What is your definition of a startup?

I’ve been involved in various startups in the greatest variety of roles. My business ventures had originally always been connected to software development and clients would order startup software development from us. Consequently, I was able to conduct an analysis of several hundred endeavors, a portion of them being successful. My clients would often invite me to take part in them, but for a long time I remained separate from it and didn’t get involved in the projects as a participant. At times, there were very strong projects and teams where I would get involved for a little while as a project participant, and then in 2016, I founded my first very own communication technologies startup.

I can characterize the concept of a Startup from my own first-hand experience: it’s a business in its beginning stages which is built around innovation. In a successful startup, innovation is managed to be developed into a beneficial model. As a consequence, that creates a full-fledged organization that during the first months and years has very active growth. This active growth in particular draws attention to the startups industry while the investors help with even greater acceleration of the growth of the fledgling companies.

What inspired the idea of Sunny’s creation?

In my last job, we created a complex system that tracked the movement of trains and called rescue services in the event of an emergency. The equipment that we developed was very complex and broke down fairly often. Our company’s engineers had to constantly go on business trips in order to repair or update those systems. When the number of packages grew above 200, the repair problem grew particularly acute and there weren’t enough qualified engineers to handle the repairs. We had to train new specialists over and over. Consequently, in the software development department, we thought up a revolutionary solution – we created a remote access device capable of connecting as a human. It was the predecessor of what now lies inside Sunny.

Several years later, the device proved necessary again when a totally different task arose. I was aware that if this solution were made more universal, its use could grow broader as well. I shared this idea with my friend and we started to regenerate that concept. That was what laid the foundation. The idea of the robot in particular surfaced significantly later as a consequence of reflection on the topic of “how to explain this to other people so that they buy it”.

Who is working on Sunny’s launch?

We have a strong team of motivated and inspired people. Participants see the creation of a new way of life as their mission, a life in which robots will help people. Today, the 12 of us are the Sunny family. We work from different countries – America, Canada, Russia, Turkey, Italy, Montenegro, and Ukraine. Over 60 people have invested their efforts into Sunny in the over 2 years that the project has existed.

A huge number of people are helping us who share our passion. Those are experienced mentors, experts, consultants, and volunteers. We conduct a large number of experiments on our audience and we’ve put together a little community.

Our first staff of robot operators is already forming who will become the basis of the Robot’s knowledge and skills.

Did you say family?

Yes, that’s right! We are a family. We call our robot Sunny our child and all of us together are his family. It all started as a joke, but that joke got so far along that we no longer argue that our job is to raise a boy who soon will conquer the world.

It’s no joke, we have two birthdays for him. One of his birthdays is when he actually came into the world while the other date is his age, so that he actually behaves like a fully grown human being. He possibly may grow up and grow old along with his family that he lives in.

How did you put together the first team?

I have known many team members personally for many years before the project began. We have worked with some people on other tasks while we were friends with others. It all started from a phone call in which I shared the idea of creating a universal device for IT engineers with my pal Andrey Rumyatsev. Our conversation went on for longer than 8 hours. Literally the next day, we started brainstorming about what it could be. We started thinking through the concept and looked for different options for its outer appearance. On one of the stages, we thought about a little circle sensor screen, but there were none for sale at the moment. I decided to get some advice from a friend that did engineering development. And we called Yura Polozkov. Yura actively engaged in our brainstorming and over the course of several weeks, we developed our first concept of the device. Several months later, it would taken on the name Sunny. We realized the path that lie before us and it looked like a classic startup. I invited several people from among my colleagues to handle the primary areas of expertise for the project. That’s how the first team took form.