• 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."