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

“Breakthrough for us actually was a business model that we discovered. 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 at any IP that would jointly develop was jointly owned.”
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 certainly didn't have it. We didn't respect it even. You weren't allowed to say marketing without seeing weenie immediately afterwards. I mean, it was a very much an engineering culture”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, honestly no, because the dream of where are the robots we are promised. I wanted to build the robots 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, my robot was great at technology, but really didn't have much talent within the company to understand markets and understand pricing and understand.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 I would say, well, no, no, I can't spend $5,000 in a robot vacuum if I could do that. I would hire someone to clean my floor.”
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 humans were promised robots, right? And so that Know it was a little bit of, 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 introduced myself, fello, my name is Colin Engel, the answer would be not good to meet you, Colin. It would be when are you going to clean my floor?”
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 a really quite 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They wanted to do AI research but had no robot to do research on. And we had a line of a wheeled robot, a tracked robot, and a legged robot that we would sell for between $5,000 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.”
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 did not take venture capital until year eight. 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”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
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, so Rod 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. The AI processor on this robot was an 8-bit microprocessor with 256 bytes of RAM, not kilobytes, bytes of RAM. We decided we like working together. And so I was about a year and a half into the master 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.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 I 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 you know 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. 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.”
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 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.”
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 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 a GI built a gun out of Lego that could fire a piece of Lego track through plywood. 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 has already done writing down the stuff that they've built, and I'm not done yet. And I handed my paper, I got this job.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. you know, I was making conversation, hey, 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 Europ program. And, you know, I asked Joel if I could come with him and maybe apply for a job too. And, you know, you kind of give 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.”
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, 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 canoeer and wilderness guide. the physicality of my existence was balanced by my love of building and creating. And to me, it was a wonderful and healthy balance.”
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 mom would say, Bring your milk in from the living room. And I would say, okay, and then I would embark on a two-day long project to create a gantry cream to automatically lift that glass of milk and carry it on cables into the kitchen and really shut down the house for a few days.”
2026-04-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT