Nanotronics: Matthew Putman

IndustrialSage

Matthew Putman of Nanotronics returns to discuss lean supply chain and the pandemic’s boost to the genomic sequencing field.

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Danny:

– Hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by the CEO and co-founder of Nanotronics, a man by the name of Matthew Putman. Matthew, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Matthew:

– I love to be on it. It’s good to talk to you.

Danny:

– It’s great talking to you again. We’ve got a veteran guest here. You’ve been on IndustrialSage in the past.

Matthew:

– I feel so lucky. Yeah, right at the beginning of Covid. I was saying that I actually was sick with Covid when I did your interview last time. I don’t know if you knew that.

Danny:

– Did we know, at that time—That was probably what, March of 2020-ish?

Matthew:

– Yeah, exactly. It was early in it. I wasn’t feeling well, but I was too embarrassed to say it. Not too many of us that we knew had it at that point. I was an early adopter.

Danny:

– There wasn’t a way to know at that point, I don’t think. Anyways, but glad you’re okay. Glad everything’s good.

Matthew:

– It’s great.

Danny:

– Yeah, that was a whole different world back then, wasn’t it?

Matthew:

– Oh, man, completely. It was scary. Scary time.

Danny:

– Absolutely. Well we’re going to jump into that a little bit, just see how things have changed for you and all this good stuff. But before we get into all that, for those who aren’t familiar with your company Nanotronics, tell us who you are and what you do.

Matthew:

– Nanotronics has been around for 10 years now, and we do industrial automation, bringing artificial intelligence and machine control to many different industries. We work in the genomic space. We really started in semiconductors and work in next-generation electronics. We work in multiple different industries focusing on what the next generation of manufacturing looks like. So we are this venture-backed company while being an old-school manufacturing company at the same time. The name of your podcast fits well, I hope.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. It’s good. I think what is going on right now with all the digital transformation and all the technology that’s pouring in in the manufacturing space is incredible. And I think that one of the—if you want to look at stuff. Obviously Covid brought a lot of not great things, to put it lightly. But it also, as a flip side, as a consequence, I think it created a necessity for companies to adopt a lot of this technology, or at least be more open to it. It was already kind of going that way anyways, but it certainly created a need saying, oh my gosh, we need to really come up with solutions. We saw so many weak points and vulnerabilities. And we’re still obviously going through that. How has that changed your business?

Matthew:

– It’s changed just about everything. Not in the same ways that you generally hear where we’re doing these things by remote conferences, and you have people work from home. We never did that. We were involved with building things that were a part of the effort to try to deal with the changing world from Covid. So we were all in this work time mentality and this urgency to get things done. That felt different, and it felt different to think in terms of getting things done by tomorrow because there were lives at stake, or there was this need to get research done to see where it would go. It changed a ton as far as our motivations and the way we perceive time. It didn’t change the fact that we were still working from home—or not working from home. We were working from the office still, and from the factory. Now of course, we were talking to everybody else this way. And I find what’s really interesting about that is that we could see the hardware behind things. Literally, we do imaging of semiconductors. We do imaging of displays. We could see where this hardware was starting to wear thin. While everybody was celebrating the ability to communicate, which is amazing, you could see worries of supply chain problems and when this hardware would start to break and need replacement. We could start to see where that might become a problem. And so we tried to address that with the same kind of urgency as a Covid response. So it was just this incredible confluence of a number of things happening at once.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. I remember—I think you were alluding to everyone going to Zoom and using cameras and whatnot. And then all of a sudden you couldn’t get cameras, and then all the supply chain issues there. ISPs were struggling with all the bandwidth and all the throughput that they had to have. We certainly noticed. We have done a lot of video streaming before. Yeah, you’re getting hammered, and no 1080p streams, 720. Your Netflix is getting knocked down. Just a huge strangle there, really, on all those things. Hardware, software, throughput, the whole nine yards.

Matthew:

– Yeah, and I think that in a way that pain is still going to be here for a while and will take companies and mindsets to change in order to address that. Computers are 24-month lead times sometimes for certain parts. People can’t get automobiles. There’s huge problems due to this chip crisis, due to everything that has been disrupted over the last year and a half, and perhaps a mindset that existed before that this just exacerbated. There’s a lot of pain and a lot of opportunity right now to be addressed.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. So relative to that, how has this really altered your future over at Nanotronics?

