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

Summary

"How I Built This" with Guy Raz

Episode: iRobot: Colin Angle – How The Roomba Became a Household Icon

Date: April 13, 2026
Guest: Colin Angle, Co-founder and CEO of iRobot

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the creation and rise of iRobot, the company behind the iconic Roomba robot vacuum, as told by co-founder and longtime CEO Colin Angle. Guy Raz and Angle explore the inception of iRobot from its MIT research roots, how Roomba pioneered consumer robotics, the challenges of scaling hardware innovation, and the company's unexpected journey through military contracts, toy partnerships, and later acquisition drama. Rich with stories of personal struggle, delightfully nerdy innovation, and hard business lessons, the episode also reckons with the recent end of iRobot’s independence and Angle's forward-looking optimism.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. Childhood Roots of Curiosity and Engineering (05:11-06:16)

• Colin’s Early Obsession with Building:
  Angle shares anecdotal stories from childhood, such as engineering a "gantry crane" to transport his milk glass—revealing a lifelong passion for invention.

  “I would embark on a two day long project to create a gantry crane to automatically lift that glass of milk and carry it on cables into the kitchen and really shut down the house for a few days.” (Colin Angle, 05:11)

• Striking a Balance:
  Emphasizes his dual identity as both a "smart jock" and a hands-on creator.

2. The Path to MIT and Early Robotics (06:16-10:51)

• Serendipitous Start:
  Angle recounts how a chance walk led him to apply at MIT's legendary robotics lab under Rodney Brooks.

  "I'm at MIT and everyone is already done writing down the stuff that they have built, and I'm not done yet...and I got this job." (Colin Angle, 07:25)

• Defining Robots as Toolkits, Not Humanoids:
  Angle’s first assignment (getting a robot to open doors) led him to realize the flexibility and creativity of robotics as a “toolkit,” not just humanoid machines.

  "Robotics was a box of parts that allowed you to make smart machines that were capable of doing interesting things..." (Colin Angle, 08:52)

3. Founding iRobot: No Business Model, Just Belief (11:15-14:44)

• Bootstrapping and Contract Research:
  iRobot was born from academic ambition but had no consumer focus; early revenue came from selling robots to companies like Mitsubishi for research, with most years spent living “hand to mouth.”

  "Six and a half years before I started a month with enough money in the bank to make payroll." (Colin Angle, 13:47)

• Engineering Culture over Business Sense:
  The team respected technology, not marketing—Angle jokes about marketing being seen as “marketing weenie.”

  "You weren't allowed to say marketing without saying weenie, you know, immediately afterwards." (Colin Angle, 17:07)

4. Unexpected Lessons from Toys and Military Robots (21:00-29:48)

• Learning from Hasbro:
  Building the interactive toy "My Real Baby" taught iRobot about low-cost manufacturing and consumer production—even if it was slightly creepy.

  "We learned how to make low cost robots...That's where we learned how to make consumer products." (Colin Angle, 23:13)

• Military Success with Packbot:
  Packbot was used in Afghanistan and Iraq to safely inspect/disarm bombs. The robots became beloved by soldiers.

  "We would get postcards from the soldiers saying, you have saved lives today. It was very moving..." (Colin Angle, 29:49)

5. Roomba: From Joke to Phenomenon (31:25-42:19)

• The Breakthrough Product:
  Roomba's origins stemmed from a prototype that dragged a Swiffer cloth, but consumer research revealed only a true vacuum would hold value.

  "If it was a vacuum, then I'd pay hundreds of dollars for it. And it was like, okay, time to make a vacuum." (Colin Angle, 33:34)

• Technical Innovation – The “Squeegee Vac”:
  The Roomba’s two-stage cleaning system took inspiration from battery limitations and engineering constraints.

• Retail "Hacking" and Viral Growth:
  Early sales came from direct retail demos at Brookstone, with Angle using crushed Cheerios to showcase the device’s prowess.

  “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.” (Colin Angle, 36:45)

• Press Coverage & The Cat on Roomba Effect:
  Massive media attention and viral user videos followed:

  “We had 150 articles written about the Roomba immediately after launch...” (Colin Angle, 39:06)

• Early Marketing Mistakes:
  Failure of their first TV commercial, made “by engineers for engineers,” leading to a reliance on word-of-mouth.

6. Unlikely Lifeline: The Dave Chappelle Pepsi Ad (43:12-45:48)

• Sales Miracle:
  A surprise appearance in a popular Pepsi commercial featuring Dave Chappelle revived flagging sales, moving a quarter-million units in six weeks.

  “Pepsi had made a commercial with Dave Chappelle...and the Roomba locks onto the Pepsi and starts chasing Dave to try to get the Pepsi...We sold 250,000 Roombas in six weeks after that ad.” (Colin Angle, 44:23)

7. Brand Loyalty, Growing Pains, and Going Public (45:54-47:50)

• Standing by Customers:
  Early units wore out too quickly. iRobot replaced broken Roombas for free, which built intense customer loyalty.

  “If a company stands behind its product, you generate more customer loyalty than if that customer never had a problem with their product at all.” (Colin Angle, 46:31)

• IPO and Scaling:
  Rapid success led to a public offering (IPO) and large-scale global sales.

8. Plateau, Competition & The Need to Evolve (47:50-54:53)

• Reaching Mainstream Consumers:
  The "invisible robot" concept didn’t resonate as tech fatigue set in; consumers wanted more agency and confidence.

  “The customer wanted confidence that they could control where the Roomba cleaned and the Roomba would be safe...” (Colin Angle, 49:50)

• Product Diversification—Success and Failure:
  iRobot’s attempts at a mopping robot (Scuba) and lawn mowing robot (Terra) didn’t take off, but their experience shaped the company’s shift toward smart home integration.

9. The Amazon Acquisition Saga and Regulatory Roadblocks (53:50-59:17)

• Market Disruption:
  U.S.-China tariffs, Covid, supply chain chaos, and low-cost overseas competition battered iRobot.

  "We were spending $22 on a half a cent resistor so that we could actually build a Roomba." (Colin Angle, 54:35)

• The Amazon Deal & Its Collapse:
  Amazon’s $1.7 billion buyout bid would have boosted global reach and smart-home synergy, but U.S. and EU regulators blocked the deal.

  "We made the decision when it was clear that the European Commission and the FTC were blocking this deal. And the FTC blocked this deal knowing that they were effectively putting iRobot in a box and handing it to somebody else." (Colin Angle, 56:54)

  "The biggest loser was the hundreds of products, innovative products that could have come out as a result of this merger." (Colin Angle, 58:57)

• Aftermath:
  iRobot was ultimately sold to a Chinese competitor, transferring dozens of patents and extensive know-how overseas—“We used to, past tense, lead ... China does.” (Colin Angle, 59:17)

10. Looking Ahead: Reinvention and Optimism (60:39-63:13)

• Onward to New Projects:
  Angle is already working in stealth mode on a new robotics venture, leveraging generative AI.

  “Absolutely. It is in robotics, it's in consumer robots. It's taking advantage of this amazing new toolkit, generative AI, and using these generative tools to control robots. Because I'm still who I am. I'm still this builder.” (Colin Angle, 60:39)

• Reflections on Grit and Serendipity:

  “The journey had some amazing serendipitous moments, but they were enabled by sitting back and actually doing the work. ... I’ve got one big disappointment and thousands of bright shining moments of innovation and steps forward. And I like those odds.” (Colin Angle, 62:06)

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Notable Quotes

• “If not us, who. If not now, when are we going to actually go and start to build these?” —Colin Angle (14:44)
• “We're a bunch of nerds…You weren't allowed to say marketing without saying weenie, you know, immediately afterwards.” —Colin Angle (17:01-17:07)
• “No one believed this thing worked. And then when they saw it working...if you were press, you had a secret. And nothing is better than taking a skeptic and flipping them into being a supporter.” —Colin Angle (39:06)
• “If a company stands behind its product, you generate more customer loyalty than if that customer never had a problem with their product at all.” —Colin Angle (46:31)
• “We used to, past tense, lead the consumer robotic floor care industry. We don’t anymore. China does. And we chose to give it to them.” —Colin Angle (59:17)
• “All we can do is move forward. I think every time I write an email, I sign it onward because the things that drive my passions still drive my passions.” —Colin Angle (61:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [05:11] Colin’s childhood engineering exploits
• [06:16] Discovering MIT’s robotics lab & Rodney Brooks
• [13:46] Scrappy, contract-based existence of early iRobot
• [21:00] Move into consumer products: Partnership with Hasbro and “My Real Baby”
• [29:16] Packbot and military applications during Iraq/Afghanistan wars
• [31:25] Genesis and technical innovations of Roomba
• [36:45] In-store retail demos and landing Brookstone as first big retailer
• [43:12] Spike in sales from Dave Chappelle’s Pepsi commercial
• [45:31] Standing behind the brand: free replacements and customer loyalty
• [47:22] iRobot goes public and grows exponentially
• [53:50] Facing fierce global competition and supply chain woes
• [55:22] The Amazon acquisition offer and regulatory rejection
• [59:17] Final sale to Chinese company and reflection on industry leadership
• [60:39] Angle’s next chapter: generative AI-powered consumer robotics
• [62:06] Closing thoughts on grit, luck, and the entrepreneurial journey

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Memorable Moments

• Cheerios in the Boardroom—Angle's retail demo strategy, dumping and crushing Cheerios into carpets, impressed both retailers and the press.
• Military Robots as Comrades—Stories of soldiers treating Packbots like fellow soldiers highlight the product’s real-world impact and the emotional stakes of innovation.
• Pepsi Ad Serendipity—The Roomba’s surprise cameo in a Dave Chappelle commercial unexpectedly solves an existential crisis.

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Summary Tone & Style

The episode is candid, humorous, and often self-deprecating, with Colin Angle’s “builder’s optimism” shining through. Stories are rich in nerdy technical detail but grounded in business and brand lessons — from scrappy beginnings to hard-won, sometimes bittersweet, finale. Throughout, the tone is conversational and focused on real setbacks, problem-solving, and unshakable curiosity.

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For listeners and aspiring entrepreneurs, this episode is a masterclass in resilience, the messy evolution of an iconic brand, and the relentless drive to build, adapt, and try again—no matter the outcome.

Transcript

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[Guy Raz]

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[Colin Angle]

there's no one like you. And there never will be.

[Guy Raz]

From the producer Bohemian Rhapsody There are many legends, but There is only one Michael. Rated PG13. In theaters April 24th.

[Colin Angle]

Certainly the dream was, let's be honest, we were promised robots.

[Guy Raz]

We humans were promised robots.

[Colin Angle]

Yes, we were gonna build robots. And everyone asked for a robot vacuum cleaner from the very first day.

