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).
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
> 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'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.
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
50 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadWhat?!
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.
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?
Allbirds should've rebranded itself as AIbirds.
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.
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-...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Invest now! This is the lowest AI stocks will ever be.
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