Roomba: Hitting the Wall | Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control | 1

21:03Helen Greiner:Nobody else has done all that. That's us, man. Jones takes a moment to process this. He's surprised that he agrees. He pushes himself away from the workbench. Okay, I guess you're right. We know how to make something that's cheap but does something complicated. That's exactly what a floor cleaner for homes needs to be. Yeah, okay, let's do it. For the next six months, Jones and his fellow engineers spend their spare time working up a pitch for the kind of robot they hope to build. But Jones has been down this road before, twice in fact. He can only hope the third time will be the charm. Now, let's think about this for a minute.

21:47Helen Greiner:Joe Jones didn't suddenly have a better idea. The company had simply accumulated enough experience from a bunch of failed projects that an old idea suddenly became practical. And that's something that you see over and over in business. I know people talk about eureka moments, and that's great for Hollywood maybe, but the truth is something you don't have to have an MBA to understand. Timing is everything, or at least more than we're sometimes willing to admit. The basic idea stays the same. It's just that the world around it changes.

22:27Helen Greiner:It's December 1999 at iRobot's headquarters. Jones and his fellow engineer are meeting with an iRobot vice president to pitch their new robotic floor sweeper. Inside a small office, the two engineers stand on either side of an easel. The first page of their flip chart contains just one word. Dust puppy. Jones flips to the next page. In the center, there's another single word, clean. Arrows are drawn out in all directions from it. Bits of text explain what went wrong with the S.C. Johnson project. The robot was too big, too complicated, too square. Jones flips to the next page, which features a very different floor cleaner.

23:13It's small, round, simple.

23:17Helen Greiner:Like iRobot's military robots, it can find its own way around. And if it bumps into something, it'll just turn around. It'll be made from inexpensive plastic. And underneath, a carpet sweeper will push dirt into an onboard bin. Jones smiles as he finishes the presentation. The VP gives him a blank look. Joe, why do you think there's a market for this? Well, from the informal market research. Every time I tell people I make robots, they all ask, can you make me a robot that'll clean my floors? Everybody wants Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. You know what? I've gotten the same question. Well, let me ask you something.

24:03Helen Greiner:How much time and money would you need to make a prototype? 48 hours and two grand. The executive looks surprised. Sorry, Joe. No way. Wait. What? I've dealt with enough engineers to know irrational exuberance when I hear it. If you're going to make this work, you need more time and money than that. Tell you what, I'll give you two weeks and$10 ,000. For the next two weeks, Jones's two-man engineering team works night and day on their prototype. Then, they present it to iRobot's founders. The presentation is held inside an office outfitted with a low-pile carpet, chairs, and a small table. The prototype is a small white disc with three settings, spot, room, and edge.

24:52Helen Greiner:It even has a name, Scamp. After Jones flips the switch, Scamp goes about a business, spiraling around the room for a while, then making mad dashes toward the walls. It bumps off one, turns and heads back toward another. Piles of dirt that have been placed all over the floor disappear. The founders are impressed. Scamp is a go. But there's a catch. Scamp is just a starting point. To develop a working robot floor sweeper for the consumer market, iRobot will need to engineer, build, and test every tiny part until they have a model that's ready to sell. But the company's still too broke to fund that kind of R &D.

25:40Once again, it needs a development partner. So, Angle makes a call and gets a surprising yes

25:48Helen Greiner:from the same company that killed iRobot's last floor cleaner, S.C. Johnson. The consumer goods company funds the research on one condition. Scamp needs to have a replaceable paper dust bag that S.C. Johnson can sell to consumers whenever that bag gets too dirty. iRobot's engineers hate the addition, but they don't have a choice. They need S.C. Johnson's money.

26:19Helen Greiner:It's late 2000 in Boston. As work gets underway on Project Dust Puppy, another iRobot product debuts. It's a robotic doll made for toy maker Hasbro called My Real Baby. The toy is crammed with sensors. It smiles, it cries, and says uh-oh as if it has filled its diaper. Hasbro launches the doll just in time for Christmas with a TV ad. On screen, a young girl cradles the doll, which coos and squirms in her arms.

26:54Rodney Brooks:What you're about to see will astound you. It's My Real Baby, the amazing living baby. Hold her in your arms and the magic begins.

