A First Look at Matic, the Reengineered Robot Vacuum

Within a few minutes of arriving at the WIRED offices in San Francisco, Matic cofounder Mehul Nariyawala brings up the classic Paul Graham piece on schlep blindness. The essay talks about how engineers will often shrink away from starting a company to tackle a very commonly understood problem simply because solving that problem would require too much work. They don't want to schlep, so they put aside the world-changing idea and instead just go build something easy. We're watching the prototype, Matic, slowly work out whether the color differentiations of the concrete floor in the WIRED offices actually signal whether it's moving from hardwood to carpet. I ask Nariyawala why so many startups compete to create a self-driving car when the problem of creating a simple, effective, yet affordable robot vacuum is right there waiting to be solved.