If you can somehow get your hands on a dozen NVL72 racks and duct tape them together in such a way to rent them out as a service, you can make your money back in less than 2 years at current demand pricing. $50M is more than enough to get this going.
This is absolutely doomed but how funny would it be if 50 years from now people share trivia like "Hey did you know that Allbirds started as a shoe company?" the way people talk about Nintendo starting as a playing card company
That makes me wonder, are there any major examples of this kind of abrupt pivot actually succeeding?
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?
Yeah these are definitely some good examples of startups doing major abrupt pivots after a few years. But I was hoping to figure out if there were any successful examples of established, well-known brands doing it. (For comparison to the original topic, Allbirds was founded 11 years ago and is post-IPO.)
Samsung started as a trading company for dried fish, noodles and groceries. Now it does many things as a conglomerate but it’s mostly known as an electronics company.
Toyota started as a company to produce looms. It’s now mostly known as an automotive company.
>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.
It's not an expansion. The first line says they sold the shoe business which will continue under someone else. The company is changing names and its line of business.
That doesn't cause it to make any more sense. The leadership tab still shows the CEO is the same guy from the past 5 years, previously the President of Mountain Hardware and before that a VP at North Face, with a degree in Forestry Science.
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?
You’re assuming this is a good faith effort to rebuild the company.
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.
FYI "convertible" instruments aren't new, I suspect its just unusual phrasing that's tripping up your search. "Convertible bonds" or "convertible securities"
are more common terms IME. Either way it's typically a bond/security that can be held _or_ converted at a preset strike price. Eg a convertible bond has a slightly discounted coupon (interest) for the holder. The bond can be converted to a fixed number of shares (equity), effectively at at a pre defined price/share. If the per-share price appreciates the bond holder can convert at capture the vallue above their strike price. If the associated equity falls (or doesnt appreciate) the bond holder 1) holds to maturity 2) is senior to equity holders for recovery.
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.
> This reminds me of when a coworker left to go help develop Technicolor's (yes, that Technicolor) new social media platform.
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.
I hope their foray into compute works out better than their shoemaking. Bought a pair, didn't even last a season before starting to fall apart (which would still be very on brand for the general AI sector).
I'm also surprised how few people know about Tulip Mania[0]. Funny thing about bubbles is that mostly everyone seems to know its a bubble, but they think they will have a seat when the music stops.
It’s not an expansion, they are selling the shoe assets. It’s basically just starting a new business and redeploying capital (if there is any). It’s just a really odd way to announce and undertake it.
If my math is right they can acquire about 1800 (lowish end) enterprise AI-capable GPUs for $50M so exactly what are they going to do with that? Seems pretty small.
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.
Most folks on the NotTheOnion subreddit (where you post actual news headlines that you'd assume would be from The Onion) say this is their recent favorite
I knew something was up when every morning I'd find my Allbirds mysteriously on top of my keyboard. And coincidentally, someone has been using all of my Claude tokens every night...
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...
They were basically bankrupt 2 weeks ago and sold for $39M. The stock pop shows me that we're in a bubble of irrational exuberance. And what are they going to to with 50M? Buy a few racks of servers?
I hope this doesn't mess up their shoes. I am allergic to the plastic/leather in most shoes and allbirds is one of the few brands that typically is ok.
i do not know why this is surprising to literally anyone. did we think the D2C shoes made of felt were still a smashing business success/going concern? or have we not fully memorized the narratives that procure funding for struggling companies in this climate?
Even if they only have a 1 in a trillion chance of getting to AGI/Superintelligence first, the expected value of that (the total value of all goods an services on earth for the next 10,000 years / one trillion) is massive! They are clearly undervalued.
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.
No. This is the Jump the Shark moment for AI. Allbirds cannot compete with big AI players for GPUs As a Service.... This is nonsense. This company will go to Zero.
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