iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/371bc5cc01a747de

Certainly the dream.
Was
Let's be honest, we were promised robots.
We we humans were promised robots.
Yes.
We were gonna build robots.
And
Everyone asked for a robot vacuum cleaner from the very first day.
Wait.
when you would meet people, they'd say, Oh, when is Rosie like from the Jetsons?
gonna be in my house.
When are you gonna clean my floor?
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.
They built.
Guy Roz and on the show today, how Colin Engle set out to make robots part of our daily lives.
and brought us one of the most iconic home helpers ever.
The Roomba.
If you think about it, there are very few products that manage to cross over from being purely functional.
Into something that feels almost
cultural, the kinds of things that don't just solve a problem, but actually take on a personality of their own.
Something that people don't just use, but talk about and share videos and form a kind of relationship with.
And for the past 2 years or so, one of those products has been a small, round, slightly hypnotic robot.
That quietly makes its way across your living room floor and sweeps up dirt.
Now what's interesting about the Roomba isn't just that it works.
It's that it almost feels alive.
It bumps and turns and adapts to every corner of your house.
It's been parodied by Dave Chappelle in a famous Pepsi ad.
It was a running gag on parks and recreation, and of course it's inspired an endless stream of videos of cats happily riding around on top of it.
But here's the thing, the Roomba didn't come out of a consumer electronics company.
It came out of a robotics lab, a company that in its early years was building machines for NASA, for the US military, and for some of the most dangerous environments on Earth.
In fact, one of the company's most important creations was a robot that saved lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.
by helping soldiers identify and disarm landmines and roadside bombs.
When Colin Engel and his co founders started iRobot in nineteen ninety,
They didn't have a business model.
They didn't have capital. They didn't even really know who their customer was gonna be.
But what they did have was a belief.
that robots would one day live with us.
And could change the world.
And for years they chased that idea.
Taking on government contracts and building whatever they could just to survive.
Until one product, the Roomba.
Finally crack things open.
And what followed was one of the most unlikely consumer success stories in the past 20 years.
A product that didn't just create a category, but in many ways invented the idea of consumer robotics itself.
At its peak, iRobot would sell tens of millions of these machines around the world.
and dominate nearly 70% of the global market in robot vacuums.
But over time.
The success of the Roomba began to unravel with rising global competition.
And a company that wants to find the future suddenly found itself struggling to survive.
But that part of the story
We'll get to it a bit later, because the roots of iRobots start much earlier.
With Colin.
He grew up in upstate New York.
At a young age, he was already building and fixing things.
My mom would say
Bring your milk in from the living room, and I would say okay.
And then I would embark on a two-day long project to create a gantry cream.
to automatically lift uh that glass of milk and and um carry it on cables into the kitchen and and uh really shut down the house for a few days. So you were really more of a
The kind of kid who would take things apart maybe, like or go to Radio Shack and solder things together?
So yes, but if you asked me
Are you a jock?
Or uh
Nerd.
I would say well I'm a smart jock.
'Cause I love sport and I I played um soccer. I was
A wrestler?
I
Played hockey.
during the summers I did canoeing and so that I was a whitewater
Uh canoer and and wilderness guide.
So
The
фізикаліті озистен
Was balanced by my
Love of
building and creating and uh to me it was a wonderful and healthy balance.
And so uh it's not surprising to me that you when you decided to go to college
you decide to major in electrical engineering. You went to MIT in in eighty nineteen eighty five
And uh and that was your passion, electrical and I mean this I imagine this is what you wanted to do.
With your life.
I you know, I went to MIT
To major in whatever would let me build the coolest stuff.
You know one of the most
amazing things, serendipitous things that happen to me.
In my career is that
I was walking back.
From class one day.
Between my junior and senior year, and the guy I was with was in my fraternity.
Joel Cayley was his name and and um
You know I was making conversation. Hey, what are where you going? He said you know
I'm gonna go apply for a summer
job at a robot lab as part of this Europe program and and uh
Yeah, I asked.
Joel, if I could come with him and maybe
apply for a job too and
You know you kinda give me a dirty look like
I'm going to this too.
apply for the job. But he you know, he couldn't really say no, so he said, Okay, and so I followed him to this lab.
The application for the lab uh was actually really interesting. They gave us all a blank piece of paper.
Mm-hmm.
Well what have you built?
Just write it on the paper and
When you're done.
Hand it in.
So I started writing, you know, a Gia built uh
gun out of Lego that could fire a
piece of Lego track through plywood.
You know, I
Built a canoe.
An hour went by and I was still writing.
things on this paper that I had built.
And
I have the subhiphony thing.
This might be the place for me,'cause gee.
I'm at MIT and
Everyone is already done writing
down the stuff that they've built and I'm
I'm not done yet.
And uh you know, I handed my paper and I got this job.
And in this lab.
was run by a guy named Rodney Brooks, who's many people who know anything you know, something about robotics knows he's sort of a considered to be a pioneer
in this field. And the job was to be
Like a researcher at
this lab or to was it a paid job or was it
So w it was it was paid.
And
You know, they had projects. For example, the this Professor Rod Brooks said, Okay, Colin, we've got this robot Seymour.
has a twelve inch wide base could drive around the floor in the AI lab and
He said I want you to
Enable it to open doors.
That was a
Pretty tall ask for an undergraduate at MIT at the time. No one, you know, there was barely any robot arms around, much less.
Arms that could
Reach out and
grab handles and open them. But I I said, Okay, I'll I'll I'll work on this project and
You know, I I did the obvious thing.
Uh I built a candy machine.
So I decided that the right way to open doors wasn't to build a robot arm,'cause that was hard. The right way to do it was to put a candy machine on this robot. It'd drive up to the door and
Offer candy if anyone would open the door for it.
Pardon me with being a wise ass.
But
You know, the the this idea that
Robotics
Isn't a thing.
It's a tool kit.
was
Uh uh early lesson that I was taught.
Because
When you see robot to most people they think humanoid.
But
Given
The journey I was on robotics was a box of parts that allowed you to make smart
machines that were capable of doing interesting things and to solve a problem.
And I know that uh at some point at least you were involved in
Helping Rod building
something called gangus. And and anyone who's been to the Smithsonian, I think it's on display there. It's it was a it's an insect

