Allbirds announces pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes 175% | Hacker News Reader

Allbirds announces pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes 175%

cnbc.com

105 points1vuio0pswjnm740 comments

This appears to be almost like a SPAC. Allbirds had already sold it's IP and other assets, now they raised new money and are continuing under a different name but they're still a publicly traded company.

So it's not really shoe retailer pivots to AI but a shoe retailer selling all assets and forming a new company but uses the previous public stock listing.

So just starting a new and completely different company, but using an old brand name from a completely different business?

They're not even using the same brand name; they sold the Allbirds name and are now "Newbird AI". I guess it's just to stay on the exchange?

This would be my bet - filing for an IPO or even direct listing is months of SEC review, audits, underwriters, due diligence, etc. A shell with an existing ticker gets you access to that sweet retail investor cash almost immediately, and with less of those pesky regulators asking if you actually have a functioning product or company.

This is more akin to a reverse merger than a SPAC (eg. Berkshire Hathaway being a failing textile mill and WPP being a wire basket company) except it is unusual to see it happen within an existing leadership team. They sold off all their IP so figured they might as well use the shell to try and cash in on AI hype, I guess.

Can you explain to me how this isn't considered outright fraud? The SEC has rules specifically around the lifetime of a company / ticket in terms of things like inclusion in indexes and retirement accounts, right?

How does allowing this not simply encourage a world of, basically, stock market karma farming: making bullshit barely company companies, just to sell the ticket so they can be used to engage in a pump and dump scheme with the little wealth the working class has left?

This domain isn't exactly my forte...

You just described exactly what a SPAC is.

It is not my field either except for amateur interest. My understanding is that because they are publicly disclosing it to investors, it's not fraud in the legal sense. Fraud requires deception. It could be that they do genuinely believe that their expertise in shoe selling translates to expertise in AI infra.

If you agree (or think that enough people will agree to increase the value of the stock), you can buy the shares. If you don't, you aren't forced to buy it - and as a penny stock with a market cap of $21MM, nobody's index fund or pension is going to be forced to buy it either.

The stock market sort of _is_ just karma farming - building belief in your company vision so that investors bring capital. Nearly all companies trade at a positive "P/E ratio" - that is, the price of a share is on average 10-20X higher than their current earnings - the difference representing pure belief that the company will earn more in the future.

The regulatory guardrails around it are not perfect, but striking the balance between allowing the public to participate in the growth of successful companies in a dynamic economy, and protecting them from scams, is a fine line. Being able to invest in publicly traded companies has made many middle class and working class people wealthy, the regulations do work for most people to keep them out of trouble while allowing them to participate. The people who get hurt are the ones who trade penny stocks like lottery tickets, which is less a regulatory failure and more the impulsive behavior that drives any kind of gambling.

Basically.

They sold the Allbirds brand and IP for $39M:

> The company, valued at around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.

...used the ticker to build stock hype that will bring in another $50M:

> The company, which according to the release will be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

...and is planning on using that $90M of capital to sell a few extra shovels to the marginal buyer in the latest hype market.

> “The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,” the company said in the announcement.

This is really just picking the corpse clean... company lost 99% of value, dropping from $4B to $0.04B. This is just redirecting what little capital is left into something that might get a small return for whoever is left holding shares.

Pets announces pivot from Pets to Pets.com, stock explodes 1000%

"Pets.com, because pets can't drive."

Waait a minute, that sounds familiar...

Someone tell me if my idea is dumb:

You know how adding ".ai" to your company name / domain name increases your valuation an order of magnitude or whatever?

Well has anyone tried chaining .ai's to their company name...???

For example could x.ai increase their valuation another 5-10x by renaming themselves x.ai.ai?

What about perplexity.ai.ai.ai?

Seems like a low-hanging fruit for increasing valuation / attention on your company, but let me know if I'm missing something.

ai.ai is still free!

I can't hearrrrrr youuuu. Ai.ai captain!

Thing Ai^Ai. It might break the market.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.

That didn't end very well for them...

These moves never do.

Or "Linux Gold Corp".

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LNXGF/

It's frustrating that Schwab does not allow me to buy puts for this symbol, and I haven't enabled margin for shorting because I always bought puts instead. Never seen a clearer short in my life.

It's not just Schwab, there aren't any options traded on BIRD. And shorting is not a guarantee. First you have to find a borrow, which if it's available probably costs >1000% annualized today. Then you have to be able to maintain that borrow, even if BIRD doubles from here.

Based on the price action today, this seems like a short squeeze.

Yes, I understand the basics of shorts.

Sure didn't seem like it.

I would have closed already and made huge profits, so I guess I was right. Weird series of replies here.

Just use the new way which is starting a market on polymarket

More discussion on announcement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778038

There was a highly anomalous spike in volume around April 1st in the stock: https://marketchameleon.com/Overview/BIRD/Summary/

Oddly enough it barely moved the price at the time. I think it’s fair to say that this is a highly suspicious sequence of events.

They keep having to update the headline as the stock goes up, it's now at "more than 300%".

Now 400%!

Seems weird the new name is singular ("Newbird AI") when the old name is plural. Wonder how they chose that. I can't imagine "Newbirds AI" was taken!

You have already thought longer about the name than they have

Ah, so we have reached the "Pivot to NFTs, stock jumps" phase of the ""Pivot to AI" bubble.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinbirnbaum/2022/02/18/how-a...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90711340/whats-happening-with-ga...

edit and of course https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780223 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp.

So not long any more for this bubble as well ? ;-)

I am not the judge of that, but how this goes might be an indicator - i.e. over what timespan the pump, dump, crash of this stock plays out.

PS: googling "allbirds bankrupt" shows that no, this company is not doing well. Lots of "What went wrong" articles,

and

https://wwd.com/footwear-news/shoe-industry-news/allbirds-ip...

https://www.businessoffashion.com/news/retail/allbirds-to-be...

What a scam

I smell a shareholders' class action lawsuit. Wait for it.

Ah, yes, the Zapata Petroleum -> zap.com phase of the bubble.

Clearly not a bubble, though!

I tried suggesting this on a different forum and wow, did I get slapped down.

700%*

Peak AI (bubble)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com