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,