Hi everyone,
Episode 8 of The New Build podcast is live a little earlier than planned — and for a good reason. Allbirds has been in the headlines this month, first for selling off its footwear assets and then for announcing a pivot to AI infrastructure under a new name, around two years after Joey Zwillinger stepped down as CEO.
By coincidence, I sat down with Joey just before the news broke. We got into the full story of building Allbirds, stepping down, and what he’s doing differently now at Biologica, the women’s health company he co-founded with his wife.
About our guest
Joey co-founded Allbirds with Tim Brown in 2015, took it public at a roughly $4 billion valuation in 2021, navigated a multi-year turnaround through a volatile post-COVID consumer market, and stepped down as CEO in March 2024. He’s now co-founder and CEO of Biologica, a women’s hormonal health company he launched with his wife Liz in December 2025, backed by a $7 million seed round.
Before Allbirds, Joey was an engineer by training and ran the chemicals division at a biotech company engineering microalgae to replace petroleum-derived materials. That background shapes how he thinks about innovation and where to place your earliest hiring bets.
What to expect from this episode
Joey is refreshingly honest about what happened at Allbirds after the IPO. He walks through the decisions that worked, the signals that turned out to be misleading, and the fixed-cost investments that were easy to make in 2020 and very hard to unwind two years later. It’s a first-hand account of how a consumer brand gets into trouble when product cycles are long and consumer behavior shifts faster than inventory can respond.
On hiring, Joey argues you should identify the one or two things that will genuinely set your company apart from competitors, and hire the best executive you can afford for those roles on day one. Everything further down the list can wait. This matters more now than ever, because AI is handling more of the tedious work and raising the premium on senior strategic expertise.
We also got into the quieter trap of being a second-time founder. Investors give you more benefit of the doubt, and honest critical feedback becomes harder to find. Joey talked through the specific ways he’s built around that at Biologica.
The conversation closes on capital discipline. The advice Joey’s first investor gave him in 2015 was to take the money and spend it like you don’t have it, and it’s the lesson he says he didn’t fully internalize at Allbirds. Worth hearing for any founder raising money right now.
Where to listen
Episode 8 is live now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:
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Watch on YouTube
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Watch on Spotify
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Listen on Apple Podcasts
If you’ve built something on Bubble and want to share the story behind it, drop it in the comments or submit it here.
-– Emmanuel