The Legacy of the Roomba

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 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 Virion History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history I'm David Perce And today, it is, of course Time for the Roma When I scraped my car in the parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedge made I have definitely already been here Now is it left, right or right left? mayaybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the GICo app, and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened. It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to GICO. Support for the show comes from Vveettch pet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand dollars And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise That's where Fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to ninety percent of vet bills. You can use any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet dot com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet dot com slash save All right, we're back '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 Jen Tw, the Virg' senior smart home review, Hi Jen Hi David, G to be here as always I feel like the Romba is like an important device in your life. It's 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 Rumor the other day prepping for this. and I was like, I sent him a picture and I said, did it look like this one? Be I was trying to figure it out? And he's like, I have seen ten thousand root vacus I don't know. So but from the smart H space, it's one of the first smart homeome products I owned too Me too, actually, now that I think about it. I got the first one with the built in dust collection 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 Enggele, the CEO and co founder of familiar Machines and Magic and the co founder of Irobot, the maker of Rombas, 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 were promised a lot more robots in the home. So I feel like ye Romba 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 Jen and I have both covered Robot Jen much more so than I have. You guys have met many times. This story is longer and stranger, I think than I even expected coming into it and I'm very excited about it U But I think the place to start, Con, if I'm correct, is in nineteen ninety. with three roboticyists from MIT Yes. How I Okay' We're doing this. I'm doing This is so good. This is all of my research is coming together. It's pretty hard to do this in front of the guys. I know, but this is this is good. This is It's like okay I'm on the f cheheking cheking. This is great. Why don't you tell us about the three? becausecause the way I understand it is Actually, the three of you that started this company And 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 into his office and said Hey, Col, I'm thinking about starting a robot company And I had was just finishing up my master's as part of a PhD program And I said Okay sounds. 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, it would be cool to start a robot any 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 at JPL She had come to the conclusion that Maybe it's time to do something else. And so my call is well timed. I remember saying, okay, we're starting this company U Are you interested? Answer, yes. U When can you start? And she said, Well I'll get into my car tomorrow morning and start driving And it's like, donon't you have a job? And it's like, it's okay And so that pretty quickly Um We got together to build the robots that we were promised. We were sort of an early AI company. They only sort of real tangible technology we had other than ignorance and passion. was this methodology that Rod had made to Run AI on an eight bit microprocessor, which sounds a little crazy, but It was a fantastic strategy of builduilding up lots of little behaviors from those interactions of small behaviors, comes Lger behavior, more, more intelligent operation and it was a radical strategy at the time. but openp the doors for ical roots. Now, Roomba came in year twelve,? Right. I mean, what you had started, you all signed up to this robot company, but did you have a clue at that point what I was, canan I answer this question for you by reading of your business models hereere's a thing that Colin wrote many years later Build a rover, send it to the moon, sell the movie rights This this was this is was this really the first ex true That was in fact the first business plan. I have a picture in my office this rover was supposed to look like. and we had The producer of the Blues Bothers 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. had an agreement with NASA around sharing data And We actually built a Six legged rover U 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 Uh, uh, brilliant pebble, a Ronald Reagan era anti ballistic missile rocket that we had taken the heat seeker out and put our little robot in 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. You know way back in nineteen ninety. Yeah. And I also I found a list from a PieceC wrote for IE Spectrum that with a slide entitled I Robots fourteen Failed Business mododels. I just want to read you a few of them because they are just delightful. seell robots to the oil industry to stimulate production in wells, sure, earn royalties on robotic toys. sell educational robots to museums seell 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 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 U, you know, many, many years before we return to profit and We had a business model where' We partnered with larger companies like the oil industry, that's they were interested Johnson Wax, they were interested in industrial floor care. Baker Hgh and Halliburt on the oil side So the remarkable thing, all of those failed business models Um, 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 U it was suubbsistence living But it was living and we survivive long enough to fail enough different ways to to understand what it actually takes to make a valuable company with Rbot Well, and that's's that's an interesting I think important point to kind of Explore is nineteen ninety There were I mean What was the 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 Um 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 are saving lives Breaking out of that seemingly unescapable reality that that was U shackling the robot industry into nothingness required. Two things teechnology to allow the robot to be smarter, 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 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 I you know, probably the most important thing we did was buildild toys with Hasbro where I We started realizing 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, Okaykay 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 Colin, we don't have such a thing And I said, well Could it be? that you don't have a catalog of gears. And the answer was, well We just design 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 You want to know how much it costs, you should weigh it And it's like I don't understand's like, no Tooling is free The cost of the plastic drives the cost Ty And That was just a completely different mindset to think that the human labor required to design the robot wasn't the driving factor in the cost of 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 sppat out Romba Did you end up shipping toys with Hasbro We did. What were they We built a robot Um called My realal baby had the five universally recognize facial expressions. It was amazing CAM system in the head that it allowed it's plastic head to sort of morph and be happy or sad and the idea was instead of being interactive and 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, Wh don't we figure out how the child is playing with the toy and play along. And My real baby was Um You know, it was moderately successful and led to Other things like for real friendriends, which is still a franchise, with Hasbro today, where some of the technologies in Mro Baby got transferred over It was a massive learning experience for us. 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 time. It does seem like the idea of an in home robot or even maybe specifically a robot vacuum was being tossed around inside of I robot relatively early on. Yeah. Absolutely because everyone told us to do it. It got to the point where I would introduce myself random person. Hello, my name iss Colin Enngl S of My robot and they would Before they would even say, good to meet you, Colin, they would say, when are you going to clean my floors too 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? wouldould you pay five thousand dollars? Because if you're willing to pay five thousand dollars, I probably know how to make a robot that would clean your floors 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 fromom the very earliest known interestnteresting We just didn't know how to clean floors. We didn't know how to build it at an affordable price know we didn't really have investable capital because We didn't take venture until year eight. Um So There wasn't really much we could do with this knowledge until sort of our circuitous journey. started knocking down barriers. So we talked about toys Suddenly We could build something inexpensive. We worked with Johnson Wax on industrial cleaning robots And suddenly We knew clean floors The navigation one was really quite entertaining We developed robots to clear minefields. and the search algorithms that the original Romba, like the one you have in front of you, used to ensure that it cleaned the room it was placed in We're actually mine hunting algorithms that we developed Darpa And so You know, as each one of these hurdles got knocked down. there came the day. when one of my engineers came up and said, Hey C. I think we can do it It's like really it's like I need fifteen thousand dollars and and two weeks And I'll get you a prototype. And it's like, okay, if if 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 experimenting with and prototyping ideas like this along the way that like the The thing that became Roomba was not the first time anybody inside of IiRobot had ever built something that kind of looked like Roomba that there was a There was sort of a march towards this thing over time Not a direct merarch. I mean there was Back in nineteen eighty nine one of the employees sort of for a U January term project. This is Joe Jones. Joean Jones. Yeah, he built a little round robot that littleittle 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 Roomba. And I think we should just call it the rug wararrior. I mean, better than the name. S, I push back. I think we have the best internal name for Ruma that because we called it had We had an internal survey. We were a company of engineers and little else We one wonderful thing about Egineers is they kind of feel like they can solve any problem, including the naming problem for a floor care robot. And so we had this vote inside as to what to call Romba And Rug Warrior is pretty good, but it pales in comparison to the cyber suck Which was That's good That's a wining internal name for Roomba But this thing that 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 Right It's very primitive, but like it has it has the sort of sweeping brush on the front. It has a bumper that lets it kind of Trle around and find stuff on L around. Yeah, it almost actually have 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 Romba was I was going to be a sweeping robot And we had, you know, these swiffer cloths were all the rage And we said, Well, we don't actually have to have a rotating brush because That's actually pretty hard the u whyy don't we have a drag behind cloth And It actually worked quite well But when we were doing consumer testing. the we asked people, well, what would you pay for this robot? And they said Well, wed probably pay about fifty dollars for a robot that drags a swipper clloth. around And we like Yeah, that's not going to work. The battery costs more than that. So the u Um 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 vacu cleaner. Now how do we make a battery powered vacuum cleaner? Well, wait hold on. before you 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 We're very annoyed by this outcome that everybody has in their head the idea that a sweeeper is like a crummy 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 this 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 actually already solved Do you come out of this having everybody be like, oh, I want a vacuum and And you're like, you people are idiots. You know what you want You must have a little bit. throughroughout Ruma's history, we would rail against wishing we had consumers that had different sensibilities. It was 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 a disaster for Yoma for many years. And you know we argued as to whether we could convinced the world that carpets with fringe were bad just instead of having to solve the problem, but how to ultimately. Yes. Yes. So ultimately we had to say, okay, okay, fine. People want fringes. You're going to have L if people have their have their fringe carpets and we'll have to go figure out when we're stuck on fringe and unwinded 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 consonsumers responded to and wanted. and it happened againgain and again, if if you don't mind me. Getting ahead of myself, I'll give you another example where that happened later in the company.. where for many years. Many years. People would say, OkayK, Colin What is the perfect room And I would say, well, The perfect roomba is the roomba you never see. You never touch You just come home every day to a perfectly clean home. That sounds pretty good And then I was talking to someone and I said, you know, Colin, I I'm not sure you're right because If hired If I hired a cleaning person or I was interviewing a cleaning person, And they came in and said H. 