YouSaid · the spoken record

Colin Angle

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-04-13
most recent: 2026-04-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 12 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 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 Starward 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It is in robotics. It's in consumer robots. 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 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 passion 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 iRobots. Sure. You know, it's a journey. And the journey's not done yet.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's Mertra Blash. I mean, I mean, the biggest loser was the consumer in 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?”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 is walking between sessions, walking the facility. On the doors of the agents at the FTC, the employees, like badges of honor on the doors where deals blocked.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a robot in a box and handing it to somebody else.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 really rugged. Then people stuck at home started thinking, hey, I'm stuck at home. I should buy 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 Arumba 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”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly you have a new solution for the smart home. And really that was what led me to saying, hey, IRobot and 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. You know, we needed to diversify. And, you know, the obvious second act to us was wet floorcare or mopping. 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 a 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? 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 you are there. 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So that it was efficacy, control, and safety. And it opened up the marketplace to the next phase. Of growth when i robot and robot vacuum cleaners as a category really started eating vacuum cleaner sales.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, it sounds pretty compelling. Unless you put that in the context of actually hiring someone to clean your home, right? Because if you remove Rumba and you insert cleaning person and you say, imagine a cleaning person coming into 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 in my 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 to growth, absolutely did not.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably 250 employees by that time. But, you know, 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 ask 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did, but this was a moment to preserve the brand. And 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 Trusted and respected and beloved brand.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With celebrity endorsement. 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 Rumba to last 150 hours, which was the European standard for upright vacuum cleaners”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the whole world didn't know Roombo is a vacuum, but he knew it was a vacuum and he throws the potato chip on the ground. The Rumba 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 are ready. 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. We sold 250,000 Roombas in six weeks.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Used to bring the whole company together 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. 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did have 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. No. But 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It was validation after 12 years of beating our heads against the wall, 12 years of wondering whether we would ever find that robot that everyone could get.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The mall. Right in the shopping mall, yeah. 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. It was amazing. We sold 70,000 Roombas in the first three months.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that we launched with Brookstown, and about two weeks later, I get this call from the woman managing her account, Pam Camelsten. 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, pretty good. You know, 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?”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it's like, oh my God, it works. And we went to like from the lowest to the highest level at Brookstone in about 40 minutes and then the head of product or merchandising came in. We showed America. It's like, oh, that's pretty cool. But we couldn't possibly sell this for any price above $200 Had planned on selling it for $199”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 then so I would. Take these cheerios out of my back pocket. I would sprinkle them on their floor. With great drama, 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. Great.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Brooks One 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-defined 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, 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 we showed her the Roomba. And she was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Let me show it to my boss. And so she brought in her boss and her boss said, oh my God, that looks like it actually works. Let me show you to my boss.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had invented a new way of vacuuming that was incredibly efficient. And so that's why didn't Roomba happen earlier? Well, he just needed to have a small, desperate company that happened to be expert in mine hunting toys and industrial cleaning. To come along, and then it's kind of obvious that what you should do. And some of our biggest challenges had to do with how do we sell this thing because we had far less experience on that front.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 couldn't afford a lot of battery power. And so 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 what 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,”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can do that. And so that they would say, well, how much would you pay? And they say, well, we pay $40, $50 for that. It's like, the battery costs 40 bucks. I mean, come on. 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 we work on it two weeks? Give us 15 grand in parts and I'll have a prototype. So they went and 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I told this 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, couldn't actually pick up dust, but if you crumpled up little, the right-sized little bits of ball.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. We're on the head of the robot, someone in pencil had sort of ticked off every time that robot took out an IED. 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 fallen comrade.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 9-11 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 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 Pacbot robot that we had designed and said, you got to send this to Afghanistan.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My passion is building. 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 going to do a better job than I can do. I mean, I remember viscerally, I used to love 3D CAD. You know, it was like one of my happy places.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 And all sorts of drama. And so that sitting in the CEO role was actually very comfortable to me. What wasn't comfortable was putting down the soldering iron”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 they're like, well, 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to 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, the baby would say, hey, I'm being rocked. I guess I should be sleepy. And I 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 cost covered for three and a half years. But we learned how to make low-cost robots.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But 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. Made the robot industry real.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were on a mission. Very successful at getting press and validation. We got the cover of magazines. We were on the cover of National Geographic. We were in the cover of Scientific American. We were on the cover of popular science like four times.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were paying ourselves. I say making no money We were paying salaries, we were paying overhead, we were paying for parts, we were developing IP. I mean, we were having a ball. No one left.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT