Adam Robinson, 45, his wife, their two young children, their nanny and two friends died when their private Learjet crashed near Greenacres and Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday. The aircraft was en route from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it went down, killing all nine people on board, including the two pilots.
Robinson was a serial entrepreneur who founded Retention.com, RB2B and MoltSets. In recent years he lived in Aspen, Colorado, and became known for advocating bootstrapping — building companies without outside venture capital. His companies collectively brought in $35 million in annual revenue, and days before the crash Robinson posted on LinkedIn that RB2B had hit $10 million in annual recurring revenue and MoltSets had nearly reached $1 million in ARR.
Before transitioning to startups, Robinson worked as a credit trader at Lehman Brothers and stayed on at Barclays after the 2008 financial crisis. He relocated from New York to Aspen in recent years and amassed a following of more than 160,000 on LinkedIn and 13,000 on X, where he frequently argued that bootstrapping was easier and less risky than building venture-capital-backed unicorns.
Friends and colleagues mourned Robinson as a devoted family man and a thoughtful competitor. Brett Hurt, a friend and mentor, said Robinson was "a genuinely good, loving guy that just loved his family and loved the community." Larry Kim, CEO of Customers.ai, said competing with Robinson made him sharper and that he was a builder who pushed the category forward.
A joint statement from the families of the victims called Robinson and his wife "the love affair that will last forever," saying their "warmth, generosity and gift for making people feel welcome touched so many lives."
The crash also claimed the lives of Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, friends of the couple, and Anita Maria Cetina, the children's nanny. Investigators have not released a cause for the crash.
