The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no employees

Summary

When Allbirds pivoted to AI in April, it felt like a joke from Silicon Valley breaking free of the TV: The direct-to-consumer shoe purveyor whose flimsy kicks helped define what we’ll loosely call Silicon Valley style had discovered a new trend to chase. The move was right out of the meme stock playbook written by Gamestop: Take a troubled public company, latch onto the hottest fad, and reap the rewards of a rising stock price as retail investors piled in. Well, it worked. The company sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised another $100 million from the stock market, and now it’s called Smartbird. Now, Nadia Carlsten has to make it work. A former AWS executive with an engineering PhD, Carlsten most recently led the European compute company DCAI before she began yesterday as Smartbird’s CEO. “We’re going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we’re going to be getting an office,” Carlsten told TechCrunch from Amsterdam. “The shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday, so that’s all done…The first task that I’m tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team, looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations, for example.” Call it a startup with a sole founder and a very large seed round. What’s next is less clear. Smartbird aims to be an AI infrastructure provider, latching on to the seemingly bottomless demand for compute to train and run deep learning models. But Carlsten insists that Allbird’s transition was carefully thought through. “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,’” Carlsten, who will be paid a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job, said. “It was really about, do we have a chance to build a business over time that is going to find this niche in the market and be able to grow over time?” When Allbirds pivoted, one thing that went by the wayside was its public benefit corporation status, which had been intended to enshrine the sustainability commitments that were part of the shoe company’s pitch. NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceX SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO The US government’s Anthropic models ban was never about an AI jailbreak The AI layoff wave is becoming a powder keg Amazon CEO reportedly raised Anthropic model concerns before government crackdown The FBI built its own replica small town to simulate real-world cyberattacks Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it