Matthew:

– Wow. It’s as if we have emergency use approval not only for FDA devices that we make but for everything that we’ve imagined and worked on that we thought had 15-year horizons before. For instance, where we’re working in the genomic sequencing space for our customers that work in that space, suddenly they went from being a small part of our business to being a huge part of our business. We see mRNA vaccines are the most widely-distributed biotech in the world. Nobody would have expected an mRNA therapeutic on this scale this quickly. So that changes a big part of our customer base. We focus on that. I’m in a new building here that we had built—it’s actually the oldest building here in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, or one of the oldest buildings. They made submarines, and we made this, this modern building. We’d had this planned out for a couple of years, so we knew exactly how we wanted workflow to be.

We’re going to make robots in this place. We’re going to make microscopes. Now in one part we’re making non-invasive ventilation devices that we’re shipping around the world. So we’re actually changing the physical infrastructure. We’re getting different types of people to do assembly and machining that we wouldn’t have thought before. So we’re adjusting to a world that is moving quickly and trying to make sure that we don’t miss that opportunity to do things that are outside of Covid but that we’ve always wanted to do, that I’ve thought important. So I can spend my rest of my career personally doing things that I’ve imagined always wanting to do, but not certain that the world would present that kind of opportunity. So there’s great risks and great potential reward that is very different than I would’ve expected a couple of years ago.

Danny:

– Yeah, that’s certainly a truth. You said something interesting I want to circle back on in a little bit. I don’t want to completely derail off this right now, yet.

Matthew:

– Oh, sorry.

Danny:

– No, no, no, you’re great. It’s an off-topic question that piqued my interest, so it’s very good. Relative to some of these changes that you’ve seen happen, you said, we’ve set everything up this way. We’re going to manufacture microscopes and these different—oh, actually that’s now, that’s off. We’re moving over to, you said either respirators or ventilators.

Matthew:

– Yeah, non-invasive ventilators that don’t require intubation. It’s a way that actually helped me when I was sick with Covid, and we’ve invented and got emergency use approval within three months. So that was something that was completely outside of anything that I planned for Nanotronics’s subsidiary of the company but has used our manufacturing techniques while, by the way, still doing microscopes. It’s just trying to do both in the same space, and we still have our other facilities as well working on the other products. But it’s just changing the way—and I bring up the space because even the physical structure of what we do is different. It’s not from working from home that it’s different from us. It’s the physical space we work in we had to transform to meet the changing product line and changing demand and changing opportunities.

Danny:

– Right, no, absolutely. How much of those, relative to some of those changes you said a large chunk of your business had switched. Do you see that continuing? Do you see that waning a little bit in the future and pivoting back? Where are you thinking things might go now?

Matthew:

– I have to put this—Nanotronics health division that makes the noninvasive ventilation and makes other products in the medical space. I’m going to put that over to the side a bit because that’s all new. That’s a different sort of business model. That goes to consumers, and that’s—but as far as our industrial space and what we make, we’re lucky that we made a product that, by using artificial intelligence, it’s agnostic to what industry we work in. That’s why we’re able to move so quickly into these other fields. Now luckily the fields we work in, I don’t see this synthetic biology going away. It’s only growing, so we’re glad to be in that space, in genomics, and moving then into proteomics. When will we see next-generation electronics as being a necessity? We’re having to deal in the United States with the fact that we import most of our semiconductors from a single company in Taiwan. The building of US fabs for next-generation, for us to even be self-sustainable in the United States, is only going to grow. So the places where we started to make larger progress during the pandemic are places that will, I think, be the largest part of our growth going forward as well.

Danny:

– Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Again, certainly super interesting. You kind of touched on this a little bit, but if you were to put your—if we get the crystal ball out a little bit, thinking of the future here, what does the future of the industry look like to you, maybe even in some of those specific industries? I know you kind of have your hands in a couple different areas.

Matthew:

– Yeah, it’s the great thing about making these industrial-enabling platforms and getting deep in is that we get to see where the world is moving just before it happens. It’s a nice little view into the future. Whatever little bits of that we can help with is wonderful. If we take it by sector, it’s clear that moving to lower-cost genomic sequencing is more important than ever in order to do genome editing and eventually do proteomics because what we see with mRNA vaccines is being this rushed, as people thought for a year, to get this operation warp speed was actually something that was done much faster in the labs.

Danny:

– Let me ask you real quick. I’m curious.

Matthew:

– Yeah, sure.

Danny:

– I’m, and I’m going to suspect a lot of people in my audience may not be as familiar with genomic sequencing, and you mentioned something else. Could you explain what that is on a fifth-grade level—or a kindergarten level for me?

Matthew:

– Yeah, and it relates very much to what we’re all getting now with these—hopefully all getting, in my opinion—is these vaccines. The human genome is the code for making proteins in our bodies. This is the code to who we are and how things replicate. Being able to understand how to measure our own genome so that we know who we are is important. It’s also important to know what the sequence of a pathogen, such as Covid, is. Certainly not just Covid; this applies to any pathogen. Luckily by knowing that and the specifics of that, in this case sequencing SARS-CoV-2, you’re able to find what area of that needs to be edited in order to in this case do something which is, ignite the spike protein. It’s a chance to be able to ignite the immune system by using this RNA, in that case, the messenger of the sequence that matters.

This is something that existed in many different forms, both sequencing—understanding what the genome of any animal, bacteria, or viruses were—for giving information. It also existed for being able to do genetic modification. We know this for crops, and we know this in many different studies and the creation of biologics that happened in the lab and were going through trials for many, many years, 10, 15 years or more. But this was a chance to take all of that research that existed before and apply it to creating a therapeutic, a vaccine in this case. Now we’re seeing right now variants which are mutations of SARS-CoV-2. You want to be able to sequence as fast as you can this Covid at any time so that you can then alter, know with the current vaccine will catch it or if not be able to alter the code, so change that RNA in order to be able to deal with the new mutation. We’re not at that point, from what we know at this point.

But what changes, and where this becomes very crucial in dealing with the new world of being able to address urgency with this type of deep technology that most people were not familiar with until Covid is that we no longer should have to wait a year or two years or, in our cases, our whole lifetimes to get this advanced technology. It should be nearly immediate. That requires very rapid sequencing, and it involves then production of that new sequence inside a nanoparticle, in the case of how these particular vaccines are being delivered. Now we don’t do the sequencing ourselves, but we work with the companies that make them in order to do imaging for it, in order to improve the yields so that we can run this through as quickly as possible and to work with the companies to improve the price. So all of this makes what we would consider a more abundant, healthy future.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. That sounds super interesting. Thank you for explaining that and breaking that down for me there. It sounds like just basically this technology, the future, you’re able to just respond faster and be able to, like you mentioned, get out therapies and vaccines and just different treatments for people faster because this technology allows.

Matthew:

– Yeah, I think a lot of these things that we hear about what went on during Covid, people seem to have fallen in one of two camps. There were those that life stopped for, and that’s unfortunate but necessary in a way. We were either quarantined, or there were no jobs to go to, or you’re working from home. Life had changed in that it slowed down. Pace of life slowed down. And then there were the industries that were in the trenches, and every moment mattered. And so it was, you just had to work constantly. And there was heartbreak to that of course. And there was an incredible rush that you were able to do something that would last, and that the methods of doing it would last far beyond this particular crisis. We were very much in those trenches.

Danny:

– Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that. It’s 100% true. It just switched. It was like half over here and half over there. It’s very fascinating, I think, hearing these stories and just how you guys were able to pivot. I think you said earlier one of the products, because you mentioned with the ventilator, which you said you benefited from… Thank God. That’s great. I’m glad that—sorry to hear that it got bad for you. But you’re here, so that’s good. That’s great.

Matthew:

– I’m glad as well.

Danny:

– Yes. But you said that took three months to get emergency authorization use to be able to go to market with that and just switch all those.

Matthew:

– Yeah, that was really a pretty amazing story because I have a CPAP machine at home that people use for sleep apnea. I had had some previous health issues, and I knew that you could raise your blood oxygen level at least some by having this assisted breathing. So I did this, would measure my oxygen levels, and noticed that it would increase from a dangerous, near hypoxic level to a safety level. So I called my father who is my co-founder and a great inventor and partner for many years, I said we’ve got to make one of these, but make it that it costs $200 instead of thousands of dollars for a medical-grade device. It has to be one button, and we have to ship it to the world. So he built it at home, a prototype. Then we brought it to our facilities and put it to our R&D team, and we got emergency use approval in three months and started distributing these.

Danny:

– That is crazy. How did you manage the supply chain for all of that?

Matthew:

– That’s where Nanotronics came in handy. Nanotronics is as vertically integrated as you can imagine. It’s been part of our philosophy for many years. I’ve been concerned about supply chains being problematic. And so we bought our supplier for our core company before, and we make as many of the parts as possible from machining to assembly. We do as much as possible. And we also have manufacturing techniques that use this closed-loop AI so that you can train humans to do assembly incredibly quickly or train machines for those things that are automated. So while some of the other manufacturers of equipment in this space had huge supply chain disruptions, we had a fresh start. We could start building this ourselves and not have these types of dependencies. I hope that that serves as a model for not just the rest of our business but just in general that people can do things and companies can do things that are not as intertwined as we think they are.

