Colin Angle on iRobot, Regulation, and the Future of Physical AI

Transcript

Colin Angle (00:00.416)

A robot was never a science project. You know, we didn't raise venture capital until year eight. From the very first day, if we wanted to eat something other than ramen for dinner, we needed to sell robots. You know, the crucible which birthed me was one where you had to be pretty damn sure that the robot you were building was going to make some money because otherwise you didn't eat.

 

Brian Heater (00:35.102)

Hey, welcome to automated. I'm Brian Heater, the managing editor at the Association for Advancing Automation. have a very special episode for you this week. Colin Angle is actually someone I've spoken with several times, many times over the years, usually on stage in front of a bunch of people. This is actually our first time speaking on the record since he left his role as the CEO of iRobot, though, given everything that's happened in the news over the past several months, we do obviously discuss that part of his life in quite a bit of detail. Colin also offers a bit of insight into what he's been working on since at familiar machines and magic. So thanks so much to Colin, as always, for a great conversation. Thanks to you as always for tuning in. It would dramatically improve my day if you liked and subscribe to the show and our newsletter of the same name. And I will see you on the other side of the interview.

 

Interview:

So we we actually floated the idea of you coming on the show a few months ago and you told us you wanted to wait it out until you had some news to announce. Obviously some some things have changed since then. You have some some stuff to talk about right now. Let me start by asking you. Is your relationship with iRobot currently if at all?

 

Colin Angle (02:03.08)

It's really not at all. About two years ago when I stepped down as CEO of iRobot and then left the board, that team has a lot to do and it was easiest for me to just do a full step away. really my understanding of their strategy in the last year and a half is basically zero. Certainly I read the news like everybody else.

 

Brian Heater:

You've you found out on like Sunday with the rest of us.

 

Colin Angle:

I found out on Sunday with the rest of us on December 1st, there was some other filings that sort of tipped the hand as far as where things going. yeah, it was, man, okay back up again, as we were saying before we started recording, obviously, like you and I have, I was going to say history, but that makes it sound more sorted than it actually is. You and I have spoken many, many times over the years, but we haven't spoken in quite some time again, because I think, you you've been keeping your powder dry on what you're working on. Certainly, we haven't really had much more than a couple of like DMs on LinkedIn since the transition. So.

 

Brian Heater:

When that initially occurred, when Gary initially took over, you know, again, you had your your co founder of the company, you had been there for, you know, like 30 some odd years at that point. Did you have conversations with him? Did you give him any advice when he was taking over?

 

Colin Angle (03:38.99)

I mean, during the transition, we definitely had a few conversations. There was limited to trying to make sure that he understood what I was leaving and my thoughts on things he should be worrying about or paying attention to. But it really was one, two conversations. You know, there was a lot going on and Gary was eager and ready to jump right in. So it felt like he knew what he wanted to do. And it was time for me, honestly, to go step away and let him manage the ship.

 

Brian Heater:

I think at the time, obviously I was still at TechCrunch at the time when it happened. And I believe at the time, I think I tried to interview him, but I'm sure that he was really busy and they were dealing with transition stuff. But I wanted to ask him the same thing that I asked. you know, when the new Peloton CEO took over or, know, essentially, you know, why obviously like this job, you know, you're stepping into kind of a difficult position. This is a bit of a challenge. coming out at a hard time. You know, he wasn't handled. He wasn't handed an easy, easy job. It was a difficult task. He was stepping into something pretty difficult already.

