• Nadia Carlsten, CEO of Smartbird, spoke on the public company's shift from sneakers to AI.
• When the AI pivot was announced, the company's stock skyrocketed. It has since come back down.
• Carlsten said Smartbird has a different approach to AI infrastructure, focusing on customer needs.

Before Smartbird was powering large language models, it was making shoes.

The CEO of the AI infrastructure company, Nadia Carlsten, spoke about the transition with chief correspondent Ben Bergman on Thursday at Business Insider's The Long Play.

Its roots are the sustainable sneaker company Allbirds, which skyrocketed in the late 2010s. The shoes were particularly popular among the Silicon Valley crowd. Allbirds went public in 2021 before the market turned on many direct-to-consumer businesses. The stock quickly fell, and it sold to American Exchange Group in March for $39 million.

"The short answer is the shoe business wasn't doing that well," Carlsten said.

The company then sold off its footwear business and shed most of its workforce, rebranding as Smartbird. The AI pivot skyrocketed the stock and was briefly up 800%, though it has since come back down. Carlsten, who became CEO in June, said she had never worn those wool shoes.

"The goal of the company was to do something valuable and meaningful. And for me, I knew I wanted to do AI infrastructure," she said.

After looking at the emerging AI infrastructure sector, she believed with the company's transformation, it was the "right place at the right time" for her to join.

In the five months since she took over, Carlsten said the experience can be described in one word: exciting.

"Never in my life thought that I would be the CEO of a former shoe company and managing what is essentially a startup." Since taking on the role, she has focused on building out a new team, scouring new technologies for the company to look into, and producing a new pipeline of customers.

While the stock price has gone down since the initial pivot-induced spike, Carlsten does not regret taking on the challenge. She is betting on the company's long-term potential.

"The stock market is going to do what the stock market does," she said. "What I care about is making sure that we're putting the company on the right path, and that we're able to build it quickly enough and well enough that we have a sustainable business that investors will love. So what happens in the short term? Not that important. What happens in the long term is very important."

When asked why the company decided to reinvent itself in the public eye instead of beginning as a private start-up, Carlsten countered with a question: "Why not?" she said, "It will come back up."

Having to reinvent the company from scratch can be challenging, and the public's presence is clear, she said. Yet, Carlsten said reinvention is inevitable for companies.

"This is a very public reinvention of the company, and people are watching," she said. "I think every company needs to reinvent itself every now and then."

When asked why the company is fully remote, Carlsten said most of the work at Smartbird is done virtually or at data centers, meaning an office would not be of much use.

"We spend a lot of time actually building things, which I actually love. So if my people are sitting in an office, something's wrong," she said.

Working within the emerging AI sector

Carlsten said that although her competitors are building similar AI infrastructure, the way Smartbird is going about it is unique.

"For us, it's about the right infrastructure for the right company at the right time," she said. "Our business model allows us to work more closely with customers, but it also is a lot less capital intensive."

Smartbird is looking to work with companies that have yet to explore implementing AI in their systems, she said. As more companies outside the tech realm look to adopt AI into their businesses, they have the choice to build infrastructure themselves or outsource it, and Smartbird wants to be the one to do it for them, she said.

"We'll do the infrastructure part. We'll let you focus on the actual business," she said.

The most common misconception Carlsten said she has encountered in the business is that it's all about GPUs. She said the company does a lot more than just run GPUs.

"It's really about having a holistic system that a customer can use to do AI," she said.

Another rumbling that's taken over the tech company discourse is whether there's an AI bubble and if it will pop. Carlsten said that depends on how people go about defining the bubble.

Excitement in the sector means funding might be going into companies that may not prosper in the future, but this is something that happens with the arrival of new technologies, she said.

"Every time there is a transformational technology, this happens," she said. "Even if we assume that there is a bubble, that doesn't mean that the technology is not good. It also doesn't mean that the adoption of the technology is going to go away."

• Logan Ivey wanted to make videos for Airbnb. So, he put his résumé on a balloon.
• His video about it got over 16 million views, and Airbnb offered him a contractor gig.
• "There is just no competing with that with a 1 page resume," he told Business Insider in an email.

Job applicants have dozens of tricks to make their résumés stand out. They print their CVs on colored paper or use eye-catching fonts. They include prompt injections for AI.

Logan Ivey put his résumé on a balloon.

Ivey has been making videos full-time since 2022, he told Business Insider in an email, and helped scale Matter Neuroscience's Instagram page to over 300,000 followers.

When looking for a new gig, Ivey made a list of what he considered the best companies with the worst Instagram accounts. "I thought airbnb was the coolest!" he wrote. "Being paid to travel and stay in cool places seems like a dream job."

So, he put "hire me" in big letters on a star-shaped balloon, along with a comparison of his and Airbnb's Instagram engagement rates, likes per post, and views per reel, based on his calculations.

Ivey then put the deflated balloon in a lockbox, similar to the ones Airbnb hosts use to store their property keys. He then mailed it to Airbnb, who would have to fill the balloon with air (get it?).

He posted a video about the process on Instagram on October 3. It's since racked up 16 million views, and Airbnb quickly responded: "Logaaaannnn my guy, my friend, check your DMs before this package triggers a security incident."

The company's account said it had the "perfect role" for Ivey.

Sure enough, Ivey posted an update three weeks later. Airbnb had DMed him, he said, and the two sides agreed that Ivey would make some videos. He listed some spots he'd like to film: a treehouse, a former elementary school, and a bath made of rock.

Ivey told Business Insider that he'll be a contractor and that "nothing beyond the follow up video I made has been set in stone yet."

Let's face it: the job market can feel impossible these days, and applicants are aiming for as much visibility as possible. Becoming a "LinkedIn lunatic" might help. Another applicant received her job offer after posting a presentation that pitched herself.

Ivey's takeaway: make yourself stand out. Before making his balloon-résumé video, he'd applied to about 15 jobs without receiving a single interview.

"Making your skillset widely known is definitely beneficial," he told BI. "One company told me they have 10,000 applicants per job posting. There is just no competing with that with a 1 page resume."

The maker of miracles may no longer be God, but it does rhyme with him. 

Anthropic, creator of Claude, filed its S-1 paperwork on Monday in preparation for a gargantuan initial public offering. The document runs over 300 pages and spans more than 240,000 words, some 50,000 more than the New Testament. It asks potential investors to prioritize mission over money: "Mission" appears 79 times, while "money" — the thing an S-1 is filed to generate, in this case, a bajillion dollars worth — a mere 17.

The company professes it could "bend the arc of geopolitical history toward freedom"; it could grow economies everywhere, including "the poorer parts of the world"; it could cure "diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia." Page 4 of the S-1 is not dissimilar from Jesus in Matthew 11: "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them."

Anthropic aims to "bring forth an age of miracles," it writes, and the investors who buy in should be true believers. Because in the wrong hands, as you'll see if you turn your missals to page 46, AI can be built in ways that pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."

While S-1s are definitionally visions of the future and full of hype, most are drab financial documents, eye-popping for their prospective profits more than their prose. But Anthropic didn't just open up its book; it wrote its own Good Book, a Bible-like statement of good and evil that joins a growing canon of the company's sacred texts. If you were to stumble onto any random page of this S-1, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading not a perfunctory government filing but the scripture of a doomsday religion.

Anthropic has long dodged allegations of fomenting a new, questionable faith. Headlines and takes on Anthropic's cultishness abound: "The Cult of Anthropic" (The Information), "Anthropic is a Cult and Claude is rapidly becoming its God" (The New York Post), "Has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic?" (Peter "Beware the Antichrist" Thiel). Critics point to the employees' extinction predictions — p(doom) is not too far from p(rapture) — and ties to the effective altruism movement. It doesn't help that Dario Amodei was reportedly a Y2K prepper in high school. Anthropic has welcomed the reputation in other ways, inviting religious leaders to oversee the construction of Claude's rules.

In its S-1, Anthropic asks investors to take an actual leap of faith.

Let's play: Is that an Anthropic core value or one of God's 10 commandments?

Anthropic asks its employees to act for the "global good," be "helpful, honest, and harmless," and "hold light and shade." They shall have no other gods — as in, "put the mission first." And, just as followers must sublimate themselves to praise God, Anthropic employees must be "low-ego." The S-1 says it at least nine times.

To understand Anthropic, you'll need to understand 42 ornate terms. The S-1's glossary is sprawling, including neologisms for virtuous acts ("closing the loop") and evil deeds ("prompt injection"). Then there's "Constitutional AI," a type of large language model that is trained with goodness in mind. The SEC's "Plain English Handbook" implores companies to use "concrete, everyday words" and to avoid "relying on glossaries and defined terms." But can you truly be AGI-pilled if you don't speak of "interleaved thinking," "mechanistic interpretability," or "multi-agent orchestration"?

You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work.James Bort

It's exceedingly hard to get a job at Anthropic, and not just because of the massive pool of cash-eyed engineers seeking IPO windfalls. The company has an intensive interview process, one it name-checks in the S-1. It looks for honesty, trust, and (you guessed it) a low ego. "We are willing to turn down candidates who don't demonstrate them, even if they are extremely strong technically," the S-1 reads. They must, in other words, be devotees through and through.

Accepted engineers become "Ants." Most tech companies have a name for their employees: Googlers, Metamates, Amazonians, Nvidians, Palantirians. Anthropic's moniker evokes the image of a collective, company as colony. In Proverbs 6:6, ants are considered diligent and prepared. Staffers may yell its teachings at their OpenAI foes: "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!"

CEO Dario Amodei — Amodeity — leads the ants' march, along with his six apostles. These cofounders pull equal cash salaries and are "distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission," the S-1 says. And, while the company opens itself to a broader group of believers through its forthcoming IPO, the divine cofounders will retain majority decision-making power.

Anthropic has its own form of tithing: The cofounders all made voluntary pledges of 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy. They incentivize their employees to do the same, promising to match donations.

Cult is an overused word, and many parts of Anthropic are far from cultish. Where cults are led by a liturgical leviathan that squashes the speech of their participants, Anthropic touts its culture of open dialogue. "Our teams operate in a truth-seeking environment where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or the most senior title," the S-1 reads.

Americans' faith in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the police, higher education, public education, news media, the medical system, and traditional organized religion are each at record- or near-record lows — and just as AI has brought on tremendous economic and social uncertainty. In that cauldron of doubt, tech founders — with their world-historic money, power, and ubiquity, and in their pursuit of it — sense an opportunity, to offer promise and purpose. As Sam Altman once said, "The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion." They may also be trying to build devotion out of necessity, as the economy and stock market increasingly relies on AI gains.

"If these companies fail, what happens?" asked James Bort, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at DePaul University, and coauthor of a recent research paper on "cultic startups." "You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work."

Anthropic didn't respond to my request to know more about how it wrote the S-1. So, we asked Claude: If the S-1 is a confession of faith, what are you? I am its product, Claude said. "The word made flesh, or at least made weights."

• Anthropic filed its S-1 on Monday, revealing the company's internal financials.
• Investors, researchers, and tech onlookers shared their thoughts.
• Some applied S-1 learnings to their own industries, like startups and venture capital.

Anthropic is ready to IPO. Analysts and onlookers are weighing in.

On Monday, the AI lab filed its hotly anticipated S-1 paperwork. The prospectus offered an inside look at Anthropic's financials: a net loss of about $42 billion in 2025 and revenue of $4.6 billion. It plans to trade under the ticker symbol ANT.

