New CEO Nadia Carlsten, appointed June 17, explains in her first extended interview why Allbirds' public company shell was more valuable than a clean-sheet startup — and hints the company may leave San Francisco for Silicon Valley.

Smartbird CEO Nadia Carlsten gave her first extended interview since being appointed this month, telling ABC7's Nancy Chen on Tuesday that keeping Allbirds' Nasdaq listing was the central logic behind the company's pivot — not any residual brand equity from the wool sneakers.

"There are advantages to taking the company that already exists and especially a company that's already in the public markets, which is very attractive for a lot of reasons," Carlsten said in the ABC7 interview, conducted from London. "Having access to that public equity is very interesting and useful."

That's an unusually direct answer, and the filings back it up. Allbirds structured the AI pivot through a definitive proxy statement filed with the SEC on May 8, 2026 (accession 0001193125-26-213226), calling a June 3 special meeting to approve three things simultaneously: an asset sale of the shoe business to an entity called Allbirds IP LLC, a charter amendment, and — critically — the issuance of Class A shares beyond the 19.99% Nasdaq threshold upon conversion of certain convertible notes. A Form D for an exempt securities offering (accession 0001653909-26-000008) was filed May 1, the week before the proxy. Translation: the shoe assets went out the door while fresh capital came in through the convertible note structure, all while keeping the ticker and the ability to issue public equity. The terms of the note issuance were not disclosed in the proxy summary.

Carlsten, a former AWS executive who earned her PhD at UC Berkeley, was formally appointed June 17. EDGAR reflects the name change to Smartbird, Inc. as of filings through June 15. The stock has surged more than 400% on the pivot announcement, per ABC7's prior reporting — a market reaction driven entirely by narrative at this point; the company has not disclosed revenue, customer names, or contracted infrastructure buildout.

The strategic target, Carlsten explained, is "sovereign AI" — organizations that cannot or will not put workloads on public cloud infrastructure. She cited customers who "need their computers and their infrastructure to sit in a specific geography." That is a real market segment, one that European governments and regulated industries have been actively trying to address, though Smartbird has disclosed no specific customers or contracts.

On headquarters: still listed at 530 Washington Street, San Francisco, per EDGAR. But Carlsten signaled that may not hold. "We are very much still going to be a California company," she said. "But we're looking at areas like Palo Alto, San Jose, the Silicon Valley more broadly, at the moment."

What remains unconfirmed: the size of the convertible note raise, the sale price for the shoe IP, any signed customer contracts, and how the company intends to build or acquire the physical infrastructure an AI infrastructure company requires. The EDGAR SIC code still reads 2300 — Apparel. That's the next filing to watch.