Uh that
can walk on six legs.
Uh and this was kind of a
A revolutionary
robot that was created at the time.
Yes.
So
Ron
uh was interested in
Planetary exploration.
And
This little silly robot.
was able to successfully climb over

More successfully than robots that were
Using supercomputers.
And
The
AI processor on this.
Robot was an eight bit microprocessor with two hundred and fifty six bytes of RAM.
Not kilobytes, bites of RAM. Wow.
So we decided we like working together.
And
Uh so I was w I was about a year and a half into the master's thesis.
Rod said.
He said, Hey Colin, I I got something to ask you. I said, Okay.
It's like well I'm thinking about starting a a a a robot company
Based on
Behavior control.
And uh said, Okay, I'm in, I'll run it.
That was that was easy. That was I mean, yeah, it was it w I didn't he wanted you to run it or or or you volunteered to run it. Or kind of both.
He was telling about it'cause I think he wanted to be involved. But he didn't probably have the time, right?'Cause he's also teaching classes and re and and publishing. I mean he c he couldn't
Run a business as the CEO, presumably.
Right. Yeah.
Alright, so so this company that he
he wants to start would w would of course become I robot.
Uh and it was gonna be him.
And you and another student from MIT, Helen Grainer.
Uh, and this is uh nineteen ninety. So you you're like in your early twenties. Uh and and so
What was your sense of of what this robotics company would be?
There was no
Core application.
There was a need at the time.
Uh where people would say, Hey, can you build us a robot like Genghis?
Uh that we could go and program because it takes a long time to build a robot. Who would ask for that? So
Rod had a pretty good network.
Yeah, it would be like Boeing.
Or
Mitsubishi.
So the there was no business model in the sense that you didn't go out and raise money, right? I mean it was sort of like hey, uh r I'm c I'm connected, right?
Let's just do the research let's have our research funded by contracts from the government or from corporations who may want, you know, a copy of of this robot to tinker with and maybe
They'll hire us to do some contract work for them and that can finance
what we're actually trying to build. Is that is that fair to say? Yes, we did not take
Venture capital until year eight.
Right.
We had designed these robots, and Mitsubishi.
Would.
Say I want to buy
uh a legged robot. And we would say, Okay
But what would they want to do with it? Just to see it, just to have it?
They wanted to do AI research.
But had no robot to do research on. I see. And we had a line of a wheeled robot, a tracked robot, and a legged robot that we would sell for
Between five and ten thousand dollars.
We would
get paid half of the money up front. We would use that money to go out and buy the parts.
Uh I had invented a way of building
uh the robots they were kind of origami robots.
Um they were made out of
Bent sheet metal.
Okay.
early way of of of inexpensively building
A machine.
But we really lived hand to mouth for
quite some time. I think it was six and a half years before I started a month
With enough money in the bank to make payroll.
Well.
And
it it didn't seem like you were you guys were starting a consumer products company. I mean, it seems like you the the
Yeah.
business was going to be for
military
applications, maybe space, military, maybe some industrial, but not
This you aren't in any way thinking about

