Legacy and Hall of Fame

For basically as long as we've been dreaming about robots, we've been dreaming about robots that might clean our house because it turns out that cleaning and vacuuming are one of those activities that humans have to do and would really love to stop. Well, there's a better way . And it comes from a somewhat unlikely source, a group of researchers and government contractors in Boston. From the Virgin Box Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pears and today it is of course time for the Rumba All right, we're back. It's vacuum time . We were gonna just run vacuums in the studio the whole time and then we realized that was a terrible idea. Joining me in the studio, Gen Tui, the Virgin's senior smart home reviewer, hi Jen. Hi David, good to be here as always. I feel like the Rumba is like an important device in your life. It's a big part of my world. Tell me why . Well, on a personal level, I test a lot of robot vacuums, so it's all its fault because this was one of the first . And it's actually I was talking to my husband about our very first Rumber the other day pre askedpping for this and I was like, I sent him a picture and I said, Did it look like this one? Because I was trying to figure it out. And he's like, I have seen ten thousand robot vacuums . I don't know So but from the smart home space, it's one of the first smart home products I owned to say. Me too, actually, now that I think about it, I got the first one with the built in dust collection thing and it was like the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Also joining us , one of the people most responsible for this thing being on the table, Colin Angle, the CEO and co founder of familiar machines and magic, and the co founder of Irobot, the maker of Robomas. Hi, Colin. Hey, it's great to be with you guys. Thank you for joining us . Tell us about your current robot vacuum situation. How many, how many are running around just out of frame right now, would you say? Well, you know, the house is well equipped . So there's not a lot of manual vacuuming that happens at the Angle household. And you know, but still , I mean, we're promised a lot more robots in the home. So I feel like Ruma is taking the first steps and it's time to be taking more steps. I agree. So Colin, you, I was saying this to you just before we started. You are the first maker of a product that we're covering on this show that we have ever allowed to be on the show talking about their product. I feel privileged. I'm very excited. And it was Jan and I have both covered IROBAT Jen much more so than I have have. You guys met many times . This story is both longer and stranger, I think, than I even expected coming into it, and I'm very excited about it . But I think the place to start, Con , if I'm correct, is in nineteen ninety . Yep, with three roboticists from MIT. Yes. How might we do this? I'm doing this so good. This is all of our research is coming together. It's pretty hard to do this in front of the guys. I know, but this is this is good. It's like okay on the fly checking . This is great. Why don't you tell us about the three? Because the way I understand it is that actually the three of you that started this company what you were all interested in and knowledgeable about ends up actually being very important to what the company ends up being. So who was this group that came together to make this thing? So one of the co founders, Rodney Brooks was my thesis advisor at MIT and one day he called me in his office and said , Hey Colin, I'm thinking about starting a robot company . And I was just finishing up my master's as part of a PhD program, and I said, Okay, sounds good, I'll run it . And with about that much thought because I had decided that doing thesis sized robot projects was not particularly interesting because robots are incredibly complicated and take many years and many, many, many years of work to get it to happen. And so I kind of independently thought, hey, would be cool to start a robot company to build something actually useful . And so I was in , and so we started this company and my first call was to Helen, who was at the time working at a JPL , and she had come to the conclusion that maybe it's time to do something else. And so my call was well timed. I remember saying, Okay, we're starting this company . Are you interested? Answer, yes . When can you start? And she said, well , I'll get into my car tomorrow morning and start driving . And he's like, Don't you have a job? And it was like, It's okay . And so that pretty quickly we got together to build the robots that we were promised. We were sort of an early AI company. The only sort of real tangible technology we had other than ignorance and passion was this method ology that Rod had made to run AI on an eight bit microprocessor , which sounds a little crazy, but it was a f antastic strategy of building up lots of little behaviors that out from those interactions of small behaviors comes larger behavi or, more intelligent operation, and it was a radical strategy at the time, but opened the doors for practical robots. Now, Roomba came in year twelve. Right. So what you had started, you all signed up to this robot company, but did you have a clue at that point I actually was can I answer this question for you by reading some of your business models . Here's a thing that Colin wrote many years later . Build a Rover, send it to the moon, sell the movie rights. This was this was this really the first was that ? That was in fact the first business plan. I have a picture in my office of what this rover was supposed to look like. And we had the producer of the Blues brothers , a guy named Bob Weiss on our board of directors. So he's going to film it all. And we had a contract to get a I think it was a Chinese long march booster was how we were going to get it in the air. We had an agreement with NASA around sharing data, and built a six legged rover that became became a significant driver of the micro rover revolution. And my name's up on Mars as a result. And we tested our little rover out at Edwards Air Force Base , we flew it in a brilliant pebble, a Ronald Reagan era anti ballistic missile rocket that we had taken the heat seeker out and put our little robot in and showed that it could all work. So we were the first company to fail at being a private space company . It's a true honor. Yeah, you know, way back in nineteen ninety. Yeah. And I also found I a list from a piece you wrote for IE Spectrum with a slide entitled I Robots fourteen failed Business Models. I just want to read you a few of them because they are just delightful Sell robots to the oil industry to stimulate production in wells, sure, earn royalties on robotic toys, sell educational robots to museums , sell landmine clearance robots. There's a bunch more. This sounds very much like you knew you had a cool technology and had absolutely no idea what you were going to do with it. Is that a reasonable state of affairs? Yeah, we were a technology looking for a solution , which is always problematic. Yeah, amongst the worst strategies for entrepreneurship , our only saving grace was that we were we didn't raise any venture capital until year eight . If we had done it earlier, we would have certainly failed because it took many, many years before we turned to profit. And we had a business model where partnered with larger companies like the oil industry. They were interested, Johnson Wax, they were interested in industrial floor care . Baker Hughes and Halliburton on the oil side . So the remarkable thing, all of those failed business models profitable failures because we were paid to actually do that. The museum , you know, we did robots for the Sony Wonder Museum in New York City where you could actually play a video game like experience. And so that it subsistence living living , but it was living and we survived long enough to fail enough different ways to start to understand what it actually takes to make a valuable company with robots . Well, and that's that's an interesting , I think important point to kind of explore is nineteen ninety there were I mean, what was a robotic state then? So at the time , the robots were incredibly expensive . And so you could build a robot to go down and do underwater exploration You could build a robot to go into space. You could go build a robot to go into a nuclear power plant that was melting down and save it only because only a robot could do those tasks and so that the cost of the robot didn't really matter given that you were saving lives , breaking out of that seemingly unescapable reality that was shackling the robot industry into nothingness required two things , technology to allow the robot to be sm arter, to truly be autonomous. Yeah. And the second is to bring down the cost of the robot so that you could actually build something . Yeah , that didn't have to save the world to justify its cost . And you know, and so that many of the twelve years before Roomba launched between nineteen ninety and two thousand two was spent doing those two things . And probably the most important thing we did was build toys with Hasbro where started realizing that there are alternatives to building a robot out of machined aluminum and using connectors that cost seventy five dollars each I still remember I was working with Hasbro and just getting started and he's like, Okay , send me your catalog of all the gears that I can use and all the motors I can use to build my robot. And they said, I don't understand , Cullen, we don't have such a thing. And I said, Well , how could it be that you don't have a catalog of gears? And the answer was, well , we just designed it And if you need a gear, well you just injection mold the gear. In fact, Colin , the way to think about a toy is to want to know how much it costs, you should weigh it . And it's like, I don't understand. It's like, No , tooling is free . The cost of the plastic drives the cost of the toy . And that was just a completely different minds et to think that the human labor required to design the robot wasn't the driving factor and the cost to all of the machine time to mill your gears because really it was just injection molded plastic . You know, and maybe batteries were expensive and motors cost a dollar or fifty cents if they were typical toy motors. And it was a different world and opened up what was possible and ultimately spat out Roomba . Did you end up shipping toys with Hasbro? We did. What were they? We built a robot called My Real Baby that had the five universally recognized facial expressions. It was an amazing cam system in the head that it allowed its plastic head to sort of morph and be happy or sad. And the idea was instead of interactive in the way toys at the time were interactive, they would seize control of the interaction and drag you through a play pattern so it could know what was happening because it was controlling what was happening . And we said, Well, that doesn't really sound developmentally positive. Why don't we figure out how the child is playing with the toy and play along ? And my role baby was , you know, it was moderately successful and l ed to other things like for real friends, which is still a franchise with Hasbro today, where some of the technologies in MiroBaby got transferred over , but it was a massive learning experience for us . Okay . So to go all the way back to the beginning, it seems like even as you're working on all this other stuff, right? You're going through these many business models, you're working on all this stuff, you're going to space . It does seem like the idea of an in home robot or even maybe specifically a robot vacuum was being tossed around inside of iRobot from relatively ly ear on. Yeah, okay. Absolutely because everyone told us to do it. It got to the point where I would introduce myself to random person. Hello, my name's Colin English , CEO of IROBOT. And they would before they would even say good to meet you, Colin, they would say, When are you going to clean my floors ? To the point where I would bet people this was going to be a reaction because I found it odd. And then I started saying, well, how much would you pay? Would you pay five thousand dollars ? Because if you're willing to pay five thousand dollars, I probably know how to a robot that would clean your floors . But they would say, Oh no, if I had five thousand dollars, well, I'd hire a maid to clean my, you know, a cleaning person to clean my house. But I don't , so I'll have to wait. And so it was from the very earliest known ing , we just didn't know how to clean floors, we didn't know how to build it at an affordable price . You know , we didn't really have investable capital because we didn't take venture until year eight . So there wasn't really much we could do with this knowledge until sort of our circuitous journey started knocking down the barriers. So we talked about toys . Suddenly we could build something inexpensive. And we worked with Johnson Wax on industrial cleaning robots. And suddenly we knew how to clean floors . The navigation one was really quite entertaining. We developed robots to clear minefields and the search algorithms that the original Rumba, like the one you have in front of you used to ensure that it cleaned the room it was placed in were actually mine hunting algorithms that we developed with DARPA . And so as each one of these hurdles got knocked down, there came the day when one of my engineers came up and said, Hey, Colin , I think we can do it. It's like, really? It's like, yeah, I need fifteen thousand dollars in two weeks and I'll get you a prototype . And it's like, okay , if we can start to make progress in two weeks and fifteen thousand dollars , maybe we spend another two weeks and see where it goes. So everything had kind of come together over those years to get you to this point, it sounds like. But from what I understand, you had been sort of experiment ing with and prototyping ideas like this along the way. Like the thing that became Rooma was not the first time anybody inside of IRobot had ever built something that kind of looked like Roomba. That there was a was sort of a march towards this thing over time . Not a direct march. I mean, there was back in nineteen eighty nine , one of the the employees sort of for a January term project. This is Joe Jones. Joan Jones. Yeah, he built a little round robot that picked up little balled up pieces of paper. He called it the rug warrior, which I think we can get to this later, but way better name than Rooma. And I think we should just call it the rug warrior . I mean better than the name . See, I push back. I think we have the best internal name for Rooma that because we called it we had we had an internal survey. We are a company of engineers and little else. And we the one wonderful thing about engineers is they kind of feel like they can solve any problem , including the naming problem a floor care robot. And so we had this vote inside as to what to call Roomba. And Rug Warrior is pretty good, but it hales in comparison to the cyber suck , which was right, that's very good. That's very good. Internal name for Roomba . Yeah . But this thing that Joe had built years earlier . I was reading back on it and there's a bunch of stuff that's in there that is correct, right? It's very primitive, but it has the sort of sweeping brush on the front. It has a bumper that lets it kind of trundle around and find stuff shape. Yeah, it almost actually I have a picture of one of the very first prototypes here . It's like not that far away . One of the interesting things with Roomba was it was going to be a sweeping robot . And we had these swiffer cloths all the rage. And we said, well, we don't actually have to have a rotating brush because that's actually pretty hard . Why don't we have just a drag behind cloth ? And it actually worked quite well, but when we were doing consumer testing , we asked people, well, what would you pay for this robot? And they said , well, we'd probably pay about fifty dollars for a robot that drags a swifer cloth around . And we like, yeah, that's not going to work. The battery costs more than that. So we asked the follow up question, well, what if it was a vacuum ? And that came back, well, I would spend several hundreds of dollars if it was a vacuum cleaner. And so we said , okay, I guess it's a vacuum cleaner. Now, how do we make a battery powered vacuum cleaner? Well, wait, hold on. Before we get to that, this is actually one of the things I'm particularly curious about because in reading about this moment in there, it seems very clear that some of the folks on the team, potentially including you , were very annoyed by this outcome , that everybody has in their head the idea that a sweeper is like a crumby broom and a vacuum is like a beautiful piece of high technology. And you're sitting there being like, well who cares? It gets all the stuff off your floors. Why are we having this debate with each other? You're going to make us go do a bunch of work to solve a problem we've already solved . Do you come out of this having everybody be like, Oh, I want to vacuum and you're like, you people are idiots. You know what you want? You must have You must have a little bit . Throughout Roma's history, we would rail against wishing we had consumers that had different sensibilities It was a long time . I mean , would you really want a carpet that had fringe ? I mean, who wants carpets with fringe? I mean, it's it's a disaster for Yuromba for many years and you know, we argued as to whether we could convince the world that carpets with fringe were bad just instead of having to solve the problem. But how to get ultimately yes. Yes. So ultimately we had to say, okay, okay, fine. People want fringes . You're going to have people have have their fringe carpets and and we'll have to go figure out when we're stuck on fringe and unwind it. And it definitely was a learning experience as a company that was overly indexed in engineering that thought it knew the right answers needed to reconcile with the fact that we actually had to build something that consumers responded to and wanted. And it happened again and again , if you don't mind me getting ahead of myself, I'll give you another example where that happened later in the company. Sure, where for many years , many years , people would say, Okay, Colin , what is the perfect Roomba . And I would say, well, the perfect roomb is the Roomba you never see, you never touch. You just come home every day to a perfectly clean home, right? That sounds pretty good . And then I was talking to someone and I said, you know, Colin , I'm not sure you're right . Because if I hired a cleaning person or I was interviewing a cleaning person , and they came in and said , well Well , I'm excited to do a really good job for you, but you can never talk to me . I'm not going to listen. You're never going to see me. You just have to trust that it's all going to work out That person is probably not going to get hired . And if Roomba was actually going to succeed , we needed to follow a very different trajectory where would clean around we'd get permission to clean around the kitchen table. We would do a good job , then we would be given permission to clean the kitchen. And if we did a good job, we could clean more and more . And technologically, that's like the hardest thing you could do because you need mapping, you need understanding, you need object recognition, you need all this stuff . And yet to build trust in your solution , you do it by being given small jobs that lead to larger jobs . And finally getting that insight led to developments with Arumba and the proverbial crossing of the chasm and unstucking the company, which was sort of plateaued , you know, at hundreds of thousands of robots sold a year and propelling us to being able to sell millions of Rumbos a year. The other thing was , it seems like almost immediately people started to develop feelings for this little vacuum they were watching just bumble around below them. And I remember this from the very beginning because the very first room was they didn't have the sort of mapping intelligence, they didn't know where they were going. They just ran into stuff and it's it's like it's precious, right? Like you end up sort of falling in love with this like bumbling little circle on the ground. And I feel like those two things together, right where it's like people actually need to see it for it to work. And if they see it work, they will care about it in a way that is almost like bizarre given that it's a vacuum must just change the way you think about what the space this thing is going to occupy in people's homes. I mean you're spot on and both of those factors had a huge impact in actually building the industry . So this first idea that no one believed that it worked , what made that so important was actually in how we developed awareness of the Rumba . So I had it was easy to get to to a reporter's phone because robots are interesting. And I would call up , you know, call up a reporter and say, hey, want to see my robot vacuum cleaner. And they would immediately say , okay , robots are accessible vacuuming robots. My readership is interested . It can't possibly work . But if you want , sure, I'll invest thirty minutes you come into my office and show it to me. And so that I would show up to their office with at that time, everywhere I went, I had a little baggy of cheerios in my pocket And you know, I'd be in the conference room and it'd be all professional and nice. And I'd show them the robot and they would say, Oh that's not very big . That can't possibly work. And I said, well, actually it does. And I would get up out of the chair and reach into my back pocket and pull out some cheerios and drop them on the ground. And then for dramatic effect . I would stomp on the Cheerios and then grind them into the carpet at which point I had the reporter's attention because they were like, Oh boy , now I have stuff to clean up. Thank you very much Fellan. And I had put the room on the ground and had this down so that it worked great and it would pick up the Cerios. And then there's this phenomenon if you're a skeptic and I can flip you into supporter , you are more enthusiastic than if you immediately like the idea in the first place , because you think you know something that nobody else knows because you didn't believe it worked. So the rest of the world must think like you. And so the rest of the world must also think that robot vacuum cleaners could never work, but you know it does . And so the PR campaign for Roomab in the first was insanely successful. So we had no money for advertising or any of that , but on launch , I had over a hundred top tier articles written about Roomba. And we sold seventy thousand Roombas in the first three months after launch , which is amazing. And it was like, oh my god, what has happened ? And it was because of this skepticism and for probably the first decade , if you believed Roomba worked, you bought it. And if you didn't believe Roomba worked, you didn't. And so that all of our strategies for selling Rumba was somehow demonstrating that it worked. This is actually a perfect spot to take a break . We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to go back. We're going to shift this into some fancy electronics stores and we're going to talk about it. We'll be right back . All right, we're back. So Colin, I believe it's it's two thousand two right now, right? Yep. It's the fall of two thousand two . You've shipped this thing, you've got your top tier media placements, everything's starting to go very well . The first Roomba comes out. It was two hundred dollars . And if I was one hundred ninety nine two hundred dollars and it was on sale. If I have my research right, it was on sale mostly at those like fancy technology stores that existed at the time, Brookstones and the Sharpie imagery. , you have the keys to make a lot of saliva as you say it. Was that for the reason you were talking about before we took the break because those are places you can have demos and you can show people how it works and you can have these things like running around in these stores. Does that end up being really important as you're starting to get this thing out in the world? You know, the truth is actually much stranger than logical this is why you're here . Okay , so it is a complete fluke that Roomba was allowed to be in retail at all . In fact , we launched with Brookstone and nobody else. Okay . And the reason why we're at Brookstone is that when we called up Brookstone We called up the head of the hard to find tool catalog part of Brookstone, which I don't think even exists anymore . And the lady that was in charge of that catalog , it was her first day . So she didn't know that she's supposed to hang up on people like me . And she's like, Oh, that sounds interesting. Why didn't you come in? It's real. Okay, someone said, Yes , and off we go to because you're still feeling like once I get in the door, I can win this game. I just have to get in the door. We're not even that smart. We're just someone didn't reject us immediately. So this is good. Dream . And we're entrepreneurs. So entrepreneurs' super power is optimism. And so we off we go to Brookstone and we demo and she's like , Oh my god, it actually works . Let me go get my boss. And so she got her boss and we demoed to that person. They say, Oh my god, it works. Let me go get my boss. And within fifteen, twenty minutes, suddenly we're up and the head of the divisional manager of all purchasing, like the big guy comes in and he kind of swaggers in and he says, Huh . Huh . It actually works . Well, we couldn't possibly be interested in this for anything above two hundred dollars Well, funny, you should say that . We're selling for one hundred ninety and nine dollars , at which point he got all excited. And the magical moment for Roomba was about two weeks after launch , the woman was put in charge of her account. I still remember her name, Pam Camelstein calls me up and she says, Hey Colin, how's it going? And I'm like, Of course , well, Pam, how's it going? We're good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she said, well, things are going pretty well . We'd like to order more . And I said, Oh, that's great. How many would you like? And she said , Well, how many can you build ? And that was the moment that it was like, Oh my God , this is this is real . And Brookstone and that as soon as Brookstone's success was starting to be noticed everybody called . But as manufacturing started to catch up , we brought more and more retail partners online. And then we had another problem that you can't we had Roomba and Brookstone selling for two hundred dollars and Roomba and Target selling for two hundred dollars. And that's not typically how the world works. And so that we needed to come up with a premium version of Roomba, so that the robot you have in front of you is the original Roomba with the peel off sticker I can see is still there . It is a virgin sample that was thank you for treating it so beautifully. The second Roomba was red . That one has three buttons on it. Small, medium, large because you had used to have to tell the Rumba how big the room is. Well, in order to justify having a super premium one that we could continue to sell in Brookstone , we had first it had a snazzy red paint job and it had a fourth button called Max . And Max would just Max would just turn on the robot until the battery died . Maximum power . Maximum power. And then so that was how expanded distribution, but you know, it was a journey but it bizarrely worked out. It was a different problem every day . And so that the early days of Roomba , we had designed this thing to a European durability standard. It would go for one hundred and fifty hours without breaking, which was what a European high quality vacuum cleaner would do . But we missed the fact that people were using Roomba instead of half an hour a wee k , like people use an upright vacuum cleaner, they use were using it an hour a day . And so that suddenly every Roomba we sold if it was used day would die in three months . That's a bit of a problem. Yeah, that's a bit of a problem . And it was going to take us two years before we solve that problem and so that we had an incredible return policy where almost without question , oh, your room is broken. I'm sorry. We'll send you a new one. And people went through five Roombas we fixed the problem and made a Roomba that could be used every day and would still live for three years. It was but the good news is if you give good customer service , you get more loyalty than people who never have a problem because they know that you'll stand behind your product and that was a savings grace kept Roomba going through some of the most fragile times for the entire company. Here, I just want to play you a Roomba ad from two thousand three. And Kon, I want to hear if it makes you feel anything . It's just going along a straight line on a carpet. This is the only time a Rumba ever knows a straight line. Go to places you can't . Columns that Cheerios ? All cheerios. Push of a button. All will be cheerios. Wait, no, no, coffee beans, coffee beans. It will change the way you clean forever. Our worst commercial with the best eggs. Look at these fine retailers. If it's down there, you're gonna get it. Oh, that's good . If it's down there , we'll get it. That must have been what inspired the SNL skit Okay, all sorts of stories there . All right. Let's do the SNL skate now. I have a video called Womba Saved to play for you, and I have been assured that I will get in trouble if we play it, but this was parodied on SNL with a different kind of down there. We'll just say. Colin, I am eager to hear what you how it felt to be parodied on SNL All across the country, thousands of women are discovering the next generation of freshness with Womba, new from the makers of Roomba . The first fully automated completely robot ic feminine hygiene product . Roomba . It's a robot and it cleans my business, my lady business . And I like that. Colin, what was it like being on SNL ? So we knew nothing about that. You don't even get a phone call? No, I'll not. I was literally sitting on my couch on Saturday and And that comes on and I'm staring at the screen in disbelief. Pulling out my phone and saying, Did you just see this ? Is this good? I don't know what this means. What does this mean ? And it was like you guys were just parodied on Saturday night live and they just assumed everybody knew what Roomba was . Because this is still pretty early. And I was like, yes, that's good. Roomba is enough of a thing that it is part of popular culture . And you know, I've used that video to just bizarre enjoyment and success over the years. I got my first roomer right I think two thousand four or five because I'd just moved into a house and I had just, you know , I wanted something to help me in the home. And I think that was what's so interesting about the womba ad was that it was about Ad Sorry Skit. It was focused on women. And I can imagine that this was kind of an unusual t arget market for a tech company at that point, like selling a tech product to women housewives or the woman the person who runs the home generally . And I was a working not quite mother yet, but close to. And having something that was going to do a large portion of my chores was groundbreaking. I mean to me that was worth spending some extra money on and it sounds like that was probably something you missed in the development of this product that it was actually, you know, who that target audience was because you were more interested in developing the ro bot. Well, we got smarter . And in fact, for a while, there was a permission slip you could download off our website , which you would give to your spouse saying that it's okay to buy me a Rooma . Because that was going to be the other question. You should never buy your significant other vacuum. That was kind of like written and all I did get mine as a Christmas present from my husband So it's, you know, it was enough of a thing that we actually tried to go and say, but this isn't like buying someone an upright vacuum cleaner. This is actually freeze them up to , you know, but it was it was a moment where you were changing cultural norms. Yeah. So here's a question that I found surprisingly difficult to answer in the course of doing this research . Was this thing any good? Like yes, people loved it. Yes, lots of people bought it, but there's a really fascinating reaction that I found over and over , which was like it just sort of inefficiently bumps around my living room. It gets up some stuff, but it doesn't get everything. But I love it so much . And I'm like, on the one hand, smashing success. On the other hand, I'm not all that sure I'm confident this was a very good vacuum . I mean, it is a really good vacuum . And Jen's shaking her head calling, I gotta tell you . I'll let him go first. The suction power is substantially less than an upright . That's a big difference, isn't it? That's a big, big difference. But the way it uses that suction is wildly different than suction is used on an upright vacuum cleaner. If you flip over your room in front of us, you'll see that the entire all of the suction is actually pulled through a narrow squeegee . So two little bits of rubber that are only about a sixteenth of an inch apart. So it's a little bit like putting your thumb on a hose . It accelerates the velocity of the air . And so that in order to make this all work and to build a vacuum cleaner that could run on batteries , you couldn't build something that would compete head to head with plug into the wall uprights. You had to sort of break down the cleaning process into two steps so that the counter rotating brushes don't work at all on fine particulate , but the counter rotating brushes would pick up all the big stuff and then the little fine particulate that would be missed by the brushes would get picked up by what we call the squeegee squeegee vac . And so that it would do a very good job as far as if you compared a standardized cleaning test that had sort of a bag of stuff , it would do pretty well . And it would just do it this is, you know, I would say this is the world's most efficient vacuum cleaner by every power metric , it is it falls in order of magnitude behind or more , and yet it cleans reasonably well. And the way we positioned it because believability was so challenging, we would say , our goal is to make it so home is cleaner more of the time. Right, rather than your weekly clean, it's every day . It runs every day and in theory, maybe. Right. So that if you spill something in the ground, it's going to come in and pick it up. And if you still want to, once a week, once every other week, pull out your upright and go and vacuum , well, have fun with that. And then over time , we're able to make it more and more and more powerful where we stop saying, okay, well , you know, every week or two use an upright. Yeah, it definitely closed that up over time, but I'm curious Jennifer your thoughts on those early ones because yeah my memory of it, it was years before I owned one, but my memory of it is that it was very very it would help you make the real vacuum easier, but it was not going to do the full job for you. At least that was a lot of people's perception. What was it like in the early days from your perspective? Yeah, so I was very excited to get one and I loved the idea that it was going to clean under my bed, clean places that I had not cleaned since I moved into my house a couple years before and but the problem I had is that whilst it vacuumed well, it was not a good robot . And I think this goes to the core. Meaning it got stuck? Yes, like it would never finish the jedob I would set it in the morning , go to work, come home expecting a clean floor and it had gotten like three feet . It would be hung up on a barrier between rooms. Yeah, it was always the was for me. Yeah. Yeah, it's something ru g tassels or something would get in the way. And so I got it got very frustrating because you know I wanted it to do well. I was rooting for it . But after a while it was like this, is taking me more time messing around with it , trying to get it to work. Like it came with the two virtual walls because in case anyone forgets, this first room did not, or the first few rooms did not havei W,i didF not have an app it was press a button and it goes and then you had these little virtual towers so you could stop it from going into certain places. So I would try and set up the virtual towers so that it wouldn't go to the places it got stuck . y Andet I would just constantly come back and it hadn't finished the job and that was, you know, disappointing and frustrating because it's supposed to be the sort of robot should be autonomous, right? It should be working on its own, right? That's this is the beginning of the sort of machine the evolution of machines in our homes to become robotic and to become robots and in some ways to have agency and in some intelligence. They've got smart , but it wasn't the bump and roll that was my problem. It was the couldn't figure out how to get out of situations when it got stuck . And so I got it was not smart. It was an office smart bot. It made me angry . Yeah. It was doing its best, but it wasn't very succeeding . And it didn't tell you when it's bin was full. That was the other thing that annoyed me because it would just keep vacuuming and it wasn't doing anything because it's bin was full . So it's like you're just running around my house for fun . I mean, you can see how you would fall in love with this little thing, right? Like it's really it's just out there doing its best. Actually, we got rid of it and I didn't get another one until I started testing them for my job . So I didn't miss it. It hadn't done enough for me at that point. What about you? When did you first get one? I got one when I first had an apartment with carpet. It was what it was. And it was it was the sort of thing where it was like, I am better off letting this thing run once a day. It'll do a pretty good job and it means the amount of time I have to spend like really working to clean this just goes way down. And I never looked back. I was a daily rooma user for a very long time. And then we moved to a place with two floors and I never quite figured out where to put it and it all sort of started to fall apart. Someday, Con, you're going to come back. We're going to do a whole episode about stairs. The Version History Stairs episode is going to be spectacular. We should take a break and' thenre we do the going to version history questions, but before we do , I just want to play you, Colin, what I believe is your true cultural legacy of the Roomba . I strapped an NP three player to one of those playing robots, calling DJ Rumba. The guy cruises around and plays music. What's hot, DJ Rumba? DJ Rooma Tear it up Colin , I don't know how you missed that as a product idea, but it was it was just sitting right there for you . You know, you could download plans to make DJ Roomba out of your create. So we made an educational version of Roomba and would actually let you make DJ Roomba because what's not to like? Exactly. That's not to love about DJ Room. That's exactly right. We're going to take a warmer break and then we're going to go back to do the version history questions. We'll be right back . All right, we're back. It's time to do the eight questions that we call the version history questions. We're going to try to explore the legacy of this thing through eight questions. The first question is the time matrix , a concept everyone loves and has no questions about. And this maps idea versus time. Something is was it the right idea at the right time, the wrong idea at the wrong time, or somewhere in between ? And actually Colin, I would like for you to go first on this because I think based on the stories that we 've been talking about, you could put Roomba at any one of these four quadrants. And I'm curious where you would put it with some hindsight. So it was definitely the right idea . People wanted it. It could have happened earlier All you needed was a company that had expertise in vacuuming, mine hunting toys and robots. And just one of those companies but even in actually that's an interesting question. Like in theory, if you had started at this ten years earlier, could you have gotten to it ten years earlier? Yes. Interesting. It would have been three hundred dollars, not two hundred dollars. Okay , but they're techn ology existed to do the Roomba earlier , but it was absolutely the right idea and just needed someone to invent it. Okay, so I think where it is right now on the graph is neatly in right idea, but kind of smack in the middle of right time and wrong time, which feels about right. It is because I don't it doesn't strike me as there wasn't anything culturally perfect for it at that moment, right? It wasn't like something had to happen for the world to be ready for this. I think if you had shipped it ten years earlier, people probably would have loved it ten years earlier. Right. So I would put it at the top of right. This was an idea that wanted to happen and there was technological breakthrough that enabled it. So it was less about right time, more about finally figuring out how to do this right idea . I like it. And that came right down more to the money, right? Being able to do it affordably was the key. If you could have done it ten years before, you said it was going to be more expensive. So three hundred dollars would have worked too. Huh. Interesting. You just didn't have someone, a company didn't exist that could have done this at that point. Correct. You needed to go through all of those learnings, all those different robot s. Right. If I had to do this again, I would have launched it at four hundred ninety nine cents instead of one hundred ninety nine because we raised the price every year. Yeah, like the last one was like a thousand dollars . Yeah . Yeah. And the best part of the market at this moment today is like the fifteen hundred dollars . They did get a lot more expensive, which is kind of the opposite of what should happen with . Well, it just goes to show you this is something that people value. Yeah . And we didn't get the price right. There was a lot more that could have been extracted in price within reason, but great idea that any time would have been the right time . And it could have happened earlier. I like the phrase it was an idea that wanted to happen. I think that makes I think that's right. All right, so this I feel good about this . Clearly right idea right in the middle of Ray Time and wrong time. From the Smart Home Space is just such an interesting product because it really fills a need and it has so much potential in the world of robotics and how the smart home and robotics , how robot ics can help us in our homes and ultimately bring us something around Rosie the Robot. Question number two, was this peak anything? I have a couple I'd like to offer you and then I'm curious what you guys think. Was this peak falling in love with your gadgets? I have actual evidence for this. So this comes right after the Tamagashi Craze. It comes right after the Furby Craze. We've gone through this first run of these kind of anthropomorphicized robots that people really like learn to care about and love. And I think Roomba is maybe the most lasting version of that. Like people loved and hated their furbies. Furbies were weird and sort of obnoxious , but the rumor was like your little best friend helper and I think I don't I can't think of a gadget since at least one that has been sort of mainstream that people have had that kind of affinity for as they did, particularly in the early days. I think now robot vacuums are so ubiquitous that people don't connect to them the same way . But I don't know. There was just something that moment with products in general, but especially the rumor that feels like peak falling in love with your gadgets in a non horrifying way . Yeah, because you couldn't really anthropomorphize it because it didn't look like a creature or a human, but it was your buddy. Like when it worked , it helped you and that gave you that connection . I never named mine and I didn't fall in love with mine so yeah sounds like personally I don't know that I would call it peak fall in love with gadgets but it was it was one of the first gadgets I bought honestly so I guess it drew me into the gadget world. Listen, not all relationships can be successful. No, you know what I mean? The only other one I had was is this peak robot . Like have we done any better robots since this ? In the home or peak home robot, that's good. Yeah, that's a little more specific . Colin is clearly hoping to prove us wrong if we say yes here. Yeah, I mean, I think it's local maxima home robot . Okay meaning that it was the first home robot that actually stayed out of the closet and there hasn't been other examples of home robots that have endured like Roomba . Right? I mean, it's, you know, people own them for years and continue to use them , they find a way into your routine , and you'd be hard pressed to find another robot that has the staying power of Roomba. This really was the first AI device in our homes, right? I mean, it is an AI device . Absolutely. Like, it was autonomous and independent and in your home and made decisions whether that was because it hit a wall or not . I know. Is it artificial intelligence to hit a wall and then turn to your right? You know, it's something. It was the beginning there, for sure . Definitely was. Would you actually that's a good question? Looking back, Colin, would you would you call it AI? Like I know it's it's buzzy and fun and exciting to do so, but like with your engineer head on, not your CEO hat on, would you call that first Room an artifici intelligent product ? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that what people think of as AI has changed . And in fact, for many, many years people, were like A,I , what is that? That can't possibly be real. And now no one says that anymore. But the software we were running at the bleeding edge of AI research at the time and IRobot was at its origin, an AI company. We had a technology not a product. What was that technology ? It was AI , not as powerful as the AI that we get to play around with today , but the same ideas and theories and so forth that went into its development or ideas and theories that drove current AI . I think I remember you telling me that one of the first names for IROBOT was actually artificial creatures. Is that right? Am I remember? That is completely correct Yeah, isn't it? You know, you can see that my passion is still there where I've gone from artificial creatures ink to familiar machines and magic. The journey continues . The I robot name was good. I robot, you human. But I was very sad when Colin told me that that was not his idea, and that was some marketing company rang Okay, you can't win a mall. You can't. All right, question number three , if you could go back in time , take over and develop this thing yourself, could you make the product more successful? Colin, you're gonna go last because what do you know? Jen, I want you to go first. What do you think? It was obviously very successful, but I think what was missing from the first couple iterations design . I think it could have made itself at home in more homes faster if it looked better because it looked too techy. Like it looks like it was designed by engineers. And again, to my point earlier about the actual core audience here probably was the stay at home mom or the housewife or the working mother to have something that helped or working partner who looks after children to have something to help with the chores. But it's in your home. It's not a piece of tech. It's a device that you're going to have roaming around your house much more often than your stick vacuum . And I think like Dyson really kind of hit that with adding style to a utilitarian device. So that's what I would have done, I think, just I would have made it look nicer . It's a good one . Mine would be and this is still a feature request I have for Rumbas and Robot vacuums in general. I want to be able to put it down and just say clean right here and have it successfully clean right here. Like I want I want it to act like a stick vacuum. If I just pick up the handle and put it down and I want to start it and have it vacuum and pick it up and put it back. And that is theoretically difficult , but strangely difficult to pull off. Colin, A, I would like you to defend yourself. And then I want to know your answer to this question. I mean, that's a feature that honestly we , you know, it has spot clean so you put it down and hit Spot. It'll clean where you put it sort of and sometimes sort of or it'll get confused and wander off into the other room . If I controlled the cell phone industry, we actually develop apps where you could activate the camera on the app and show it where you wanted it to clean and say clean that and tap on the screen and it would do that. You had to register when cell phones started having VR functionality , we actually implemented that, and it works really well. You'd have to align the frame of the Romba to your home . Completely doable . You know, I think that again, if I controlled the world today , it would be a functionality that is easily accomplished , either using the cell phone device or at this point you just you could just point where you wanted it to clean and have the Rumba watch you and know what to do. Like with the remote or actually physically point to physically point. Say Roomba, clean that, have Roomba look at you and it knows enough . Now that won't work with a laser based Roomba or a laser based RVC that would only work with one with cameras and the industry is moving away from cameras toward lasers because for a series of other largely very good reasons but this is the tradeoff, right? Like I don't want a camera roaming around my living room. I also want it to be able to clean over there. Like trade off those Yeah, balances. I think that the privacy and security, I mean, Robert did a really good job. We didn't stream video to the clou . You never had to have an image leave your robot . You know, the Achilles heal of cameras versus lasers in the past was a laser could make a map of your home more quickly than a camera . And for whatever reason, IROBOTS competition was able to get consumers to believe lasers were higher tech cameras, which is ridiculous . But this didn't have a camera on though, did it? No, no, no, not the first one, but yeah. The last thirty million we made had cameras on it. But this one, I mean, could you have had the remote be like a pointer and say go clean here 'cause that could give me a joystick with the thing. Give me a playstation. A joystick there you go, that would've sold. Yeah. We did that. You had a joystick? We had a remote with a D pad on it so you can drive it fair enough . But I mean, to some extent that was a lot of fun and not very useful because you could just pick it up and put it down where you wanted it to go . So I mean, I think that and we can talk about stairs too. We had designs of room as a climb stairs, but the marginal utility of climbing the stairs the cost benefit unfortunately was n't there. Sure. But wait, what would you tell young baby Colin back in the day? If you can go back in time and make your life easier and make the Roomba an even bigger hit, what would you do? Sell it as a subscription . Interesting . That wouldn't make anybody upset. Everybody everybody would keep rooting for you for that for sure. Well, I mean you could have a very easy entry price point . You could have invested a lot more in the technology in the robot . The people have a lot of loyalty to the Rumba once they bring it home and so that people would rather maintain their Ruma than treat it as a disposable . And a subscription business model , we started that at the end. It was very successful. So I think that would have been cool. That's a good one. All right. Question number four , will the youth ever make it cool again? And I think for this one, this is actually a fun one for this one because I think I would argue and you should both feel free to disagree that people don't like love robot vacuums the way that they used to because they're so ubiquitous, they just do a job now. They're vacuums. And I think in part that's a sm ashing success story, right? Like they're they're not novel in people's lives anymore . Is there a turn these things could make that would make people fall in love with them again? More cats riding on them? Cats are good Should we give them anthropomorphic faces? Should they look like the dolls you made for Hasbro, Colin, where they can cry when they haven't vacuumed in a while? I think that none of the things that you have suggested are the way to make people love their Roomba again. Okay . Should we make them dumb again? Are they too smart now? They don't bump into walls anymore. I think that the way to do it is to find the right morphology where people can enjoy them as part of their home or part of their family a little bit more without crossing into creepiness . Yeah, I mean the most recent one I just started tested recently the Mattic which is a whole new concept of verbal vacuum comes with Goog ly eyes and stickers . And it's to your point about that kind of connection . I think and my actually my daughter, who's fifteen, did not enjoy, has not really ever enjoyed robot vacuums in our home . Mainly she's the one that turns them off because they're so loud, but she fell in love with the one that had the stickers and the cookly eyes . I think a cool person robot in your home that also has a utility and is a companion . I could get behind I mean it's I think the answer is not obvious or complicated and is complicated, but I think it is there . It's just hard to do, right? I mean, it's how do you get something that is you can connect with but not be intimidated by, not creeped out by , you get this noble utility , you know, it can be done . It just isn't simple . And there's way more ways of screwing it up than succeeding. Question number five, what feature of this thing should every current version have? Is there anything on the first Rooma that we should bring back? I would argue the answer is bump around aimlessly mode . which is just fun to watch and my pets would enjoy very much. I've got an answer . Hm The handle. The handle. Yeah, that's a good one. And that is probably coming from someone who is a robot vacuum reviewer and who has about twenty of these things in her house and is constantly moving them around. But having a handle instead of just like the little notch you pick it up with. Yeah, or you have to like use two hands to pick it up. I love the handle. Handle's a good one. Con, what about you? You know, I think that we have to make sure that the ease of use stays incredibly high . The thing that made the original work is it kind of did what you wanted to do. It had a clean button and it did it. Yeah . So keep it simple. Keep it simple. Yeah, yeah. I think small medium large is actually a non crazy way to think about this even in twenty twenty six . All right. Now we have the Virgin History Hall of Fame questions. Every product has to pass all three of these tests in order to get in. Question number one, did this product do something truly new I mean, I think the answer is clear. Spoiler alert. I think we all are pretty sure the room is getting into the version history hoff. I hate it. Connect really, nothing would have made me happier than to keep it out when you were here. But I think it's gonna get in. I think it clearly did something truly new, right? Is it was it the first ever robot vacuum? No shouts to the Electrolux trilobite for two thousand dollars . Yeah, but this was the one that it was the one. Yeah. It was the first practical home robot. Yeah . Yeah, I think that's very clear. Question number two, was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? And this is this is the only one I think you could make a case that it was not remarkably good. But I think put all the pieces together . And frankly, only one of which is was it a very good vacuum? And it was good enough, I think it did when it did its job, it did it well. Right. It was just that You add the other job. You add the relationship people formed with it. Yeah, I think it was remarkably good. Colin, what do you think? You're enjoying this way too much, aren't you? Roomba is remarkable in that it was the first practical robot that delivered more value than it cost . And that is a remarkably challenging and fifty million Rumbus later I think that we got that one right . I would agree with that. And then last question, did it change history ? Is there a world before it and a world after it? And Colin, I want you to start on this one because I mean you lived through this, but if the question here was did it sort of bend the course of the universe a little bit . Do you think it did? Yeah , before Roomba, people thought robots were only humanoids . I think Roomba taught us that robots could be more they weren't science fiction. We could reasonably believe that we could have robots in our home in our lifetime . And You know, is it perfect? No , is it something that fifty million people wanted in their home? Apparently, yes . And we actually never named it robot , the world named it a robot . We called it an intelligent florvak and because we weren't sure that we could get away calling it a robot. And I think that we still are challenged by people thinking robot equals humanoid , but at least they're more open to the fact that it's about solving problems and we have this amazing toolkit and lots of morphologies can come at play , including humanoid, but also small disc like objects. Conn, to your point about the naming thing, when I was doing all this research about those original studies and focus groups, one thing that I loved was you called it a carpet sweeper and then only sort of reluctantly started calling it a vacuum when you added a vacuum to the thing. And then only sort of reluctantly called it a robot when everybody else is calling it a robot. So like this, this thing was supposed to just be a carpet sweeper and then it became a robot in people's houses that they fell in love with in a sort of remarkably organic way. And that to me is a very like cool and important part of this story. So I think it did. I think there is no question. I came into this episode knowing this was gonna happen. But here we are. The Ruma makes it into the Virgin History Hall of thee. Congratulations. Congrats to the robot. It's a huge day . And it also makes it. It was going to make it anyway just because of DJ Rooma. If you get that, you get in no matter what. All right, it is time for us to get out of here. Colin, thank you so much for joining us. It has been an absolute pleasure having you. My pleasure. This is great fun. Thank you for having me. Jen, thank you as well. This is delightful. It's been a lot. I hope you and your Roma make up. Again at this point. I feel like you guys have a lot to talk about, but I think it'd be okay . Thank you as always for watching and listening. If you want to support all of this, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the Vergeb comurg slash subscribe. You get all of our podcasts at free, you get all kinds of other stuff and it helps us do all of this. Thank you as always. See you next time . Version history is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media podcast network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Brantson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuck, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkins. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffron and Joe Neb ras. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. You can follow the dedicated Virgin History podcast feed for all of our episodes as soon as they arrive, and you can watch full episodes on our new YouTube channel at Version History Podcast