Hacker News Reader

Comment by yurimo | Hacker News Reader

Rodney Brooks is widely recognized and celebrated roboticist, ran CSAIL for a while. iRobot as a company created a new market and managed to put a functional household robot out there, whether Chinese alternatives ate the share of it is largely irrelevant to his argument on humanoids, which I find to be completely reasonable.

View on HN

There is a wide gap between academic and entrepreneur/business operator though. He was one of three co founders of iRobot the company l, is not even credited at the inventor of it, and iRobot has largely been a one hit wonder. They created a category but the underlying product largely was unimproved until China started dominating.

His other business was a failure and his third current is in a crowded marketplace. Humanoids are the minority in warehouse automation.

Who is even talking about his argument on humanoids? What does that have to do with my comment. My response was on a comment praising his triple success in business and I am questioning that definition of success.

You say one hit wonder, but iRobot's PackBot and other gov-focused efforts were/are very profitable, though the company had to spin off the defense arm.

What are the other efforts? Packbot was sold off for $45mm for the time a company with a market cap of $1.6bn. Again the PackBot could be great but would you call a product that had low $ contracts to the government that eventually was sold for peanuts a wildly successful company? I don’t consider iRobot to be a wildly successful company.

Endeavor Robotics was recently sold for $382MM. So clearly it was actually valuable.

Are you aware that from an investor perspective, creating a household brand and high IRR though IPO is considered a wild success? All companies eventually decline. By your metrics GE wasn't a wildly successful company either. Or AOL. Or Yahoo. Or Myspace. Every one of those companies eventually declined and your return would be poor if you held on to your investment over their entire arc.

Are you aware you are picking the wrong numbers. $382 is post iRobot when endeavor sold to Flir. Why would you even use that number. PackBot sold for $45mm. That’s a decade worth of work and investment for $45mm. I think you might be narrating a bit too much and putting words into my mouth. I don’t know the IRR for iRobot as I was never part of the funding rounds while private or an insider while public. That said it was a stagnant public company that had a jump around Covid time which has come crashing back down. Maybe those folks like yourself, based on the way you speak, invested early in the 90s in iRobot and were part of that IPO.

I am not attacking the man only a perspective that I am not sure investors would see him as a wildly successful entrepreneur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com