The S-1 sets the stage for a blockbuster IPO. Here's what smart people are saying about Anthropic's filing:

Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction

Venture capitalist Sarah Guo opened her X post with a big "CONGRATS" to Anthropic on the S-1 filing.

Guo shared her first takeaways: the inflection in operating profit, the focus on novel discovery, the mismatch between consumption-based revenue and long-term compute obligations, and more.

"I am curious to see how 1) a company with strong mission changes - or doesn't - how it operates under quarterly public inspection and 2) how public opinion may change when retail owns a piece of the upside," Guo wrote.

Gary Marcus, emeritus professor at NYU

Gary Marcus, one of the AI industry's most outspoken critics, wrote on X that Anthropic provided financial statements through June 30 — but omitted a full Q3 update.

He predicted that the company's economics had not improved, and alleged that Anthropic was "trying to skirt the truth."

Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Anthropic told investors it generated $16.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 45% from the prior quarter.

Ann Bordetsky, founder of Elora Capital

Ann Bordetsky was a partner at New Enterprise Associates' technology practice before founding her own firm, Elora Capital. She wrote on X that the S-1 was a "juicy read."

The filing will set "a (high) bar for how capital markets evaluate AI startups," Bordetsky wrote.

Harrison Rolfes, Senior Late-Stage Research Analyst at PitchBook

In a note sent to Business Insider, Harrison Rolfes said Anthropic's filing shows just how fast the company is growing — and just how expensive that growth is.

His main positive highlight: the $11.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter. His big worries: the $321.4 billion in future lease payments that haven't begun yet, and the $265.6 billion in fixed minimum purchase commitments.

"The compute commitments are enormous, and the suppliers are also lenders," Rolfes wrote, pointing to financing arrangements with Google, Amazon, and Broadcom. "The price range, Q3 revenue and the total compute commitment are still blank, so the next amendment should fill in a lot."

Finally, Rolfes said it's important for investors to note that Anthropic's founders retain outsize voting power. Put plainly, "public shareholders won't control the company," he wrote.

Sam Ro, financial journalist and founder of TKer

Sam Ro, a financial journalist and former Business Insider reporter, wrote in his Substack that Anthropic's longwinded AI risk section shouldn't make investors fret.

If AI really does create an existential catastrophe, he wrote, "having money might not be your biggest concern."

He also said it's anybody's guess whether Anthropic's stock price will rise or fall after it opens on the market.

The company hasn't been consistently profitable, he said, but "a company's valuation depends less on what it earned (or lost) in the past and more on what it's expected to earn in the years to come."

Gavin Baker, managing partner at Atreides Management

On X, Gavin Baker wrote that Anthropic's annual recurring revenue has "likely gone vertical," even after the company cut prices on its AI tokens.

"I am shocked, absolutely shocked," he wrote. "$100b plus in year-end ARR looks possible again."

Jacob Bourne, analyst at eMarketer

Jacob Bourne, an analyst at EMARKETER, a sister company to Business Insider, wrote in an email that Anthropic's filing comes as investors are increasingly wary of debt-fueled AI infrastructure projects.

"Anthropic's decision to press ahead is particularly noteworthy given its own warnings about AI risks, signaling a willingness to face heightened public scrutiny," he wrote.

Bourne also said the S-1 comes as the cost of developing frontier models remains "eye-watering." It's all evidence that companies are turning to public markets for fresh investments "to remain at the cutting edge of AI development," he wrote.

SemiAnalysis

SemiAnalysis, the research firm founded by Dylan Patel, posted the "most mind blowing stat" it had seen in the S-1. It cited Anthropic's raised capital, compared to its cash and investments.

Anthropic is "growing at a rapid pace" and "profitable on an operating income basis as of the June quarter," SemiAnalysis wrote.

"This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism," the firm wrote.

Brad Gerstner, CEO of Altimeter Capital

Brad Gerstner heaped his praise on Anthropic. He congratulated the team on "another important milestone!"