[Guy Raz]

Wait, when you would meet people, they'd say, oh, when is Rosie, like from the Jetsons, gonna be in my house?

[Colin Angle]

When are you gonna clean my floor?

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Colin Angle set out to make robots part of our daily lives and brought us one of the most iconic home helpers ever. The 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 20 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. 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. 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, and by helping soldiers identify and disarm landmines and roadside bombs. When Colin Engel and his co founder started iRobot in 1990, they didn't have a business model, they didn't have capital, they didn't even really know who their customer was going to 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 cracked 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 once defined 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 iRobot start much earlier with Colin. He grew up in upstate New York. At a young age, he was already building and fixing things.

[Colin Angle]

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 crane to automatically lift that glass of milk and carry it on cables into the kitchen and really shut down the house for a few days.

[Guy Raz]

So you were really more of the kind of kid who would take things apart, maybe like, or go to Radio Shack and solder things together.

[Colin Angle]

So yes. But if you asked me, are you a jock or a nerd? I would say, well, I'm a smart jock because I love sport. And I played soccer, I was a wrestler, I played hockey. During the summers, I did canoeing, and so that I was a whitewater canoer and wilderness guide. So the physicality of my existence was balanced by my love of building and creating. And to me, it was a wonderful and healthy balance.

[Guy Raz]

And so it's not surprising to me that when you decided to go to college, you decided to major in electrical engineering. You went to MIT in 1985, and that was your passion, electrical. I mean, I imagine this is what you wanted to do your life.

[Colin Angle]

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 happened 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, you know, I was making conversation, hey, what? Where are you going? He said, you know, I'm going to go apply for a summer job at a robot lab as part of this UROP program. And, you know, I asked Joel if I could come with him and maybe apply for a job too. And, you know, he kind of gave me a dirty look like, I'm going to this to apply for the job. But, 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 was actually really interesting. They gave us all a blank piece of paper and they said, 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, gee, I built a 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 had this epiphany saying this might be the place for me, because, gee, I'm at MIT and everyone is already done writing down the stuff that they have built, and I'm not done yet. And I handed my paper and I got this job.

[Guy Raz]

And this lab was run by a guy named Rodney Brooks, who met many people who know something about robotics. He's sort of considered to be a pioneer in this field. And the job was to be like a researcher at this lab. Or was it a paid job or was it.

[Colin Angle]

So it was paid and they had projects. For example, this professor, Rod Brooks, said, okay, Colin, we've got this robot, Seymour. It has a 12 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 said, okay, I'll work on this project. And, you know, I did the obvious thing. I built a candy machine. So I decided that the right way to open doors wasn't to build a robot arm, because that was hard. The right way to do it was to put a candy machine on this robot and drive up to the door and offer candy if anyone would open the door for it. Part of me was being a wise ass. But this idea that robotics isn't a thing, it's a toolkit was an early lesson that I was taught. Because when you say a 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.

[Guy Raz]

And I know that at some point, at least you were involved in helping Rod build something called Genghis. And anyone who's been to the Smithsonian, I think it's on display there. It's an insect like robot that can walk on six legs. And this was kind of a, a revolutionary robot that was created at the time.

[Colin Angle]

Yes. So Ron was interested in planetary exploration and this little silly robot was able to successfully climb over very rugged terrain, more successfully than robots that were using supercomputers. And, and the AI processor on this robot was an eight bit microprocessor with 256 bytes of RAM, not kilobytes bytes of RAM.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Colin Angle]

So we decided we liked working together. And so I was about a year and a half into the master's thesis. Rod said, he said, hey, Colin, I got something to ask you. I said, okay. And it's like, well, I'm thinking about starting a robot company based on behavior control. And I said, okay, I'm in. I'll run it.

[Guy Raz]

That was, that was easy.

[Colin Angle]

That was. I mean, yeah, it was. I didn't.

[Guy Raz]

He wanted you to run it or you volunteered to run it, or kind of both.

[Colin Angle]

He was telling about it because I think he wanted to be involved, but

[Guy Raz]

he didn't probably have the time. Right. Because he's also teaching classes and publishing. I mean, he couldn't run a business as the CEO, presumably.

[Colin Angle]

Right.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. All right. So this company that he wants to start would of course become iRobot. And it was going to be him and you and another student from MIT, Helen Graner. And this is 1990, so you're like in your early 20s. And so what was your sense of what this robotics company would be.

[Colin Angle]

There was no core application. There was a need at the time where people would say, hey, can you build us a robot like Genghis that we could go and program? Because it takes a long time to build a robot.

[Guy Raz]

Who would ask for that?

[Colin Angle]

So Rod had a pretty good network. You know, it would be like Boeing or Mitsubishi.

[Guy Raz]

So 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, I'm connected, Rod. It was like, I'm connected. And let's, 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 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?

[Colin Angle]

Yes. We did not take venture capital until year eight.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Colin Angle]

So in the beginning, we had designed these robots and Mitsubishi would say, I want to buy a legged robot. And we would say, okay, but what

[Guy Raz]

would they want to do with it? Just to see it, just to have it.

[Colin Angle]

They wanted to do AI research, but had no robot to do research on.

[Guy Raz]

I see.

[Colin Angle]

And we had a line of a wheeled robot, a tracked robot, and a legged robot that we would sell for between five and $10,000. We would get paid half of the money up front. We would use that money to go out and buy the parts. I had invented a way of building the robots. They were kind of origami robots. They were made out of bent sheet metal.

