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