27:04Helen Greiner:The doll makes headlines, but it doesn't make money. Still, the sales dud is valuable for iRobot. It teaches the company how to cram sophisticated technology into an inexpensive consumer product. A clever combination. That's exactly what the Project Dust Puppy team is trying to pull off with its robotic floor sweeper. They're building a product that performs just like a vacuum. Only, it's not a vacuum. It's a floor sweeper whose bristles effectively brush all kinds of debris into a dust bag. No suction power required. It's definitely clever. But in the consumer market, clever design isn't everything.

27:51You know, this makes me chuckle a little bit

27:54Helen Greiner:because I think about how engineers tend to fall in love with how something works. But I think we'd all agree that most customers care about what problem it solves, right? Apple has walked this line for years, sometimes shipping technology that's technically less impressive than the competition, but which matches what people are looking for. If you've got some cool technological innovation and you think you can sell it, surely there's no greater test than this one. does it do what the customer wants it to? It's not about the vacuum. It's really about the floor, right? Right?

28:37Helen Greiner:It's summer 2001 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two years since SC Johnson agreed to fund iRobot's new floor sweeper project. iRobot's engineers and executives gather behind a one-way mirror to watch their robotic floor cleaner roll around in front of a focus group. The project has made great strides in recent months. The robot even has a new name. Branding experts considered and rejected the names Dust Puppy, Scamp, and Vroom. Also cast aside as one of the iRobot engineers' favorite nicknames, the Cybersuck. Instead, the company is going with Roomba, A mashup of room and Roomba. And now, the Roomba is getting its first market test.

29:27Helen Greiner:The robot easily scoops up Cheerios and aimlessly bumps against chair legs. The test group is delighted. When the demonstration is over, the moderator reveals the truth behind the robot's design. It's not a vacuum. It's actually a high-tech carpet sweeper. Suddenly, the mood shifts. Some in the focus group say they would pay good money for a robotic vacuum. But they won't pay much at all for what they see as just a high-tech broom. The negative feedback throws Roomba's designers into a fury. Returning to iRobot headquarters, they argue that it doesn't matter whether Roomba has suction power as long as it performs just as well as a vacuum.

30:10Helen Greiner:Some say the consumers just don't understand how creative their technology is. By the end of the day, the engineers simmered down. They glumly agreed that after almost a year and a half of development, the Roomba has to change. If the consumer wants a vacuum, the Roomba will be a vacuum. Weeks later, S.C. Johnson makes things worse. After spending more than a million dollars on Roomba's development, it suddenly decides to pull funding again. The good news is that it allows iRobot's engineers to drop the SC Johnson requirement to include a replaceable dust bag. Now they can build their vacuum with an onboard permanent dustbin.

30:58Helen Greiner:The bad news? Without SC Johnson's funding, Roomba needs rescuing again. end. But for now, the vacuum will have to wait, because iRobot is about to get a much bigger call.

31:20It's September 2001 in Lower Manhattan, and it's hours after terrorists and hijacked planes

31:26Helen Greiner:struck New York City's Twin Towers. A team of iRobot engineers arrives at the site of the collapsed towers. Their mission? Send robots into the refuge to search for survivors. They unload a pair of robots called packbots, machines that climb using tank-like treads and small flippers that rotate up and over whatever's in their way. The packbots were built on a Pentagon contract, originally meant for military reconnaissance in hostile, hard-to-reach spaces. They were still being tested when the towers fell. Now, they're joining similar robots from around the country at ground zero, crawling into gaps too dangerous or too small for human rescuers.

32:11Helen Greiner:But as the days pass, the search for survivors quietly becomes a search for remains. A little more than a month later, U.S. forces strike deep within Afghanistan. in. It's war, and soon the pack bot will be called to active duty, tasked with saving American soldiers' lives. The Pentagon's steady stream of money, along with some of iRobot's first venture capital funding, buys the company a little time. And as the months pass, the Roomba project reemerges. Just as iRobot's vacuum gets ready for market, something unexpected happens. Arrival gets in its way.

33:02Helen Greiner:It's November 2001 in Stockholm, Sweden. At its headquarters, the home goods giant Electrolux makes a surprise announcement. It's selling a robot vacuum, intended for home use. iRobot has known about this machine's existence for years, but with no new news or updates from Electrolux. The company assumed the project was dead. It wasn't. Electrolux calls its vacuum the trilobite, after an extinct marine animal that resembled a pill bug. Now, the trilobite doesn't exactly look like an insect. Instead, it looks just like the Roomba. It's round. It's short. It spins. It follows walls. Back at our robot's headquarters, one engineer thinks this news is a fatal blow.

