Nanotronics: Matthew Putman

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More

We sat down with Matthew Putman, CEO & Co-Founder of Nanotronics, to discuss what it means to live in an age of so much rapid technological advancement.

 

 

Danny:

Hey, thank you for joining me today on today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I have the CEO of Nanotronics, Matthew Putman. Thank you so much for joining me today from New York.

Matthew:

It’s great to be here, thank you.

Danny:

So, for those who aren’t familiar with Nanotronics, can you tell me a little bit about your organization and what you guys do?

Matthew:

Sure, Nanotronics is a science and technology company. We blend artificial intelligence. We actually make robotics, we make microscopes. We bring these together in order to scale technologies that are either a challenge to scale otherwise, or need to get to the next level. So whether they’re large businesses who need to innovate, which we all need to continue to do.

Danny:

Yeah.

Matthew:

Or they’re upcoming businesses, such as quantum computing, nanotechnology, genomics, a number of really interesting businesses. And what I’m interested in, maybe we can talk about some, I’m interested in technology as foundational technology that has to do with process control. How things are made has not really changed since the 1950s. And I think that would surprise people. But now with some of these new technologies that I mentioned it’s possible to make change.

Danny:

Absolutely, well it’s a very exciting time in the industry, and across multiple industries and verticals as we go through a lot of this digital transformation, there’s a huge emergence of technology that is happening. You’re seeing it really just revolutionize many, many, many businesses, and you’re going to continue to see that as that technology growth curve continues to just kind of grow, exponentially. But before we get into all of that really fun and exciting stuff, I want to know your backstory of how, tell me, how did you start your career? How did you get into manufacturing?

Matthew:

Look, my career goes back farther than most people. When I was a child, my father had started a business, and actually both of my parents. And before that, my grandparents worked in a sort of startup. So I come in from this sort of serial entrepreneurial background, but in making factory equipment. So, back when I was eight years old, my father started a business that put computers, personal computers, at the beginning of the personal computer age, in 1982, onto factory floors for doing process control. And you’ll hear a lot of why, how that has directed my life.

So I grew up in that type of environment, in a factory itself, seeing businesses grow. And, I went through other times of my life then. I’m a musician, I play free-jazz piano, and I produced plays and movies, and tried, really explored, where arts and this background that I’d had in industry, how was this different? How are we all part of the same world? I ended up getting a PhD in applied physics, working for my family business, and continuing to play music. I was working at a university. I had a really wonderful lab at this university. And we would see these great inventions coming out of the lab. The problem is they weren’t actually coming out of the lab. They were staying within the lab.

So we were working with things like nanoantenna in order to be able to make photovoltaics that worked at night. We were working with regenerative medicine scaffolds that would extend life. But we couldn’t celebrate too much because it was hard to get these things off the ground. I grew up in this business where I was dealing with scale of industries that were lower-profit type of businesses, then I was dealing with no scale at all. So, on some of the most exciting science and technology in the world. So Nanotronics was an effort to take the most interesting things and scale them for a wider audience. So I went through this strange path to get where I am.

Danny:

That takes, okay, so let me back up a little bit. So a lot going on here. You mentioned, I think I heard you said that you even, obviously, you’re a musician doing your jazz piano, I think that’s awesome, but also you were, you produced some plays and some movies? Did I hear that right?

Matthew:

Yeah, and I am still really involved in the arts. I mean, I think it makes a fuller experience of what’s going on in the world and what’s going on internally. So I’m on a board of two nonprofits. One that’s in the arts and science, nonprofit. The other is a dance and theater nonprofit. And still involved with producing movies and plays from time to time. Certainly it’s not a job anymore. It’s something that I care deeply about though still, yeah.

Danny:

That’s really exciting. So, all right, so, obviously you’ve got, this was something, that entrepreneurial spirit, that gene, if you will. I mean, you grew up in that, obviously. You mention, generationally, I mean, it was a thing. Was there a moment when, you mentioned you were eight years old, and you were seeing how, putting PCs into a plant, and utilizing that. Was there a moment that stands out, where you said, “This is awesome! “I love this and I want to do this for the rest of my life.”

Matthew:

So, there were a lot of wonderful moments as a kid and as a teenager, but I think that it was as an adult, while working in the arts. I had two really great mentors, in addition to, my life has been this sort of journey of creating new mentors, and I hope that I find more as we go on. But outside of my family, I had this music teacher in high school, Elinder Mynica, and she became a dear friend of mine, introduced me to the opera and to art in ways that I hadn’t experienced before. And her husband was a material scientist and applied physicist that worked in a university. So I used to spend all of these dinners, going to operas then, and talking, and I realized that these two people were what my life was going to be, with the things that would bring me both fulfillment, and where I could have some influence in the world.

So, it’s hard to remember exactly one moment, but the time that I remember the most was that, I had never considered myself a scientist and capable. And this mentor, Eberhard Mynica, Elinder’s husband, I did this presentation for, and I was so nervous, I wanted his help. And he said, “This is really good work. You should take it forward.” And I remember this gave me an enormous amount of confidence that I could participate. I mean, I’m nothing special, but I could participate in creating something.

Danny:

That’s awesome, so, I love this theme that we’re kind of talking about here a little bit about the blend of really art and industry. Or the, I think you mentioned earlier on, that some of the challenges when you were going through your PhD was there was a lot of R and D development, a lot of innovation that was happening inside the labs, but yet, from a, it wasn’t going to market, if I understand that. It was, or implementing scale to it. And sounds like you found a way to bring both of those worlds together now. To be able to do that, to have a playground, if you will, to come up with these innovations, these solutions, to these real-world challenges, but then actually to be able to go to market and scale them.

Matthew:

Oh yeah, and we’re incredibly lucky because we make something physical, but more than that, our customers do. And so, we do have not only a sandbox for our incredible R and D engineers, and the people who build the things, and do the engineering, and the drawings, but we get to see, we get to sort of step back and see what’s going on in the world, and where it could be in the next two, five, and 10 years. And I consider these technologies that we get to see and what we participate in as foundational technology. They’re just different than where we’ve lived in maybe the last 15 or 20 years, which are, we call application. You have apps on the iPhone, but what is going on inside an iPhone? What are the huge amount of chipsets that are inside there? How are they improving? Is there something that is stagnant about the way things are made, even while the world of applications was getting better and better? And, I’m feeling if those foundational things are not improved at the rate of the applications, you won’t have the next generation of applications either. That’s making factories artificially intelligent, not just apps and advertising tech that are all using artificial intelligence, as an example.

Danny:

That’s, no, you’re 100% right. You’re talking about, changing and innovating the platform, that foundational piece. Something that you’re able to build upon there. So, I’ve got a couple questions, and I want to figure out which one I’m going to ask first, but, I think I know the answer to this, but what’s the thing that you get up every morning and you say, “This is what I want to go tag. “This is my motivation, this is my purpose.” What is that?

Matthew:

If you know the answer, tell me, that would be… Yeah, if every day were the same thing that I wanted to tackle, to get into, I get bored too easily to get in a kind of routine like that. I’m lucky to see new challenges all the time. But those things are, they fall broadly in the category of bringing a level of abundance that doesn’t exist now. And that could be getting rid of waste. So that’s waste of humans wasting their time, it can be a waste of capital, it could be actually creating a sustainable environment. And so, the way we look at it is that if you build things more efficiently, and you have the speed to iterate and create new things faster, you also eliminate waste. So, we do this in a number of ways, and our customers do. We want to, our customers work on things like making next-generation semiconductors, so that we do have better smartphones. Or they work on making full genome sequencing much faster and less expensive. And from that, you get a certain abundance because it will eventually lead to personalized medicine. So, we get to see a lot of these incredibly exciting things happen, and that’s what gets me up in the morning to come to work. And what an incredible thing to get to work with our team to help enable those things to occur.

Danny:

That’s awesome, no, hey, it sounds like you have a really fun job, you’ve got a fun company, a fun job there. And I have a very unique admiration for you because I do not have sort of that engineering bone or that, I can’t do that. So, kudos to you, that’s awesome.

Matthew:

I don’t know that I have any bone for engineering. I think, first of all, I think that there is something that people have lost track of, is that they think that we are at an age where things have become so complex that we can no longer invent. But there was a time 150 years ago, 120 years ago, where most patents were done by an individual. Now it’s very large corporations that hold most of the patent portfolio of our country. And this can lead to the feeling that you’re not an engineer. And I bet you have ideas every day and can build. So a big part of it is just inspiring people, not that I’m particularly good at that, but there is something that needs to be done, through, usually through showing people that it is possible, that they can be building the way that a different generation did, but now with these tools, of things like artificial intelligence, to be able to build this way.

Danny:

Well, you’ve got me sold. You’re inspiring me on that. And I think that one of the, maybe, when we talk about some of the challenges in the industry, one of them is workforce. Actually attracting new workforce into the industry. And I think what you mentioned right there was talking about inspiring people and showing people what can be done. We were just, we were at MODEX couple weeks ago, big material handling and supply chain trade show, and it was, it’s amazing to see all the robotics, and the innovation, and the AI, and the virtual reality, and the, just all the things, all the innovation going on, and I think there’s a lot of times that people, particularly the younger generation is like, “Oh that space is just kind of like manufacturing, “and logistics, ehh.” But you said something really key I think. And that, maybe it’s a lot closer than we think.

Matthew:

I mean, it’s everything that exists inside of what we’re doing, but it’s actually something that is accessible. I mean there’s something I used to say back when a lot of people were talking about Facebook being invented in a dorm room, I used to say, I don’t want the next social network to be made in a dorm room, I want the next factory.

Danny:

Yeah.

Matthew:

And we see where people can get inspired to do such a thing. You can see where 3D printing is going, for instance. What if, a 3D printer you can think of as a small robot and a small factory.

Danny:

Yeah.

Matthew:

What if the human is enabled to dream up the thing that they want to invent, and this piece of, this tool that’s automated can then take that human potential and that human creativity and build it for them? One thing Nanotronics is doing is taking then a 3D printer, and other things that are, that can help people build, and freeing the human to do the creative work, and using an AI to make this as good as possible. To make something more than just toys. To make something that is foundational and interesting, and is going to bring about a new type of industrial revolution. And suddenly, if you think in this world of, “What can I print because I dreamed it,” then suddenly, you are empowered to dream it and to create it.

Danny:

Absolutely, so, and well, okay, so on that note, one of the things that I would love to ask, and this might be a little off script, but we hear about this all the time. We hear about virtual reality, AI, machine learning, all these great applications in the manufacturing space. What are some concrete ways, I think you kind of started to get into that a little bit, what are some concrete ways that manufacturers are rolling out with AI-enabled robotics, or, what are some specific uses?

Matthew:

So, I want to not be negative with what I’m going to say, but often when you think, what you think is happening in the world may not be. So, a robot itself in a factory is not the most exciting thing about a factory.

Danny:

Right, yeah.

Matthew:

The way that it’s working right now. So, it’s almost what is about to happen that we should be getting excited about more than what currently is happening. And what is about to happen is the things that we have seen in artificial intelligence that have excited us in other fields are going to make their way into how we build things. So, are you familiar with a division of Alphabet called DeepMind was able to beat the greatest Go player in the world, one they called AlphaGo?

Danny:

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Matthew:

And this was a huge moment for, really for the world, to see that the most complex game where there’s more potential ways of moves than all the atoms in the universe, and a AI, using something called deep-reinforcement learning, could be optimized in order to take moves that were not intuitive to humans at all, and be better than any human. This was, this wasn’t just a brute-force approach. This was having to think, and correct, and follow new strategies, and new tactics along the way.

Now, factories don’t currently work this way, but we’re making factories work that way now for the first time. Where it’s not just robots that are building, let’s say semiconductors, or you go into the Tesla factory, and they’re making cars with single robots that are incredible factories, but what if you’re making something, and as you make it, there is a problem with it, or as you make it, you could make it better? And a machine, not too dissimilarly from winning in Alpha Go, makes a change in the process in real time, to make the best product. Then it’s only our imaginations that are limited to what can be built.