Danny:

– Yeah, that’s a great point. If there was anything you keep hearing, talking about, it’s resiliency of the supply chain. Everyone obviously is reassessing and looking at all the vulnerabilities. There’s a question now of, how lean is too lean? Certainly looking at, assessing the supply chain issues. Maybe we can get something cheaper, but gosh, now we’ve got to look at what kind of vulnerabilities we have here. To your point, being able to align that a little bit more vertically. I like how you mentioned it was the closed loop. I think 100% right, and I think a lot of companies are looking at that and adjusting that right now. It’s not a quick, overnight fix, but I think that’s exactly where companies are going to be moving.

Matthew:

– Right. I imagine for a large company to completely change the way that they handle supply chain management and manufacturing procedures and processes is a really big deal. With this particular breathing product, starting from scratch probably gave us a little bit of a help, sort of the idea the start-up mentality can come in to disrupt industries. The point not to be in this case to have a business destruction of something but to actually shore up something that helps people breathe. Now everything feels this way. Helping the environment is a big thing right now that I’ve been thinking about that has gone from future to urgent. How do we deal with the environment as this sort of emergency-use approval to be able to deal with environmental disaster? How do you deal with it in order to make sure that we have everything that we need that we just cannot get due to something like a chip crisis or really a shortage of most supplies right now. It’s a strange time. There’s going to be some pain, but there is a mindset that is now a precedent that has been established from what has gone on with Covid that can be pushed in other directions.

Danny:

– Absolutely. What a fantastic story about—I love it how you just kind of like, hey, we’ve got to do this, and here is how we can do it, and let’s go. You were able to spin it up, go to market, and get it out there. Fantastic story. If I were to give you a magic wand—we’re in magic land right now—what’s one thing that you’d like to see in your industry or the industry, or maybe even the industries that you serve, changed or improved upon? And one caveat is, it can’t be Covid.

Matthew:

– It wouldn’t be Covid specifically anyway because I look at any pathogen as being the same. When you look at this, if you’re looking at synthetic biology, it doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with one coronavirus or another or a cancer, it’s a different way of looking at these things. If there was one thing, I think the hyper-distributed world of building. The ultimate goal is to be as atomically precise as possible. So if we can make things as close to perfect without waste, it also means that we are not reliant on getting large amounts of material. We are not destroying the environment. And we’re making really what we need where we need it. If that happens, it encompasses all the things we’re talking about. It leads to personalized medicine in a very short amount of time. It leads to making sure that I have a computer where I need it and when I need it rather than waiting on everything that it takes to have 24-week lead time. So I think that’s where we need to focus. And even though it sounds like a Star Trek replicator for those that have seen Star Trek, there are very close steps and things that we’re starting to see that let us believe that this is technologically possible. So now it’s just taking some steps toward getting there.

Danny:

– I love it. It’s such a great answer. I love asking that question because you get all kinds of answers there. But it was interesting talking about customized, more personalized manufacturing so you reduce the waste. It reminds me of, actually, the contact lens manufacturing space which blew my mind. I didn’t know that the traditional contact lens manufacturers produce around three sizes for your eye, your cornea, and there’s a large, huge numbers of variants. I thought that was very interesting that, hey, it’s just three. It’s some finite number that’s very small like that. I think it’s interesting when you go look at how, you can use a lot of this technology now to start thinking about how to solve that, to your point, to reduce a lot of the waste because you know there’s a ton out there because it doesn’t work for everybody, and there’s all kinds of issues. That’s just one, tiny little example.

Matthew:

– Yeah, I think that part of this is starting to think of everything as a factory. If you think of a cell in a body, it’s a factory that we are now figuring out how to deal with in order to activate immune cells and immune response. That’s a factory. There’s a bunch of factories in building things within your mouth. If you’re working on dental work or if you’re doing these—no matter what you’re doing on that small scale or whether you’re building automobiles, it’s all a way of thinking about manufacturing. It’s thinking about manufacturing as close to that place as possible. I think that that’s going to take a change of mindset still, even though we’re maybe getting closer. But I think people will start to be able to hold this in their hands and see that convenience as even being a greater convenience than we’ve seen with a lot of our modern technologies.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. It’s super interesting stuff. So here is where I wanted to ask you a question that popped in my mind because you mentioned something I thought was interesting there. You mentioned basically there’s a lot of things that you want to be working on that you haven’t been working on. What are those things, if you’re able to share?

Matthew:

– Well—

Danny:

– And it could just be general ideas. I guess I was just curious about that.

Matthew:

– Yeah, I mean—

Danny:

– And we don’t have to. It’s alright.

Matthew:

– Oh, no, it falls into so many different categories.

Danny:

– Where to begin?

