Adam Wilson

Co-founder / Chief Software Architect

Sphero

We chose fun, and then we emphasized it in everything that we did.

About Adam

Says that because he didn’t grow up with much money, he developed a fascination with taking things apart and trying to build new things with the pieces.
From there, the natural transition was to learn code, which was essentially an extension of his penchant for building things.
One summer, he went and lived with a relative who wrote software for airplanes.
To satisfy his propensity for building things, he worked a day job constructing houses, but every night, he went home and studied physics.
Eventually, he couldn’t keep up the two lives he was living, so he quit his day job and went back to school, where he met his Sphero co-founder, Ian Bernstein.
The two came up with hundreds of ideas for robotics that could be controlled by phone, but ultimately, they chose to produce the Sphero robot; Adam says, “we chose to have fun.”
At one of the competitions that they entered, they won a mentorship by Disney CEO Bob Iger; Iger showed them the prototype for Star Wars’ BB-8 and asked them to develop the robot.
Says the most uncomfortable thing about running a company has been the interpersonal interactions he has to partake in, but he’s found his confidence in order to enact his vision.