Emmet

uh a tuesday evening's close and it is right now about 100 million but in the moment shares jumped from two books and change to 22 bucks and change nearly a 10 bagger so the san francisco maker of wool trainers was once valued at more than four billion dollars and it was sold yeah which was also nonsense

Which was also known.

Everything about this story is like a parallel universe.

So it was sold, the sneaker business, for $39 million to the American Exchange Group.

And the plan is for a shell listing

And again, I quote, if I may, to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service and AI native cloud solutions provider in connection with the pivot the company anticipates turning to Newbird.

Yeah, I said that already.

So, Mike, I proposed to you in our little chat-a-roo yesterday to celebrate this utterly unpredictable change in strategy.

Well, the same management team are running the new gig.

There was a terrific article in, I think it was Fortune magazine by two years ago about Allbirds.

It was sent to spread big article, thoroughly enjoyed it.

If you Google it, folks should read it because what it displayed was they had co CEOs.

um there were kiwis new zealand guys and they both had a different strategy they were trying to coexist two different strategies where one guy was like yeah we do performance uh sneakers for you know endurance runners and long distance runners and the other guy was like no no we do these kind of tree every day what they call the tree runners which are like sneakers for wearing around the streets and they're not designed for long

for long runs in fact i can tell you from experience they were actually designed for your big toe to pop out the top that's my only memory of alberts is you complaining you complaining that you put a hole through them and then buying more pairs and biologically my feet are fine they i don't have a disobedient or dysfunctional big toe anyway um i i suggested to you that we would have a

pivot episode um i said i'd pick a few from memory unaided by ai or the internet or research on the internet um and you would pick a few uh i'm gonna try and pick some that did well post pivot i think we said and you were gonna try and pick a couple that didn't so well do so well i really hope that's what we agreed was it mike more or less yeah i've kind of picked two companies that have

shown pivots um plenty of pivots some bad some good within the same company so i i did a big long story for both but they fit that a bit yeah so i think it's only fair to give the formal definition of a pivot okay now the first thing i already gave a friend's reference but what a pivot is not is trying to get a couch

or sofa around a bend in a stairwell.

So that's what it's not.

But in the business sense, a pivot is a deliberate change in strategy or direction, usually based on new information while keeping the core goal of building a successful business intact.

And it typically happens when the original plan isn't working out as expected and the company adjusts something fundamental, such as the product, the customer,