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. The Roomba succeeded only after Angle's team discovered customers would pay hundreds for a vacuum but not for a cloth-dragging robot, requiring invention of a dual-brush, squeegee-style system that became 70% more efficient than traditional vacuums.