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 gonna see me. You just have to trust that it's all gonna work out Whats that person is probably not going to get hired. And Roomba was actually going to succeed we needed to follow a very different trajectory where We clean around we get permission to clean around the kitchen table We do a good job then we would be given permission. 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 Build trust in your solution You do it by be Given small jobs that lead to larger jobs And finally getting that insight led to developments with Aromba and Proverbial crossing of the chasm And unstucking the company, which was plateaued you know, at hundreds of thousands of robots sold a year. propelling us to being able to sell millions of Romas 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 like it's precious. 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, youre you're spot on in both of those factors um had a huge impact and actually building the industry So this first idea that no one believed that it worked made that so important was actually in how we developed awareness of the Rumba. So I I had it was easy to get to a a reporters 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 immmediately 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 to their office with At that time, I would everywhere I went, I had a little baggy of Cheerios in my pocket And 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, o, It'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 cheheerios 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, o, Boy, Now I have stuff to clean up. Thank you very much, Cen room on the ground and had this down so that it worked great and it would pick up the Cheerios. And then There's this phenomenon where If you're a skeptic and I can flip you into supporter, You are more enthusiastic then 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 Roomba in the first years was insanely successful. So We had no money for advertising or any of that But on launch I had over a hundred Tier articles written about Roomba and we sold seventy thousand Rombas in the first three months After lunch which is Amazing. And it was it was like, oh my God, what what has happened? and And it was because of this skepticism and for probably the first decade If you believe Romba worked, you bought it And if you didn't believe Rumba 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 gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna come back. We're gonna to shift this into some fancy electronics stores. Yeah, and we're going to talk about it. We'll be right back Yeah When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account If between won the lottery. I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bnd But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline bro telepad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just big babies. But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe. It feels good to say some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now. but home projects, I second guess everything. Is that noise normal? Is that water damage? And who should I even call? That's where thumbtat comes in. Ulpload a photo or voice notote and their AI powered search helps diagnose the issue and match you with the right top rated local pro Instead of second guessing or searching for hours, you get clarity and can hire the right pro with confidence. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. They know homes. Hire the right pro today So C, I believe it's it's two thousand two right now, right? Yep Fall of two thousand two H You've shipped this thing, you've got your top tier media placements. everythingverything's starting to go very well The first Romba comes out, it was two hundred dollars And if I'm one hundred ninety nine two hundred dollars. That's a journalist It was hundred dollars. And it was on sale. if I have my research rightite, it was on sale mostly at those like fancy technology stores that existed at the time, Brokstones and the sharper images.amakmer.bsolutely Well You have the key is to make a lot of saliva, as you say. 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. Do 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 o than any logical U This is why you're here in Cor. Okay. so It is a complete fluke that Boma was allowed to be in retail at all. In fact, We launched with Brookstown and nobody else. Okay. And the reason why we're at Brookstown is that when we called up Brookstown the We called up the head of the hard to find tool catalog 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. Okay. someone said, yes Um, and Off we go to because you're still feeling like once I get in the door, I can 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. entrepreneurs so entrepreneurs superpowers is optimism. So we Off we go to Brookstone and we demo and she's like, oh my God It actually works U 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 minut, suddenly we're and the the He headad of the divisional manager of all purchasing, like the big guy comes in And he kind of swaggers in And he says, Huh It actually works Well, we couldn't possibly be interested in this for anything M above two hundred dollars He said, Well, funny, you should say that. We're selling for one hundred and ninety nine dollars. at which point he got all excited and The magical moment for for rumor 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 Pam, how's it going with you? We're good. M how now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeahah, yeah And she said, well, things are going pretty well. We'd like to order more. And I said, Ohh, that's great How many would you like And she said How many can you build And that was the moment that It was like Oh my go This is this is real and Brookstone and then as soon as Brookstone's success was starting to be noticed Everybody called But as manufacturing started to catch up We I Bad more and more retail partners online and then we had another problem you can't we had Roomba in Brookstone selling for two hundred dollars and Room 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 Romba with the peel off sticker, I can see is still there. It is a virgin sample that was Thank you for reading it so beautifully. The second Romba was red That one has three buttons smallall, medium large because you had used to have to tell the room how big the room is. 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. then so that was how we 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 breraaking, which was what a European high quality vacuum cleaner would do But we missed the fact that people were using Bomba instead of half an hour a week people use an upright vacuum clear aren't they we're using it an hour a day. And so that suuddenly Every Roma we sold, if it was used every day would die in three months That's 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 through Five Rombas before We fixed the problem. and made aroma that could be used every day and would still live for three years. It was U Yeah. 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 Roomba going u through some of the most fragile times for the entire company H 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 car seat It's the only time Barumba ever went in a straight line. G go to places you can't Coum is that Cheios? All Che push of a but. All will be Cheeros. Wait, no, no, coffee beans, coffee beans. It will change the way you clean forever. Our worst commercial with the best tline. Th these fine retailers. If it's down there, you 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 skit now. have 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 U with a different kind of down there. We'll just say. Colin, I I am eager to hear what you how it felt to be paroded on SNL All across the country, thousands of women are discovering the next generation of freshness with womomba, new from the makers of Roomba first fully automated completely robotic feminine hygiene pro Rom back It's a robot and it cleans my business, my lady business. And I like that. Colin, what was it like being on SNO? So we knew nothing about that. You don't even get a phone call? I was literally sitting on my couch On Saturday And comes on and I'm staring at the screen and belief. I mean, pulling out my 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 would have parodied Unsetting it live. And they just assumed everybody knew what Roomba was. because this is still pretty early and Yes, that's good. This is this you Roomba is ennough of a thing that it is part of popular culture. And you know, I've used that video to bizarre enjoyment and success over the over the years. I got my first roomor right I think two thousand. four or five because I had 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 womombber ad was that it was about sorry, skit. It was focused on women. And I can imagine that this was kind of an unusual target market for a tech company at that point, like selling a tech product to women housewives or the woman who the person who runs the home generally. And I work I was a working 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 robot. 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 yours ouse saying that it's okay to buy me a Roma. BeCa that was gonna to be the other question. You should never buy your significant other vacuum. That was kind of like written. And I did get mine as a Christmas present for 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 some of an upright vacuum cleaner. This is actually freeze them up to h, you know But it was it was a moment where you were changing cultural norms. 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. 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 smmashing 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, T. I gotta tell you. I'll let him go first. The suction power is substantially less than an upright That's a big and 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 Your room in front of us You'll see that the entire all of the suction is actually pulled through a narrow squeegee T little bits of rubber that are only about a sixteenth of an inch apart. So it's a little bit 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 buildu something that would compete head to head would plug into the wall perates you had to sort of down the cleaning process into two steps so that the counter rotating brushes donon't work at all on fine particulate the counter rotating brushes would pick up all the big stuff And then the little fine particulate Um, would be missed by the brushes would get picked up by what we call the squeege squeegee vax 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 a 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 Your 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 upate and go in vacuum Well, have fun with that And then over time where 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 g up over time. but I'm curious, Jennifer for your thought on those early ones because ye my memory of it, it was years before I owned one, but my memory of it is that it was V it was it was 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. problem I had for 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. L it would never finish the job. So I would go 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 was for me. Yeah. Yeah, something rug tassels or something would get in the way. And so I got it got very frustrating because you know, I wanted it 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. L it came with the two virtual walls because in case anyone forgets this first rooma did not well the first few roomas did not have wiFi, did not have an app. 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. And yet, I would just constantly come back and it hadn't finished the job. And that was you disappointing and frustrating. because it's supposed to be sort of, you know, 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 too become robots and in some ways to have agency and in some intelligence.. They've got Martter But it wasn't the bampp 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 off a smart bot. It made me angry. Yeah. It was doing its best, but it wasn't very. It wasn't succeeding. And it didn't tell you when its 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 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. was what it was. And was it was the sort of thing where I 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 look 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 come back. We're going to do a whole episode about stairs. The Virgin History Stairs episode is going to be spectacular. We should take another break and then we're going to do the Virgin History questions. But before we do I just want to play you, Colin, what I believe is your true cultural legacy of the Romba I strapped an MP three player to one of those spling robots. callall him DJ Roba. The little guy cruises around and plays music. What's hot, DJ Romba? DJ Roomba T it 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 Roma out of your create. So we made an educational version of Romba and would actually let you make DJ Rom because what's not to like? Exactly. What's not to love about DJ Rom? That's exactly right. We're gonna to take one more break, and then we're going to go back to the firstion and answer questions. 