If you're in shoes pivot to AI

Author

Lon Harris
April 15, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Top News

  • Allbirds undertakes the ultimate pivot: In June of 2023, Jason famously tweeted “if you’re in crypto, pivot to AI.” But even he could not have foreseen just how popular that strategy would become, across so many verticals. Take footwear makers Allbirds, which sold off its shoe brand and assets last month, and relaunched as “NewBird AI.” The new plan: offer a “fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider.” There may be some method to this madness. By selling off its assets and brand, but keeping their shell entity intact, Allbirds retains a position on the NASDAQ (trading as BIRD) and a corporate infrastructure, while investing $50 million in fresh funding (from an “undisclosed institutional investor”) into those aforementioned GPUs.

  • Snap cuts 16% of its staff: The popular video app and former Spectacles maker became the latest company to blame layoffs on AI. CEO Evan Spiegel revealed plans to drop around 1,000 full time employees, adding “we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity…” and so forth. But as with Jack Dorsey’s announcement that Block would cut 40% of its workforce, for which he also cited AI as a leading motivator, not everyone is convinced. AI makes a convenient scapegoat in 2026 for situations in which management simply over-hired, but seeks to save face. Bloomberg points out that, just last month, activist investment firm Irenic Capital Management took on a stake in Snap and essentially demanded layoffs, not because of AI advancements but because “like many of your peers, you over-hired.”

  • Federal gov’t investigates data centers: The Trump administration has been extremely cordial with the AI industry to date, and there’s no specific reason to suspect that this relationship will sour any time soon. Still, it’s worth noting that the federal government announced plans to survey data centers nationwide, to get a better sense for their actual energy use. (This marks the first-ever attempt to collect this kind of information from data centers specifically.) Energy Information Administration (EIA) chief Tristan Abbey revealed the plans in a letter to Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO). As demand for compute skyrockets, the AI industry is desperate to add more GPUs to its stack. Still, they’re facing a lot of pushback from local residents wherever they go, not to mention an initiative backed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to halt all data center construction indefinitely.

TWiST 500

John Collison of Stripe isn’t just one of our favorite founders, and a T500 member in good standing. He’s also one of our favorite podcasters as well. This week’s episode of his chat show “Cheeky Pint” features a fellow T500 alum, ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski. The full episode is absolutely worth your valuable time (especially if you’re one of those people who watches pods at 1.5x speed.)

Here are some highlights:

  • With so many strides being made weekly with LLMs, why haven’t we seen a truly immersive conversational agent that could pass a “Turing Test”? Mati explains why real-time conversations remain just out of reach.

  • Inside the “deployment gap.” Why it takes so long for advances in frontier models to reach the consumer level.

  • Why “speech-to-speech” models aren’t as intelligent as models that reason through text, but why that also might be preferable when it comes to conversations with human users.

  • How speaking with a voice agent changes people’s behavior. Mati observes that, when ElevenLabs switched from a sign-up form to an interview with a voice agent, people offered up more personal information and richer details about their lives and plans for the tech. Voice doesn’t just make these exchanges faster, it fundamentally shifts the nature and quality of the information being exchanged. – Lon

A message from Render

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This Week in Startups

E2275: Stillcore Capital partner Mark Jeffrey joins the show once more to pick through the Templar/Covenant-72B scandal and look ahead at how the Bittensor community can prevent future (alleged!) rug pulls. They’re joined by subnet owners Ken Miyachi (of BitMind) and Will Squires & Steffan Cruz (of MacroCosmos) for a full rundown on the specific powers wielded by subnet owners, how investors should divvy up their TAO vs. Alpha Token purchases, and much much more.

E2274: It’s the (alleged) rug pull threatening to tear the Bittensor community apart! Jason and Alex are discussing the highly-visible Templar subnet, which had trained the massive Convenant-72B AI model using an innovative, decentralized approach. But when CEO Sam Dare (allegedly!) sold off $10 million of subnet tokens, he threatened the project’s future, and caused the largest single-day drop in the price of TAO ever. What really happened? Who’s in the wrong? And how can the Bittensor ecosystem prevent this from happening again? We’re digging in on a new TWiST.

E2273: Anthropic’s Mythos is so dangerous… you’re NOT ALLOWED to use it! Jason and Alex explore the potential for Project Glasswing, and whether this modern-day Manhattan Project can keep us safe from the cyberthreats to come, along with guest AI expert and Neurometric CEO Rob May. Plus we’re checking out Death By Clawd — the website that tells you how long your startup has to live before it’s Claude-shotted — along with creator, Gyani aka “The G-Man.”

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LAUNCH Accelerator 36!

Our 36th LAUNCH Accelerator cohort has kicked off. If you’re an early stage investor and want to take a look at this cohort first-hand during an exclusive pitch session, please email [email protected]!

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