Key Takeaways
- Enable Ventures invests in scalable tech solutions that align revenue with measurable impact for people with disabilities
- There's a growing market of ADA-generation entrepreneurs building inclusive tech from the ground up, not just retrofitting accessibility
- AI presents huge opportunities for disability tech, with the community well-positioned to guide ethical development and implementation
- Infrastructure (accelerators, mentorship) is developing to support disability tech entrepreneurs from ideation through scaling
Today I’m talking to Regina “Gina” Kline about National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Gina is the founder and managing partner at Enable Ventures.
Gina tell me a little bit about your accessibility journey and what brought you to today?
My journey began with many enlightened and brilliant colleagues in enforcing the American With Disabilities Act (ADA). I started in ADA work at the Justice Department in the disability rights section and from there carried on for many years as a disability rights and civil rights attorney.
That process really got me acquainted with the barriers that confront people with disabilities. Whether in school, work, education, skills training—that really begin with the premise that there was technology that was built, brought to market, and proliferated without people with disabilities in mind.
It got me thinking for a number of years about all of the really dramatic downstream effects of product design that did not begin with the disabled community at the table.
There has been a powerful demographic trend line that includes the ADA generation. That generation is now roughly 34 years old, which some of us might say are prime working age years.
What we get when we have a rich population of people who know what they want and need to be successful in school and employment—who've only grown up with technology and access to an elevated sense of the design potential of technology—is that we are seeing a consumer group that's had enough. These consumers have a real respect for quality, inclusive and universal design for very powerful UX and UI attributes and technology that they want to use and buy and who will take an approach to vote with their feet when it comes to the nearly $13 trillion in consumer spend that they control in the capital markets.
What I started to realize as a lawyer is that the legal bar is still doing important and elevated work in vindicating the civil rights of people with disabilities across the United States to be free from discrimination in employment from public entities, in places of public accommodation, and throughout the United States. That is still very much wholesome and important work because there still needs to be someone who stands up for the rights of the community.
I started to realize is that there was an open question about what the future would look like, if we critically ask, “Who decides who gets to build in this space? Who's actively building the rival image to discriminatory tech? And how are they accessing resources to build that tech?”
At the heart of it, the arbiters of who builds and who doesn't are people who control capital. Why was it that we had the proliferation of discriminatory technology? It's because we have the capitalization of that technology.
Who will align capital with purpose so that we have the proliferation of highly inclusive, accessible and affordable technology that's built in the image of the manifold diversities of our community and our society.
How do we get at that solution and how quickly can we get at it because we have these eager, hungry consumers-the ADA generation consumers-that are looking for the technology they need to compete in the global marketplace, to compete in higher ed and skills trading, and the technology can barely make it to market fast enough for the consumer demand.
And I thought that was a very good problem to solve. So I founded Enable Ventures with the strategy of investing market rate capital in venture scalable ideas that had the ability to impact millions of consumers who had unmet technology needs and who had an urgent need to access technology to drive equity in capital markets.
Sounds like you’ve moved from the end of the accessible tech cycle to the beginning of it, helping reallocate capital to solve problems rather than waiting to fix problems. It reminds me of the shift left in design for accessibility privilege.
Well, there needs to be design in the capital markets too. We have done a good job of creating a set of criteria and an evidence base around inclusive design principles and universal design principles.
It's been until now that folks have thought to do that with how we align capital with product and with investment. And of course, everything in the technology world had a a capital predicate to it. Who builds and who doesn't build this is predicated on how we sustain business ideas into material reality and how we scale them.
And the earliest stages of venture capital have really predicated what technologies are in your pocket for the last 50 years in the consumer market.
What's very exciting and interesting is that there are builders and makers and dreamers and innovators across the world, members of the ADA generation, who are bringing to market their very best ideas. And the interesting thing about that community is that when they build, they build with everyone in mind, not repeating the original sense of the shortcomings of product design that does not begin with the manifold diversities of the community, but actually decidedly creating tech that will penetrate the general consumer market after it solves its hardest problems and removes its most severed barriers.
And that's something very, very exciting to see, because what it means is that those ADA builders are knocking on the front door to tech, not the side door, not the side alley, not the back door, but the front door to tech, which means that there is a marketplace that's formulating this highly competitive, that's a market rate, and it will amount to highly scalable companies that can meet that unmet demand across the world for technology.
So, Enable Ventures is an impact investment vehicle, right? How does that differ from a normal VC?
Our strategy is to align capital with materially measurable impact, which means that as a strategy, we're screening ideas and makers, innovators, who are willing to stand by what they measure, and they're willing to approach their go-to-market strategy, their revenue model, their ability to scale over successive years, their ability to find really true fit with customer base and end users' product market fit with consumers in a way that does not see revenue as a trade-off with impact.
There are so many stories of the last generation of venture capital that connote that these are two separate missions or that impact must inevitably run contrary to market rate principles or the ability to scale or experience net profits from a business.
What is unique to disability is that it is has been long relegated to a charitable lane. One that the community is now reassessing. Why is it that disability has only been confronted with charitable capital or philanthropic capital?
Not to denigrate philanthropic capital, which has uplifted the lives of people with disabilities around the world. But why was that historically the principal form of capitalization when so many people with disabilities have a unique fit with entrepreneurship?
Many of my friends in the community often talk about how the experience of disability is one of constant problem solving. One that has a unique fit with finding problems that are closest to home, tooling around thinking differently and finding different ways to solve those problems. And leveraging lived experience to know that there is a product differentiation and an approach to problem-solving that will work.
Understanding the marketplace that you are working in and how product can fit into people's real lives is a market advantage. And there's a remarkable group of people now building across the world who think that that's their differentiated advantage as entrepreneurs and see a very close fit with building in the disability marketplace as a result.
That means we're seeing more and more founders with disabilities who are leveraging their lived experience as an agile and interesting fit with entrepreneurship and scaling businesses in that way.
Can you talk a little bit more about like how you report out impact and the kinds of impact that your portfolio companies are making right now?
There is a really powerful group of companies that are coming to market for whom there's very little daylight between how they make money and how they scale their impact. And those companies are the most interesting catalytic and innovative companies in the world.
When you think of a company that is working in effective communication or captioning or improving communication between people, the way that that company scales revenue is typically through connected minutes of communication. I'm speaking in generalities, this could be applied to any number of companies. But there is very in a revenue model like that, there's very little way that that company can shake its impact because every minute of connecting communication is a minute of impact.
So that revenue model and that impact coincide and that is what we're looking for in terms of how very highly catalytic impactful companies around the world, that when they make money they are scaling a successful product that has very profound product market fit with disability end users, that's driving measurable material changes across the world.
But those changes can be measured in units just as there can be very strong and powerful unit economics in the revenue model.
So that is very interesting opportunity. Now here's why scale is important. And there are a lot of companies that scale and don't scale impact. There are a lot of impactful companies that never achieve scale. And therefore, there's traumatic unmet needs across the world.
What's interesting and why scale can be important with fidelity to impact is that there's nearly only one out of 10 people in the disability marketplace that have the assistive technology or other technology they need.
So we have a urgent need to address the global unmet needs of the disability population as it relates to technology. And you can't assess that in a vacuum. You have to assess that when stacked against a nearly $2 trillion hole in global GDP, where people with disabilities should be.
And that means that tech isn't just tech for a tech sake, but it has an absolute causal relationship to who works and who doesn't. It has absolute causal relationship to who accesses certain fields and industries and who accesses a certain kind of skills training.
In today's world, technology is table stakes for what kind of education and employment outcomes you have. And we have to get really smart about how to make up for lost time in that ever-widening skills gap in that ever-widening global economic development gap. So this is about macroeconomics as much as it is about company by company. It's about building a sector that can catch up and meet the urgent demand. And that's a very exciting opportunity.
