Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15Iterate Again

Colin Angle

Colin is the chairman, CEO, and founder of iRobot, a public company (IRBT) valued around $3 billion that makes the popular Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. He is one of the founding investors in Techstars Boston and has been a Techstars mentor since 2009.

When we started iRobot in 1990 we had the vision that we would “Build Cool Stuff, Deliver Great Product, Have Fun, Make Money, Change the World.” To accompany that vision, we had an audacious business plan to launch a private mission to the moon and sell the movie rights. The surprising thing was how far we actually got! We created a launch vehicle (a robot named Grendel) and it was further developed and flight-tested on a very small spacecraft affectionately called a “brilliant pebble” at Edwards Air Force base. We had agreed to sell NASA the data collected to help finance the mission. We even recruited the producer of the Blues Brothers movie to be on our board of directors.

Although it was an interesting and bold idea, it didn’t work out in the end. But, we had found a way to get paid for the effort through government programs, we got to work on a very cool project, and we were far from disheartened. We knew that there were going to be more innovative and unique ideas in our future, and we set out to try again. Next, we decided to pursue industrial cleaning robots in partnership with Johnson Wax, oil exploration robots with both Baker Hughes and Halliburton, and robot toys with Hasbro. In ...