Neil Freiman

Toby, for the last time, I do not want to hear about your fantasy football team.

Okay.

That's legitimately cool.

So with generated assets, you can create investable indexes, kind of like ETFs, but they are your own ideas.

Yep.

podcast description if your Roomba looks a little gloomy today maybe it's hiding in the closet and won't come out it's because the company that makes it just went bankrupt on Sunday night Roomba maker iRobot filed for chapter 11 and agreed to be taken over by its Chinese supplier

It's a disappointing chapter for a 35-year-old company that pioneered the way humans and robots interacted.

When iRobot released the Roomba back in 2002, it made the average person feel like they were living in the Jetsons, a robot that vacuumed the house for us.

Truly, this was the future that was promised.

But other companies got hip to the game, and intense competition from Asia slowly ate away at the Roomba's profits.

Then tariffs gobbled up all the rest, especially the 46% rate on Vietnam, where Roombas were made and then shipped to the U.S.

iRobot was thrown a lifeline in 2022 when Amazon agreed to buy it for $1.7 billion, but that deal fell through following antitrust scrutiny from the US and the EU.

The good news for Roomba owners, your robot vacuum won't immediately become a brick.

iRobot says that despite the bankruptcy, it's business as usual.

Your robots will continue to vacuum while you sit on the couch, and it expects no disruptions to operations.

Toby, it's a small company, iRobot, but its story sits at the intersection of so many big forces, globalization, antitrust, AI, and robotics.

Really interesting founding story, too, about iRobot is an old company, you know, dates back to the 90s, was founded in 1990, actually, by three researchers at MIT.

They had been studying the way insects move around.

They've been studying this all throughout the 80s and how they make very complex systems.

And they translated that to robotics.