Colin Angle
CEO & Co-Founder, Familiar Machines & Magic. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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He is best known as the co-founder and former longtime CEO of iRobot, guiding it from an MIT spinoff into a public company. Earlier in his career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he contributed to the design of behavior-controlled rovers that led to the Mars Sojourner rover.
1shows
1appearances
22statements
8resolved
5supported
1contradicted
63%fully supported
Everything Colin Angle said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Angle: FTC staff post blocked deals on doors as badges of honor
“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.”
Colin Angle Favored Amazon Acquisition Because iRobot Scooba And Terra Failed
“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.”
Angle: China now leads consumer robotic floor care instead of US
“We used to, past tense, lead the consumer robotic floor care industry.
We don't anymore.
China does.”
Angle: Standing Behind Broken Products Creates Higher Loyalty Than Flawless Operation
“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.”
Angle: Robotics is a problem-solving toolkit rather than humanoid machines
“This idea that robotics isn't a thing, it's a toolkit. Was early lesson that I was taught because when you see a robot to most people, they think humanoid, but given the journey I was on, robotics, was a box of parts that allowed you to make smart machines tha…”
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: iRobot sold 70,000 Roombas in its first three months
“We sold 70,000 Roombas in the first three months.”
Angle: iRobot Sat on 250,000 Unsold Roombas Late in 2003
“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.”
iRobot Sold 250,000 Roombas in Six Weeks After Chappelle Pepsi Ad
“And we sold 250,000 Roombas in six weeks.”
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.”
Angle: iRobot lost market share to Chinese fast-follower competition
“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.”
Colin Angle's New Stealth Startup Uses Generative AI For Consumer Robots
“It is in robotics. It's in consumer robots. It's taking advantage of this amazing new toolkit, generative AI, and using these generative tools to control robots.”
Angle: Genghis Robot Ran on an 8-Bit Processor with 256 Bytes of RAM
“The AI processor on this robot was an eight bit microprocessor with 256 bytes of RAM. Not kilobytes, bytes of RAM.”
Angle: iRobot Did Not Take Venture Capital Until Year Eight
“We did not take venture capital until year eight.”
Angle: iRobot Lived Month-to-Month on Payroll for Six and a Half Years
“I think it was six and a half years before I started a month with enough money in the bank to make payroll.”
Angle: iRobot Bootstrapped Early R&D at Breakeven Cost for Joint IP
“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…”
Angle: iRobot reached roughly $50M in defense revenue
“And so that, I mean, we might have gotten up to maybe fifty million of revenue coming in from the defense side.”
Angle: 500 to 1,000 PacBots were destroyed in combat
“I mean, I, probably 500 to a thousand of the robots were destroyed, but that was okay.”
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 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 sold roughly 150,000 My Real Baby dolls with Hasbro
“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…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Colin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | CEO & Co-Founder, Familiar Machines & Magic | 1 | 22 | 63% 5/8 | full record on How I Built This → |