So to summarize, basically, your way of looking at impact is, can I find companies that have strong product market fit in an enablement function where when they make another dollar, we know that dollar is going to benefit a community that we're trying to raise up or increase productivity for?
That's exactly right. Can we find companies for whom assessing the benefits that are bestowed by the growth of the company are not ethereal but are actually materially able to measure benefits with hard criteria.
I think also tying that to dollars makes it a lot easie to understand how you get full value alignment because I have seen some folks who do impact work where they have kind of an impact metric and then they have a dollar metric and they're also often can be trade-offs when you have these two metrics that you're optimizing against.
I think that what is so powerful about the disability category is that there's clear alignment between any number of workplace technologies, any number of skills training technologies, any number of next generation assistive technologies, and economic development. We have now arrived in 2024 with full knowledge and awareness of which buttons to push in terms of technology and alignment with employment and other economic outcomes.
We just are under capitalized as a category until now, and all of that is dramatically shifting at the same time that there is the arrival of the ADA generation at work and the arrival of a silver tsunami aging right into disability. And those dual demographic trends make it absolutely the time to invest more capital and more solutions to meet the unmet technology needs of those populations.
Yeah, absolutely. certainly have, you know, large number folks who are growing up, who grew up with technology or adopted technology later in life that are now aging, and most disabilities are age-related micro level.
And when you think about the efficiency of all that, we know that when a student needs captioning in higher ed, it can make the difference between accessing the full curriculum or not based on the accuracy of that captioning.
We know that there are companies like Ava that's in our portfolio that is built highly accurate real-time captioning that is serving students in higher ed. But we also know the aging population disproportionately needs and consumes captioning. And so, instead of two different strategies, those are the same strategy and the strategy aligns around building inclusively from the beginning to materially reach both demographic groups.
And that shows you how in alignment and how varied the needs are of the community and how many people actually are in alignment with accessibility.
When you are investing in founders working in the space, how do you segment the addressable market?
Well, as most folks that are advancing aligning capital with opportunity, we look at how a company is defining and serving it, whether it's end-user and it's pair are the same or whether it's end users are different than it's pair. We're looking at what is the net impact of a product or service on the community, but we're also looking at, you know, what a marketplace is this company entering, and what is the strength of the product and the market and it's fit.
So we tend not to think about the total addressable market as different—a bingo card with different sub populations on it. What we're really looking at is the success of the design and the success of the design potential to reach as many people as possible, including the hardest to serve people.
That last part is important because what we're saying is that so often we don't plan for the edge cases, we take the middle of the bell curve in terms of the design potential of a product that's what those original sins of product design have done. What we are looking for is actually the hardest use cases that the product will serve and the market penetration across the general consumer market oftentimes that it will also convey value to.
And so what is most prime is design and the design stress testing and red teaming and ensuring that there are no downside effects from the design, there's no discriminatory exclusion from the design; that the design constraints have tested and taken into consideration the iterative user feedback of the impacted communities; that the product itself is not a solution in search of a problem to solve but it is directly contrived from an urgent need to solve a problem and that this product actually gets at the heart of removing barriers, and barriers to economic participation being prime. And so that is what we're looking at, is the design innovation.
Can you give me some concrete examples of that?
What’s really exciting is that the strength of the portfolio companies is derived from their trusting relationship with the communities. The examples that come to mind are:
Inclusively that was founded by Charlotte Dales and her co-founder Sarah Bernard. Inclusively is a two-sided job matching and retention platform that has global reach. And when Inclusively was being formulated, Charlotte Dales created the platform because of an experience of a family member who was having difficulty identifying accommodations as associated with interviewing and finding a job.
And what we know to be true about employment platforms, particularly job matching platforms and retention product across the world, is that the community has long complained on the job candidate side that it's very difficult to find opportunities with employers that understand reasonable accommodations and are in search of disability-diverse talent.
On the employer side, we often find employers saying things along the lines of I'm terrified to brush the subject because I feel like I don't have the right lexicon to ask job applicants what they need to be successful either in the interview or in the onboarding process.
And so there is a symmetry and a mismatch between in conversation, a lack of transparency about what people want and need. It used to be also that there wasn't the use of AI to screen people in, like Inclusively is doing.
We have long heard in the community about algorithmic bias and AI being leveraged to screen people with disabilities out, particularly people who have identified an need in their request to be interviewed or to be onboarded into a business.
What Inclusively is doing is an elevated approach to this mismatch. It is cutting the friction out of matching employers with job applicants and screening them in on the basis of disability for employers for whom they are in a search for disability diverse talent.
So on one side of Inclusively are the employers like Salesforce, Edward Jones, the NFL, the NBA, some of largest employers in the United States, if not the world.
And on the other side are today 100,000 qualified people with disabilities looking for jobs. So it's a steadily growing platform. And it's unique attribute is that it was built out of an apparent need for people to self-identify on a trusted platform.
The platform's purpose is to lead to positive employment outcomes, not to screen people out, but to lead to a positive match. That shows an elevated differentiated approach to design that could only be informed by the iterative feedback of the community, could only be built for purpose with the knowledge of how candidates with disabilities were being treated on other platforms and what to avoid in the design of this platform.
It also has a retention product attached that has now allowed employers to elucidate to their current workforce the accommodation that it is invested in so that that information is a drop-down menu becomes readily apparent to all of the workforce to show what the company calls foundation success enablers, meaning that these are the things that businesses have already invested in that you might not know are available that will ensure your success.
Another example from our portfolio would be Mindset Care, which is a platform that is TurboTax for Social Security Disability Application. Social Security Insurance and Social Security Disability Insurance have long been anachronistic pen and paper applications for a cornerstone of the income assistance program. And many people who are applying for those programs lack access to their own own medical information, have incomplete medical documentation, need the assistance of council and cannot find council to help apply for the program.
They are presumptively eligible and don't know it. They are either criminally involved in being released from incarceration and have lacked access to representation, are homeless or housing insecure and so on and so forth. And so what we see is that program, reportedly, has nearly 30,000 people with disabilities die on the wait list for disability benefits each year and have lacked access to an agile, simple, and parsimonious way to apply for benefits that people are ostensibly eligible for.
And what Mindset Care has done…the founder had a lived experience with a family member who was eligible for social security disability insurance but did not have the facility to apply himself. The sibling was Darren Webb who founded the company received several pounds of medical documentation in the mail in order to apply for his brother's eligibility for the program and it took months and months and months of waiting to discern eligibility.
Darren thought there has to be a better way and he's launched Mindset Care which is now an AI driven platform that is taking into account the privacy and the security of personally identifiable information on the platform but also using AI in novel ways to reduce the time it takes to fill out the forms, to scan medical documentations that are required for the form and to help dramatically reduce backlogs and reduce the amount of time applicants take to apply for one of the cornerstones of the income assistance program, and that is often a portal to other important programs like health insurance.
So I've heard folks argue that there's no market driven solution to accessibility in a government regulation to make this happen. What do you say to someone who says that?
For a long time, there has been a micro market that built up over correcting the discriminatory failures of other tech, and that market has been known as the accessibility market. A lot of that market has been backed by all of us to try to get point solutions out into the market that will correct discriminatory tech.
But I'm here to say there's a new market that is powerful and formulating at warp speed and that market does not begin with a net assumption at baseline that we're correcting other people's shortcomings. That market is a blank slate that founders with disabilities and those co-creating and co-designing are building on. And that blank slate is saying let's begin from the beginning and imagine what we need in the future to thrive, not just to compete in a quality sense, but in an equity sense.
How do we thrive in work, in school and higher education and skills training? We don't do it with a point solution to correct tech that already exists. We dream up new tech. We invent ways to arrive at new frontiers to elevate human potential to optimize human experience.
Are there some macro trends that you think people should pay attention to?
Well, I think certainly it's on everybody's dance card to talk about artificial intelligence everywhere I go. And I think it's really important that we have a conversation about what's at stake in leveraging AI, that there is a notion in many communities across the disability community, which is highly heterogeneous, that there are no better group of people to imagine a world that is driven by AI that optimizes the human experience, that respects personal privacy and dignity, that drives new efficiencies and affordabilities, that cuts red tape, that elevates the interest of removing barriers in people's lives.
Now, with that said, there is no higher burden then to get AI right for people who need it the most and who better to safeguard the interests and rights of people with disabilities in building AI than people with disabilities themselves.
And so the conversation is not if or when builders and entrepreneurs and makers will grapple with the intense need for ethical parameters and guardrails in building AI, and the need for iterative feedback from the community. It's not if or when…it's happening!
But the question is about who will capitalize those ideas over others. And there is an urgent desire to participate. In agentic solutions, I know what you're doing is really a perfect example of leveraging AI for digital agent assistance.
When you think about, and I just ask you to think about this, think about which community has been most comfortable with leveraging personal assistance for the longest period of time. And it will be the disability community, but now we are moving into a virtual environment, which this has been a banner year for personal digital assistance.
And the question is who better to build that personal digital assistance that customized experience, whether it's in customer service, whether it's in call centers, whether it's in as a work management tool, HR tech, on every level, whether it's a personal digital coach, a tutor in your pocket, a teacher on your phone. But at every level, there is the notion of how to divide space between your optimization of your personal sense of self-esteem, of sense of talent, and the need for personalized support that we can get from AI.
So the interesting opportunity and the things that are being negotiated right now in the marketplace is how to optimize human potential, not to blot out what is unique about human drivers—and I'm using the word driver, meaning the human agent in all of us—but how to optimize human potential, leveraging artificial intelligence and new approaches to personal assistance through digital means.
How do you build the next pipeline of entrepreneurs from the ADA generation?
An early company, SmartJob that was founded in 2020, has been working really hard with disability technology accelerators across the world. And this is the other really good news story about this exciting new category in the capital markets is that throughout the world, we have come at an evidence-based model of how to effectively support new entrepreneurs from idea to business plan, to go to market strategy, which is not something that you arrive at without a broad and varied community of interest. And I mean a community of interest that includes business mentors, that includes universities and institutions of a higher ed, that includes trade association, that includes folks that are in the field of accessibility - so I want to invite people listening in the field of accessibility to say there's a role to play here too - that at the table in our working is we're calling them accelerators, but they're really entrepreneurial support organizations that are often led by people with a lived experience of disability who count their mission in life to support other people with disabilities are those aligned with co-creating co-designing with the community to make it to market.
Part of the programming of these entrepreneurial support programs is a crash course in marketing a product, a crash course in running a P&L and doing taxes in business and corporation status and then we get to a layer of product design and review iterative feedback from a statistically significant sample of user testers, right? Like, where are you going to find that if you're testing something that is computer vision, if you're testing something that is a wayfinding solution by with for the blind. Where are you going to find the user testers that tell you this actually works.
And these entrepreneurial support organizations are supporting the next generation of founders with disabilities to run their the right steps between idea to market. And some of them have really defining scaler programs. So after their strong product market fit, you come back and they're running cohorts of entrepreneurs and supporting them in testing their revenue models and for scale and supporting them, not just from idea to business plan to market, but from market to a significant depth of business, pipeline and scale.
And so, So I really believe that there is an auspicious moment right now where the infrastructure is being put in place for more and more and more companies to come build in this market, to access capitalization. The way companies become investable is they become thoroughly useful. They become in alignment with purpose and strong product market fit with consumers, and they're testing all of that early with the right infrastructure and mentorship and support from a lot of these programs, that we're going to see hundreds and hundreds of companies a year that are building in this space at the front door to technology, not in a niche industry.
What's one thing that surprised you since founding Enabled VC?
Well, that's exactly what is surprising and elevated. exciting is that the time is right for this marketplace to flourish, that there are absolutely intuitive entrepreneurs builders who they have great business sense, but they also have personal experiences in access to the community to inform their product design and that adding those things together creates an incomparable moment for the design potential of technology to really rip down barriers that have been persistent in the marketplace.
I think that there is a convergence of social change attached to civil rights, investment capital in really great builders in this space who will live to see their solution, to market, and to scale, and to sustainability.
I've been using the word scale, but I think let's highlight the word sustainability, which is how do we build businesses that will be here in a generation? How do we build businesses that are here to fundamentally change our conception of what tech can do to elevate the human experience, not to replace the human experience, but to remove barriers and drive equity for people who've been long ignored.
I mean, think about how many times students graduate from the finest institutions in this country, arrive at a wonderful place of employment and can't get into the workplace software. Imagine how many times. people cannot access the basic textbook in institutions of higher learning. That's a critical barrier that all of us in the accessibility space have long been working on those problems.
Let's go a step further. Once we're into basic access, what's there for people? What type of workplace technologies can really get at the next step? I'm in workplace technology now. I've gained access through accessibility. But am I learning new and emerging into skills and new and emerging industries?
Am I competing on equal footing? Am I accessing the kinds of jobs that are upwardly mobile that have an increase in pay year over year? Am I accessing the kinds of hard and soft credentials that will land me in a different generational wealth? These are next level conversations that have everything to do with technology.
The technology conversation cannot end when you access your workplace computer. We need to dig deep into educational technology, healthcare technology, workforce technology that are the next layer of conversation, which is who's building in those places.
And by God, accessibility is table stakes. Getting into those softwares is table stakes. But then what next? We have an ever widening skills gap in the disability community, an over concentration of workers with disabilities in manual skills jobs and non-knowledge based digital jobs. We have an ever expansion of knowledge based jobs in the industries that have the highest grossing wages in the in the economy.
So what are we doing about that? Well, it has a technology predicate to the question because that is where most people are accessing agile, accessible, affordable, easy to apply skills— workplace technologies, educational technologies, and healthcare technology.
I wish for the day when we're no longer talking about simply accessing the front page to your computer, so to speak, in a proverbial sense, and we're really talking about all the work that we have yet to do to get workers in a competitive footing globally. So the builders in our marketplace are catching up for lost time in that respect.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs to join in this accessibility movement in this future that we're co-creating?
Yeah, I think that we're ready to gain your wisdom and the good benefit of your ideas and that ideas have power. And so there is an infrastructure to support people who want to test their ideas to viability.
By the way, there's a dignity in failing too. As you know, as I know, part of entrepreneurship is failing up. And there is an infrastructure to test whether those ideas are viable, meaning to give it a go requires an organized approach to determining and stress testing, whether a product will work, whether it will have a an elevated customer experience, whether a buyer will buy pilots or multi-year contracts or, you know, a sustained business model.
We want everyone to have the dignity of taking their ideas distance or not, meaning, or maybe they won't survive, but you go back to the drawing board.
That is where economic development comes from. I think we need to be honest about the core of the economy are not only, MSMEs (micro, small, and medium business enterprises). There's a place for that kind of entrepreneurship as well in the disability community and a quickly growing infrastructure around that in entrepreneurial support organizations.
Then there's a place also, the core of the economy are other people's ideas that have been capitalized and manifested that are putting good people to work. The legions of businesses that started small and grew steadily and achieved scale and technology and put great people to work.
I think it's important to say that our founders are so dedicated to hiring inclusively, to growing their businesses steadily and recruiting diverse talent within their businesses. So not only is their technology making an impact, but the way that they behave as employers and as leaders and business leaders is changing the ethos around how business views disabilities as well. And I hope we'll continue around the world for all the builders and makers in this space who become business owners and employers.