33:53Helen Greiner:We can't compete with Electrolux. They're a$3 billion company. We're a$13 million company. Come on, this is game over. The Roomba team decides they have to see the competition firsthand. Two executives are dispatched to the only place it's being sold, Sweden. There, with one posing as an Argentine aristocrat and the other acting as his valet, they quietly purchase two trilobites and bring them back to Boston. Jones tears one apart. He finds the machine is beautifully engineered. It uses sonar, just like a submarine, to locate objects in a room. So, unlike the Roomba, the Trillabyte never bumps into anything.

34:39Trillabyte also has a shiny metal chassis, while the Roomba is made mostly of plastic.

34:45Helen Greiner:But Jones also notices some flaws in the Trillabyte. The Trillabyte lacks two of the Roomba's inventions, a sidebrush that sweeps debris away from walls and into the cleaning pad, and a dual-stage cleaning system that helps funnel dirt into the bin. And the Swedish machine has one more weakness. Its price. Electrolux is selling the Trilobite for$1 ,700. That's more than eight times what iRobot hopes to charge. At iRobot's offices, the panic starts to lift. Maybe this isn't game over. Maybe it's game on. What iRobot's done here really isn't that far off from what Southwest did by studying the legacy carriers, or what Netflix did by taking an X-ray to Blockbuster's internals.

35:38Helen Greiner:Once iRobot bought the competitor's machine and took it apart, they realized Goliath might be beatable after all. You'll find versions of this story all over business history. Sometimes the competition looks a lot more intimidating from a distance than it does in bits and pieces on the workbench. In September 2002, Roomba finally goes on sale. The product debuts at Brookstone, the Sharper Image, and Hammacher Schlemmer. Priced at just$199, it offers something consumers have wanted for decades, a real-life Rosie from the Jetsons. Customers love it. The first production run of 25 ,000 machines quickly sells out.

36:23Helen Greiner:iRobot CEO Colin Angle starts figuring out how to meet that demand with more supply. And as he does, he begins thinking bigger. Much, much bigger. Maybe too big.

36:53Rodney Brooks:Barbs sting you. His coldness sends a shiver up your spine. Your heart aches. Your ears burn. You yearn for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to profess their undying love for one another. You can't bear it any longer. Well, maybe a chapter longer. Performance is so good, you'll give love a second chance. Audible. Stories that speak to you. What if AI could recreate the voice of somebody you loved who died? What if it destroyed your reputation with words you never said? And what if you fell in love with something that was never human? I'm Mark Fennell, and in my brand new Audible original podcast, I'm travelling the globe to investigate the very personal ways AI is already changing our relationships, our memories, and our sense of what is real.

37:40Rodney Brooks:Unreal. Listen now on Audible.

37:54Helen Greiner:It's October 2003 in Massachusetts. iRobot is on a roll. Its defense business is busy supplying packbots to U.S. combat troops, and its Roombas continue selling well. And now from its brand-new headquarters, iRobot has just released a new TV commercial for the Roomba. The one-minute-long spot is set to jazzy space-age music, but on the screen not much happens. The Roomba moves forward mostly in a straight line traveling over carpets and floors. At one point the Roomba even disappears from the screen as it goes under a bed.

38:30Rodney Brooks:Now there's a smarter way to vacuum. It goes places you can't. It picks up what you see and what you don't.

38:40Helen Greiner:The ad closes with a toll-free number and lists a website where orders can be placed, and then a tagline.

38:47Rodney Brooks:Roomba Robotic Floor Vac. If it's down there, we'll get it.

38:53Helen Greiner:Orders don't pour in. The ad doesn't connect with customers the way iRobot CEO Colin Angle had hoped it might. And the timing is terrible. When the Roomba first hit shelves in 2002. It sold 70 ,000 units in just three months. Riding that momentum, iRobot made an aggressive move, ordering 300 ,000 Roombas from a manufacturing facility in China, counting on a 2003 sales boom. But as 2003 comes and goes, only 50 ,000 Roombas had been sold that year. Now, 250 ,000 robot floor vacs are sitting idle in a warehouse, and Colin Angle is starting to panic. He calls it an existential crisis.

