Roomba
product on 24 shows · 11 statements across 6 episodes · said 149 times in 60 episodes since 2016
How I Built This 42 
TBPN 24 
All-In 15 
the a16z Podcast 10 
My First Million 9 
20VC 8 
Big Technology 7 
the MAD Podcast 5 
Another Podcast 3 
the Neon Show 3 
No Priors 3 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 3 
Top Founders 3 
Acquired 2 
Latent Space 2 
Lenny's Podcast 2 
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1 
the Pitch 1 
Cheeky Pint 1 
the Knowledge Project 1 
WTF is with Nikhil Kamath 1 
Invest Like the Best 1 
Sourcery 1 
Catalyst 1
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 42TBPN 24All-In 15the a16z Podcast 10My First Million 920VC 8Big Technology 7the MAD Podcast 516 more shows
2026 51 mentions in 8 episodes 6 per episode
- iRobot: Colin Angle. How The Roomba Became a Household Icon
- And How Matic Won By Choosing the Most Boring Market in Robotics with Founders Mehul and Navneet
- Warning Signs For The AI Boom, Anthropic Passes OpenAI, Robinhood’s AI Trading
- When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
- Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | The a16z Show
- Building inference data centers on the high seas
- Box CEO on AI Agents & Why Enterprise Can't Keep Up | a16z
- World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 41 mentions in 22 episodes 2 per episode
- OpenAI Restructuring: Who Wins and Who Loses & Mercor Raises $350M at a $10BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Make $8K/day From These Side Hustles You’ve Never Heard Of
- We Interviewed the New Thiel Fellow Dropouts
- Steven Sinofsky & Balaji Srinivasan on the Future of M&A, AI & Tech
- Weekly Recap: Gwyneth Paltrow Saves Astronomer, Figma’s IPO, Top AI Researchers Ranked
- Weekend Special: Elon Recap, Balaji, Chris Dixon, Brian Armstrong, Crypto Day + Thiel Fellows
- Weekly Recap: Apple Sitting on $100B, Disney Enters The AI Race, Marc Andreessen, All About GPT-5
- Marc Andreessen on Why Apple Might Miss the Next Platform Shift
- 14 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 18 mentions in 10 episodes 2 per episode
- The Secret Billionaire Party (ep6)
- 6 startup ideas from the Tech Warren Buffett (make $120k/mo)
- Elon Musk SUES Sam Altman
- CHRISTIANITY: Why it's making a comeback (ep23)
- AI Predictions for 2025: Geopolitics, Agents, and Data Scaling — With Alexandr Wang
- Brian Halligan: Building HubSpot into a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
- Predicting AI’s Next Advances — With Suhail Doshi
- No Priors Ep. 48 | With Covariant CEO Peter Chen
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 8 mentions in 7 episodes 1 per episode
- HIBT Lab! Nuro: Dave Ferguson
- AI Keynote: Six Bold Predictions About The Future Of Artificial Intelligence
- No Priors Ep. 36 | With Hubspot's Co-Founder Brian Halligan
- Kevin Niparko: Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams | E1066 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- E137: Inflation cools, market rips, Ripple/MSFT beat regulators, NATO summit, cocktails of youth
- Ep #4 | WTF is ChatGPT: Heaven or Hell? | w/ Nikhil, Varun Mayya, Tanmay, Umang & Aprameya · Nikhil Kamath
- E116: Toxic out-of-control trains, regulators, and AI
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 12 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
2021 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2019 11 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
11 statements about Roomba, every show
Angle: No navigation system was good enough for early Roomba positioning
“At the time there was no navigation system good enough to give you an actual position.”
Angle: Roomba achieved energy efficiency by splitting debris and dust pickup
“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.”
Angle: iRobot sold 70,000 Roombas in its first three months
“We sold 70,000 Roombas in the first three months.”
iRobot Sold 250,000 Roombas in Six Weeks After Chappelle Pepsi Ad
“And we sold 250,000 Roombas in six weeks.”
Angle: iRobot sales plateaued around 2008 after exhausting early adopters
“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…”
Angle: iRobot paid $22 for half-cent resistors during pandemic shortages
“We were spending 22 dollars on a half a cent resistor so that we could actually build a Roomba.”
Chen: First consumer robots will focus on navigation rather than physical manipulation
“If I have to guess, it probably would be a home robot that don't involve much manipulation. So think of it as like a home robot that might be like a Roomba. It can follow you around, like you can talk to it. So like it has that navigation of movement aspects o…”
Marcus: Robust AI was formed to add common sense to robotics
“And, in fact, the point of the company that we formed is to add common sense, which the Roomba lacks.”
Consumers name Roombas and insist on repairing the exact same unit
“People will do it even with very, very simple robots, just like the Roomba vacuum cleaner. You know, it's not a very compelling anthropomorphic robot, and yet people will name them and feel bad for them when they get It's stuck and insist on getting the same o…”
Dave Turetsky: Roomba Succeeded by Solving a Task Robots Can Do Imperfectly
“The most popular robot ever in the history of robotics is the room of vacuum cleaner, because they found this one task that a robot can do poorly and still make you happy.”