iRobot’s Colin Angle On NOVA’s Secret Life Of Scientists
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 21 of December , 2009 at 2:18 am
You might have known that Colin Angle, the co-founder and CEO of iRobot, was an engineer. I’ll bet you didn’t know that he likes to snowboard and hates folding laundry (need a robot that can help with that?). Last week Colin was profiled on NOVA ScienceNow’s The Secret Life Of Scientists, and you can watch three more videos from the interview over on their website.
One of the weirdest things (amidst a bunch of weird things) that Colin mentions is to what he credits continued Roomba sales after its initial success at launch back in September of 2002:
“It was the week after Thanksgiving and sales were very disappointing, and we were still a pretty fragile company financially. It was a stressful time. We would get together every morning and [one day] the guy who ran direct sales raised his hand and said, ‘Hey guys, why did sales triple yesterday?’ Well, we didn’t know why. We hadn’t done any ads, there was no newspaper article about us, and we hadn’t been on ‘Oprah’, but sales had somehow tripled. And one of our engineers raised his hand and said, ‘Well, you know, I saw this Pepsi commercial yesterday, maybe that was it.’”
So, uh, thanks Dave Chapelle, I guess we Roomba owners all owe you one.
Or something.
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