Altimeter will partner with Anthropic through "major participation in the IPO on top of our existing ownership," Gerstner wrote. He used an American flag and a rocket emoji.

Gerstner's venture capital firm is a longtime investor in Anthropic, co-leading the AI lab's Series H in May.

Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures

During an interview on CNBC, Matt Murphy, one of Anthropic's earliest investors, said he's increasingly bullish on the AI lab.

"You wait your entire 25-year career to find a technology wave like this," he said. "To be able to have invested in the leader early is just phenomenal."

Vivek Gopalan, partner at 8VC

Vivek Gopalan is an investor at 8VC, the venture capital firm cofounded by Joe Lonsdale. He posted a graph from Anthropic's S-1 showing rising revenue per dollar of compute.

"You need to believe that this is monotonic and increasing," Gopalan wrote.

Dan Shipper, CEO of Every

Dan Shipper had "big news" to share: a joke about Anthropic's ever-present safety focus. He celebrated that the S-1 "doesn't say 'or it might kill / unemploy everyone' in the first paragraph!"

The CEO of Every, an AI agent startup, called it a "win for humanity."

Dadisi Olutosin, cofounder and CTO of DealView AI

Dadisi Olutosin said on LinkedIn on Monday that Anthropic’s IPO filing raised a question for potential investors: “When does an extraordinary company become an overpriced investment?”

Olutosin wrote that at a reported valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, buyers would pay about 101 times the company’s trailing revenue, compared with roughly 20.5 times the revenue pace at which Series H investors bought in.

“Innovation can transform an industry,” Olutosin said. “That doesn’t make every entry price attractive.”

Sinan Aral, MIT professor and cofounder of Milemark Capital

Sinan Aral said Anthropic’s potential valuation could make it one of the world’s most valuable companies, but that its infrastructure commitments also pose a “tremendous economic risk.”

Aral told CNBC's "Squawk Box" show on Monday that he has questions about what the AI lab’s margins and profitability would look like as it spends hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure. Aral also said there are many risks described in the company’s S-1, including the possibility that its products could act on their own.

“The question is, where is the enduring value?” Aral said. “And I think the enduring value is going to come from companies that can demonstrate enterprise profitability, productivity, and actual value add rather than just providing intelligence.”

Nick Moran, general partner at New Stack Ventures

Nick Moran wrote on LinkedIn said Anthropic’s $80.7 billion loss in the first half of 2026 was largely an accounting story.

“Anthropic lost $80 billion on paper mostly because it became more valuable,” he wrote.

Moran said the bigger question for investors is the price they’ll pay. While Anthropic’s revenue growth remained “spectacular,” Moran wrote, it slowed from the second quarter to the third as the company sought a higher valuation.

“The loss is an accounting story. The multiple is the real one,” Moran wrote. "Institutional and retail demand is real. I wouldn't be surprised to see it end up on the higher end of the range."

Brian Sozzi, executive editor of Yahoo Finance

Brian Sozzi wrote on LinkedIn that he has three takeaways from Anthropic’s IPO prospectus: the banks leading the offering, the AI lab’s adjusted profits, and its warning about risks to humanity.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the lead underwriters and “will be cleaning up here on fees,” Sozzi wrote on LinkedIn, adding that Anthropic was profitable on an adjusted operating and net basis in the first six months of the year.

Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist and "All-In" podcast co-host

Venture capitalist and "All-In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya praised Anthropic in a brief X post after the S-1 dropped.

"Ant is an amazing business…," Palihapitiya wrote in a Monday noon X post.

The VC has previously been critical about Anthropic, advising consulting firms not to deploy Anthropic and OpenAI's products.

"If you are running a consulting business and you are deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization (I'm looking at you PwC and Accenture) you are letting the fox into the hen house," Palihapitiya wrote on X in May.

Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said his earlier predictions about Anthropic's financials have largely held true, calling it a gross-margin-positive profile and "obviously a tremendous business."

Acharya's post on Monday was a repost of a September post, in which he laid out some predictions for Anthropic.

He said in the earlier post, "Overall I think the market underweights how sophisticated anthropic has been in aligning its business interests with its technical and mission interests."

Aaron Levie, CEO and cofounder of Box

Aaron Levie, the CEO of enterprise cloud company Box, said the industry is still in the early stages of AI adoption, as most companies have not started using AI agents in full force.

As deploying agents increases token consumption, the average Fortune 500 customer's spending on Anthropic products could rise, he said in a Monday X post.

"This S-1 gives you a sense of both the strength of the frontier lab business model - even amidst massive competition - and how early we are in the build out of AI," Levie wrote.

• Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale's wife has an interesting nickname for their AI agent.
• She calls it "Tradbot," he said, a name inspired by the social media trend of tradwives.
• The Lonsdales use their "Tradbot" for help with parenting.

What does Joe Lonsdale's AI agent and Ballerina Farm have in common?

Lonsdale, who cofounded Palantir before building his venture capital firm, told CNBC on Thursday how his wife, Tayler, uses AI — and the nickname she's given their agent.

"My wife has Grok Bot at home," Lonsdale said. "She calls it the 'tradbot' for tradwife."

For those unfamiliar, a tradwife is a woman who embraces traditional gender roles, such as supporting her husband with household work and taking a primary role in raising kids. Some of these tradwives become influencers, posting videos of their ornate meals or gifts for their husbands.

The Lonsdale family's "tradbot" helps them manage parenting duties for their six children. Lonsdale said the AI agent tells them about health appointments and activities.

He asked the "tradbot" to help his two-year-old break up with his binky. "It's telling me when to and when not to give it to him," Lonsdale said.

Parents have been employing AI for all kinds of use cases. One mom of two previously told Business Insider that she sends voice memos to Claude to help organize her life. Another said that she built AI agents to help manage schedules and school emails. Business Insider's Amanda Hoover declared mom, dad, and AI the "modern parenting throuple." The debate of how much — if any — AI should be involved in parenting continues to rage online.

Lonsdale is a vocal proponent of AI, having invested in it heavily through his venture capital fund, 8VC. During September's AI extinction freak-out, Lonsdale reassured the public: "The world is going to be alright, guys."

Clearly, Lonsdale's use of AI has extended beyond the office. "My wife's definitely using it at home," Lonsdale told CNBC, "and we're using it a lot at work as well."

• The great bidet takeover has reached the workplace.
• White-collar workers are bartering with their bosses and weighing job offers over bidet access.
• "It's the superior way to live," one said.

Seungmin Hong felt he had two options: Stay at Tesla or have a clean tush.

After finishing an engineering internship at the automotive giant last year, the University of Waterloo student was weighing whether to stick around or accept a job offer from much smaller Simbe Robotics.

During Hong's final interview at Simbe's San Francisco office, he asked to use the restroom, and there it was: a glistening, inviting bidet.

"That cemented in my mind: 'Yeah, this company actually cares about their employees,'" said Hong, who grew up with a bidet in the bathroom of his childhood home. He took the job.

Move over espresso machines, ping-pong tables, and nap pods. For workers like Hong, the humble bidet is the ultimate job perk.

In recent years, the hygiene-friendly fixtures have gone from novelty to must-have for many US households. Toto, one of the biggest manufacturers in the space, said cumulative global sales of its Washlet bidets surpassed 70 million units last year, up from 50 million in 2019. High-profile fans include Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani, actor Janelle James, and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Now, some devotees are pushing to make bidets a standard in offices. Once you get used to one at home, they say, going bidet-less at work is a pain in the rear.

Michael Fiore used to sometimes get about halfway through his commute, then turn around and drive back home just so he could use the bidet in his bathroom. About a year ago, he had an epiphany: Why not install a bidet at work, too?

