[00:00:00] Speaker A: A strong manufacturing base is absolutely critical for the health of a country. And so people are trying to pay attention to, you know, how can we make this industry better? We're starting to see a lot of innovation starting to take hold.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the robot industry podcast. We're glad you're here and thank you for subscribing. Before we get to our episode today, I want to let you know that I have a new podcast I'm starting called Automation Matters. It's more about the front end of the automation business and whether you're a builder, integrator, distributor, or robot. OEM, this is for you. The new podcast is about sales, marketing, business development, strategy, and much, much more. And I'm excited about automation matters, but more on that later. I'm super excited to have Saman Farid from formic on the show today. I've been following format for years and years and years. So, Saman, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Salmon, can you tell our listeners what you do at Formic?
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Formic provides pay by the hour robotics automation service. So what that means is we go to manufacturers who have labor shortage or empty headcount. They tell us what some of those tasks are, and we show up with a robot that does that task for them. If we show up with the robot that hits that task and hits the rates or the service level that we commit to, then we charge an hourly rate for the usage of that robot. So our hourly rates range anywhere from $10 an hour to $30 an hour, depending on what type of system it is and what it's doing. But it's a rate that's comparable or lower than labor. And that includes everything. That includes all of the outfront engineering and design and installation and service and maintenance and spare parts and programming and reprogramming of that robot. And so for a manufacturer, it really takes all the headache and all the risk out of the equation.
90% of our customers never have had robots before, and that's something we're super proud of because it allows a lot of our customers to get automated for the first time.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: So how did you get involved in automation and building a very cool, probably one of the most disruptive models today for manufacturers?
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, I think automation is a field where there's just an incredible amount of learning that happens.
I started my career as an engineer. I worked to build a bunch of different manufacturing facilities across the US and China. I worked for companies like Honeywell and also helped commercialize a bunch of different energy related technologies in western and northern China.
While I was doing that, naturally ended up working with a lot of robotics and automation, both as an engineer and a project manager. And then I moved from that into the world of software. Felt like that was where the rate of change was happening the fastest in the technology industry. So started a software company that was actually building infrastructure for television connectivity. I ended up selling that business and then started an e commerce company that I sold, then ended up as a venture capitalist for some time, about ten or twelve years. But throughout that time, and always was fascinated by robotics and automation and the way that technology did or didn't most of the time actually permeate into advances in the automation and robotics industry. So over time, as I was an investor, I invested in about 50 different robotics companies that were using one tool or another to kind of make robotics and automation easier, easier to deploy, easier to install, using computer vision to make them more flexible and more adaptive to their environment, and more context awareness. And all of these things were happening. But at the same time, I was kind of consistently disappointed by the rate of adoption in the real world. All this incredible technology and incredible engineers were coming together to build fantastic tools. Despite that, the end users, the people who needed it the most, weren't adopting automation. The only people that were adopting automation at scale were some of these very, very large companies. You know, automotive oems account for 80 plus percent of robot adoption. And, you know, what about everybody else, right? You go to every other manufacturing facility. 90% of factories in America today don't have a single robot. And so seeing that, it just felt like there's this cognitive dissonance. On the one side, I would see the future and see, hey, all these things work. And then on the other side, I would see that adoption was very, very low and not evenly distributed. So that was how I got into the world of robotics and automation. Eventually, I realized that there's this massive opportunity to really make it easy for people to adopt automation and robotics. I felt like it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. So I left my job as a venture capitalist and started formic.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: That's great. That's a great backstory. And I was just going to say, when I almost interrupted you, there was that you've seen all these from these different lenses, and yet you're still interested in manufacturing. And that is a segue into my next question. And I know you mentioned it like so many, so many customers are not using robotics and automation and conveyance and whatever else. But I was going to ask you what's going on in manufacturing from your perspective?
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, well, maybe first I'll just tell you why I'm so fascinated by manufacturing and why I love it so much. And the real reason is because I think everything in the world is downstream of manufacturing. Basically, you don't get consumer products, you don't get automotive, you don't get aerospace, you don't get defense, you don't get anything unless you have a strong manufacturing capability. What I realize is that each subsequent phase of human civilization has really been marked by its ability to do better and better manufacturing. And it feels like we've stagnated as a civilization for a while. And so that's what really gets me excited about it, what I see happening in manufacturing right now, almost like kind of a tale of two cities. I spent a lot of my career in China. I lived there for about 15 to 20 years. During my time in China, I worked in a lot of manufacturing facilities and with a lot of manufacturing businesses, I saw an incredible. From the early nineties, when we originally moved to Beijing, to every subsequent time I went.
Compare that to today. It's two completely different countries. The entire industrial base was built in the last 30 years. Even still, the pace of iteration and innovation in those manufacturing businesses is extremely high. And so that was a lot of what I saw in my early career. And then I came to the US and I saw the manufacturing industry. And frankly, it just felt very, very different. It felt like it was marked by fear of change and fear of competition. While there were a lot of innovative entrepreneurs and very, very enthusiastic kind of business owners who wanted to grow their businesses, the tool set and capabilities that were around them, very difficult to utilize. And so they were stuck with doing things the old way, you know, the way that their father did it or their grandfather did it. You go to a lot of manufacturing businesses and they're still owned by the same family, and they operate more or less the same way as they did two generations ago. I think that's a really sad state of affairs. I think in the last few years, we're starting to see the revitalization of this sector. There's a lot of attention, I think, through the Inflation Reduction act and the Chips act and from the trade war during Trump's time. Each of these subsequent things have made it clearer and clearer and clearer. A strong manufacturing base is absolutely critical for the health of a country. And so people are trying to pay attention to, how can we make this industry better? We're starting to see a lot of innovation starting to take hold.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: That's very exciting. And I'm, I'm in your camp, absolutely awake. We need a strong manufacturing base, and we've been giving it away to different low labor cost countries for far, far too long. So I'm excited to have you on and have this discussion. So what is your customers pain that you kind of talk to them every day? Right.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: Our customers biggest pain today, for most manufacturing businesses, ultimately, is the unavailability of labor. Labor is very difficult to find. It's very difficult to retain. I think the average factory that we work with has like 150% to 200% annual turnover in their labor headcount. So, you know, the amount of hiring that has to happen and rehiring and retraining is just incredible. So that's on the one hand. And so everybody's looking for answers, and automation and robots are the kind of obvious answer. But when we talk to manufacturing businesses, we hear the same three things over and over again. Number one, they say, I know I'm going to go out of business if I don't automate. That's almost a given in most of the conversations that we have. Number two is, I've been trying to automate for the last ten years. I think people are putting real dedicated time and attention and effort. And number three, I still don't have any robots.
I think those three things together are really a cognitive dissonance for me. But I think they point to some of the biggest challenges of the automation industry, which is that these things that are so critically needed are not accessible to the people who need it the most. And I think system integrators and machine builders and the like are there as a layer to try to help. But in reality, to work with a machine builder or a system integrator in an effective way, you actually have to be very knowledgeable about robotics and automation. Otherwise, in the best case, you spend a lot of time and energy to get this automation sell across the finish line. In the worst case, you get tricked by the system integrator, who is probably not that much better at the thing than you are, and you end up overpaying for equipment that you don't need. And I can tell you firsthand, I've been to a lot of manufacturing facilities that have a robot graveyard in the corner somewhere. There are robots that somebody convinced them was a good idea to buy. They probably spent a few hundred thousand dollars on equipment and engineering services, and they ended up with something that sits in the corner and collects dust. And so I think people have been burned by that over and over again. And as a result, it's very, very difficult for manufacturers to really think about automating their whole line.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: I agree with you about systems integrators and customers having this big gap between them where they just, they don't know what they don't know, and sometimes they order too big a steak and they can't finish it. So I grew up with systems integrators, so I have certainly a preference there. But can you give me maybe some of the examples, and I, too, have seen robots sitting in corners. Absolutely. Can you give me an example, maybe, of some of the applications that you're doing with your customers? Because there's just. It's so big.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: We tend to focus on applications that are relatively repeatable across different customer use cases. So what that looks like today is primarily case packing palletizing for end of line. We also do a good amount of machine tending for CNC mills and lathes and presses. We have some welding applications. And then on the machine tending side, we also do a good amount of injection mold tending for plastic injection molding. So those are right now our focus areas, but we're going to expand from there relatively quickly. AMRs and AGVs are one of the areas where we have seen a lot of demand for our existing customers. There are a lot of other applications where people are trying to pull us into right now. We're trying to go at them one at a time. But the focus of our business is really on productizing these things. I think the internal model that we have when it comes to this topic is products, not projects. I think integrators are very project focused. Each project is a bespoke engineering project that they're trying to optimize for the needs of that customer in that application. I think that's a great approach when you have very custom things or very specific things for that customer. But if you want to drive mass market adoption, what you need is products, and products that are repeatable and easy to use. And not necessarily one size fits all, but one size fits most. And that requires a different type of engineering, a different kind of.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Can you tell our listeners what you do at Formic?
