IRobot

“For all practical purposes, we are the only consumer robotics company that is shipping in the United States, and ironically, the largest consumer robotics company in the United States.”

“We did not take venture capital until year eight.”

“I think it was six and a half years before I started a month with enough money in the bank to make payroll.”

“The breakthrough for us actually was a business model that we discovered. We would 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 c…”

“It came out in, 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 costs covered for three and a half years, but we learned how to make lo…”

“I mean, it was thousands.”

“And so that, I mean, we might have gotten up to maybe fifty million of revenue coming in from the defense side.”

“I mean, I, probably 500 to a thousand of the robots were destroyed, but that was okay.”

“At the time there was no navigation system good enough to give you an actual position.”

“By breaking vacuuming into two pieces, one for doing large debris and one for doing small debris, We had invented a new way of vacuuming that was incredibly efficient.”

“We sold 70,000 Roombas in the first three months.”

“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.”

“And we sold 250,000 Roombas in six weeks.”

“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.”

“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 i…”

“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.”

“We were spending 22 dollars on a half a cent resistor so that we could actually build a Roomba.”

“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.”

“In fact, I had to testify, I was deposed as part of this process, and I was walking, you know, between sessions, walking the facility, and On the doors of the agents at the FTC, the employees, like, badges of honor on the doors were deals blocked.”

“We used to, past tense, lead the consumer robotic floor care industry. We don't anymore. China does.”

“And the FTC led by Lena Kahn chose to block that deal because I think Benedict Evans said in his place because of an insipid monopoly in the house vacuum cleaner marketplace, very tongue in cheek, right? It was an absurd decision at the time. It only got more …”

“I probably favor more allowance for M&A to happen. I think there's been some kind of, you know, dubious cases around, you know, why can't iRobot get, get bought by Amazon? Why can't Facebook buy Meta, buy, buy the Giphy or whatever, the 50 person VR company? L…”

“We need to get back to a place where, you know, Microsoft and Google can go buy, you know, a company that's de minimis relative to their size. You know, Amazon can buy vacuum cleaner company, you know, iRobot without, you know phalanxes of lawyers and having t…”

“I don't think this matters one iota to Amazon”

“They bought iRobot, which prompted some absolutely hilariously, kind of delusionally paranoid things about, oh my god, Now Amazon is going to have a millimeter scale accurate model of your house, and just think what they could do with that. Now their advertisi…”