Marin Tchakarov's family moved to the US after the iron curtain fell. As CEO of Kindred AI, he now seeks to use AI and robotics to improve human working conditions. Danny: Alright, thank you for joining me today on the IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by the CEO of Kindred AI, Marin Tchakarov, coming in from San Francisco, California. Marin, thank you so much for joining me today. Marin: Danny, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Danny: Well, I'm excited to jump into today's episode, but before we get into all the good things here, could you tell me, who is Kindred AI? What do you guys do? Marin: Yeah, so we've developed an artificial intelligence platform that, through machine vision, grasping, and placement technologies, together effectively solves for complex commercial problems at our customers in real-world settings, in production settings. Danny: Excellent. Well, the talk of the town right now, not just right now, but it's been before: digital transformation. We're seeing huge leaps and bounds. And, now, because of this fun thing called COVID, I suspect that we'll get into that; it's accelerated that conversation for lots of organizations. And I'm willing to bet that you've probably experienced the same thing. And we'll get into that here a little bit more in the episode. But before we do that, I would love to get to know Marin. I want to get to know you a little bit better. Tell me, how did you get into this space? Take me back. Marin: Sure. It's been an interesting, long journey. I was born and raised, I grew up in Bulgaria under the iron curtain, and in a family of scientists. We immigrated to the US just about as soon as we could right after the wall fell. That was probably one of the most transformative changes in my life, really. It was, in many ways, a classic yet modern-day immigrant story where we all came, barely speaking the language and had to really ramp up and immerse in this culture and in this world. That's taking you far, far back. Danny: No, that's great. I love it. Marin: I'm extremely fortunate and proud to have had a relatively long career in technology and, so, it's been a path of building a brand, for one, for myself in terms of what I'm passionate about with respect to trends, technological trends and how I, for one, perceive them enveloping in the future. And, so, most recently, prior to joining the artificial intelligence and robotics world, I was in the connected devices, smart devices world. I was at companies like Jawbone and Pebble prior to Kindred. Danny: Okay, so I'm always fascinated by hearing stories of people, particularly immigrant-type stories. What was it like transitioning from coming over and, then, starting anew? What was that like? Marin: It was a massive shock to the system on so many different levels. Obviously, the language barrier. Look, I knew just about enough English, based on what I've learned from watching American movies in Bulgaria. Danny: Yeah. Marin: So anything from the very basic language barrier to culture to just completely different economic and political systems where the abundance that we have in our world here and how fortunate we are was a staunch contrast to where we came from as a family. So it, to this day, continues to be the most formative inflection point of my life. And that's probably because of how incredibly hard it was to tackle all of those things in as fast as possible type of fashion and be able to integrate, really. And, so, I would say that that was incredibly formative for me and put me on a very different path. Danny: I can only imagine.