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Formic provides pay by the hour robotics automation service. So what that means is we go to manufacturers who have labor shortage or empty headcount. They tell us what some of those tasks are, and we show up with a robot that does that task for them. If we show up with the robot that hits that task and hits the rates or the service level that we commit to, then we charge an hourly rate for the usage of that robot. So our hourly rates range anywhere from $10 an hour to $30 an hour, depending on what type of system it is and what it's doing. But it's a rate that's comparable or lower than labor. And that includes everything. That includes all of the outfront engineering and design and installation and service and maintenance and spare parts and programming and reprogramming of that robot. And so for a manufacturer, it really takes all the headache and all the risk out of the equation, right? Our customers, 90% of our customers, never have had robots before.
And that's something we're super proud of because it allows a lot of our customers to get automated for the first time.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Simon, thank you for that explanation. What's the process? If I own a factory and I have an application that I think might be a good fit for Formic, so.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Generally we'll do a quick discovery call if the application makes sense, usually we'll send one of our application engineers on site. They will do a quick evaluation of the facility. We'll generate a full 3d lidar scan of the facility and do a full automation evaluation.
And then we'll come back with a series of proposals on what are the different things in the facility that are good fits to automate? And what can you expect as an hourly rate to automate that thing? And if those look good, the customer lets us know which ones they want to do. We go back, we do all the work involved, we make sure the equipment is ready and programmed, and we validate everything. And on the assigned day, we show up with a fully functioning system, we drop it on the floor, we stay usually for a day or so to validate. That system works with all the different categories of products that they have, all the different skus. We'll do some training of the onsite staff at that point, transfer the project to our service and maintenance team. And so, unlike with a typical integrator or a hardware acquisition, we actually never walk away. So from that point on, our team is responsible for maintaining the uptime of that equipment for as long as you have it. What that means is we do all the work involved with servicing and maintaining and spare parts, and if there are environmental changes, we adapt to it and we commit to a service level agreement throughout the entirety of our contract.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: You're on the team?
[00:15:09] Speaker A: We are on the team. We are your automation team.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: It gets complicated because when you're a large systems integrator, it's like this bubble that moves through your factory. Anything that is not building or designing or installing automation, it throws the bubble askew. So you're kind of with them all through the project, which I think is very cool.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Absolutely. I think a lot of that's where we've created the most value for our customers is actually after the system has been installed, because once it's installed and you get it working, anybody who's done automation knows that that's not the end of the journey.
All of the headache and challenges and modifications and new skus, all that stuff happens after that initial deployment, and it's critical to have somebody on the team, in this case, it's us, who can actually be responsible for guaranteeing uptime on that system.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: So what kind of applications do you tend to stay away from?
[00:16:09] Speaker A: We generally stay away from applications that are highly specific to only one customer. So if you're the only facility that's going to need that thing, we're probably not a good fit for you, because a big part of our business requires us to be efficient at using economies of scale across all of our customer base. So we build things that are relatively standard, relatively repeatable, we optimize them so that they're very flexible and easy to install and easy to manage and easy to maintain.
We get economies of scale because we do that not just for you, but for you and ten neighbors, or 100 neighbors in this case. Today, actually, with all these facilities that we're servicing and managing and maintaining, we keep an inventory of spare parts, we have maintenance technicians across the country. We can keep these systems up and running. We have 24/7 remote monitoring capabilities, we have a control center that's watching every single robot and every anomaly on every single robot that is deployed in our fleet. And as a result, we're able to leverage that economies of scale to drive much, much lower cost of deployment, much, much lower total cost of ownership, and most importantly, much, much higher overall uptime. So across our fleet today, like we just checked the data yesterday, the trailing twelve months, our entire fleet of robots performed at 99.7% uptime, which is a number I'm extremely proud of.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: You should be proud of it. It's a crazy number. So you're turnkey, right? Because you're providing the robot, you're providing the end of arm tools. So when you show up, everything is done for, there's no extra, extra engineering costs.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: That's right. And I like to joke, we're not only turnkey, we actually turn the key for you. Right. What I mean by that is that we don't drop off a system that's ready to go. We actually make it work and we sit there until it's performing perfectly, and then we sit there throughout the entire life of that system. So you could think of us as the robot operator. We own and operate these robots. They just happen to be in your facility and they produce work that's valuable for you.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: So I had a question about how you charge for the service. You've kind of already answered this, right? It's an hourly gig for the robot, and there's no soft costs. Everything is included. So let's say we charge you to.
[00:18:15] Speaker A: Have $0 until the system is installed on your floor and hits the service level commitment, and then we just charge the hourly rate.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: If I want to automate machine tending, you come in, you scan the machine, you take a look at the parts of, you know, who the machines are. Like if it's going into a lathe or a mill or something like that, and then you do the proposals. How long does it take to, to get a machine like what's. You must have kind of an average.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Deployment time for our standard systems is generally eight weeks. For our slightly non standard systems, it's generally between twelve to 16 weeks.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: How long will your machine last? Like, I know you've probably done some of this math because you're probably talking to banks all the time and, and other financial people. How long does a system last from your perspective?
[00:19:03] Speaker A: It depends on the system. It depends on the components that are in that system. Every component has an MTBF associated with it. We take that into account and we plan around. If your question is kind of, how long do we intend to use a system? It's generally between five to ten years. We intend to be able to deploy it and redeploy it if needed. It depends, obviously, if it's collaborative versus industrial robot, it depends on what kinds of components go into it. There's a certain amount of things that get written off in that first deployment.
As you mentioned, if we have to integrate with the CNC machine, that's money. We're never getting back until we get to the end of that contract.
All that factors into our hourly rate and our pricing. But there are some things that are recoverable and some things that are not.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Let's say I'm a manufacturer and I've got a program and I have you come in and then the program changes. And now I have to change programs or change end of arm tools. What happens there?
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah, good question. So usually that's divided into two possible categories of situation. In one category, it's just a programming change. The same tool and the same system can handle an additional part in that situation that's included for free. So if your project changes, we will come in and reprogram that system to do the new task. There's obviously the second path, which is a little harder. Changes need to be made. That's a lot more variable because different scale of changes do need to be made. In some cases it's just a matter of swapping out an end of arm tool. In some cases it's a matter of 3d printing an extra bracket. In some cases you're moving outside of the bounds of the capabilities of that robot and you need a whole new robot. All of those are possibilities. We have what's called the Formic Flex program, which is built in on most of our projects. And that Formic Flex program allows for a customer get an upgrade basically on any system that they've deployed with us. So customers who sign up for that Formic flex program can basically handle whatever changes that are thrown at them by getting different kinds of automation cells as their needs change. And we'll take back the old one and we'll deploy a new one.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Very cool. I really like this idea that automation modules are being reused and not going into garbage dumps or anything like that. Do you have a favorite robot brand or a favorite control platform that you use?
[00:21:28] Speaker A: We love a lot of them today. In our fleet we have Fanix Yaskawas, Abbs Doosan. See if I miss anybody. I think we have some urs on the control side, mostly around Allen Bradley Plc's, but we have some keyence PLC's and other things like that depending on the application. But our software that we've built is actually kind of hardware agnostic. So we can take almost any kind of system and integrate it into our overall solution pretty easily and pretty quickly. That allows us to make sure that we're not tied to one specific robot vendor. Our only obligation is to our customer and to make sure that we do the best thing for them. So we will never say, oh, we're a fanuc shop or we're a Yaskawa shop or we're a cooka shop. Because what that implies is that if the best thing for my customer is not a fanuc, I'm going to still force them to buy a fanuc. That's not how we work. We are 100% committed to success and uptime, and what that means is that we are flexible with every vendor out there.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: So you've got a couple of success stories. Maybe you could share one with us. You've got one that I think is a granola bar or.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Granola bar. Yeah, I'm trying to think which one is the granola one. But we have a lot of customers now. We're in about 100 facilities. Many of them have multiple systems. One success story I can share recently is we have a customer in California called Mirancho, which is they produce tortillas. That was their original business.
They also produce a variety of other kinds of products. So we went in initially with one or two. We put in two robots, I think, to start, and we helped them start automating their palletizing on a couple of lines really quickly. From that point, they expanded to five.
Now there are seven systems, and by the end of the year, we expect to be about ten systems deployed in that facility. Not only that, they are actually owned by a very large food conglomerate that owns a bunch of other manufacturing businesses. And because of the success that we had with that one site, we've actually started really quickly building deployments in their other kind of sister facilities. And that's a very common situation. We've had the exact same situation with a company called Cameron's Coffee, where we deployed one or two robots. They quickly expanded to four additional ones. And their parent company also has now deployed some of our robots in a different one of their facilities in Texas. So we're starting to see this take shape. One of the things we're very proud of is we have so far a 98% renewal rate. What that means is customers that come to the end of their contract have renewed for an additional term. And that, for us, is really, really good confirmation, because it means that we're actually doing something that's valuable for our customers. So that's something we care a lot about.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: That's very exciting. And for the Cameron coffees of the world, they just, like, call you up and say, hey, we need another system. And same thing. Right? You just provide them with a quote and come in and build a system.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. And one of our customers, compact industries, which is in Chicago, we deployed the first system for them. I think the day after we installed that first system, they called us and said, we want another one. And two weeks later, we showed up with another system. It was kind of very, very fast deployment. Those are the kinds of stories that we love and are extremely proud of, because automation is something that people really have a huge mental hurdle around. It seems like this huge project, I got to think about it for months and do analysis and run a capex evaluation, look at every kind of possible hardware configuration and all of these things. People get mired in doing that process, and they take months and months and months, and frankly, most of the time end up not doing anything right, because the status quo is always easier than doing something new. What we're trying to do is remove that friction and hurdle. We're trying to say, look, it can be easy. All you got to do is point, and we will show up with a robot that will do the job. Like it truly can be that easy. You just have to choose the right partner.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: Samantha, can you tell our audience a bit of what formic core is?
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So, Formic Core is our robot operating system. It allows us to overlay on top of any of our deployments, and it has a couple of different tentacles. One tentacle is that it obviously interfaces with the robot arm. It interfaces with the PLC and all the components that are attached to that PLC. It also connects to all the peripherals that are attached to that system. It has this auto configuration process where it automatically detects what's been connected to it. It automatically maps all of the I O as necessary and makes it very, very easy for us to deploy a new cell. Another tentacle of formit core is our HMI. And so we have a central HMI that is the same on all of our deployments, and it allows any of our customers to interact with that robot in a super easy way. It has multiple languages for different operating conditions. It actually allows the customer to directly ask for help on that HMI so they can hit a button, you can remote in, and we can solve whatever problems that are happening. They can connect to our 24/7 operations center at any moment just by hitting a button. And so formit core makes it very, very easy for our customers, again, who don't have a lot of experience with automation, really, really quickly get to a level of comfort.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: I don't think a day goes by that somebody doesn't talk to me about AI or I see a webinar on AI or something. Are you using AI in some of the systems or subsystems that you're building?
[00:27:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So we actually don't use any AI in our robots themselves. What we found, we've evaluated all of the AI modules that are available out there. We've built some of our own. And what we found is just the accuracy is not at the level that we need it to be for the manufacturing environment.
I mentioned earlier, our 99.7% uptime that comes from rock solid reliability. Despite the fact that I wish AI was better, it's not quite good enough to run the robots yet at that level of precision. That being said, we do use AI for a different part of our business, which is the project evaluation process, because that's a process that's historically been very, very manual. Engineers would have to evaluate hundreds of different factors about a facility. They'd ask hundreds of different questions about that facility. They'd find out a bunch of things about what it would take to scope out that system. There's a lot of engineering and design work that would go into building that work cell and choosing all the components and peripherals. That's a process that we've mostly automated. Now, with AI, our salespeople can go on site, collect a couple of basic pieces of information, do a lidar scan or a camera scan, feed that to our AI system, and it spits out exactly what is the kind of fully designed robot hardware. Here are the mechanical prints. Here are the electrical prints. Here's the bill of materials. Here's the programming for that robot itself. All of that feeds into formit core, which actually runs on the system.
What that allows us to do is really reduce our overall deployment costs.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: Sam, and who's your key customer? Is it the plant manager? Is it the CEO or.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: I?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: I think with a capex reduction might be your CFO.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: All of them have different, you know, different buttons that need to be pressed. I think our generally, the people that we work with the most are the kind of ownership and CEO level of the business, because they typically see the full picture. They see the challenges with labor, they see the challenges of the production. They see that on the sales side, they have orders that they could take if only they could produce for cheaper.
Everybody's turning down business because they can't afford to offer a lower price. And all of these things are happening and are impacting the business. And so when we're able to put in automation, it kind of impacts everybody in a different way. Of course, the CFO is excited about us. Sometimes the HR team is excited about us. Sometimes the plant manager or the kind of operations team is excited about us. Sometimes everybody's got different reasons to be appreciative of what we do. But I will also say there are a lot of people that resist change.
One of the groups that we typically have to contend with a little bit is the engineering team at our customers organization, because they're great engineers, but they have very limited bandwidth in terms of what they can do, they are scattered across a lot of projects. And there's the typical thing that every engineer does. I'm an engineer myself, which is, well, I could do that on my own, or I could probably do it better. I think it takes a little bit of time for us to say, well, we don't doubt your skill as an engineer. You could probably do it, but do you really have the time and energy and attention to dedicate to getting this across the finish line and moving quickly? And if you do, why haven't you done it already? Why haven't you done it five years ago or ten years ago?
And typically the answer is, well, I've got other priorities. And we're like, so go focus on those other priorities. Let us solve these problems for you.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Yeah. A lot of people can't have lunch in two weeks. Meanwhile, you're delivering equipment in two weeks. So I totally, totally get that. So how do you find new customers and prospects for Formic?
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of them are from word of mouth. A lot of them are customer referrals. Those are actually kind of today the primary source of new business for us as people having a great experience and introducing their friends and saying, hey, this is a way to make your life easier.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: So I'm kind of interested in formic. And what are some of the challenges that you're facing growing this business?
[00:31:29] Speaker A: We're always in the process of hiring great talent.
We have a bunch of fantastic engineering capabilities and deployment and monitoring and maintenance capabilities and software team, but all those teams continue to grow. So we're always on the lookout for great talent, great engineering talent, great operational talent, great software talent. All of them are necessary for our business. We're also continuing to grow our sales team, so we're always on the lookout for people who really take a customer centric view rather than a kind of automation centric view. And so people who are willing to kind of sell to the manufacturing industry and see things from our customers perspective, rather than see things from a kind of robot provider's perspective, those are always the people that we love having on board.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: So thank you very much for coming on today. This has been very excited. I've been looking forward to this for a long, long time. And when you're not busy building robots for everybody in the world and robot systems, what do you like to do for hobbies?
[00:32:31] Speaker A: I don't know what you're talking about. What are hobbies?
I have two kids under three years old and a startup. I think that's all the hobbies I get to have in this life.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. How can people get ahold of you and find out more?
[00:32:48] Speaker A: I'm at the letter Srmic Co. Or you just go to our website, Formic Co. There's lots of places on there that you can reach out to us.
Would love to hear from anybody in your audience.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Well, thanks again for joining me.
[00:33:02] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me, Jim.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: Our sponsor for this episode is Earhart Automation Systems. Airhead builds and commissions turnkey automation solutions for their clients worldwide. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing, project management, delivering world class custom automation on time and on budget. Contact one of their sales engineers to see what Earhart can build for you and their
[email protected]. and that's spelled e h r h a R D t. Our co sponsor is anchor Danley. They are the leading manufacturer and distributor of robot and automation bases, high quality die sets, components blanchard ground steel plates and metal fabrications used in the production of tools, dies and molds for metalworking and plastics injection molding, mining, construction equipment and general fabrications. And I'd like to acknowledge a three the association for Advancing Automation. They're the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the robot industry podcast, you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. Today's podcast was produced by customer Attraction Industrial Marketing, and I'd like to thank my team, Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, my business partner Janet and our sponsors, Earhart Automation Systems and anchor Danley.