So that factory becomes less of an assembly line, the way that you consider a, sort of Henry Ford-style assembly line, which is still the way most factories are, by the way, whether there’s robots or not, and it becomes different variations of additive manufacturing, like you would think with a 3D printer. And this happens, we’re seeing this happen in the field of genomics, we’re seeing it in LiDAR for autonomous vehicles that we’re very involved with, we’re seeing it for the very first quantum computers that are being built, really big deal, and we’re going to see it, and we have to see it, in things that involve super-complex supply chains, like a computer, like a smartphone, or smart device in general, that can be built in a more distributed fashion. Once we can do that, we know that we have an intelligent factory.

Danny:

That’s, so we’re really, to put it in a, I’m going to put it in my terms here a little bit. I’m going to bring it down a few notches now, because, as I understand, it’s really the ability to be able to adapt sort of on the fly. So to be able to input and take in all kinds of data, and be able to process it at a ridiculous speed, to be able to say, I detected changes that would make this more efficient, and then now we are able to actually go implement those changes in more of a real-time fashion, is that?

Matthew:

By making choices, by an AI making choices to fix things that humans would not be able to make. And you can also, we do this also with manual, where we’re doing a kind of augmented reality, where we track people’s hands when they’re making things, and show them how to make corrections. Now I say we, it is the AI that’s making the corrections, or showing the human how, but it’s the human that did the design, or the human that has defined what they want to make, that thing that matters to them.

Danny:

So with the advent of quantum computing, I mean, just the amount of data crunching that they’re able to do is just, it will exponentially increase. So you’re going to be able to see more of that. I mean, didn’t Google, wasn’t this one of the things that they supposedly cracked over the summer last year?

Matthew:

Well, cracking is a funny thing. They did something that was deemed, this thing called quantum supremacy. So, in a way, the way I see that is it’s kind of a way of showing that quantum mechanics can work for creating something other than a classical computer. You still can’t do an enormous amount with a quantum computer, but it showed that we’ve hit an inflection point that soon you will be able to do things that are currently impossible to do with a classical computer. So we’re just at the very, very beginning of that, and it’s extremely exciting.

Danny:

That sounds, I can’t wait. Imagine all the change, and the innovation, and the increase in the efficiencies, and the processes that you’re seeing, and you mentioned with supply chain, I imagine that it’s really a new, it’s a new era. It’ll be a new, as we talked about before, a new journey, as we are going through all this. I think that’s going to be very, very, very exciting to see what unfolds, and all the different solutions, and increases in efficiency.

Matthew:

Yeah, it’s certainly more than increases in efficiency. It’s actually completely foundational, in a way that we haven’t seen in several generations.

Danny:

Well, so, kind of moving along here, what are some of the challenges that you’re seeing, obviously we’ve kind of touched on it a little bit, what are some of the biggest challenges that you’re seeing in the industry right now, from your viewpoint?

Matthew:

So, right now we’re on a path where we think that there is commodification of everything. We’ve had, for your life and mine, you’ve had something called Moore’s law, which you’re familiar with. Are you familiar with Moore’s law that… the basic idea is that you have computational power that increases at the same price, and at the same time, price and cost for us comes down as things get faster and better. But there is also something that’s happening that is a bit dangerous, and a challenge. It’s that to make those electronic devices, the factories to build them are exponentially getting more expensive. There are fabs, which are fabrication factories to build semiconductors, that cost over $20 billion to make now. To build the factory. Unthinkable for any other generation or any other time. Any other time meaning even 10 years ago, this was unthinkable.

So a huge challenge is to bring about some of the changes that I was mentioning earlier, in order to make factories much, much less expensive. If you don’t do that, the barrier to entry is going to be huge. I mean, you can imagine, the barrier entry for you to create a podcast, or for us to write an app that might be interesting for our phones, or for the computer, the barrier to entry is only our imagination, and what we want to do with it. Barrier to making a factory right now can be billions of dollars. That’s a challenge that we have to face, or we’re going to have real stagnation. And that’s what we’re looking to face. I think that’s by far the biggest one.

