Allbirds Is Now An AI Company - History Is Not Impressed

Benzinga_recent_news04-21 04:36

Early in my career, a senior partner told me something I never forgot: “Cosmo, in this business, you’ll continually see the same mistakes made by different people. Your job is to recognize them faster...

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Your job is to recognize them faster...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.benzinga.com/Opinion/26/04/51927058/allbirds-is-now-an-ai-company-history-is-not-impressed\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n","source":"benzinga_recent_news","html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Allbirds Is Now An AI Company - History Is Not Impressed</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nAllbirds Is Now An AI Company - History Is Not Impressed\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2026-04-21 04:36 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.benzinga.com/Opinion/26/04/51927058/allbirds-is-now-an-ai-company-history-is-not-impressed><strong>Benzinga_recent_news</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Early in my career, a senior partner told me something I never forgot: “Cosmo, in this business, you’ll continually see the same mistakes made by different people. Your job is to recognize them faster...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.benzinga.com/Opinion/26/04/51927058/allbirds-is-now-an-ai-company-history-is-not-impressed\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":"CHAT","symbol_name":"ROUNDHILL GENERATIVE AI & TECHNOLOGY ETF","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://www.benzinga.com/Opinion/26/04/51927058/allbirds-is-now-an-ai-company-history-is-not-impressed","article_id":"2629776712","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":["https://static.tigerbbs.com//next-assets/images/benzinga-post-card-placeholder.svg?optimize=medium&dpr=2&auto=webp&width=240?op=imageView2&mode=2&width=256&height=256&quality=70&format=png"],"rights":{"source":"benzinga_recent_news","url":"https://www.benzinga.com/Opinion/26/04/51927058/allbirds-is-now-an-ai-company-history-is-not-impressed","rn_cache_url":null,"directOrigin":true},"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2629776712","pubTimestamp":1776717360,"columns":[],"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"benzinga_recent_news","name":"Benzinga"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"Allbirds just became NewBird AI. Long Island Iced Tea became Long Blockchain. Why companies rebrand for hot trends — and why it rarely works.","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"benzinga.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"CHAT":"ROUNDHILL GENERATIVE AI & TECHNOLOGY ETF","BIRD":"Allbirds, Inc.","AGIX":"通用人工智能 ETF-AGIX","ARTY":"ISHARES FUTURE AI & TECH ETF","AIPO":"Defiance AI and Power Infrastructure ETF","BK4146":"鞋类"},"translate_title":"Allbirds现在是一家人工智能公司——历史并不令人印象深刻","themeId":null,"isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"BIRD":1.5,"CHAT":1.5,"AIPO":1.5,"AGIX":1.5,"ARTY":1.5},"content_text":"Early in my career, a senior partner told me something I never forgot: “Cosmo, in this business, you’ll continually see the same mistakes made by different people. Your job is to recognize them faster each time.”\nI thought about him this week.\nYou may know Allbirds. They’re the sustainable sneaker company that became the unofficial footwear of Silicon Valley. Founded in 2015, their merino wool shoes were so popular with tech workers that wearing a pair of Allbirds to a board meeting was practically a dress code. In 2021, they went public and reached a $4.1 billion valuation.\nThen the market remembered they were a shoe company.\nSales fell. Then fell some more. Between 2022 and 2025, revenues dropped nearly 50%. They closed all their U.S. stores. The stock shed approximately 99% of its value from peak to trough.\nAt Tuesday’s close, the entire company was worth roughly $24 million, which is less than what it cost to build many of the stores it just finished closing.\nSo what did Allbirds do? On Wednesday, they announced they are selling the Allbirds brand and pivoting to AI compute infrastructure. The new company will be called NewBird AI. The stock surged 641% in a single day.\nI’ll give you a moment with that.\nBack in December 2017, a little-known nonalcoholic beverage company in Long Island, New York, made a startling announcement. Long Island Iced Tea Company — facing potential Nasdaq delisting with annual sales of roughly $5 million — declared it was shifting its “primary corporate focus toward the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology.” It was also changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp.\nThe stock jumped 432% in one day. The company had not yet invested in or partnered with any blockchain company. It was, in the truest sense, in the “preliminary stages of evaluating specific opportunities.”\nThose preliminary stages never advanced. Long Blockchain was subsequently delisted from Nasdaq, subpoenaed by the SEC, and investigated by the FBI for alleged insider trading and securities fraud. Its blockchain business, as the SEC later noted with exquisite understatement, “never became operational.”\nI documented this in Wealth Your Way (Chapter 11), alongside the Electronics Boom of the late 1950s when companies added “tronics” or “sonics” to their names and rode Space Race excitement to stratospheric valuations. One record player company, American Music Guild, rebranded as Space-Tone and watched its stock jump 600% within weeks.\nAnd the dot-com era, when a Purdue University study found that 95 companies simply adding “.com” to their existing names saw their share prices rise an average of 74% in the 10 days around the announcement. Ten of those companies had core businesses with no connection to the internet.\nThe names change. The game does not.\nHere’s a question worth sitting with: if we’ve been through this before, multiple times, why does it keep working?\nThere’s also a detail in the Allbirds announcement worth more attention than it’s getting. The $50 million financing facility funding this pivot is convertible. The investor provides capital as debt and can later convert it into equity, often at a discount. As the company noted, this “can lead to significant dilution for existing shareholders.”\nSo let’s tally this up. You buy a struggling shoe company after it surges on a press release. And then, as the convertible facility gets drawn down, your ownership stake gets quietly diluted. The investor who provided the $50 million gets shares at a discount. You, the retail speculator who bought in on a Wednesday afternoon, do not.\nAs Hemingway once put it: “How do you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”\nIn Wealth Your Way, I identified the recurring recipe behind several boom-and-bust cycles: a compelling story around a new and exciting technology; a new generation of speculators looking for the big score and ignoring past lessons; existing companies (particularly struggling ones) scrambling to attach themselves to the hot new thing; and the stock buyers not at all concerned with the price paid.\nSir John Templeton famously warned that “this time it’s different” are the four most dangerous words in investing. He also acknowledged, to his credit, that about 20% of the time, the people saying it are right. The problem isn’t the technology. It’s confusing a great story for a great investment, and thinking those differences will go on, unabated, forever.\nNewBird AI has every opportunity to prove history wrong. It just has a lot of history to prove wrong.\nThe FI Portfolio that you’ve patiently built, through monthly contributions and discipline, probably doesn't need NewBird AI.\nNeither did it need Long Blockchain Corp.\nNeither did it need Powertron Ultrasonics.\nMy old partner was right. The market is endlessly patient with those who learn from history, and endlessly expensive for those who don’t. The names on the doors keep changing. The lesson never does.\nAs always, invest often and wisely. Thank you for reading.\n**\nOriginally published on April 16, 2026, at www.CosmoDeStefano.com. Used with permission.\nMy book, Wealth Your Way, is available on Amazon, and consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter, with fresh, no-fluff insights on money, investing, and building lasting wealth.\nThe content provided is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. You are welcome to share, quote, or use the content — including for research or machine learning — please credit Cosmo P. DeStefano and link to www.CosmoDeStefano.com. \n**\nBenzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.\nTo add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.","kind":"highlight","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"isVideo":false,"video":null,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0,"need_auth":false,"need_login_tip":false,"code":"91000000","status":"200"},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":true,"tenantId":"TBGLOBAL","deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.42.0","shortVersion":"4.42.0","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"ttm","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/2629776712","isCrawlerRequest":true}