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…their robot vacuum uses LAR or cameras. I don't think most people know. I don't think most people care. I certainly had bought Roombas uh you know for my first apartments and homes before I knew what what technology was running on them. I just care does this thing clean my floors or not. Um and I think >> you know over time there started to feel like a gap between Roombas and some of these Chinese competitors with other features. Things that were unrelated to navigation. Things like does this thing have a wet mop as well as a vacuum in it? Can there sort of be these other features that can maybe make this thing a little more useful or require a little less oversight? So, are there other features that the Chinese competitors and other competitors introduced into their robots that you wish the Roomba had adopted earlier? >> So, honestly, we got wet mopping wrong. Uh we built our first mopping robot two years after Roomba and we felt like creating an independent mopping solution was the right strategy and it gave the best customer benefit. It did the best job >> as in having a safer robot that mops the floors than the one that vacuums the floors. >> Yeah, we called it Scuba. uh and uh you know we we built it, it worked great, but the customer didn't go for it. It was never going to work as an independent product, but it was going to work as an incremental feature and we reacted late and we took some damage and had to do some uh rugged hustling to go catch up. So, you know, I deserve arrows for for the for mopping. Um, I I believe that um the LAR people are still wrong and I just wish we had moved faster and and and had a longer runway before that because that led to a great place. >> Let's I feel like we we sort of um missed the the middle of the story, which is the uh attempted sale to Amazon. You you mentioned it earlier, but I I kind of want to revisit that. Um, so in August 2022, Amazon offers to buy iRoot for $1.7 billion. It ultimately falls apart over antitrust concerns. I think some people look at that and they think, well, that seems fine because Amazon's already plenty big and I don't want it to own like, you know, every vertical of e-commerce in existence. Um, but I imagine that you may feel quite differently. So make your case that this was a bad outcome for America that iRoot was not able to become a part of Amazon. >> Well, that's pretty easy. uh you know we got to a point where uh for very good and and uh understandable reasons the market pressures and the competition led to an economic model where iRoot was finding itself pressured to innovate and you know iRoot was a proxy for the United States because we were the only public company doing consumer robotics and so that Uh if you were a fan of having consumer robotics being an industry where I America could cons could claim leadership, you needed by robot to continue to be able to invest like big dogs and uh create innovations that was going to give consumers the choice that um uh they were asking for. And so the challenge was the acquisition seemed to become all about Amazon and not at all about consumer preference. leadership in the consumer robot industry e choice that um uh they were asking for. And so the challenge was the acquisition seemed to become all about Amazon and not at all about consumer preference. leadership in the consumer robot industry and doing what the European Commission, the FDC were are are charged with doing is defending the worst abuses of monopoly. >> I mean, at the time, iRoot's market share in Europe was 12% and declining. The market leader in Europe was a company that had been in the marketplace for 3 years. That's kind of the definition of a vibrant, dynamic marketplace. How do you even create an argument that says there are monopolistic forces, antitrust forces that are at play here? >> What was what was the rumor's market share in the US at the time? I'm just curious. >> I mean, it was uh hanging around 50%. >> Okay. So not not like an overwhelming uh monopoly but a dominant player in the market >> and the market share unfortunately for us at the time was going down. Well there was multiple competitive healthy competitors that were seeing their market share going up. Again very difficult to say okay this is a monopolistic position. In your view, was the the failure of the the antitrust regulators that they kind of misjudged what kind of acquisition this was? that this was more of a lifeline or a a sort of um you know aqua hire or something strategic to sort of let the company keep operating um from a place of weakness rather than sort of Amazon trying to gobble up a you know a company on the rise that was uh you know sort of going to enable it to extend its dominance into another area. And it would be impossible for me to believe that anything was missed. We sp I mean iroot spent tremendous amounts of its own resources and Amazon spent many many times what iroot spent over the course of 18 months doing our best to make incredibly clear the facts and circumstances regarding the acquisition. There was nothing unsaid and there was no gee golly I wish we had asked that question but we didn't. >> So why did it get blocked? Uh it wasn't ignorance. >> One concern wasn't okay. One concern that came up a lot at the time was uh iRoot famously used these cameras and there were worries that Amazon was just going to have detailed views inside the homes of many many Americans and this could be used for some targeted advertising or just other uses that people might find creepy. Um, of course, now we're in a world where chi uh you know it's uh owned by a Chinese company and so all those same images are you know going to be in China. I'm curious what was the conversation around that at the time with those regulators and did you float the possibility that like look if it's like not Amazon that has access to this data it might be something that you like even less >> you know I think that uh we and and to my knowledge continue to have incredibly rigorous privacy and security in fact images never leave the Roomba you know we defend it in depth meaning that all of that use of cameras was uh was all done on the edge on the robots. No image ever left the robot unless you gave explicit permission to the exact image that we showed you that we are going to share. Uh all opt in and uh iroot uh was all done on the edge on the robots. No image ever left the robot unless you gave explicit permission to the exact image that we showed you that we are going to share. Uh all opt in and uh iroot adheres to the highest uh level of cyber and security. you know, we were the first consumer product company to ever uh meet the requirements of uh a um you know, sort of the gold standard in data security. >> So, if it wasn't the privacy concerns that you think led the FTC to block this acquisition, um and if you don't think it was ignorance on their part, what was it? Why do you think the government stepped in to prevent this merger from happening? >> I have no logical answer to that question. I do not believe there is any economic rationale which would say that the FDC or the European Commission had any evidence that the consumer was going to be negatively harmed by the acquisition of iRoot by Amazon and I view I believe that passionately the consumer only lost and so that if that's not the reason Why did the Federal Trade Commission with the Commissioner Lena Khan outspoken in her opposition of big tech choose to take a position contrary to the formal charge of the FTC to protect the interests of the consumer? Uh, and answer it with your own gut. >> What What is your own gut? I believe iRoot had nothing to do with the blocking of the deal with the FDC >> that it was essentially just Lena didn't want Amazon to get bigger and that was the end of the conversation. >> I believe iRoot was this is Colin's personal view. We were roadkill. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, so let's talk about you know as we sort of are running out of time here. what you think the implications of this are for future efforts to get robotics companies off the ground in the United States. We've had some uh robotics companies on the show uh over the past several months. What does your experience tell you about their likely path forward? And you know, what concerns do you have about the future of American manufacturing? you know, uh the the tragedy of of the blocking of the transaction is we did it to ourselves. And the net result, um which I have argued was done with eyes wide open was putting the consumer robot industry in a box, gift wrapping it, and handing it to someone else. Markets are difficult to create. They're fragile. They need to be nurtured. They need to be cared for. And there are many, many people who are working incredibly hard to take any scent of an exciting new market away from the inventor. We as a nation need to decide what we want to have happen. Right now, here we're sitting around with physical AI, uh, humanoids. Uh, it's at an exciting point. Billions of dollars have been invested in leadership and creating American companies that are uh doing tremendously exciting research and the ramifications is worth trillions of dollars of value creation in the future. Uh if you know what has been written and invested in is to be believed. And so, uh, are we going to protect and catalyze American companies to continue to lead? We need to reestablish confidence that the FDC's role is to prevent the abuses while catalyzing American competitiveness. M…

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