 

Colin Angle (05:39.022)

Absolutely. The whole challenge and one of the reasons why we're chatting today is that the situation that led to that moment in time was one from which I think many should take a lesson, put some eyes against because coming out of COVID and really looking at the situation that iRobot was in, landscape had gotten much, much more competitive. What was happening in Europe, what was happening in Asia, what was happening in the US, much less what had already happened in China, was to the detriment of the market leadership that iRobot had traditionally enjoyed since we launched the product way back in 2002. When I was looking at our strategic plans, how do we diversify beyond being a single product company? What is our role in the home? All of these really critically important questions required levels of investment that were stretched relative to the profitability of the company at the time. When Amazon called and really became clear that our long-term strategy and Amazon's long-term strategy was quite aligned. Amazon was willing to lean forward and make it something that really was in the best interest of first and foremost, the customer, the innovation that it would have unlocked to create new ideas and bring them into the smart home was personally very exciting and I think would have. tremendously benefited the customer, the investor in that robot would have gotten a good outcome and obviously Amazon was interested. So it felt like one of those rare triple wins that should have gone through and perfunctory review and boom, boom, boom, know, know, six, eight weeks later, we're off and running. But that's not what happened, obviously.

 

Gary's challenge certainly was born out of the fact that instead of that, 18 months passed in leaving iRobot in this weird purgatory where we needed to operate as an independent company. But at the same time, we needed to preserve the assets that Amazon wanted to buy. And at the same time, our access to capital change because honestly, the banking relationships, as you would imagine, are all the banks are making decisions that, you've been sold. there is no, if we're not the Amazon bank, there's not a long-term beneficial relationship there for us. And so you find yourself in a difficult situation of just waiting and at the same time spending tremendous amounts of money which if the deal fell through would be unrecouped, trying to ensure that the regulators have crystal clear answers to their questions and a true understanding of the situation that iRobot faced. We're in this purgatory for 18 months, paralyzed, and then a deal gets blocked. And it's like, okay, go on about your lives. And everything that led us to be looking for an acquirer or being open to being acquired 18 months prior was still there but worse. And so you're right. Gary got a rugged hand to play and needed to scramble.

 

Brian Heater:

This was a point I was making, obviously you've been discussing, it was ultimately the EU that really threw it down, but there were discussions here in the States. know Helen has been really critical specifically of Warren, local senator. But I also wanted to point out that...There was just so much going on. you mentioned again, a lot of specifically there are a lot of Chinese companies, the bottom end of the market, you know, market saturation that they're like at the top of the market, too. But then like there's a pandemic happening, right? I mean, like there's a supply chain shortage, like everything is becoming more expensive. And since then, you know, there's been been terrible.

 

Colin Angle (09:53.71)

You're giving me flashbacks, right? mean, Twitch may come back. Yeah, I mean, we were talking about this before, because one of the last times that you and I spoke was probably around 2019 at CES when the Terra, the lawnmower, you were talking around that. And I think if I remember correctly, that was kind of a casualty of supply chain issues already, wasn't it? I mean, it was a difficult time. you know, the shipping costs went up double, tripled, quadrupled. And the first part of the pandemic, everything shut down. And then the second part of the pandemic, we couldn't get parts. We were buying, you know, little tiny resistors that were supposed to cost five cents for twenty five dollars each simply because We couldn't build product without them. so, you know, for 17 years, had a great run. And then it seemed like the world was conspiring against the profitability of the company. And at the same time, we were looking to continue to innovate. It's why the Amazon deal made all the sense in the world for us to take the tremendous engineering talent. the vision that was aligned with what Amazon was trying to do and make the journey continue because building a new category, this robotic floor care category in the world is a full contact sport. mean, it's something that is fragile. And if this country desires leadership, you know, it needs to be attended to.

 

Brian Heater:

I should point out, obviously, throughout the years, there were other attempts at diversification beyond the Roomba.

 

Colin Angle:

Yeah, you know, and none of them really took off like Roomba. It's not to say that we had run out of ideas, but, you know, the history is the history where consumer robotics in the home is challenging. And there's only so many different wallets that, you know, places where value can be created. You know, it's been a personal passion and journey for 35 years for me and I'm continuing that journey with my new company to try to crack the equation. And there's good days and bad days and certainly the whole period of time leading up to, you know, saying yes to joining forces with Amazon was a particular sequence of challenging events. And it was a very good option for us at the time.