In that way you
Probably thinking about
Building a business that was going to
Work with the
Governments.
We didn't know.
Uh certainly the dream.
Was
Let's be honest, we were promised robots.
We we humans were promised robots. We humans were promised robots, right?
You know, it was a little bit of a if not us who, if not now, when are we gonna actually go and start to build these. So we didn't know how to build consumer robots. Everyone asked for a robot vacuum cleaner from the very first day.
In fact, if I introduce myself, hello, my name is Colin Angle. The answer
Would be not good to meet you, Colin.
It would be when are you gonna clean my floor?
Wait, sorry, when you would when you would meet people, they would ask you what you would you did for a living. You would say I build robots. I build robots, and they'd say, Oh, when is Rosie, like from the Jetsons, gonna be in my house. When are you gonna clean my floor, right? Because they thought of Rosie from the Jetsons and that's what they wanted. And you would hear this from the beginning.
From the very, very beginning. But we just had
no idea how to do it. In fact I would start to get a little snarky and say, Well how much are you willing to pay?
Are you willing to pay five thousand dollars if you are? Well, maybe I can do something for you and it would say, Well no, no, I w I can't spend five thousand dollars in a robot vacuum. If I could do that, I would hire someone to clean my floor.
But I guess I'm wondering is when you would hear that
Yeah.
It sounds like it would be a little bit annoying because
Actually
A lot of what you were doing was for
research for government, you know, or military or space
purposes, right? Which which you could argue from your perspective, you could think, well, we're actually doing something much more uh consequential, like we're building robots that could save lives or could
Explore space. I mean w was that in the back of your mind?
You know, honestly no.
Because the dream of
Where are the robots we are promised?
I wanted to build the robots.
For the rest of us.
And so that it was
Almost okay, I I'm building robots for the military. I'm building bo robots for the oil and gas industry.
Because I need to pay the bills.
But one day we'll do we'll be in a better position.
And
At the time I robot
was great at technology, but really didn't have
much talent within the company to understand markets and understand pricing and understanding. Yeah, you guys were a bunch of science nerds. You didn't know about marketing or distribution or
respect it even. You weren't allowed to say marketing without saying weenie.
you know, immediately afterwards. I mean it was it was a a very much an engineering culture. Yeah. So I mean so given all that, how how are you actually gonna become a real business? How how are you gonna come up with a
a sustainable model.
The breakthrough for us actually.
Was a business model
That we discovered.
We would come up with a
A a a way of working together.
Where I would work at cost.
I would work at break even.
But since I wasn't making any money
We would split
the value that we ultimately created.
For this big company
This is nearly free. They were getting
MIT engineers working on a problem that they cared about.
At a third the price.
And they only had to care about this value sharing thing.
If something good came out of it.
And they would own the IP they brought to the party, we would own the IP that we brought to the party, and any IP that was jointly developed was jointly owned.
That was the deal. That's pretty risky because you would have to depend on their resources and their willingness to commercially.
Exploit that.
It w it was risky, but also
Since they were putting money into it.
In my mind
They had to at least believe it was a good idea.
So Johnson Wax is is a fine example. Um This SE Johnson, right? Is that what you're doing? SC SE Johnson. Huge, massive company. They own tons of consumer
Products that we use all the time. Yeah, and and they've sort of divided into the consumer brand that we all know, and then the professional.
uh that develops cleaning chemicals for janitorial services. Their problem was
Uh so they sell the chemicals that are used to clean floors.
Right.
Есоні IDA was.
If
We created
Chemicals which were
Specially designed.
For robots to clean the floors.
Then Johnson Wax.
And
More of the solution.
And can create a differentiated
Value proposition.
Why because it's not.
Maybe the chemicals are more expensive, but with the robot the whole system.
Saves.
The
Target or the shopping mall.
Money.
And
This all
improves their profit margins and and creates a good business.
And this was an autonomous robot you're talking about?
Absolutely.
So okay, so I I'm s obviously we're I think any everybody listening can start to connect the dots of where this is headed, but this is still nineteen ninety five, ninety six, ninety seven, you're working on this thing.
But uh
I'm assuming they never commercialized it, it never went anywhere.
That's correct.
We weren't going to succeed as a business.
Until something actually broke through and became right,'cause you were making no money.
We were paying ourselves. We s I say making no money.
We were paying salaries, we were paying overhead
Um, we were paying for parts. We were developing IP. I mean it was
We're having a ball. No one left.
Everybody was just psyched to be in this lab tinkering. W we were on a mission.
Yeah.
And
We were
Very successful.
At getting
Press and validation.
We got the cover of magazines, we're on the cover of National Geographic, we're on the cover of Scientific American, we're on the cover of
Popular science like four times and even though you weren't making consumer products.
I think a lot of the military applications like Well remember, nobody was making robots for consumers. That's true, right, right. But you know, the uh company's m uh mission statement was
Build cool stuff.
Deliver great product, have fun, make money, change the world.
It was powerful.
Because we were gonna be the people.
That made the robot industry real.
Let me come back in just a moment. iRobot launches two products that could not be more different.
A roving bomb diffuser for the military?
and a babbling toy doll.
For kids. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.
Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz.
So it's the late nineteen nineties, and as part of iRobots mission to make cool stuff.
Colin leans into consumer goods.
and starts a conversation with Hasbro.
And after a little back and forth, he agrees to a three-year deal to make robotic toys.
And did you know what kinda toy it was gonna be? Well they wanted to make a um
Baby doll was the first one. And what w what do they want the baby doll to do?
Well
What did I wanted to do?'Cause we were pitching the idea. See, we wanted to make
A baby doll that was actually alive. And we were gonna go and use artificial intelligence to make a toy that could detect.
how it was being played with and play along.
And and make it magical.
And so that if you rocked
The baby and the baby would say, Hey, I'm being rocked. I guess I should be sleepy and I go
go do go do a napping play pattern or if you're feeding it. Okay, I'm I should go do a feeding play play pattern. Um
It was really cool. It's it came out in in nineteen ninety nine and
Called My Real Baby and we
Sold one hundred and fifty thousand of them, I think.
And
They introduce us to
low cost manufacturing.
And so
Did we make any money out of it?
We got our cost covered for three and a half years.
But we learned
How to make low cost robots.
And you learned a hell of a lot about how to make
Consumer products.
Correct. That's where we learned how to make
Consumer products.
It's interesting'cause I I I looked at these myreal babies and uh and they did well for a short period of time, but then they were discontinued.
And I I guess um the r some of the reviews and again these are uh reviews from adult writers were that some people
They were a little creepy.
But uh you know.
When we're doing development
Uh at first my royal babies
Eyes look left and right as opposed to opening and closing.
Oh wow. And that that was really creepy. So that was that was like lesson one. It's like okay, you you can't do that.
And I remember there was a crisis right before we launched because
Yeah.
the baby when it was young, it would it would coo. You know, and then as it got older it would start putting
Words together.
And someone on the Hasbro side listened to its
Babbling.
Mm.
And became convinced.
That
The robot was saying, Baby, baby, bite my butt.
Mm.

And so we w you know they're like, Well that's not we can't launch with this.
It was like
It
randomly babbling. It's like no no no it's saying baby, baby, bite my butt.
And so that we had to like
Have a crisis
software uh uh um strategy to figure out how to
Provably keep
My real baby from
babbling in that particular pattern, which was
crazy and ridiculous and wonderful and and just very real and and part of the journey of
Consumer products.
I wanna I wanna just pivot for a sec and ask you about the business side because
We're now
getting you know, we we've covered a lot of what's happened in the nineties.
And really and I think it was only in nineteen ninety eight where you took on some outside funding. You got you finally raised

Which is is
But what I'm more interested in is you'cause you were twenty two
when you became the CEO in nineteen ninety. So by
two thousand, you're thirty two, right? Mm-hmm. And you and I mean this in the most
uh ad uh with great admiration. I mean, you are an engineer, you're a nerd, you're like focused on building things that matter.
You're not a guy who
has any interest in you you're gonna go to business school, you're not gonna go to do a business administration degree. And so
How did you learn
Over those ten years.
How to run a company.
Well you had to make
Choices
And my journey at iRobot.
Started back.
When I was a wilderness guy.
Right?
I was taking
Two?
staff people and six campers out into the woods for six weeks
And bringing them back alive.
With
All sorts of challenges.
food, canoes tipping over. Yep. You know, and and all sorts of drama. And so that sitting in the CEO role
was actually very comfortable to me. Now
What wasn't comfortable.
Well is putting down the soldering iron.
'Cause that was your passion. That's what you were good at. My passion is building.
Yeah. And along the way
I realized
That building
A company that could build cool stuff.
Counts.
And uh I think that one of the habits I had
That allowed me to succeed.
was whatever I was doing on any given day.
I try to figure out how to give away
All of it.
How can I go and take all of the responsibility I currently have?
And delegate as much as possible to people.
who are going to do a better job than I can do.
Yeah.
I mean I I remember viscerally.
I le I used to love three D CAD, you know, it was like one of my happy places. Computer assisted design. Yeah. Uh making three D designs of things and and I hired this guy.
And he was like a fresh out from uh college and he sat down
And in the first day.
He created something spectacular and I looked at it.
Thing, Wow, that's spectacular, and my heart was saying
I should never do 3D CAD again.
Nice.

It was like oh yeah, oh crap, okay, fine. This is it's time to move from being the guy who loved bending the sheet metal.
To the guy who loved
creating an environment where creativity could flourish.
Sprinkling
A little bit of a
Well that's not gonna work.
Or have you thought of this?
Two
indirectly guide decision making processes.
H let's talk about
Um defense.
products for a moment because I you know, if you are a defense contractor
your your client is the is the government, right? And so and that can be big business. That's why all these defense contractors are headquartered in Washington, DC, because they want a piece of the action.
You guys had contract with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Yep. You did uh something called the Packbot, which was an all terrain robot that was designed to like
detect bombs and then dispose of them and and these were actually used in Afghanistan and Iraq by the US military.
Absolutely.
So if you think about
Like a pizza box with with tracks.
on either side. You're you're close.
Right. Um and then
We started being able to put
Arms on them and so that
they could be used by a a bomb disposal team.
When nine eleven happened and we sent troops into Afghanistan.
We saw on the news.
That
they were sending the airborne troops into the tunnels and the caves in Afghanistan
with you know a flashlight and a pistol and a rope tied around their waist so that they could pull the soldier out in case they were shot.
Well, they were down underground and we said, No, no, no, this is what our robot was for. And so we started going down to Washington
with our pack bot robot that we had designed and said
You gotta send this to Afghanistan.
How many total do you do remember, how many um pack bots did you eventually sell?
to the military. I mean it was thousands. Thousands. Wow. And each one well, I guess the price eventually went down to about forty five, fifty grand, but so that I mean we might have gotten up to maybe fifty million
Of revenue coming in from the defense side.
And probably
I'm sure some of these pack bots
uh got blown up, right? Absolutely. I mean I I probably
Five hundred to a thousand of the robots were destroyed.
But that was okay. Yeah,'cause you're saving a human life, of course.
We would get postcards from
The soldiers.
Saying
You have saved lives today, and it was very moving and f
There was one robot
That we actually got back.
We're on the head of the robot.
Someone in pencil.
And sort of
Ticked off.
Every time that robot
Took out an IED.
Well.
And we got it back because finally the bomb got the better of the robot.
And the ID technician apparently carries us back to the depot, tears in his eyes, can you fix it?
Like it's a a fallen comrade. Or a dog, right? Like a uh uh yeah,'cause of course dogs are used. Yeah. It's amazing. I I know I was familiar with these because I
Back in in the day I was a a war reporter and spent
two and a half years in and out of Iraq and saw saw these in action and uh

I mean iRobot still was a relatively small company and you had all these concurrent projects. You had, you know, you you got the the these
Robots, right, detecting these pack bots for the military. You've got pr you know working on S. C. Johnson project, you're working on eventually with Hasbro.
But let's
dive into Roomba. I mean you up until this point, okay, you made the these dolls for Hasro and
And so there were some consumer products. So you had learned about
mass production and um
and consumer uh marketing
But what's the origin of Roomba? How do you start talking about, hey, wait a minute, let's make this.
You know, I I I told the story about how people would come and say, Hey Colin
Uh when are you gonna clean my floors?
Yeah.
And so we knew this was a good idea.
And one of the early employees, a guy named Joe Jones, had actually
Built.
Well he was at
uh working at MIT.
A little
round robot that picked up
S.
It couldn't actually pick up dust, but it if you crumpled up little the right size little bits of ball
It could suck it up. It could suck it up.
You know, and then twelve years pass and
The toy contract was coming to an end.
Mm.
And Joe came up to me and said, Hey Colin.
I think it's time to do the vacuum.
Can I can we work on it two weeks.
Give us fifteen grand in parts.
And I'll have a prototype.
So they went and they um

Made it round. It was round so that
It would never drive into
Anywhere that it couldn't turn around in its own
diameter and and and and escape.
And it dragged an electrostatic cloth, like a swiver cloth behind it. It wasn't a vacuum. Okay. And it
Kinda worked.
But it didn't have a
No eyes. No, it's different. No camera for navigation, no No, that came much later.
Okay.
Gotcha.
Um so we kept developing this idea.
And
We knew we needed a better navigation system, but at the time there was no navigation system good enough
To give you an actual position.
Right,'cause it if it was just randomly bumping, you couldn't
Guarantee that it was gonna clean the entire floor of the room.
Correct. You know, no one's gonna die if you didn't.
Oh but it had to do it had to do a good enough job.
And then
We had done research with customers.
Around
The product.
One of the early problems with Roomba
Was
If
It was only dragging an electrostatic cloth.
It was not valued by the consumer.
Right. It's just that's just a drag it's just dragging'em.
piece of cloth on your floor. Right. I could do that. And so that they would say, Well, how much would you pay?
And it's like, well, we pay forty, fifty bucks for that. It's like the battery costs forty bucks. I mean come on. Yeah. The um uh you know, this isn't gonna work. It's like well, what if it was a vacuum? It's like oh well if it was a vacuum, then I'd pay hundreds of dollars for it.
And it's like uh okay, uh time to make a vacuum.
And then we had to go
Invent.
The world's most
Efficient vacuum cleaner.
Because
We we couldn't afford a lot of battery power.
And so we um we c said, Well what if we break this whole vacuuming problem down
into two steps.
Where we have these counter rotating brushes, just spinning brushes that pick up all the big debris.
And then
Have we we called it a squeegee vac.
It's it it it uh between two little rubber blades is a very narrow
Hm.
And because you're pulling the air.
through that narrow gap it moved faster.
It's kind of like putting your thumb on the end of a of a hose to make it squirt faster.
And the velocity of the air actually.
Is what
Picks up the dust.
And so that by breaking vacuuming into two pieces, one for doing large debris and one for doing
Uh small debris
We had invented a new way of vacuuming.
That was
incredibly efficient. And so that
You know, it's
Uh why didn't Roomba happen earlier? Well it just needed to have a
small desperate company that happened to be expert in mine hunting
Yeah.
and industrial cleaning to to come along. And then it's then it's kinda obvious that what you should do and and uh
You know, the th the some of our biggest challenges
had to do with how do we sell this thing.
Because
We had far less experience on on that front. This is in two thousand two when you finally had a product to launch.
Finally had a product to launch and we thought Sharper Image was gonna do it.
Um and then they backed out.
And I called up
Brookstone.
Yeah, I was gonna say sharp image no, then you call Brookstone. Right. The Brookstone story was amazing because
The only person who answered the phone,'cause we dialed everybody, was this woman who was in charge of the hard to find tool catalog.
And it was her first day on the job.
So she hadn't yet been trained that she shouldn't talk to people like us.
And so she heard our pitch and and said, Okay, well well m I guess you can come in.
And so we brought you know, we we got in the car, we went down to New York City or whatever it was, and and we showed her the Roomba.
And she was like, Oh my God, this is this is amazing. Let me let me sh let me show it to my boss. And so
She brought in her boss and her boss said, Oh my God, that that
Looks like it actually works.
Um let me let me show you.
To my boss. And you could demo this. You could say here he goes. Yeah, yeah, ca we we we we had working demo.
Would you bring like Cheerios or something to like put on the ground?
So my secret.
was to to I w I would
Like a vacuum cleaner salesman I I would have a a little Ziploc bag of of Cheerios in my back pocket. You literally had Che I just said Cheerios'cause kids and Cheerios Cheerios was the best. Because what I would do
Uh you know, we'd be in it be in their conference room.
And I
They would say, Oh, that's neat, does it actually work?
And I was like, Well, of course it works. It's like, really? Prove it.

take these Cheerios out of my back pocket. I would sprinkle them on their f on their floor and then I would
in great with great drama, I would I would stomp and crush and try to grind the Cheerios into the rug, at which point I had their complete attention.
because I just messed up their conference room.
And then
Put Roomba down.
Rubo's great at cheerless.
Great.
The dust, the the big chunks, everything. And it was you know Cheerios are bright so on a dark carpet they show up really well.
And the and it it's like Oh my God.
It it works.
And we went to like
From the lowest to the highest level at at at at uh Brookstone in about
Forty minutes and then the head of product or merchandising came in and showed him our
That's pretty cool, but we couldn't possibly sell this for any price.
uh above two hundred dollars.
And
We had planned on selling it for one hundred ninety nine dollars.
Amazing.
And so that's the same thing.
We launched with Brookstam.
And about two weeks later I get this call from the woman managing her account, Pam Camilsein, I remember her name.
And she's like, Hey Colin, how's it going? It's like, well, no, how's it going with you?
And
C'est cool.
Well well pretty good. You know, we'd like to we'd like to order some more product.
And it's like really?
Uh
Well how much? And she said, Well
How much can you build?

Wow.
How did that how did that happen? I mean
Brookstone, of course, uh we I remember we did an episode on the Temper Pedic mattress and it started with a pillow and they launched that at Brookstone. So
You know, Brookstone. But still Brookstone is not
Target, it's not Walmart. How did it do so well? Was it uh was it just'cause it was so weird and unusual, it got press coverage?
It was two things.
First
Brookstone discovered
That
If they put it in front of the store.
And just threw down
dirt and Cheerios and stuff and what and showed it working. Yes.
It would draw traffic into the store. In the mall. In the mall. Right in the shopping mall, yeah. So it it demoed really well.
But
Combine that with the press
Because we had no money to advertise. We had up five thousand dollars a month for PR, I think was was our budget.
But that h that whole shtick where I
go into the conference room and throw Cheerios on the on the on the ground. No one believed this thing worked.
And then when they saw it working.
Then if you were pressed.
You had a secret.
And nothing is better than taking a sceptic and flipping them into being a supporter.
And
We had a hundred and fifty articles.
written about the Roomba immediately after launch, everything from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today to Newsweek to it was amazing. We sold seventy thousand Roomba's in the first three months.
That's in
Incredible. So you guys were probably popping champagne bottles thinking.
This is it. We we we finally struck struck gold here.
If it absolutely. It was
Validation авter твої.
of beating our heads against the wall again twelve years of
Wondering whether we would ever find
That robot that everyone could
Get?
It's amazing. I read that that by the end of that year.
I mean, what a turnaround. Fourteen
almost fifteen million dollars in revenue yes for iRobot, which is incredible given that you the year start out
Not not good. Um I read that on the strength of that amazing
those lost three months in two thousand two.
You use very
Well very understandably.
ordered a ton of robots to to m to be made for two thousand three because
You sell seventy thousand in three months, you're gonna need
hundreds of thousands for 2003.
Right. So
Uh that euphoria certainly.
Uh turned around fast. I mean it it it w you know, seventy thousand and a quarter or
We should sell three hundred thousand.
in in two thousand and and three
And um it
Almost didn't turn out that way.
In fact
We had a commercial that we made which
Completely
Failed.
I describe it as a
Commercial made by engineers for engineers. It was just a practical commercial showing what the thing did. Yeah, and and it didn't resonate. I haven't seen that commercial. Was it just like a
Literally like, Hey, our floor's messy. Why I got this root like was it. It didn't show any people.
Uh it just showed the robot driving around the ground, picking up stuff, going under things. Oh my god. You should have put a cat on it.
We did have, you know, one of our most epic slogans in that first commercial, which was
If it's down there.
We'll get it.
Uh but you know, that didn't work either.
The uh.
But
Uh you know, so
We ended in two thousand three.
It was after Black Friday, after Cyber Monday, and we had sold a grand total of fifty thousand robots.
From that.
uh year and we're sitting on two hundred and fifty thousand robots.
That's not good. I mean that's a lot of inventory and
Yeah.
That would be
Existential crisis time.
But we come back in just a moment.
Roomba gets a marketing makeover from a totally unexpected source.
A Pepsiad?
Starring Dave Chappelle.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this.
Welcome back to how I built this.
I'm Guy Raz. So it's the fall of 2003, and after an early boom in sales, Roomba is starting to flatline.
And iRobot is sitting on a lot of inventory. But suddenly, and for a reason Colin never could have predicted?
Things.
Turn around.
We used to
uh bring the whole company together for for stand up.
for a couple minutes at the beginning of every day and just sort of
Okay, how's it going, how's it going.
So here we are.
you know Wednesday after Cyber Monday and
The guy running the the uh uh e commerce store said, Hey.
Why did sales triple yesterday?
Yeah.
Nobody knew. There was no new press. There was no new anything and then
Uh I think it was an intern who raised his hand and said
You know, it's funny. I
I saw a commercial.
And sure enough
Pepsi?
Had
Made a commercial.
With Dave Chappelle the comedian.
Where
Dave walks into this beautiful house and he looks over and there's a kitchen table with
Uh Pepsi's and bowls of snacks and chips and so forth. And he
goes over and grabs his Pepsi and grabs a potato chip and a Roomba comes out.
And
He looks down at the rumba.
And he says.
A vacuum.
It's like
God th the whole world didn't know Roombo was a vacuum, but he knew it was a vacuum and he throws the potato chip on the ground.
And the Roomba goes and cleans up the potato chip and then
the Roomba locks on to the Pepsi and starts chasing Dave to try to get the Pepsi.
And there's a cut screen and now he's on his back. His pants are ripped off.
He stands up
A beautiful woman appears and he says
Your vacuum cleaner.
Ate my pants.
There was nothing I could do.
And it's nothing chases thirst like a Pepsi.
And we sold two hundred and fifty thousand roomba.
In six weeks.
After that ad.
After that ad hit.
I mean Pepsi basically made an ad for you without even telling you.
With celebrity endorsement with
You know, and
It was funny and
We kinda realized we knew nothing about marketing.
And
started hiring people into the company that
could help tell our story better.
And so it's a huge epiphany for me. It was two thousand four. Suddenly we we
tripled our sales.
From two thousand and three and and
We're starting to feel like
We knew what we were doing other than the fact that
We had another crisis, which was
The fact that we had designed Roomba
To um
uh last
Hundred and fifty hours, which was the European standard for upright vacuum cleaners.
To last before it needs to be recharged.
To last before die. Oh.
Oh, before it died.
Right? Oh.
But upright vacuum cleaners don't get used very often. So 150 hours is a really long time for an upright vacuum cleaner.
But it's a really short time for a robot that might be
Used half hour at a time.
half hour at a time, an hour a day kind of thing. And so that's
We were having a uh a huge crisis where people were
having their rumba's
very early after six months of use. And so that we had to make
a decision as a company.
To
Uh
Just ship them a new robot.
You had to j uh f just a f free replacement. Free replacement. That that must have cost you a fortune.
It did, but
This was a moment to preserve the brand.
And you know, another wonderful truth.
Is if
A company stands behind
It's product.