Danny:

Interesting, how are you, so how are you guys solving that?

Matthew:

I think creating these close-looped AI systems that have corrective action, this is a really big thing. You don’t have waste of materials, you don’t have incredible amounts of expensive equipment. So, generally factories are built with I’d say a hardware solution to building things. So if you think about that Henry Ford factory line, it is a line, but in this case, it’s a line of very expensive, physical things to build something like, let’s say, semiconductors in those $20 billion-plus fabs. If you could do this at single stations, at one small station the size of my desk, which is something that Nanotronics works at that we can do all types of testing and AI analysis, the reason we can do that is that we don’t use a big hardware solution, we use computation. And that computation is partially AI, it’s partially the ability to have controls that could never exist before over the machines. So it’s really switching the mentality to having computers and software solve for things that used to only be done with very complex, expensive hardware.

Danny:

Excellent, yeah, well I, it sounds like, again, what you guys are doing is very cool. I think that a lot of people, and myself included, I’m excited to learn more about it, as I don’t know a whole lot about this, and I think that it’s exciting to see new companies such as yourself coming in and doing this, and to really solve a lot of these challenges that we’re seeing in the industry. And, to pivot a little bit, and I apologize, these questions are very redundant, or maybe a little obtuse.

Matthew:

I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you totally get it, and I think that, I mean I, no, and I do think you could be inventing, by the way.

Danny:

No, I think, I, this is great, and I feel like you hear of these terms and this stuff being slung around all the time, but my gut is that a lot of people, and even myself included, we’re like, “Yeah, oh absolutely, yes this.” But really, at the end of the day, it’s actually having some sort of deep understanding or knowledge of it is very little. We did a big thing on blockchain a couple weeks ago, and I said, “Listen, we’re just going to, let’s just, “I’m going to ask the really stupid questions,” and, I mean, that was one of our most-viewed videos. People were really interested in how, blockchain in manufacturing, and we just went very simply, what is this? Is blockchain bitcoin? Well, no, you know? These are the questions that people, they ask us. And so it’s–

Matthew:

Well I think when this… it’s so important to know that these things are more graspable than society would say they are. One of the biggest challenges is just to let people know that they’re capable, more capable than the system says they are.

Danny:

Yeah.

Matthew:

So we all grew up with this system that says that if you’re not good at mathematics at a young age, you won’t be able to succeed in technology and science. And that’s just not true now. It’s absolutely right that you’re asking questions about blockchain and having an episode about it. And it makes sense that many people are listening to it, because many people may be able to get in and utilize blockchain in their lives, and they get to understand the way that the world is working around them. That should be inspirational that we can all create something.

Danny:

Awesome, no, I love it, that’s awesome. So, kind of wrapping up our segment, so for those who would like to learn a little bit more about Nanotronics, or yourself, what’s the best way? I mean obviously, go to your website, Nanotronics.co, C-O, is that right?

Matthew:

Yeah, that’s right. And on our website we have a section called think space. And these are podcasts that I have done, there’s some that, and then there’s some other places on our site that have some media that we’ve done, those are more about these philosophical ideas, but they’re also interviews that I’ve done with other people to hear what other people’s mentors are. And then somehow it does tie into what Nanotronics does as well. So absolutely, go to the website, and just float around to these different areas of it, and hopefully you find something.

Danny:

Awesome, well, Matthew thank you so much for spending some time with us on the Executive Series here.

Matthew:

I loved it, thank you!

Danny:

I loved it as well. So, we’ll be releasing this soon. So, thank you so much.

Matthew:

Great.

Danny:

All right, so that wraps today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with the CEO, Matthew Putman, of Nanotronics here. So, really great episode. I really enjoyed learning about a lot of this stuff. A lot of really cool stuff coming down the track. So, be sure to like and subscribe, join in the conversation that we’re going to have on social media. If you’re not on our email list, I encourage you to subscribe. And I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching, or listening.

 

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Sponsored by Optimum Productions