So he did.

"It's been a total game changer," said Fiore, president of Smith's Gardentown, a retail garden center in Wichita Falls, Texas. "It's the superior way to live."

There's just one wrinkle. Employees who were accustomed to using the restrooms available to shoppers have started coming to what Fiore jokingly calls the "executive" bathroom, which is reserved for staff. It houses one bidet-equipped toilet, meaning he now often has to wait to use it himself.

"Word has spread," he said.

Persuading the boss

This past summer, Cynthia Howard asked her boss to install a bidet in the single-seat restroom she shares with about a dozen of her colleagues. The fulfillment specialist at Swifthouse, a logistics company outside Philadelphia, argued it would reduce toilet paper costs, cut employees' restroom time, and improve morale.

Swifthouse's founder and CEO, Dave Harriger, said the proposal persuaded him to order a $60 bidet attachment that same day. He said he's pleased that Howard and other employees like it, though he's not a convert himself.

"I used it once. I yelped and don't know if I'll use it again," he said. "It's cold water on your butt."

Pricier bidet models that sell for thousands of dollars apiece offer warm-water sprays, air dryers, deodorizers, and even Bluetooth speakers.

Not every worker is comfortable asking their boss to install the devices in the office. To help those folks out, Jonathan Brown, a data scientist in Orange County, California, launched buttstuff.work earlier this year. The site lets employees register their interest in having bidets at work without directly approaching management.

Brown said he has long wondered why Silicon Valley workplaces offer perks like beer taps and catered lunches but not bidets. He plans to share the data his site collects with bidet manufacturers to help them find potential customers. So far, Brown said, about a dozen people, mostly from small businesses and universities, have signed up. His only promotion has been a post on Reddit.

"People don't love talking about bathroom stuff at work," said Brown.

The bidet goes to work

Bidet makers say interest has surged since what Bill Strang, president of corporate strategy at Toto, called "the great toilet paper panic of 2020," when pandemic shortages sent Americans searching for alternatives.

Strang and Justin Allen, CEO of Tushy, another bidet maker, said workplaces are a relatively small but growing part of the bidet business. Installing the devices in office restrooms can be challenging, as some require plumbing modifications, code compliance, and a nearby electrical outlet.

Allen sees the demand firsthand. The bidets in Tushy's shared office restroom in Brooklyn, New York, are a draw for employees of neighboring companies, he said, adding that a FedEx driver regularly stops by during his route to use the facilities.

Cushy tech companies have long dotted their stalls with bidets. Business Insider spoke with workers who spotted them years ago at some Google and Microsoft offices. Now, with awareness and interest spreading, some workplace observers say what was once a nice-to-have perk could become a competitive advantage for employers well beyond Silicon Valley.

A recruiting tool

Robert Hatta, an executive recruiter and talent consultant in Columbus, Ohio, thinks employers pushing return-to-office mandates would have a much easier time attracting and retaining talent by investing in the fixtures.

In a LinkedIn post that drew nearly 150 comments last year, Hatta argued that flimsy toilet paper and a lack of privacy can make office life less appealing. His prescription? Sound-insulated, well-ventilated stalls, preferably equipped with bidets.

"It's about respecting people's dignity," Hatta told Business Insider. Going to the bathroom "is an important part of the workday."

The state of a workplace's facilities can reveal a lot about its culture, said Lou Downe, director of the School of Good Services, a UK-based provider of leadership training. Details such as free menstrual products, well-maintained soap dispensers, and bidets can offer clues about how much thought an employer puts into its workers' comfort, they said.

Hong, the bidet-loving Tesla alum, has since left Simbe to build his own startup, Simantic. While the company goes through Y Combinator, he and his cofounder are shacking up in an Airbnb. No modifications are allowed, so no bidets.

Once Simantic raises its seed round, Hong said he and his cofounder plan to rent some office space. He knows what their first purchase will be.