39:47Helen Greiner:In late November, iRobot calls its entire staff together for a routine meeting. Angle tries not to let on how nervous he is about the Roombas languishing in inventory. Various division heads give status updates. When it's the iRobot's e-commerce manager's turn, he says something surprising. He tells the group, sales tripled yesterday. Angle interrupts. Whoa, whoa, what do you mean they tripled? The e-commerce manager shrugs. I'm not sure. Maybe there's some kind of new press about us. Maybe we got an endorsement somewhere. No, there's been nothing like that. Anyone know what's going on here? In the back of the room, an intern shyly raises her hand.

40:32Helen Greiner:Yes, go ahead.

40:33Rodney Brooks:I think it might have something to do with Pepsi.

40:38Helen Greiner:The intern describes the beverage giant's most recent commercial starring comedian Dave Chappelle. In the commercial, Chappelle is picking up his date. While she gets ready upstairs, he grabs a Pepsi and some chips. Then a robotic vacuum comes out of nowhere. Chappelle throws a chip on the floor and the vacuum sucks it up. Chappelle starts teasing the robot, waving his Pepsi can in front of its sensors. Suddenly, the robot attacks. Chappelle ends up on the floor as the robot gobbles up his pants. His date finds him standing in the living room in his boxer shorts. Get vacuum cleaner, I ate my pants.

41:14Helen Greiner:There's nothing I could do. With the ad making a splash, it takes just six weeks for iRobot to sell out its entire stash of 250 ,000 Roombas. So let's see. iRobot spent money making its own ad and it barely moved the needle. Then Pepsi turned the Roomba into a punchline and now everybody wants one. You know, here's another pattern you see over and over in this media-saturated marketplace. It's not just that people understand a product better when they see it in action. It's that when they see the product used in a real-world setting, many start to wonder, am I missing out on something? After the Pepsi ad, the Roomba keeps on showing up in pop culture.

42:00Helen Greiner:It's on Saturday Night Live, and the hit show Arrested Development, among others. All the laughs it's getting help iRobot sell its one millionth Roomba. And now, iRobot is ready to cash in.

42:20Helen Greiner:It's November 2005 on Wall Street. Flanked by iRobot's founders, a PacBot robot rolls toward a podium at the NASDAQ exchange and extends a robotic arm. The robot rings the opening bell, launching iRobot's IPO. Shares skyrocket, rising more than 11 % by day's end. Traders are betting on a robot-filled future. But to do that, they have to overlook most of iRobot's past. The company arrives on Wall Street, having lost money every year from 1990 to 2004. Its true revenues are up more than 540 % since the Roomba launched. But iRobot only recorded its first profit in 2004 with a meager$219 ,000. And not everyone inside iRobot is celebrating the IPO.

43:16Helen Greiner:For the engineer who made all this possible, it's starting to feel like someone else's party.

43:26Helen Greiner:It's November 2006 in Burlington, Massachusetts. Joe Jones is in his office stacking books on the floor. He climbs on top of the stack and reaches up to pull down a giant cutout of Bullwinkle the Moose. Jones first put the cartoon over his desk when he was on the Roomba development team. He considered that group to be misfits inside of iRobot. Engineers, designers, and marketers who didn't fit anywhere else. It seems like iRobot agreed. Soon after the Roomba launched, that development team was let go. The way Jones hears it, iRobot wanted people who could manage a product line, not the misfits who built it from scratch.

44:09Helen Greiner:Now, most of the original Roomba team has left the company, and Jones is about to join them. A colleague pops into Jones' office. Hey, Joe, so it's true you're really leaving? Yeah, I'm afraid so. Wow, I'm sad to hear that. Where are you headed, man? I'm looking for a startup. A place that'll do something new in robotics. You don't think iRobot wants to do something new? Jones shakes his head. He's been pitching new ideas ever since the Roomba launched. The company has passed on all of them, while it focused attention on the Roomba and its defense business. Look, I'm mystified by the company's disinterest in new things.

