Follow-Up: Who Was Adam Robinson? The Austin Tech Founder Killed in the Florida Learjet Crash

On November 2, TMZ, the New York Post and other outlets identified the seven passengers killed in the November 1 Learjet 60 crash in Florida. The name drawing the most attention in the U.S. tech world was Texas technology entrepreneur Adam Robinson and his family. The jet was flying from Austin, Texas, to the Bahamas when it went down in Greenacres, Palm Beach County, Florida, killing all nine people aboard — two crew members and seven passengers.

Robinson, 44, grew up in the Houston area and graduated from Rice University in 2003, where he studied economics and played varsity basketball. He then went to Wall Street, spending about eight years as a credit-default-swap trader at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, a span that included the 2008 financial crisis.

After leaving finance, he co-founded the email marketing company Robly with his brother, building it entirely with their own money. In interviews and his own accounts, Robinson said Robly was eventually sold for an eight-figure sum. A feature inside Robly that identified website visitors' email addresses proved so popular with customers that it was spun out as GetEmails, which grew into Retention.com, a service that helps e-commerce brands identify anonymous visitors and build first-party customer data. Robinson said the company took no outside funding and reached about $22 million in annual recurring revenue in four years.

In 2024 he launched RB2B, applying visitor identification to business-to-business sales and marketing, and in 2026 he rolled out a new venture, MoltSets, in sales data services. In interviews before his death, Robinson put the combined operation at about 32 employees and roughly $35 million in annual revenue, all bootstrapped without venture capital — a rarity in the U.S. startup world that made him a frequent podcast and social-media voice on bootstrapping.

His wife, Helen Sharp, also known after marriage as Helen Robinson, was a ceramic artist who later made art full time. The couple's children are Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2. Also aboard on November 1 were the children's nanny, Anita Maria Cetina, and the couple's friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr. Just days before the crash, Robinson was still publishing pieces about technology and entrepreneurship and promoting his new company.

In their joint statement on November 2, the families called Adam Robinson and Helen Sharp "devoted parents" and the children "the light of their lives." The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash. Official identification of the remains still requires DNA matching, and no official list has been released.

Related: Follow-Up: Families Release Photos and Tributes After Florida Learjet Crash; Captain, 55, and Co-Pilot, 20, Identified by Families

Related: Follow-Up: Families Name the Seven Passengers Killed in the Florida Crash; County Seeks Emergency Declaration

(Source: TMZ, New York Post, Retention.com public materials)

Source: TMZ, New York Post, Retention.com public materials

Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)

Photo: 图：Adam Robinson，Retention.com 联合创始人兼首席执行官。照片来源：Retention.com 官网团队页。 Photo: Adam Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Retention.com. Photo: Retention.com team page.

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