So they plan to buy low latency powerful compute hardware at the absolute top of an emerging, very unstable market without a proven model after previously making shoes.
Buy high, sell low. Amazing business move.
Are we sure this isn’t The Onion?
Allbirds made a surprising announcement Wednesday that it is pivoting from shoes to artificial intelligence.
The move boosted shares of the miniscule market cap company by more than 300%. The shares, which were under $3 a day ago, jumped to above $10.
The company announced that it’s pivoting its business to AI compute infrastructure on Wednesday in a release posted to its investor relations page.
The new company, which expects to be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.
What the fuck? Is this the SPAC reborn, but like a cordyceps instead of a gambling ring?
How the fuck do they go from sustainable low carbon shoes to AI compute infra during an AI compute hardware squeeze, with low capital to boot?
Part of me wants to point out Japanese mergers pull this sort of genre change all the time but that would lend legitimacy to what’s clearly a market rort.
They must be 15 days late doing this prank.
They just sold their company 15 days ago for $39 million. It was once worth $4 billion. Either these companies keep doing the dumbest shit they can, or somebody somewhere is getting rich off of burying these companies.
Likely the latter.
What is a " pets dot com " moment?
Pets dot com was one of the most widely talked about failure of the dot com bubble.
And to put the pets dot com thing in context a bit, you have to remember that pets dot com was basically offering to ship pet food and pet furniture (notoriously voluminous and heavy objects) to people at a time when courier and direct-to-consumer freight services were still slow, insanely expensive and unreliable, the contemporary joke was that Fedex parcels would arrive looking like they had been run over (or even worse if they were marked fragile). This was before Amazon was doing free 2-day shipping and all the consequences that had in transforming the logistics market.
So you have to realize that the world was a different place back then, and expectations were different, and the realities of doing business online were different, so when pets dot com said they were going to make a business out of selling notoriously voluminous and heavy objects online with no brick-and-mortar locations to customers who would then have to wait for it and be prepared for disruption in the shipping process while their animals starved, reasonable people thought they were completely fucking unhinged. But business people thought it was fucking genius.
And it turns out they were in fact completely unhinged, and it was not genius, their failure ended up being emblematic for the complete insanity and detachment from reality that was going on while the “dot com” bubble was inflating, and represented the failure of the false idea that if you slapped a “dot com” on any particular industry you would capture and revolutionize that industry automatically, which is what pets dot com thought they were going to do. At the time everyone thought brick and mortar was so expensive and online was so cheap they were all going to be Netflix and completely kill their respective industry’s Blockbuster overnight. They were very wrong. Turns out you can’t just go ahead and start selling pet food online and replace all pet food stores and nobody had really thought that through, they were so overconfident that success was assured because they were doing it online and online is obviously better than brick-and-mortar in every way, right? Right?
It is a very similar kind of insanity and a very similar breathless fascination with AI’s imagined potential to replace every job and be used in every business that is propelling the AI bubble. They will inevitably find out they are wrong too but they can stay irrational about it for a very long time before reality catches up with them and we don’t know exactly how harmful it is going to be when it finally does, other than “probably a lot”.
They should have waited for PetsAI.
🫧
salesforce ones to ai sloppytopper
Look, you can go all-in now, or miss the boat and be dead in the water!
-some bot
Anybody got any recommendations for new tennis/running/everyday shoes?
Altra
If you don’t mind dressing like a dad, New Balance has never done me dirty.
I’m a big fan of Merrell’s Vapor Gloves. But you have to be ok with barefoot/zero drop shoes.
Feathers are going to get ruffled.