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Visit kpmg dot com slash us slash adaptability to explore the addaptability indndex and Pulse surveys today Trying to locate new sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle and a haystack That's why the Guardian is launching stateside with Ky Wright and Carter Sherman conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world Three times a week Hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources the Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness And the Guardian is not billionaire owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference Go to the guuardian. com slash stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube The Guardian. com slash stateside. All right, we're back. It's time to do the eight questions that we call the Vversion history questions. We're going to try to explore the legacy of this thing eight questions. The first question is The time matrix, a concept everyone loves and has no questions about And this maps Idea versus time. somethingomething is was it the right idea at the right time, the wrong idea at the wrong time or somewhere in between U'm 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 Romba 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 emys and robots and. Just one of those companies But 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. interestnteresting It would have been three hundred dollars, not two hundred dollars. Their technology existed to do the Romba earlier It was absolutely the right idea and just needed someone to invent it. Okay So I think where it is right now in 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 So I would put it at the top of right. this was an idea that wanted to happen And there was no teechnological breakthrough that enabled it. So it's less about rightite 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 Interesting You just didn't have someone a company didn't exist that could have done this Correct. You needed to go through all of those learnings, all those different robots Right. If I had to do this again, I would have launched at four ninety nine instead of one hundred n ninety nine. because we raised the price very 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 fifteen hundred dollars. They did get a lot more expensive, which is kind of the opposite of what should happen. Well it just goes to show you this is something that people value. Yeah Yeah. And we didn't get the price right. There was a lot more could have been extracted in price within reason, but Um Great idea any time would have been the right time Yeah and it could 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 clelearly right idea right in the middle of right time and wrong time. From the Smart Home space is just such an interesting product because it really feels a need And it has so much potential in the world of robotics and how the smart homeome and robotics robots 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 craz It comes right after the Furby craze. We've gone through this first run of these kind of anthropomorphosized robots. peopleople really like learn to care about and love. And I think Roomba is mayaybe the most lasting version of that. Like people loved and hated their furbies. Furbies were weird and sort of obnoxious The Rumo was like your little best friend helper. and I think did I don't I can't think of a gadget since att least one that has been sort of mainstream. that people have had that kind of affinity for as they did. partarticularly in the early days. I think now robot vacums are so ubiquitous that people don't connect to them the same way I don't know. There was just something something about that moment with productros in general, but especially the ruma that feels like pe 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 creature or 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. Lot all relationships can be successful. No you know what I mean U the only other one I had was is this peak robot Like have we done any better robots since this? in the home orotk home robot. That's good. Yeah. That's 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 homeome robot Okay. meaning that It was the first home robot that actually stayed out of the closet And There hasn't been many other examples of home robots have endured like Ruma Right? I mean, it's, you know, people own them for years and continue to use them They find a way into your teens And you'd be hard pressed to find another robot that has 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 your right? You know, it's something. It was the beginning M 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 hat on, not your CEO h on. Would you call that first rooma an artificially intelligent product Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that people think of as AI has changed And in fact, for many, many years People are like, AI, what is that? That can't possibly be real. and now no one says that anymore The software we were running was at the bleeding edge of AI research at the time And I Hi robot was at its origin, an AI company. we had a technology, not a product. What was that technology It was AI. U not as powerful as the AI that we get to play around with today same ideas and theories and so forth that went into its development 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? I remember? That is completely correct. Exly Good, isn't it You know, it it's you can see that that my passion is still there I've gone from artificial creatures Ink to familiar machines and logic. The journey continues. The 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, right Okay. You can't win them all. 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 to 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 ple iterations was design I think it could have made itself at home in more homes faster if it looked better. Because it looks too techy. like it looks like it was designed by engineers. And again, to my point earlier about this the actual core audience here probably was, you know, the stay at home momum 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 And 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 you like Dyson really kind of hit that with st 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 Rumas and Rbot 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 it to act like a stick back. If 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 rep in the problem, 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 Uh, You know, it has spot clean the u so you put it down and hit spot. it'll clean where you put it U sort of. and sometimes'll try sort of. it'll get confused and wander off into the other room. If I control 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 the on the screen and it would do that You had to register When cell phones started having VR functionality Um We actually implemented that and it works really well you'd had to align the frame of the roombud to your home Um completely doable. The um U you know, I think that Again, if I controll the world today, it would be a functionality that is easily accomplished u either using the the cell phone device or at this point You just you could just point where you wanted it to clean and have the Romba watch you and know what to do. Like with the remote or actually physically point to physically point. Say Roma, clean that. Roma look at you and it knows enough that won't work with a laser based Rinda or a laser based RVC It would only work with one with the cameras and Yeah And the industry is moving away from cameras toward lasers for a series of other largely very good reasons.. But this is the trade offff, right? Like I don't want a camera roaming around my living room. I also want it to be able to clean over there. How sign those Yeah balanance. I think that the privacy and security, I mean, Rva did a really good job. We didn't stream video to the cloud never had to have an image leave Your robot The u You know, the Achilles heel of 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, I robust competition was able to consumers to believe lasers were higher than cameras, which is ridiculous. But this didn't have a camera on mod did it No, no, no, not the first one, but ye. 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 an here because that could give me a joystick. rem move the thing. giveive me like a pol station a joystick. There you go, that would have soldved. Yeah. We did that. You had a joystick? We had a remote with j with a deep pad on it until you can drive it Fair enough But I mean, to some extent that was A lot of find and not very useful because You could just pick it up and put it down where you wanted it to go. Um So I mean, I think that And we can talk about stairs too. We had designs of roomas to climb stairs, but the marginal utility of climbing the stairs the cost benefit Unfortunately wasn't there But wait, what would you tell? young baby Colin back in the day. If you can go back in time and makeake your life easier and make the Romba an even bigger hit. What would you do? sell it as a subscription Interesting. That wouldn't make anybody upset. Everybody Ebody would keep rooting for you for that for sure. Well, I mean, you could have left a very easy Um, entry price point You could have invested a lot more in the technology in the robot the u people have a lot of loyalty to the Roma once they bring it home And so that peopleeople would rather maintain their rooma than treat it as a disposable. and the 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. Quion number four Um 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 peopleeople don't 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 smashing success story, right? Like they're They're not novel in people's lives anymore Is there 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 Hasborro, 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 Romba again 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 Uh morphology where people can enjoy them. as 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 Mematic, which is a whole new concept of robber vacuum, comes with Googly eyes and stickers. And it's to your point about that connection. I think 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 in 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 complic and is complicated, but I think it is there. It's just hard 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 H Fertility You know, it's 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 Roma 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 U The thing that made the original work is it kind of did what you wanted to do. it a clean button and it did it. Yeah. So Keep it simple. Ke 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 think I mean, I think the answ is clearly. sppoiler alert. I think we all are pretty sure the room is getting into the version history hot f. I hate it C.'s I really nothing would have made me happier than to keep it out when you were here. But I think it's gonna to 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 trilobte two thousand dollars Yeah, but this was this was the one that It was the one. Yeah. It was the first practical homeeroot. Yeah I think that's very clear Question number two, was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? And 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 when it It did its job, it did it well, right. It was just that you add to the, you add the relationship people formed with it. Yeah. I think it was remarkably good. Con, what do you think You're enjoying this way too much, aren't you? Rooma is remarkable in that it was the first practical robot that delivered more value than it cost And that is a remarkably challenging thing and and fifty million Rombas later And I think that Uh 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 you lived through this, but if if the if the question here was was it sort of bend the course of the universe a little bit Do you think it did? Yeah, beforefore RMba, people thought robots were only humanoids I think Romba taught us that robots could be More and that 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 want it in their home? Apparently, yes We actually never named it a robot. The world named it a robot.. We called it an intelligent flloorvac and because we weren't sure that we could get away calling it a robot. And I think that We still challenged by people thinking robot equals humanoid, but at least they're more open to the fact that H It's about solving problems and we have this amazing toolkit And lots of morphologies can come at play including humanoid, but also small disk like objects Con 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 sweeeper 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, this thing was supposed to just be a carpet sweeeper And then it became a robot in people's houses that they fell in love with a remarkably organic way And that to me is a very cool and important part of this story So I think it did. I think I think there is no question. I came into this episode knowing this is going happen. But here we are. The Roma makes it into the Version History Hllay. 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 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 love. I hope you in your Roma make up that point. think I feel like you guys have a lot to talk about, but I think it would 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 Virds thebirds dot com slash subscribe. You get all of our podcasts ad free, you get all kinds of other stuff and it helps us do all of this. Thank you as always. We'll see you next time Version History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media podcast It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuck, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkins. Our editorial director is Kevin McShange, Studio support from Matthew Heffren and Joe Nebris. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland