero, but a lot less than the rounds of funding they raised.
This reminds me of when the Long Island Iced Tea company renamed themselves to the Long Blockchain Corp in 2017 when crypto was soaring and their stock immediately took off.
Four years later the SEC charged three people (including the company's majority shareholder) with insider trading.
But my jogging has been great recently! I've been posting PBs on Strava, though I don't remember creating a Strava account any time... hmmm...
What, ah, do they have to do with AI?
They were absolute trash for daily, lasted me only few months and stank like hell.