You generate more customer loyalty than if that customer never had a problem.
with their product at all.
by investing in the brand.
My robot became
A trusted respected.
And beloved.
Brand.
And and presumably you were making I mean you had learned about mass production.
While you had worked with Hasbro a few years earlier.
So I'm assuming you were you were producing these in China, right? I mean that that that was the only way to make them affordable. Yes, so they were they were manufactured in China for many years until
Much later in the game we moved it to Malays to Malaysia. Malaysia, okay. Yep. So within two years, I think the
I robots do a hundred million dollars, almost a hundred million dollars in revenue. You still have the pack bot, which is still
an important product but in two thousand five you guys go public, you become a publicly traded, um
company on the Nasdaq and
Help me understand. When you filed for for an IPO in two thousand five,'cause in in nineteen ninety it was three people.
Do you remember at that by that point how many employees
i robot had.
Probably two hundred and fifty employees by that time.
But you know I think it was
Two thousand eight, two thousand nine.
We plateaued
um for a little while and part of it was the economy and part of it was
The fact that
We were running out of early adopters.
And it exposed a pretty significant
Fallacy.
In our technical direction.
Right, because
If you ask me at the time.
What Colin, what's the what's the perfect rumba?
I would tell you, well, the perfect rumba is the rumba you never see, you never touch, and you cause come home. And your house is clean. Right. I mean it's it's that right. That sounds pretty compelling.
Unless you put that in the context.
of actually hiring someone to clean your home.
Right.
Remove Roomba.
And you insert cleaning person.
And you say,
Imagine a cleaning person coming in to interview for her job and and the cleaning person says
You can't talk to me.
You can't really give me any guidance. You just have to trust me that I'm gonna do a great job. Am I hired?
Well, that sounds a little creepy.
And
The innovator and the early adopter
Or
Willing to believe.
That
This technological solution.
Is gonna be cool. But
The early majority
Which
We needed to continue growth.
Absolutely.
Did not.
And that's the customer you need to actually scale.
Right.
So that early majority is where companies go from being
Interesting.

Valuable.
Okay.
You start to plateau.
And you've gotta convince people
That this is something
They need to
What do you do?
is that the technology is getting better so you can you as the consumer can actually
Have more agency over the machine.
We needed to change how we talked about the Roomba. We needed to change
the technology and that's where navigation became important. We need
Systematic navigation, we need object recognition, we need to be able to go
And clean around objects that are specified. And then we need to communicate it.
To
The customer.
In a way that allows them to feel control.
Right,'cause that was w that's what was missing.
The Roomba works for you, not the other way around.
The customer wanted
Confidence.
that they could control where the Roomba cleaned and the
Roomba would be safe and w wasn't going to go and knock over the
precious vas or what have you, so that it was, you know, efficacy, control, and safety, and it opened up the marketplace.
To
The next
phase of growth.
When
Uh I robot and robot vacuum cleaners as a category really started eating
Vacuum cleaner sales.
Alright, so
I mean I think eventually.
Buy I don't know, maybe twenty
sixteen or uh twenty fourteen, I think you'd already sold ten million roombus, but
I have to imagine
That
In your mind, at least, and certainly in the mind of others,
if the company is really gonna grow
You had to grow the consumer business side, but you couldn't just have the Roomba
as your sort of hero product, right? Like I I imagine you're starting to think well
We gotta come up with other things that we can sell.
Right. You know, we needed to diversify.
And you know, the obvious second act to us was wet floor care or mopping.
Right.
So we
developed a robot called Scuba.
Which was a a wet mopping robot.
We also looked at we thought
Lawn mowing was gonna be
our big second act, if not mopping robots. And so that we invest tremendous amount of the same thing.
And a robot called Terra.
You know, should we be working on a dishwashing robot? Should we work on a laundry folding robot or a a bed changing robot?
And
You know the answer.
Is no.
Mm.
Is
Started
Realizing
That Rumba
Was an amazing
Smart home device.
Because
We could
figure out where your rooms were. We could figure out where the other smart devices were.
That idea
That
If I could only have a room but figured out where things were and what should happen and have a voice interface like
Alexa?
Suddenly
You have
A new solution for the smart home.
And really that was what
uh led me to saying
Hey.
Uh i robot on Amazon might have some pretty interesting synergies and because
Scuba hadn't succeeded because Terra hadn't succeeded.
Then when Amazon
started to be interested in i robot.
Uh it felt like a good idea.
Yeah, because by twenty twenty
You sold thirty million.
room b robots, mainly roombus around the world and
We're entering Covid and
Um, you know, there's a lot of challenges, but I think twenty twenty one was the year where your revenue peaked you hit oh over uh one and a half billion dollars and
Revenue, but but also from what I understand
you really start to see sales.
drop. I mean you can see what what's where things are headed in part because
There are
uh cheap knockoffs that are coming out, right? And there are uh there are competitors that are making
robot vacuum cleaners, uh, that may not have been as good, but that's cutting into your market share.
Right.
There was a period of of a real disruption starting
Twenty twenty
with the first round of tariffs.
And then you have Covid.
Which
Shut everything down. So that was
Boom boom. That was that was really rugged.
Then people
Stuck at home started
Thinking.
Hey.
Uh I'm stuck at home. I should buy a Roomba. So that's sort of
started to make things better.
But we weren't able to fully enjoy that upside because at the same time shipping costs
Went through the roof.
And components started becoming unavailable because there was such demand. And so that
You know, we were spending twenty two dollars on a half a cent resistor so that we could actually build a Roomba and foreign competition.
Particularly the Chinese fast follower business model.
Finally
Started
to put product on the marketplace.
Which customers liked.
And we saw
our market share is starting to drop.
There was a
perfect storm of just challenges. I and this is gonna lead to the to the Amazon
acquisition
uh offer and also why it made sense. I it certainly