 

Brian Heater (13:02.112)

In hindsight, it's obvious to say, yeah, well, it took 18 months. You know, you couldn't have seen that coming. again, a confluence of things. Nobody knew exactly how the pandemic was going to play out. And in a lot of ways, it's still playing out. The the terrorists are still playing out. But do you think ultimately that there were just too many eggs in that Amazon basket for iRobot?

 

Colin Angle:

Certainly, the board believed that the Amazon deal was the best alternative. And once you commit yourself to the path, you're kind of committed to the path. And we had agreed that we were going to do everything possible to preserve the assets that Amazon had acquired, according to the terms of the deal. And then you're supposed to, again, operate the business as if there is no deal subject to the terms of the operating company. Well, no, the operating companies would say what you can and can't do, right? Because Amazon bought a thing. You have also an obligation to preserve the value of the thing that Amazon bought. And typically that works just fine and yeah if the regulatory period is two or three months, six months, get to a year and a half, it's just hard. But particularly in a dynamic environment. so that predictable and well-communicated pain was being experienced as Basically, the maximum allowable time period to review a deal or drag on the review of the deal happened. that was that was hard. So did we have too many eggs in the Amazon basket from the moment we signed the deal? That was the basket. Yeah. And certainly was a case that when the deal was blocked 18 months later after being frozen in time. You have no choice but saying, okay, what do we need to do? you know, I, you know, give credit to the operating team at iRobot after I departed of making hard choices to try to do everything in their power to revitalize and give the company a path forward. you know, honestly, entering bankruptcy is not the end. That's another step in, you know, a courageous and challenging mission to preserve as much of the value as possible. To some extent, that's not the core of the conversation. At least in my perspective, the core of the conversation is why the hell didn't this just, why did this not happen? Because it wasn't because there was a monopolistic threat of abuse. In the European market, we had a 12 and a half

 

Brian Heater:

Sure.

 

Colin Angle (16:17.666)

percent market share, which was declining. The number one market leader was in the market for only three years. And so it was nearly the perfect definition of a vibrant, competitive marketplace.

 

Brian Heater:

You feel like Helen does it that effectively like the US and the EU are both trying to make points and you're a sacrificial lamb?

 

Colin Angle:

I would say that our situation was clearly communicated, that in my judgment and having been party to a profound amount of research into market position, as well as the duties of the European Commission and the FTC in evaluating these types of deals, that the situation where somehow Amazon acquiring iRobot was going to create a monopolistic position contrary to the best interests of the customers was just not met. so everything else is speculation. So you could say, if not sure that then why? And I think that that is the answer is clearly some other reason.

 

Brian Heater (18:05.238)

I'm asking these questions in good faith because I honestly like I'm not entirely sure the machinations of how boards work in the background. Is there a sense in which like, you know, if you had really like plan some robust plan B, then that would not have been in good faith when you were doing this deal with Amazon. Like if you had planned like, you know, some other like entire like getaway or some contingency plan.

 

Colin Angle:

The board is, I mean, we have a dual duty as a company to continue to operate the business as best we can as an independent company, which includes making decisions to try to ensure that our product line is as competitive as possible. And we were making those decisions while simultaneously operating under these covenants that talk about, you know, one of the big ones, you know, preserving the talent that Amazon was hoping to acquire and making sure that the technology that they were hoping to bring on board was protected. These are the types of things that, you know, you can reasonably imagine that Amazon was interested in. you know, a full scale, you know, the type of actions that ultimately the leadership team of iRobot felt like they needed to take on when the deal fell apart were not accessible during the pendency period because that would require dismantling a lot of what iRobot was about.

 

Brian Heater:

This is good information. I guess to sort of distill it, you have to focus on the day to day. You have to focus on operating a company. You have to focus on selling Roombas and then you have to focus on supporting the rumors that are out there. And then the other piece of that is insofar as you're able to, you've got to focus on maintaining that, you know, in a sense, like all of these acquisitions are also acquires, right? You've got to sure that like the really smart people stick around for those transitions.

 

Colin Angle (20:00.428)

I mean, again, Amazon was paying $1.6 billion for an organization that had for decades led the world in innovation in the domain of the consumer household. it's so obviously that needs to be maintained. so that, you know, I think that really the Again, it is true that come the end of that pendency period in the blocking of the deal by the US and the European Commission, iRobot was faced with a challenging hand to play and is and continues to do the best it can to to play that hand. You know, I think the reason why you and I are talking about is why did this happen? Sure. What is America's commitment? to leading industries that it helps to create. I look what's happening with electric vehicles. Look what happened with drones. Look what happened with cell phones. We seem to be a country which is skilled at inventing devices and industries which are going to become industries which command billions, trillions of economic value. and then feel little obligation to try to nurture these industries and do what these industries require in order for this country to maintain a leadership position. During this whole process, I was getting deposed at the FTC. And it was a really bizarre process because here's the Federal Trade Commission whose mission it is to protect and catalyze commerce in the country. I went into the interview really feeling like the person sitting across the desk from me should be my friend, should be, you know, okay, Colin, how are we going to make this happen? What are the challenges? What is going on here? it couldn't have been further from the truth. In fact, between sessions, I was walking the halls and you would see the examiners' offices with their doors closed and posted on The doors, like trophies, were printouts of deals blocked. And it just felt so wrong. Right. I mean, the FTC plays a vital role in helping to police and prevent the biggest abuses of monopolistic behavior. And I think that's incredibly important. And as a part of their duty that, you know, nothing I should say should say, you know, we should give real look at it. But the goal is protecting the consumer, protecting the the economic interests of our nation. Are we doing that? Here we are again with physical AI, the next chapter of robotics, where humanoids and embodied AI is opening up new economic opportunity, which is predicted to be worth trillions of dollars are need. And they're certainly being chased by foreign countries and foreign companies. And what is going to happen? Are we going to learn the lesson of iRobot and say, the question is, what can we do to help? Or are we going to say, well, I don't really like that company. think that

 

Colin Angle (24:05.486)

So I'm chatting with you today, not so much to complain about. Not to re-litigate history,. it's history. what are we taking away as a nation? Was the outcome of iRobot the outcome that we as a nation would have hoped to have happened? Was it predictable? Absolutely. Was it right?

 

Brian Heater:

But you also don't want to speculate on the specifics of why this specific deal was targeted as well.

 

Colin Angle (25:14.19)

You know, I think that the chairman of FTC was very outspoken in, you know, as to concerns and objections. they had less to do with iRobot, more to do with the acquiring company. You can look at the market conditions, which I robot market share in significant decline, the significant raise in increase in market share going to other new companies entering the market. And it does not take much of an economics degree to ask yourself, is this the hallmarks of a anti-competitive monopolistic position? Clearly not. so again, it leads to, OK, so why did this happen? did the right thing happen and I am not Lena Khan. I don't want to play thought police, but I can say with great conviction, it had nothing to do with iRobot's market position in both the North America and the European marketplaces because the facts don't fit. So, I mean, ultimately there was all of this FTC regulation, you know, getting caught up in that, that was making the process longer and longer and longer, that was requiring more and more money on your end. But also, I mean, it was kind of a tag team effort, right? I mean, also ultimately the EU kind of put the final nail in that coffin. Right. you know, it's you reaching out to Gary Shapiro at the Consumer Technology Association. You know, he was very outspoken at the time around, you know, evidence he had around the the European Commission and the FTC working together. You know, I was not party to that. But, you know, it is the case that the FTC track record of blocking big tech deals during the prior administration. I think that something on the order of seven of eight that she tried to block were reversed in court. And so that based on the merits of the actual case, we never had that day in court because we were blocked by the European Commission, which has a three year appeals process. So there is a process just from a practical standpoint.

By the time that process played out, the world has already moved on. So it's a process which is much more difficult to scrutinize. We get to choose as a nation how we want to support our business. And what happened to iRobot is history, right? It's done. There's no undoing those facts. But there are lessons learned as to

 

Brian Heater:

How can this nation better incubate the next industry.

 

Colin Angle:

Yeah, you know, and I think that, you know, Secretary Lutnick is saying some really interesting things about AI that are encouraging to me. You know, as we think about physical AI and generative AI as emerging industries of profound impact, they're going to live up to their potential. Really, the only question is, what is America's role in participation in those industries. And I can tell you things like state-by-state regulation as opposed to a national policy will be a chilling impact on the growth of these industries. We need a national policy. We need to understand where the rules are. And I think that we need to ask ourselves when it comes to &A and AI companies going public. what is the FTC stance going to be? Is it going to be, hey, this is a good thing, we want to help? Because blocking &A for reasons that are difficult to understand puts a chilling pale on the innovation economy as a whole, right? Because entrepreneurs and big tech, which is the primary exit for

 

Colin Angle (29:30.338)

tech companies is &A, primary acquirer is big tech. Is that door open or closed? Well, the lesson of iRobot is that door may not be as open as you think. That does not help big tech or investment into technology companies. It does not help that entrepreneur saying, do I jump off the cliff and start hanging my shingle and start a new company or not? mean, so again These things have ramifications that extend well beyond a singular instance. And iRobot was a tragic singular instance of a very unusual and difficult to understand situation where the transaction was blocked. Let's not do it again. The question around iRobot's bankruptcy is, Godspeed, please figure it out. Let the customer.  continue to enjoy the benefits of the innovation that the iRobot brand and organization represents. The reason why this conversation we're having is important is because there's a $5 trillion industry which is going to develop over the next several decades. What is America's role going to be? It's not like we can close our eyes and make it go away. That ship has sailed. It will be there. Do we want to lead it or do we want to say, let's push it offshore? And that would be a tragedy.

 

Brian Heater:

If you had to project going forward, what was your sort of, I guess, getting, or as many specifics as you're kind of comfortable talking about, was your kind of five, 10-year plan? What did the future look like? Would iRobot have continued to evolve and how would it have addressed that changing market, you know, with the sort of the bottom end players and obviously like now we're having a very different conversation around home robotics.

 

Colin Angle (31:44.736)

I laid out a strategy back in 2020 around the role that robotics could play in the smart home. And Amazon was central to that. Alexa was a really big part of that. When I say that the interests of iRobot and Amazon are aligned around a strategic direction, that's sort where I'm talking about. think that nothing has changed. At least in my perspective, the smart home is still broken. It is not living up to people's expectations because the complexity of the smart home, the technology world, needs to solve the complexity hurdle if the smart home is ever going to reach its potential. it gets at, what am I really excited about and working on now? In the world, according to Colin, which I am uniquely authorized to speak to, the robotics industry moves through a number of necessary progressions in order to advance. The first hurdle is, does your robotic solution deliver more value than it costs to produce? This is the hurdle that trips up 99 percent of robot companies because robots are really expensive and value creation is really hard. It's one of the things that Roomba got right.

 

Brian Heater (33:16.92)

This is how you beat Electrolux that first time around, right?

 

Colin Angle:

Yeah, I mean, it's like, come on, guys. And, you know, it's what I got wrong with mopping robots. The value of the mopping robot was not sufficient to to make that a commercial independent success. It was it provided enough value to give a vacuum robot a boost when compared to a vacuum robot. without that, but as an independent product didn't work. again, all everything I'm talking about, I'm guilty of learning the hard way. Sure. The second hurdle is about trust. You know, how do we build robots that are sufficiently transparent and sufficiently controllable that people trust that the robot is going to do what they want it to do? And guilty, we almost blew up as a company based on violating that one. Because for many, many years, when asked, what is the perfect Roomba? My answer was, well, it's the robot you never see, you never touch. You just come home every day to a perfectly clean home. Sounds pretty good, Except if you apply that same logic to a cleaning person who came in and you're interviewing for the job and they say, well, actually, you can never talk to me. You can never tell me what to do. Just Don't worry, it's going to be good. just, you're going to come home and everything's going to be perfect. That person does not get hired. And so we had to re-imagine what the cleaning robot experience was going to be because what the consumer really wanted was clean around the kitchen table. If you do a good job, well, then I'll give you permission to clean around the kitchen. If you do a good job, then maybe I'll let you do more of the house. And so that this that was technologically inconvenient. Right, because you OK, now I need to know where the kitchen table is or I can't clean around it. And that's hard. But as a result of doing that. We move from being. Enviable and desired by the early adopters to the early majority and the industry continued to grow. Now, what excites me now is the next step. How do we build robots that care about the job they do? Care. In of like giving them, in terms of giving them, rewarding them, giving them feedback for the job, a job well done. Well, I'm not building cleaning robots. But if you apply this this idea of caring to a cleaning robot, does my cleaning robot care that it's doing a good job? Meaning that if it goes over an area and that area is not clean, doesn't mind, does it bother the robot? Do I feel like my cleaning robot is like Mo from Wally, right? That is going to go insane if it doesn't do a good job and is going to leave it on the on the playing field trying to make sure that my home is meeting the expectations that I signed up for. How do we do that? Well,

 

Brian Heater (36:38.286)

I know we're getting really philosophical because what does it mean for a robot to be annoyed or unsatisfied?

 

Colin Angle:

We're getting philosophical because you can do that now. And maybe not in a spiritual sense, but we can start giving robots, machines in general, a perspective on how they're doing. The technology exists for a lot more awareness and understanding. based on that, you can actually imagine more sophisticated interactions with their owners and to incentivize them to improve and to incentivize that relationship to be more effective. And I think that's super interesting. that's sort of, you know, when we think about, OK, there's five trillion dollars worth of value to be created in physical AI based on robots taking on much needed work in the in the home and in industry and in commercial and in the world. A huge percentage of that $5 trillion is not screwing in screws and toaster ovens in lights out factories. It requires interacting with people. so how do machines interact with people? look, I'm not talking at all about social relations with, you know, between humanoids and people. I'm talking about doing a good job, understanding what is being expected of me and taking feedback and being deserving of responsibility for doing the things that robots are going to be expected to do. I think it's a completely fascinating thing. And you can get to these moral ethical issues by picking up that football and throwing it as far as you can. But far more interestingly and relevant is what happens in the next One year, two years, three years, four years where the training wheels are on. No one's talking about human-human like relations between robots and people. We've got giant indices creep before that's ever relevant. But going back to the vacuuming example, what is the next frontier of vacuuming robots? Because I think that's a concrete example of what I'm talking about, how do we create a different kind of relationship? And as the world is thinking about who is going to be the global leaders in physical AI, those are the types of questions that need companies to help solve and use successfully use those successful solutions to do things of actual value that builds the next industry. And then we as a nation need to decide, are we going to protect and nurture that industry? Are we going to take a different tack?

 

Brian Heater:

So, I mean, would it be fair to say like short term that familiar machines and magic is in a hardware company that it's a platform company?

 

Colin Angle (40:06.888)

Absolutely. mean, I think that the building blocks for emotionally intelligent physical AI are building blocks that we have, you don't hear talked about and are critically important as we think about what are going to be the first applications of physical AI that I can actually go to the store and buy, because it's probably not assembly line robots. think that assembly line robots are incredibly important. I think they're coming. I think it's a vibrant area of intermediate term value creation. But there's a bunch of chapters to play out before that's dominant. And I don't think it will ever become dominant because I think these other areas of interest have value equivalent to those types of assembly and manufacturing related applications.

 

Brian Heater

So give me an example.

 

Colin Angle

You know, I think that how we're going to deal with issues around elder care, how we're going to deal with issues around overcrowding in hospitals and the the trend to create and discover ways of providing care at home as a means of alleviating what is increasingly an obsolete method of providing care. What are we going to do? What about entertainment?

 

Brian Heater

What about transportation? What about the smart home? Right. mean, everything I say goes back to the smart home. What if I at home that actually in a in acceptably deservedly trustworthy fashion felt like it cared about me? And so that rather than, you know, what if the complexity barrier was solved because I have a familiar type of relationship?

 

Colin Angle (42:05.74)

with the home I live in. And I'm able to outsource all of the complexity that I didn't want anyways. Because I know the house appreciates my budget, the house appreciates the levels of comfort I expect, the house appreciates the level of security that I want to within. you know, I come home and say, hey, how's it going? I'm having company over, you know, and All of that complexity or all of that sophistication in what I just said is understood by the house and translated into a thousand different actions. And, you know, if this node or that node or that light bulb or whatever breaks, either the replacement shows up at my doorstep with instructions around what to do, or someone shows up with my permission to go repair, you know, based on my, my, my preferences and I've abstracted away all of the complexity that is limiting us today. This is where things are going and it's having the world anchor around humanoids just so profoundly understates the industry which is evolving. It's an important part. I'm not anti-humanoid I think that it clearly plays a role, but it is not the story. I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for a little while, robotics is not a thing, it's a toolkit. meaning that if you thingify robotics and your personification of that thing is humanoid, you're missing the point. It's a toolkit. You when I left iRobot two years ago, it was like, okay, what do I do next? It's like, well, of course I know what I'm doing next because the world's greatest toolkit was just dropped in her laps and things I could only dream about doing 20 years ago or even two years ago are suddenly not just possible, they're feasible in a very short timeline. And that's super exciting. know, my mourning period over the Amazon deal was held two years ago and rapidly replaced with OK, let's not screw this up again. got this one was self-inflicted. Let's learn the lesson. Now let's take advantage of the innovative opportunity that we have been gifted or built for ourselves and turn that into value creation, which can help this country remain vibrant and at the forefront of innovation. It's a confluence of things, right? I don't know if you read or want to read Joe's book, or know, around the Roomba, but he talks a little bit about his own kind of like frustrations about it. But a lot of it, you know, I think you were saying that you learned a lot of things a hard way. I think that learning things a hard way probably could is also like, it could be a subtitle to.

 

Brian Heater

You know, your business book that you're writing because you were you were a technical founder and obviously like you know, I mean, you know, you know how to be a business person now. And you again, having talked to you many, many times over the years, you've always been excited about the possibility. But in addition to the way that these conversations around physical AI are like operating, lot of possibilities. Suddenly being at a startup and suddenly starting from scratch and suddenly like not having the same sort of not kind of being beholden to shareholders and you know, not having like a huge supply chain to deal with. I can tell that you're enjoying this and there's a lot of excitement and freedom that you haven't really had for years because I mean, it's just not possible to have that in a corporate structure.

 

Colin Angle (46:16.364)

Yes, except of course you can have it in a carpet structure. You have to build the right company. Sure. Right. I mean, I I mean, mean, You can't can't like you can't be like as flexible like with the ideas. I started once you commit to like an idea like you kind of have to follow it through. Right. My commitment is to build shareholder build value for my circles, whether they're whether they're investors or, you know, the public the public market. So what is cool is I have a blank piece of paper and I have 10,000 lessons learned. And I get to do it again. You know, if things go the way I want them to and we We all know that doesn't always happen, but more often than not, it does. My aspiration is for Million Machines to be 100 times larger than Iro, but ever once. And I believe that the opportunity there is to make that happen. And that would mean that I got shareholders again. I'm a public company. I've got, you know, that's not a downer to me. That is a necessary part of building the dream. And as you know, because we've chatted many, many times. To me, it doesn't count unless it's real. My goal is to transform the world again and take this pragmatic attitude of it has to deliver more value than it comes to create. needs to be trusted. It needs to demonstrate that it actually can have a more sophisticated relationship with owners and machines I've ever had before. That's really cool. And I get to do it. so that thank goodness for this innovation economy that exists that gave me a chance to take my blank piece of paper and assemble a dream team of people who have the same crazy optimism that we can build our way to solutions of problems that need solving again. Again, I have great appreciation for the Garry's of the world who stepped up or excited to go take on them the mantle of a company that needed some heavy steering after having the crap beaten out of it through a process that, again, in my mind was undeserved and tragic, and make the best of it and help the proud company that still is iRobot find a path forward. In the meantime, I'm going to go and try to invent the future that is going to make people's heads explode and bring more joy to the world Because I'm not done.

 

Brian Heater

So let me reframe that very convoluted question that I just attempted to ask. So because I know there were a lot of pieces to it. My my sort of impression, having talked to again Joe and having read that book is like their initial frustration is and their expectations early on. I think he expected joining what a company like I robot was in the early days is that it was going to be like more SRI than a corporation, right? That it was going to be like a laboratory where there was like more experimentation going on. you know, it became again, it became a company and it really did become focused on the Roomba. And as we've been talking about, you know, maybe there was a little bit more over the years, there had been some difficulty diversifying the product line beyond the Roomba. And what I'm asking you now is with this new tool book and You know, with all these breakthroughs in physical AI, starting from scratch and knowing, excuse me, knowing what you know now, do you think that it's possible to build a large robotics corporation in the U.S., a consumer facing robotics corporation that is truly diversified from a hardware standpoint?

 

Colin Angle

Without hesitation, yes. I think it's hard. I think you need to take a global perspective on how you're going to do it. You know, I'm voting with my time and soul that the answer is yes. And I'm pursuing it with the lessons of the last 33 years. You know, I think that, you know, iRobot was never a science project. You know, we didn't raise venture capital until year eight. Right. So from the very first day, if we wanted to eat something other than ramen for dinner, we needed to sell robots. And, you know, I went six and a half years at iRobot, never have any enough money in the bank at the beginning of the month to make payroll. And we always made it. so that, you know, the crucible which birthed me was one where you had to be pretty damn sure that the robot you were building was going to make some money because otherwise you didn't eat because what we were doing was viewed as so crazy that we were unfundable for eight years. And then we turned that around and we created something that created tremendous value to our investors and created tremendous value to them as a public company for many, many years until the confluence of challenges that came upon us as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation around supply chain and COVID and the rest of it put us in a difficult situation. And entrepreneurship is not particularly successful if you forget the business part. Yeah. And that's not for very long. so that, you know, we started with that being a core tenant. And it, you know, there's a million ways I robot could have been more successful or more successful faster. And it's easy to go backwards in time and say, well, gee, if we'd only done this. But I'm I want to make it clear that I'm not I'm not really get re litigating or in indicting that at all. What I'm saying is like in order for us to even be having this conversation, I robot had to do what it did and somebody had to prove that like there could be.

 

Brian Heater (53:09.868)

robots in the home and iRobot did that. What I'm asking now is that sort of like glass ceiling or whatever having being broken now, whether there's like now there's that sort of opportunity to really for kind of, guess, have the flood gates been opened in such a way where it can really be transformational as far as consumer robots? Are we really gonna see a sea change in the way that we've been waiting for for a very long time?

 

Colin Angle

If I have anything to do with it, absolutely yes. I am ambitiously re-entering this marketplace to build a platform which has hardware and software dimensions and anyone can say they have a platform. Your platform is really valued by also the applications or the initial applications you're going to use to prove it out. We're moving at startup speed to show the world and I look forward to chatting with you about that relatively soon.

 

Brian Heater

I know, I was just gonna say, so this is gonna end up being like a four or five parter, you know? We're gonna have to do the episode where we really talk about the early days again, because we didn't really get time for that. We're gonna have to talk about what you're working on now when you're able to talk about that a little bit more. Hell, like I'm happy to do an episode about clownfish if you wanna talk about that at some point too. You know, it's been really good to catch up with you and you know. Let us know when you're ready to talk a little bit more about what you're working on now. yeah, it's always a pleasure, Colin. Thank you so much.

 

Colin Angle (54:53.528)

Thank you, Brian. It's been a great conversation.

 

Brian Heater

Really love that interview. Honestly, one of my favorite episodes of Automated so far, and we have finally officially completed the iRobot founder hat trick. Thanks to Colin. Thanks to you for tuning in. Please like and subscribe and check out our newsletter over at automated.fm. We will catch you at the same time next week for another episode of Automated.