[Guy Raz]

Okay.

[Colin Angle]

It was really quite an ingenious early way 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.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. And it didn't seem like you guys were starting a consumer products company. I mean, it seems like the business was going to be for military applications, maybe space, military, maybe some industrial, but not this. You weren't in any way thinking about consumer products or customers in that way. You were probably thinking about building a business that was going to work with governments.

[Colin Angle]

We didn't know. Certainly the dream was, let's be honest, we were promised robots.

[Guy Raz]

We humans were promised robots.

[Colin Angle]

We humans were promised robots. Right. And so that, you know, it was a little bit of a. If not us, who. If not now, when are we going to 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 going to clean my floor?

[Guy Raz]

Wait, sorry. When you would meet people, they would ask you what you did for a living.

[Colin Angle]

You would say, I build robots.

[Guy Raz]

I build robots. And they'd say, oh, when is Rosie, like from the Jetsons going to be in my house?

[Colin Angle]

When are you going to clean my floor? Right. Because they thought of Rosie from the Jetsons and that's what they wanted.

[Guy Raz]

And you would hear this from the

[Colin Angle]

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 $5,000? If you are, well, maybe I can do something for you. And it would say, well, no, no, I can't spend $5,000 on a robot vacuum. If I could do that, I would hire someone to clean my floor.

[Guy Raz]

But I guess I'm wondering is when you would hear that, it sounds like it would be a little bit annoying because actually a lot of what you were doing was for research for government or military or space purposes. Right. Which you could argue from your perspective. You could think, well, we're actually doing something much more consequential, like we're building robots that could lives or could explore space. I mean, was that in the back of your mind?

[Colin Angle]

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'm building robots for the military, I'm building 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, iRobot was great at technology, but really didn't have much talent within the company to understand markets and understand pricing and understand.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, you guys were a bunch of.

[Colin Angle]

We're a bunch of nerds.

[Guy Raz]

Science nerds. You didn't know about marketing or distribution or.

[Colin Angle]

We certainly didn't have it. We didn't respect it. Even you weren't allowed to say marketing without saying weenie, you know, immediately afterwards. I mean, it was very much an engineering culture.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. So, I mean, so given all of that, how were you actually going to become a real business? Like, how are you going to come up with a sustainable model?

[Colin Angle]

The breakthrough for us actually was a business model that we discovered. We would come up with 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.

[Guy Raz]

That was a deal. That's pretty risky because you would have to depend on their resources and their willingness to commercially exploit that robot.

[Colin Angle]

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 a fine example.

[Guy Raz]

This Essie Johnson, right, Is that SC Johnson. Huge, massive company. They own tons of consumer products that we use all the time.

[Colin Angle]

Yeah. And they've sort of divided into the consumer brand that we all know and then the professional that develops cleaning chemicals for janitorial services. Their problem was. So they sell the chemicals that are used to clean floors.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Colin Angle]

And so the idea was if we created chemicals which were specially designed for robots to clean the floors, then Johnson Wax owns more of the solution and can create a differentiated value proposition. Right. Because 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 creates a good business.

[Guy Raz]

And this was an autonomous robot you're talking about?

[Colin Angle]

Absolutely.

[Guy Raz]

So, okay, so I, I'm. Obviously we're. I think any. Everybody listening can start to connect the dots of where this is headed. But this is still 1995, 96, 97. You're working on this thing.

[Colin Angle]

Yep.

[Guy Raz]

But I'm assuming they never commercialized it. It never went anywhere.

[Colin Angle]

That's correct. We weren't going to succeed as a business until something actually broke through and became.

[Guy Raz]

Right. Because you were making no money.

[Colin Angle]

We were paying ourselves. We said. I say making no money. We were paying salaries, we were paying overhead, we were paying for parts, we were developing ip. I mean, it was. We were having a ball. No one left.

[Guy Raz]

Everybody was just psyched to be in this lab tinkering.

[Colin Angle]

We were on a mission.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Colin Angle]

And we were very successful at getting press and validation. We got the COVID of magazines, we were on the COVID of National Geographic. We were on the COVID of Scientific American. We were on the COVID of Popular Science like four times.

[Guy Raz]

And even though you weren't making consumer products, it was because you were making products for, I think, a lot of the military applications.

[Colin Angle]

Like, well, remember, nobody was making robots for consumers.

[Guy Raz]

That's true. Right, right.

[Colin Angle]

But, you know, the company's mission statement was build cool stuff, deliver great product, have fun, make money, change the world. It was powerful because we were going to be the people that made the robot industry real.

[Guy Raz]

Let me come back in just a moment. IRobot launches two products that could not be more. 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. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the late 1990s, and as part of iRobot's 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 kind of toy it was gonna be?

[Colin Angle]

Well, they wanted to make a baby doll. Okay, was the first one.

[Guy Raz]

And what did they want the baby doll to do?

[Colin Angle]

Well, what did I want it to do? Because 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 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 could go do a napping play pattern. Or if you're feeding it, okay, I should do a feeding play pattern. It was really cool. It came out in 1999 and called My Real Baby. And we sold 150,000 of them, I think. And they introduced us to low cost manufacturing. And so did we make any money out of it? We got our costs covered for three and a half years, but we learned how to make low cost robots.

[Guy Raz]

And you learned a hell of a lot about how to make consumer products.