Matthew:

– There’s hardly anything that—I’m curious about everything. I want to make a movie. I want to produce an album. There are all sorts of things I want to do in life in general. But for the big things that matter, I want to be working, for instance, on tying biometrics to actual treatment. Closing the loop on something like what we are doing with this breathing device that we call nHale with measuring what your oxygen levels are and then moving something towards looking at what your state of your body is at any given time to looking at whether there is a delivery system for something like an mRNA therapeutic. It is closing the loop, and I could take that as being medicine, and I could look at that area of where medicine and health and longevity and all these things go.

Or I would like to work on materials again. I’m a material scientist by training. There’s been huge advances in materials, but there’s also become huge necessities as we see. We have a shortage of materials to make much in the United States. So what new materials can be used? I work on things like, how can you grow new crystals in a more precise way so that you could make things out of materials that are actually abundant all around us. So I’m really interested in that field, and I’m more and more interested in geoengineering. So there are really so many different fields. I think the most important thing is not to wake up and feel overwhelmed that there’s so much to be accomplished. It’s trying to take those and put those together and say, what is this unified theory of technology that applies to everything? That’s the thing I want to invent. That’s the thing I want to be working on, that it doesn’t matter which field it is. That I can dream something tomorrow and whatever I had been working on yesterday and the year before and the year before that enables that to happen. The enabling technology’s always what Nanotronics has been doing. Now we just have to do it with wider dreams of what is possible in a shorter amount of time because we can hold these technologies in our hands now.

Danny:

– Yeah, it’s fascinating. I love all that. I can tell you’re just a little passionate, just a little bit. And that’s exciting. It’s exciting to hear. I get excited about it, and I’m not a material scientist. I don’t know these things. But I think it’s super fascinating what you’re doing. I think it’s super fascinating, just the exploration. As we’re winding down, one thing that I always love asking leaders such as yourself is, what are you doing now to stay on the top of your game?

Matthew:

– I think that I have started to do several things. A big thing, I’ve traveled a lot in my life. My career has let me, it’s been a great joy to travel everywhere, and I was inspired by places I went and different cultures and different people that I work with. And that is one thing that changed during Covid is that I didn’t get to travel as much. Nobody did. So I started to develop routines. I wasn’t able to have routines when I traveled all the time. So routines of before people wake up in the morning when it’s very early, I get a chance to sort of dive deeper, read more and take notes more at a point in the day where I’m still incredibly focused to do the harder things. So that has been good, and I try to keep actual physical books around a lot of different kinds. And when I’m at home, I can do this before I come to work. That’s really helpful to me.

That’s been a big part of it, but I’m also, I play a lot of music. I play free jazz, and I play in a jazz band. During Covid I had a chance to record with a neighbor who’s a great trumpeter who I had listened to for many years and only discovered that he lived nearby right before the pandemic. So being able to completely switch gears and improvise and say, rather than the deep study that you would do to get into a topic that is necessary, how does that contrast with what maybe I would do late in the day which is try to turn off and see what just comes. And those two things that seem so different when brought together through the remainder of the day seem to help with conversations and collaborations and hopefully invention as well.

Danny:

– Awesome. No, that’s super cool. We talked about it before, really unifying those two worlds. And I imagine that a lot of innovation and a lot of vision’s coming out of that. You say, I see things differently.

Matthew:

– Absolutely.

Danny:

– Well Matthew, listen. I could probably talk for another four-ish hours or so because you’re super fascinating to talk to.

Matthew:

– We could do, three hours and 45 minutes is all I had put aside.

Danny:

– Okay, perfect. We could totally do that. No, I think that what you’re doing is fascinating, and it’s been interesting following your company and just hearing all the stories with the ventilator and just how you view the world and your passion. You’ve got quite the resume.

Matthew:

– Well I love talking to you. The last time, it was a great break in the day of being sick, and it’s amazing to talk to you this time. So I really appreciate it.

Danny:

– Well thanks for coming on again and sharing some of your knowledge and your experiences with us. For those who would love to come check out your company, it’s nanotronics.co. Dot co, not com, C-O.

Matthew:

– Exactly.

Danny:

– Nanotronics.co, and thank you so much for your time.

Matthew:

– Oh, thank you. I loved it.

Danny:

– We’ll do it again. We’ll do another follow-up.

Matthew:

– Okay, yeah.

Danny:

– Yeah.

Matthew:

– We’ll make it a yearly thing.

Danny:

– Perfect. Sounds great. Alright, well that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with the CEO and founder—I want to make sure I got my notes right—co-founder of Nanotronics, Matthew Putman. Fascinating story.

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