How Colin Angle built iRobot from a robotics lab with no business model into a company that created the Roomba, selling 30 million units and dominating 70% of the robot vacuum market—until regulatory decisions and Chinese competition forced a sale to a Chinese firm, handing decades of US innovation overseas. Colin Angle survived 12 years of near-bankruptcy by taking government and corporate contracts at break-even, reinvesting IP value-sharing deals until the Roomba finally generated consumer revenue.