[Colin Angle]

Correct. That's where we learned how to make consumer products.

[Guy Raz]

It's interesting because I looked at these, my real babies, and they did well for a short period of time, but then they were discontinued. And I guess some of the reviews, and again, these are reviews from adult writers, were that some people felt they were a little creepy. But you know, when we were doing

[Colin Angle]

development at first, my Roy baby's eyes look left and right as opposed to opening and closing. Oh, wow. And that was really creepy. So that was like, lesson one. It's like, okay, you can't do that. And I remember there was a crisis right before we launched, because the baby, when it was young, 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 and became convinced that the robot was saying, baby, baby, bite my butt. And so we. 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 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 just very real and part of the journey of consumer products.

[Guy Raz]

I want to just pivot for a sec and ask you about the business side, because we're now getting. You know, we've covered a lot of what's happened in the 90s, and really. And I think it was only in 1998 where you took on some outside funding. You got. You finally raised some money, which is. But what I'm more interested in is you, because you were 22 when you became the CEO in 1990. So by 2000, you're 32. Right. And you. And I mean this in the most 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. And you didn't go to business school. You're not gonna go to do a business administration degree. And so how did you learn over those 10 years how to run a company?

[Colin Angle]

Well, you had to make choices. And my journey at iRobot started back when I was a wilderness guide.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Colin Angle]

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, you know, and all sorts of drama. And so that sitting in the CEO role was actually very comfortable to me. Now, what wasn't comfortable was putting down

[Guy Raz]

the soldering iron, because that was your passion. That's what you were good at.

[Colin Angle]

My passion is building.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Colin Angle]

And along the way, I realized that building a company that could build cool stuff counts. And I think that one of the habits I had that allowed Me to succeed was whatever I was doing on any given day. I tried 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, who are going to do a better job than I can do? Yeah, I mean, I remember viscerally I used to love 3D CAD. You know, it was like one of my happy places.

[Guy Raz]

Computer assisted design.

[Colin Angle]

Yeah, making 3D designs of things. And I hired this guy and he was like a fresh out from college and he sat down and in the first day he created something spectacular. And I looked at it saying, wow, that's spectacular. And my heart was saying, I should never do 3D CAD again.

[Guy Raz]

Nice.

[Colin Angle]

It was like, oh crap. Okay, fine. 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. Well, that's not going to work. Or have you thought of this to indirectly guide decision making processes.

[Guy Raz]

Let's talk about defense products for a moment because I, you know, if you are a defense contractor, your client is the government. Right. And so, and that can be a big business. That's why all these defense contractors are headquartered in Washington D.C. because they want a piece of the action. You guys had contracts with darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

[Colin Angle]

Yep.

[Guy Raz]

You did something called the packbot, which was an all terrain robot that was designed to detect bombs and then dispose of them. And these were actually used in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military.

[Colin Angle]

Absolutely. So if you think about like a pizza box with tracks on either side, you're close. And then we started being able to put arms on them and so that they could be used by a bomb disposal team. When 911 happened and we sent troops into Afghanistan, we saw on the news that they were sending the airborne troops into the tunnels in 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 while 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 Packbot robot that we designed and said, you gotta send this to Afghanistan.

[Guy Raz]

How many total? Do you remember? How many Packbots did you eventually sell to the military?

[Colin Angle]

I mean, it was thousands.

[Guy Raz]

Thousands.

[Colin Angle]

Wow.

[Guy Raz]

And each one, well, I guess the price eventually went down to about 45, 50 grand.

[Colin Angle]

But yeah. And so that, I mean, we might have gotten up to maybe 50 million of revenue coming in from the defense side.

[Guy Raz]

And probably. I'm sure some of these pac bots got blown up, right?

[Colin Angle]

Absolutely. I mean, probably 500 to 1,000 of the robots were destroyed, but that was okay.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. You're saving a human life.

[Colin Angle]

Of course, we would get postcards from the soldiers saying, you have saved lives today. And it was very moving. And there was one robot that we actually got back where on the head of the robot, someone in pencil had sort of ticked off every time that robot took out an ied.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Colin Angle]

And we got it back because finally the bomb got the better of the robot. And the ID technician apparently carries this back to the depot, tears in his eyes. Can you fix it? Like, it's a fallen comrade or a dog, right?

[Guy Raz]

Like, yeah, because of course, dogs are used. Yeah. It's amazing. I know I was familiar with these because I. Back in the day, I was a war reporter and spent two and a half years in and out of Iraq and saw these in action. And they were remarkable. I mean, iRobot still was a relatively small company, and you had all of these concurrent projects. You had, you know, you got these robots, right, detecting these packbots for the military. You've got, you know, working on an SC 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 these dolls for Hasbro, and so there were some consumer products. So you had learned about mass production and consumer marketing. But what's the origin of Roomba? How do you start talking about, hey, wait a minute, let's make this.

[Colin Angle]

You know, I told the story about how people would come and say, hey, Colin, when are you going to clean my floors? And so we knew this was a good idea. And one of the early employees, a guy named Joe Jones, had actually built while he was working at mit, a little round robot that picked up some. It couldn't actually pick up dust, but if you crumpled up the right size, little bits of ball, it could suck it up. It could suck it up, you know? And then 12 years pass, and the toy contract was coming to an end. 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 15 grand in parts, and I'll have a prototype. So they went and they. They made it round. And it was round so that it would never drive into anywhere that it couldn't turn around in its own diameter and escape. And it dragged an electrostatic cloth, like a Swiffer cloth behind it. It wasn't a vacuum.

[Guy Raz]

Okay.

[Colin Angle]

And it kind of worked, but it

[Guy Raz]

didn't have no eyes. Now it's different. No camera for navigation.

[Colin Angle]

No, no, that came much later.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, gotcha.

[Colin Angle]

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.

[Guy Raz]

Right. Because if it was just randomly bumping, you couldn't guarantee that it was going to clean the entire floor of the room.

[Colin Angle]

Correct. You know, no one's going to die if you didn't. But 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.

[Guy Raz]

Right. It's just. That's just a dress. Just dragging a piece of cloth on your floor.

[Colin Angle]

Right.

[Guy Raz]

I can do that.

[Colin Angle]

And so that they would say, well, how much would you pay? And it's like, well, we pay 40, 50 bucks for that. It's like the battery costs 40 bucks. Bucks. I mean, come on. The. You know, this isn't going to 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 was like, okay, 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. We 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 called it a squeegee vac. Between two little rubber blades is a very narrow hole. 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 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 small debris, we had invented a new way of vacuuming that was incredibly efficient. And so that, you know, it's. Why didn't Roomba happen earlier? Well, it just needed to have a small, desperate company that happened to be expert in mine hunting toys and industrial cleaning cleaning to come along. And then it's. Then it's kind of Obvious that what you should do. And, you know, some of our biggest challenges had to do with how do we sell this thing, because we had far less experience on that front.

[Guy Raz]

This is in 2002, when you finally had a product to launch.

[Colin Angle]

Finally had a product to launch. And we thought Sharper Image was going to do it. And then they backed out. And I called up Brookstone.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, I was going to say Sharper Image. No, then you call Brookstone.

[Colin Angle]

Right. And the Brookstone story was amazing because the only person who answered the phone, because 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 said, okay, well. Well, I guess you can come in. And so we brought. You know, 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. 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. Let me. Let me show to my boss.

[Guy Raz]

And you could demo this. You could say, here you go.

[Colin Angle]

Yeah, yeah, we had working demo.

[Guy Raz]

Would you bring, like, Cheerios or something to like, put on the ground?

[Colin Angle]

So my secret was to. I would like a vacuum cleaner salesman. I would have a little Ziploc bag of Cheerios in my back pocket.

[Guy Raz]

You literally had. I just said Cheerios because I think of kids and Cheerios.

[Colin Angle]

No, no, Cheerios was the best. Because what I would do, you know, we'd be in their conference room, and they would say, oh, that's neat. Does it actually work? And I said, well, of course it works. It's like, really prove it. And so I would take these Cheerios out of my back pocket. I would sprinkle them on their. 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. Roomba is great at Cheerios.

[Guy Raz]

Great.

[Colin Angle]

The dust, the big chunks, everything. And it was. You know, Cheerios are bright, so on a dark carpet, they show up really well. And. And it's like, oh, my God, it works. And we went to, like, from the lowest to the highest level at. At. At brookstone in about 40 minutes. And then the head of product or merchandising came in. We showed them Mark. It's like, oh, that's pretty cool. But we couldn't possibly sell this for any price above $200. And we had planned on selling it for $199.

[Guy Raz]

Amazing.

[Colin Angle]

And so that we launched with Brookstone, and about two weeks later, I get this call from the woman managing her account, Pam Camelstein. 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 it's like, well. Well, pretty good. You know, we'd like to. We'd like to order some more product. And it's like, really? Well, how much? And she said, well, how much can you build?

[Guy Raz]

Wow. How did that. How did that happen? I mean, Brookstone, of course, we. I remember we did an episode on the Tempur 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 just because it was so weird and unusual? It got press coverage.

[Colin Angle]

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 showed it working.

[Guy Raz]

Yes.

[Colin Angle]

It would draw traffic into the store.

[Guy Raz]

In the mall.

[Colin Angle]

In the mall.

[Guy Raz]

Right. In the shopping mall. Yeah.

[Colin Angle]

So it demoed really well. But combine that with the press, because we had no money to advertise. We had $5,000 a month for PR, I think was our budget. But that whole shtick where I go into the conference room and throw Cheerios on the ground. No one believed this thing worked. And then when they saw it working, then if you were press, you had a secret. And nothing is better than taking a skeptic and flipping them into being a supporter. And we had 150 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 70,000 Roombas in the first three months.

[Guy Raz]

That's incredible. So you guys were probably popping champagne bottles thinking, this is it. We finally struck gold here.

[Colin Angle]

Absolutely. It was validation. After 12 years of beating our heads against the wall again. 12 years of wondering whether we would ever find that robot that everyone could get.

[Guy Raz]

It's amazing. I read that by the end of that year, I mean, what a turnaround. 14. Almost $15 million in revenue.

[Colin Angle]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

For iRobot, which is incredible, given that the Year start out not good. I read that on the strength of that amazing. Those three months in 2002 use very understandably ordered a ton of robots to be made for 2003. Because you sell 70,000 in three months, you're going to need hundreds of thousands for 2003.

[Colin Angle]

Right. So that euphoria certainly turned around Fast. I mean, 70,000 in a quarter, we should sell 300,000 in 2003. And 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.

[Guy Raz]

It was just a practical commercial showing what the thing did.

[Colin Angle]

Yeah. And it didn't resonate.

