Benjamin Williams had an entrepreneurial streak well before he first set foot on the NYU Tandon campus. As a child that meant manning a lemonade stand in the summer and hawking homemade pretzels and comic books to his classmates during the school year. As an older teen, it meant launching a personal training business that earned him $50 an hour — more than any part-time job would have.
Now, as an adult, it means that he is leveraging his Management of Technology degree as the CEO of his own company, ARSOME Technology, which designs custom augmented reality (AR) software and systems for a variety of clients and strategic partners — most in the education and healthcare sectors.
Williams launched ARSOME Technology in 2016, while he was still a student, and among his first products was an interactive AR scavenger hunt for a Boston museum. He later developed an interactive experience outside the public library in Hartford, Connecticut, home of Mark Twain, to make a statue of the famed 19th-century writer come to life when patrons pointed their smartphones or tablets at it.
Most recently, the company launched a new Division, ARSOME Health, to solely focus on educating patients about their conditions, treatments, and medications—vital, as he points out, at a time when an estimated 40% of all Americans exhibit poor health literacy.
Williams chose Tandon because of its sharp focus on entrepreneurship and challenging classes but found that its diversity and international student body were also of enormous benefit. If you are going to use technology to connect people and economies, it’s imperative to have a global outlook, he says.
ARSOME Technology has grown from just two people (he and his co-founder, CIO David Oyanadel) to employ numerous others. They range in age from 22 to 72, speak up to five languages, and hail from around the world. Williams credits much of what the company has achieved to the wide range of perspectives and experiences they offer. “It's not just the technology that has made ARSOME Technology successful,” he asserts. “It's the passionate, authentic, and entrepreneurial mindset of the team behind the tech.”