iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon
About this episode
Colin Angle shares the journey of iRobot and the creation of the Roomba, exploring the challenges and successes of building a household icon.
Colin Angle didn’t start out trying to clean people’s floors. He started out trying to shape the future–with robots. In the early days of iRobot, there was no business model. No steady funding. No clear customer. Just a belief that robotic technology would one day make the world a better place. In the early days, the company built babbling toy dolls for Hasbro, and roving bomb-detectors for the military. But for more than a decade… nothing truly took off. Until one idea—a robot vacuum—finally did. With the Roomba, iRobot created a category from scratch, and a product that felt almost like a member of the family. Tens of millions of units sold, and the Roomba became part of popular culture. But to avoid stagnation, iRobot had to sell to a bigger company. When a lucrative deal with Amazon fell through, the company hit a wall–and never recovered. This is a story about building a business in survival mode, creating a household icon, and eventually getting bested by forces beyond your control. What You’ll Learn How to launch a company when you’re not sure who your customers are Why iRobot engineers underestimated…
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