44:50Helen Greiner:It seems like it's lost its appetite for innovation. As the day ends, Jones heads to the parking lot with his belongings and his giant cutout of Bullwinkle the Moose. Soon enough, others will follow him out the door. In 2008, founder Rodney Brooks proposes an ambitious factory robot capable of safely working alongside humans. But Engel tells his old professor the project is a bridge too far for iRobot. Brooks leaves amicably, with millions of dollars worth of stock and options. A month later, founder Helen Greiner leaves too. She's chasing another vision that iRobot is not. Something called drones.

45:38Helen Greiner:Here's a little fact of life about successful businesses. The skills needed to get off the ground aren't usually the same as those needed to run the company once it does. Uber, eBay, Intel, there's a long list of companies where founders eventually headed in different directions because they saw different futures, they had different passions. In the short term, the change at the top can look like weakness. But the thing that's striking is how at companies that are successful over the long haul, this kind of change is almost inevitable. Three founders started iRobot. Now, there's just one left.

46:18Helen Greiner:But the Roomba doesn't notice. Led by its robot vac, iRobot's revenues just keep climbing. From 2008 to 2011, they go up by more than 50%. And with limited competition, the price goes up too. The robot that debuted at$199 now costs closer to$400. And in 2012, iRobot releases a high-end Roomba that sells for$700. But in May of that same year, iRobot gets rocked by a major announcement made by President Barack Obama, live from Afghanistan. The president announces a drawdown in U.S. forces with a plan to end the war by 2014. Within months, some U.S. forces board planes as the slow withdrawal begins.

47:13Helen Greiner:And with fewer troops, there's less need for iRobots, Packbots. For the company, it's an issue that's only going to get worse with time.

47:30Helen Greiner:It's early 2014 in Bedford, Massachusetts, at iRobot headquarters. Late in the evening, Colin Angle, the 46-year-old CEO and only remaining founder, sits alone in his office. In the hallway outside, a lone Roomba goes about its nightly chores. Angle removes his square-framed glasses and stares at the laptop in front of him. He reads an update. iRobot's defense-related revenue fell by more than half in 2012. It dipped by another 30 % in 2013. With their defense contracts in free fall, iRobot has already laid off 124 staffers. And with the war in Afghanistan set to end within months, Engel has to make a choice.

48:19Helen Greiner:Keep a business in decline or let it go. It's not an easy decision. The Pentagon helped keep iRobot afloat during its long financial losing streak. Engel closes his laptop. He's made his decision. He's going to pursue the sale of the Defense Division and its related technology. iRobot is going to become a consumer-focused company. For more than two decades, iRobot survived by being whatever it had to be. A defense contractor, a business-to-business robotics company, and the maker of a quirky little vacuum that Americans fell in love with. Now, for the first time, everything is riding on robots made for the home.

49:09Helen Greiner:And that mostly means the Roomba. Half a world away, though, competitors in China are ramping up. They're aiming to bring faster and cheaper robot vacuums to the masses. This fresh competition comes with a question. Can the Roomba sweep up its challengers? Or is the world's best-selling robot vacuum already headed for the dustbin?

49:39Colin Angle:Be sure to follow Business Wars on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can listen to new episodes of Business Wars one week early and ad-free right now. All you have to do is join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

49:59Helen Greiner:From Audible Originals, this is Episode 1 of Roomba, hitting the wall for business wars. A quick note about the recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said at the time. Those scenes are dramatizations, but they're based on research.

50:13Colin Angle:And if you'd like to read more, we recommend the book Dancing with Roomba by Joseph L. Jones and the Boston Globe story Out of Control by Charles A. Radden. I'm your host, David Brown.

50:23Helen Greiner:Joseph Guento wrote this episode. Our senior producers are Jenny Bloom and Emily Frost. Our producer is Tristan Donovan of Yellow End. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Our managing producer is Desi Blaylock.

50:35Colin Angle:Fact-checking by Gabrielle Drolet. Voice acting by Chloe Elmore. Sound design by Josh Morales.

50:41Helen Greiner:Kyle Randall is our lead sound designer. Executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis. Chief content officer, Rachel Giazzi.

50:54Colin Angle:Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC.

51:17Rodney Brooks:The End

51:32Rodney Brooks:at the World Trade Center's North Tower. Sujo's wife, Mary, pregnant with their first child, worked just next door in the South Tower. Suddenly, an explosion rocked the building, collapsing cubicles and walls. But as Sujo and his office mates raced to escape the smoldering building, they heard another massive explosion, and Sujo realized his wife and unborn child were also in grave danger. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.