you could see, I imagine you as the CEO of the company could see that Amazon coming in and acquiring iRobot could be a great
Results, right? And they were probably going to they were excited about ex
Integrating this with the smart home and also
Building other products, maybe, or developing other products.
It it was like a win win. Our our our s investors were gonna win, the consumer wins.
uh and the employees of of iRobot
Get to be innovative again.
Amazon twenty twenty two makes a bid to acquire i robot for one point seven billion dollars. Amazing.
What an incredible
you know, close to uh at that point, you know
Thirty two years of iRobot, right? I mean
What a cool result, and so
На курс
An acquisition like this has to go through the regulatory agencies, both in the United States and in Europe, because Amazon's a global company. Uh there's the FTC in the US, the European Trade Commissioner, I think is what I can't remember what it's called. EC Europe European. EC Commission, right. And
as the FTC was had conducted an antitrust investigation, essentially saying or their argument w or was seemed like their argument was
uh Amazon uh this would be a monopoly that Amazon
already had uh a bunch of different robotics companies
this was gonna be a monopoly. Amazon acquiring another robotics company
Is a problem.
I mean uh
Doesn't make sense
Sense but yes, that was that was the argument as you describe.
And so I some point in twenty twenty four
Mm-hmm. iRobot and Amazon announced that you guys would abandon the acquisition
plans, but I from what I understand, the FTC had not made a decision yet. So why
Why did you guys make that decision?
We made the decision when it was clear that the European Commission and the FTC
We're blocking this deal.
And the FTC blocked this deal.
knowing that they were effectively putting I robot in a box and handing it to somebody else.
In other words
They you're saying they knew that
They block this deal. You guys
Had to sell it.
at to some point because your business wouldn't survive.
And you'd be forced.

They just didn't want Amazon buying it. That was their position.
Now we're into the land of speculation, but it does seem that way.
It's
I know you know.
I understand why the FTC
Exist and why they
They want to block monopolies to protect consumers.
But sometimes it seems like
They're not actually operating in the interest of American consumers because
Uh and also, it's like you guys were offered one point seven billion dollars. I mean that's that's a lot of money.
and a lot of lives that were gonna be changed and
They can say no, you can't do that.
Can't sell it.
I mean
It doesn't make sense, right? I I believe the FTC is there to prevent abuse.
And it serves a very valuable role.
But it's been taken too far.
In fact, I had to testify was deposed as part of this process. I was walking, you know, between sessions.
walking the the facility and
On the doors?
Of the agents at the FTC, the employees like badges of honor on the doors where deals blocked.
Like people would put on their doors like
Uh blocked this merger. This merger block.
I mean the biggest loser
was the consumer in this deal.
Right.
I certainly lost.
A robot lost, Amazon lost, but the biggest loser.
Was
The hundreds of products, innovative products that could have
uh come out as a result of this merger.
Yeah, Colin, you shortly after this unravels, you
Step down thirty four years at the company.
A CEO.
And eventually
within a year, I think it it was sold to a Chinese company.
which now owns all the technology
In all of the products.
That you guys built.
Yes.
We used to past tense.
Лед консумер.
Robotic floor care industry.
We don't any.
China does.
And we chose
To give it to them.
It was a choice.
We didn't have to.
And
To me
That's frustrating.
Hm.
Yeah, it's uh it's wild. I mean, especially when you think about sort of the the geo political
uh context here, right? Th the reality is that if there's a US company
That spends thirty five years developing technology in the US.
And then that technology goes to another country.
Does that make sense? In other words, if if that happened in Germany or if it happened in China and it was
Th the opposite ended ended the opposite way.
people in China will be sort of be asking the same questions, right? Like he how how is it that we spent thirty years developing this technology and now it's in the US or now it's in Germany? So it it is um
Yeah, I mean it's it is it is what it is, I guess. Um
when you step down, um
Where you you went off
on to to create a new company and I know you're still kind of in in um
Stealth mode.
Stealth mode, yes, right. Stealth mode. So you you you can't really talk about what you're doing, but it is we can sort of assume broadly it's in robotics.
Absolutely. It it is in robotics. It it's in consumer robots. It's taking advantage.
Of
This amazing new tool kit.
Generative AI and
Using these generative tools to control robots.
Because I'm still who I am. I I'm still this builder and and so the when I left iRobot after
You know, the last decade was a little tough, I felt like
I wasn't building, I was
reacting, I was protecting. So
Uh, you know, all we can do is move forward. I I mean uh
Yeah, I think.
Every time I write an email I sign it onward because the things that
Drive my passions, still drive my passions.
in now to talk to a venture capitalist or to
Talk to a factory.
It's a
much easier conversation than when I did it
Before I had done iRobots. Sure. You know, it's it's you know, it's a journey.
Uh and uh the journey's not done yet.
When you think about
you know, this journey. I mean it's an amazing journey. And of course there, you know
It didn't end in the o in the way that you wanted it it to end, but
But you still
had incredible success with this product and the brand
Um how much of where where you got it to and what happened with your career do you attribute to the work and the grind and how much do you think it had to do with being lucky in the right place, the right time with some of these products?
You know the the journey
Yeah, had some amazing
Serendipitous moments.
But they were enabled by
Sitting back and actually doing the work.
I had one of my early mentors
When
I presented in one of my first
board meetings a
twelve year plan where the year the revenue in year twelfth was
was presented to the second decimal point. He said, Colin
Never show me a chart like this again.
Try to make your next quarter. Try to make your next
Two quarters. And then
Let's talk and and uh
We don't have to have it.
fully planned out in order to
embark on the journey of entrepreneurship. We just need to
have a North Star we're heading towards and um
I would say that uh you know, here we are thirty five years in.
Uh I've got
one big disappointment and thousands of
bright shining moments of
Innovation and steps forward and uh
I like those odds.
That's Colin Angle.
Co founder.
I robot.
You know the robot I want is the one who drags my ass out of bed in the morning and makes me go down and work out. That's the robot I want. I might have something that that uh
I want that robot.
Go work out now.
I know it's warm in bed.
I know you're comfy.
But get out of it.
Uh I will I will uh
Hold you to that and we'll see what the future brings.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at gyros.com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by Katherine Seifer with music composed by Ramtina Rablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Nor Gill.
Our engineers are Patrick Murray and Quasey Lee. Our production staff also include Sam Paulson, Chris Massini, John Isabella, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, Casey Herman, Ramel Wood, and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening.
to how I built this.