‘It’s a cage match’: Beleaguered iRobot founder says the biggest reason why the Roomba-maker failed was because of growing Chinese competition

After Roomba-maker iRobot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, cofounder and former CEO Colin Angle did not shy away from sharing what went wrong. Angle, who cofounded iRobot in 1990 alongside other members of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, said in a recent episode of the New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast that one of the core problems with remaining competitive in its market was growing Chinese competition. “It’s certainly the advent of this new type of competitor, the Chinese fast follower wh ...