Death to Cool

Tweet

Angle, 37, embodies the argument for nurture over nature.

The boyish, lank-haired CEO was raised by his mother and engineer stepfather: three stepbrothers also became engineers. His biological parents, brother, and two half brothers, by contrast, don't count a gearhead among them. Growing up in Schenectady, N.Y., Angle displayed early signs of what he would become, building pinball machines and crossbows and erecting elaborate pulley systems in the trees of his backyard. "When I was two years old you could put me near a stream and I'd dam it," says Angle. "I invented thousands of things, none of them useful."

At MIT in the late 1980s, Angle quickly succumbed to the gravitational pull of Rodney Brooks, director of the university's artificial intelligence lab. In the field of robotics, Brooks was famously controversial until he turned out to be famously right about many fundamentals of the science. Most notably, he argued that robots need not think like humans to be useful, and he and his students went about proving it by building an assortment of insectlike machines -- imbued with reflexes rather than reasoning -- that could move around and perform simple tasks.

Like Roomba more than a decade later, the insect robots piqued the media's fancy. Angle's senior project, an ambulatory critter called Genghis, made the cover of Popular Science before retiring to the Smithsonian. Brooks, meanwhile, was featured in Errol Morris's documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, a panegyric to obsession and human striving in which he shared screen time with a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, and a connoisseur of naked mole rats.

In 1990, Brooks -- then 35 -- and Angle used credit cards and bank debt to launch iRobot from a small apartment in Somerville, Mass. (Helen Greiner, another graduate of the AI Lab, joined them shortly thereafter.) Brooks assumed the title of chairman, and Angle declared himself president. Forgoing sleep and salaries and putting their personal lives on hold, the founders pursued one overarching goal: to build robots that would touch people's lives. But at first the only lives touched were those of other students of robotics, who used the start-up's products for their own experiments.

Now, as growth markets go, building robots for robotics-studies programs isn't one. Soon iRobot was seeking government contracts and, later, corporate work. A list of its projects over the next decade is as eclectic and lacking in direction as a freshman's course schedule. The company's growing cadre of engineers built nuclear-waste detectors and industrial floor waxers and timid toy balls that whimpered when rolled into dark corners. Each project became a division; those divisions multiplied to as many as 12, dwindled to a handful, and then swelled as customers chose to manufacture, scrap, or back-burner their prototypes. The goal of such diversity was to mitigate risk. "We had our fingers in all these pies because we had no killer pie," Angle says. "And we didn't know how to decide what a killer pie was other than to let Darwin do it.

"Focusing this company too early," says the CEO, "would have killed it."

The eclecticism of iRobot may have saved it from the fate of some Internet companies, which assumed the mere existence of their technology would somehow will a market into being. But it also allowed the business to store up a trove of intellectual property. The importance of IP was brought home early to Angle, who in 1992 negotiated away the rights to a robot called Grendel to one of his customers. "We had to segregate that whole product line and make sure that other derivative products followed a different technology path so that [the customer] wouldn't end up owning a big chunk of what we did," says Angle. "It was very scary stuff, but it was a good early lesson."

It's a lesson many never learn: Small contractors routinely cede valuable patents and trade secrets to their larger customers. After Grendel, however, iRobot insisted on retaining the rights to all technology developed during a project, except for a few well-defined applications specified by the client. Most customers were willing to go along with that, so long as they could benefit from R&D done on someone else's dime. "The ability to draw on IP developed elsewhere became part of the story we tell, part of what we sell," says Angle. It also left the company free to use the fruits of its earlier labors -- specifically, cleaning technology developed for Johnson Wax Professional and tiny processors created for Hasbro -- in Roomba and its anticipated sister products.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT 

Read more:

Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

Sign-up for our Innovation Newsletter

Email Address: