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Adam Wilson Highlight
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.