[Guy Raz]

I haven't seen that commercial. Was it just like a. Literally like, hey, our floor is messy. Why I got this. Like, was it.

[Colin Angle]

It didn't show any people. It just showed the robot driving around the ground, picking up stuff, going under things.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, my God, you should have put a cat on it.

[Colin Angle]

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. But, you know, that didn't work either. The. No, no. But, you know, so we ended in 2003. It was after Black Friday, after Cyber Monday, and we had sold a grand total of 50,000 robots from that year. And we're sitting on 250,000 robots.

[Guy Raz]

That's not good. I mean, that's a lot of inventory.

[Colin Angle]

And yeah, that would be existential crisis time.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back in just a moment, Roomba gets a marketing makeover from a totally unexpected source. A Pepsi ad starring Dave Chappelle. 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 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.

[Colin Angle]

We used to bring the whole company together for standup 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, it's like, you know, Wednesday after Cyber Monday. And the guy running the E commerce store said, hey, why did sales triple yesterday? And nobody knew. There was no new press, there was no new anything. And then I think it was an intern who raised his hand and said, you know, it's Funny. 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 Pepsis 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 Roomba and he says, a vacuum. It's like, God, the whole world didn't know Roomba 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 onto 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 250,000 Roombas in six

[Guy Raz]

weeks after that ad. After that ad hit, Pepsi basically made an ad for you without even telling

[Colin Angle]

you, with celebrity endorsement, with, you know, and it was funny. And we kind of 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 2004. Suddenly, we tripled our sales from 2003, 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 last 150 hours, which was the European standard for upright vacuum

[Guy Raz]

cleaners, to last before it needed to be recharged.

[Colin Angle]

To last before it died.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, oh. Before it died.

[Colin Angle]

Right.

[Guy Raz]

Oh.

[Colin Angle]

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 we were having a huge crisis where people were having their Roombas break very early after six months of use. And so that we had to make a decision as a company to just ship them a new robot.

[Guy Raz]

You had to just a free replacement.

[Colin Angle]

Free replacement.

[Guy Raz]

That. That must have cost you a fortune.

[Colin Angle]

It did, but this was a moment to preserve the brand. And, you know, another wonderful truth is, if a company stands behind its product, you generate more customer loyalty. Than if that customer never had a problem with their product at all. By investing in the brand, iRobot became a trusted and respected and beloved brand.

[Guy Raz]

And presumably you were making. You had learned about mass production while you had worked with Hasbro a few years earlier. So I'm assuming you were producing these in China. Right? I mean, that that was the only way to make them affordable.

[Colin Angle]

Yes, they were manufactured in China for many years until much later in the game, we moved it to Malaysia.

[Guy Raz]

Malaysia, okay.

[Colin Angle]

Yep.

[Guy Raz]

So within two years, I think the iRobot's doing $100 million, almost $100 million in revenue. You still have the PackBot, which is still an important product, but in 2005, you guys go public, you become a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. And help me understand when you filed for an IPO in 2005, because in 1990, it was three people. Do you remember by that point how many employees?

[Colin Angle]

IRobot had probably 250 employees by that time. But I think it was 2008, 2009. We plateaued 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 asked me at the time, what's the perfect Roomba, I would tell you, well, the perfect Roomba is the Roomba you never see, you never touch, and you come home and your house is clean. Right. I mean, it's. Right. It sounds pretty compelling. Unless you put that in the context of actually hiring someone to clean your home. Right. Because if you remove Roomba and you insert cleaning person and you say, imagine a cleaning person coming in to interview for a job, 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 going to do a great job. Am I hired? Well, that sounds a little creepy. And the innovator and the early adopter are willing to believe that this technological solution is going to be cool. But the early majority, which we needed to continue growth, absolutely did not.

[Guy Raz]

And that's the customer you need to actually scale.

[Colin Angle]

Right. So that early majority is where companies go from being interesting to being valuable.

[Guy Raz]

Okay. You start to plateau, and you've got to convince people that this is something they need. What do you do? I mean, is that the technology is getting better, so you, as the consumer, can actually have more agency over the machine.

[Colin Angle]

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. Because 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 wasn't going to go and knock over the precious vase 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 iRobot and robot vacuum cleaners as a category really started eating vacuum cleaner sales.

[Guy Raz]

All right, So, I mean, I think eventually by, I don't know, maybe 2016 or 2014, I think you'd already sold 10 million Roombas. But I have to imagine that in your mind at least, and certainly in the mind of others, if the company is really going to 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 imagine you're starting to think, well, we got to come up with other things that we can sell.

[Colin Angle]

Right. You know, we needed to diversify. And, you know, the obvious second act to us was wet floor care or mopping.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Colin Angle]

So we developed a robot called Scuba, which was a wet mopping robot. We also looked at, we thought lawn mowing was going to be our big second act, if not mopping robots. And so that we invested tremendous amount in a robot called Terra. You know, should we be working on a dishwashing robot? Should we work on a laundry folding robot or a bed changing robot? And, you know, the answer is no. But what we did do is started realizing that Roomba was an amazing smart home device because we could figure out where your rooms were, we could figure out whether your other smart devices were that idea that if I could only have a Roomba 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 led me to saying, hey, iRobot 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 iRobot, it felt like a good idea.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. Because by 2020, you'd sold 30 million Roomba robots, mainly Roombas, around the world. And we're entering Covid. And you know, there's a lot of challenges, But I think 2021 was the year where your revenue peaked. You hit over one and a half billion dollars in 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 cheap knockoffs that are coming out. Right. And there are, there are competitors that are making robot vacuum cleaners that may not have been as good, but that's cutting into your market share.

[Colin Angle]

Right. So there was a period of real disruption starting in 2020 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, I'm stuck at home, I should buy a Roomba. So that 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 $22 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 starting to drop.

[Guy Raz]

There was a perfect storm of just challenges. And this is going to lead to the Amazon acquisition offer and also why it made sense. It certainly did make sense because 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 result. Right. And they were probably going to, they were excited about integrating this with the smart home and also building other products, maybe, or developing other products.

[Colin Angle]

Absolutely. It was like a win win. Our investors were going to win the consumer wins, and the employees of iRobot get to be innovative again.

[Guy Raz]

Amazon 2022 makes a bid to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion. Amazing. What an incredible close to, at that point, 32 years of iRobot. Right. I mean, what a cool result. And so now, of course, 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. There's the FTC in the us, The European Trade Commission, I think is what,

[Colin Angle]

I can't remember what it's called, EC or European Commission.

[Guy Raz]

Right. And as the FTC had conducted an antitrust investigation, essentially saying, or their argument, or what seemed like their argument was Amazon, this would be A monopoly that Amazon already had a bunch of different robotics companies. This was going to be a monopoly. Amazon acquiring another robotics company is a problem.

[Colin Angle]

I mean, that doesn't make sense since. But yes, that was, that was the argument, as you describe.

[Guy Raz]

And so at some point in 2024, 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?

[Colin Angle]

We made the decision when it was clear that the European Commission and the FTC were blocking this deal. And the FTC blocked this deal knowing that they were effectively putting iRobot in a box and handing it to somebody else.

[Guy Raz]

In other words, they, you're saying they knew that if they blocked this deal, you guys had to sell at some point because your business wouldn't survive and you'd be forced to do that. They just didn't want Amazon buying it. That was their position.

[Colin Angle]

Now we're into the land of speculation. But it does seem that way.

[Guy Raz]

It, it's. I know, you know, I understand why the FTC exists 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. And also, it's like you guys were offered $1.7 billion. I mean, that's a lot of money and a lot of lives that were going to be changed. And they can say, no, you can't do that, you can't sell it.

[Colin Angle]

I mean, it doesn't make sense. Right. 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. I was deposed as part of this process and I was walking between sessions, walking the facility and on the doors of the agents at the ftc, the employees, like badges of honor. On the doors were deals blocked.

[Guy Raz]

Like people would put on their doors. Like blocked this merger.

[Colin Angle]

This merger. Blocked this merger. I mean, the biggest loser was the consumer and the. This deal. Right. Certainly, I certainly lost. My robot lost. Amazon lost. But the biggest loser was the hundreds of products, innovative products that could have come out as a result of this merger. Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

Colin, you. Shortly after this unravels, you step down. 34 years at the company as CEO and eventually, within a year, I think it was sold to a Chinese company which now owns all the technology and all of the products that you guys built.

[Colin Angle]

Yes, we used to, past tense, lead the consumer robotic floor care industry. We don't anymore 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.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, it's, it's wild. I mean, especially when you think about sort of the, the geopolitical context here. Right. The reality is that if there's a US company that spends 35 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 happened in China, and it was the opposite ended. Ended the opposite way, I think it would also be people in China would sort of be asking the same questions. Right. Like, how is it that we spent 30 years developing this technology, now it's in the US or now it's in Germany? So it is. Yeah, I mean, it's. It is. It is what it is. I guess when you step down were you went off on to create a new company, I know you're still kind of in stealth mode. Stealth mode? Yes. Right. Stealth mode. So you can't really talk about what you're doing, but it is, we can sort of assume broadly it's in robotics.

[Colin Angle]

Absolutely. It is in robotics, it's in consumer robots. It's taking advantage of this amazing new toolkit, generative AI, and using these generative tools to control robots. Because I'm still who I am. I'm still this builder. And so 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, you know, all we can do is move forward. I think every time I write an email, I sign it onward because the things that drive my passions still drive my passions. And when I go 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 iRobot. Sure. You know, it's, it's, you know, it's a journey, and the journey's not done yet.

[Guy Raz]

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, in the way that you wanted it to end, but you still had incredible success with this product and the brand. How much of 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 had to do with being lucky, the right place, the right time with some of these products?

[Colin Angle]

You know, the journey had some amazing serendipitous moments, but they were enabled by sitting back and actually doing the work. One of my early mentors, when I presented in one of my first board meetings a 12 year plan where the year the revenue in year 12th 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, and 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 I would say that, you know, here we are 35 years in, I've got one big disappointment and thousands of bright shining moments of innovation and steps forward. And I like those odds.

[Guy Raz]

That's Colin Angle, co founder of iRobot. 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.

[Colin Angle]

I might have something that, that I want that robot.

[Guy Raz]

Go work out now. I know it's warm in bed, I know you're comfy, but get out of bed.

[Colin Angle]

I will, I will hold you to that. And we'll see what the future brings.

[Guy Raz]

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 [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was produced by Kathryn Seifer with music composed by Ramtin Erabloui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Noor Gill. Our engineers are Patrick Murray and Kwesi Lee. Our production staff also include Sam Paulson, Chris Masini, John Isabella, Alex Chung, Kerry Thompson, Casey Herman, Rommel Wood, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this.