How one founder is using technology to make the workplace more accessible

I would love to start broad, tell me a little bit about who you are and how you came to be where you are now. What inspired you to start Inclusively?

I went to the University of Colorado to study journalism with hopes of being a financial journalist. A few years in, I got an internship at CNBC transcribing interviews. They were running a series called “I am American Business”. It was a docu-series that profiled American CEOs and founders like Herb Kelleher from Southwest and Julie Aigner-Clark from Baby Einstein about their ethos and how they got started. After the shoots, I would watch the recordings and transcribe. It was the first time I had that aha moment of “oh my gosh, people start companies.” I connected the dots and it was the first time I ever thought entrepreneurship could be my career, that I could start something of my own and not just work for someone else’s company.

After that internship, I started at Deutsche Bank in London because I thought I needed experience in finance to be able to cover it as a journalist. After five years, I decided to quit and start a company with one of my friends. It was a mobile payment app for restaurants and bars. We grew it to about two hundred restaurants and bars in London and sold it to American Express at the end of 2017. 

Around that same time, my cousin became the first licensed aesthetician in the state of Florida with Down syndrome. When I went to get a facial from her, it struck me how easy it was for her employer to make some slight adjustments to her working environment to make her successful. I wanted to figure out how we could leverage technology to make it really easy for employers to accommodate people's unique requests at scale, across the spectrum of disability from Down syndrome to autism to stress, anxiety, depression and everything in between.

What can companies be doing better to help people with disabilities thrive in their workplaces? What progress have you seen since starting Inclusively and what remains to be done?

The first thing that companies need to understand is that people with disabilities are a way bigger pie than they realize, and they’re already at your company. About 20% of Americans have a disability and only about 3 to 5% disclose it to their employers. We're not talking about hiring people from untapped talent pools, they're already at your company and you're not helping them be as successful as they can be. Your company has people that are struggling with low productivity or might leave for an opportunity elsewhere because they don't want to disclose a disability to you and therefore you're not accommodating them. There might be simple accommodations that your company can offer that could make those people more productive, increase retention, and provide real ROI for the business. 

If you can accommodate people's unique requests, you can create a flexible infrastructure that allows you to widen the gate for more people to get in and thrive. Disabled people are not just people who use wheelchairs, people with Down syndrome or others with visible disabilities, disabled people are people who have learning disabilities, ADHD, those who are struggling with their mental health, etc. This is a much bigger demographic than many realize, and when you connect those dots for companies and help them understand the business case for offering accommodations, that's when companies start to really understand why they should do this.

Why right now? Why do you think this mission of accessibility and accommodation is so important in 2024?

Right now, in the workforce, there is a really unsettled relationship between employees and their employers. That’s likely only going to increase. The rising generation of the workforce, which is now over 50% of the workforce, Millennials and Gen Z, grew up in an environment that was highly personalized to them. People have started getting diagnosed more frequently and much earlier for learning disabilities and mental health issues and the schools and university systems this generation grew up in provided personal accommodations. The workforce is where they’ll spend the majority of their time and they don’t expect these things to go away just because they aren’t at school anymore, they expect these accommodations from their employers. 

COVID definitely accelerated a lot of this with remote work and the increased flexibility that was demonstrated during that point, people don't want to go backwards from there. What it boils down to is that if companies can personalize their employee experience to accommodate people across the spectrum of disabilities, they’re going to have a more engaged workforce with less churn and higher productivity. 

On your website, I noticed the term “success enablers”. Can you explain a little bit more about how you came to that and what that represents to you?

When we started to work on this project, we knew that the Americans with a Disability Act (ADA) had produced this idea that companies have to provide “reasonable accommodations”. That process is compliance driven and it's a medical model. We were trying to shift this from a medical model to a social model. The word “accommodations” makes people think of compliance and litigation. The ADA is very much wrapped around physical disabilities and visible disabilities, but there are so many other types of disabilities. “Success enablers” are something you can do to make someone more successful at your company and more successful for your business, who wouldn’t want that?

How has AI changed the conversation around accessibility? What potential benefits and risks do you see?

One thing that is great about technology and the world we're in as it relates to technology is that it's speeding up. People's ability to react has become so much faster. With email, for example, it took ten years for that technology to become ubiquitous at all companies. Now, the pace of adoption has gotten dramatically faster. Eighteen months ago, most people didn't know what ChatGPT was and now it's in every single company's roadmap. In the past, companies could just sit behind their big company as an excuse for being slow to move. Now, there's a serious cost to doing nothing because technology has made it so easy for other people to beat you at what you're doing if you're not reacting and changing. The agility technology has created is really good for accessibility.

AI as a technology is enabling companies like ours to personalize things in a way that scales and speeds up how we deliver our products. A lot of people are worried about AI perpetuating biases but I think that falls to company responsibility. It's not Sam Altman's responsibility to make sure he has accommodated every use case, it's up to the people who are leveraging technology to make sure the stuff that they are doing is accommodating all the use cases for their organization.

Who helped you rise to this level, and how do you pay it forward?

My parents are not at all in this space, they’ve never done any of the things I've done. However, they have always made me feel like I'm in control and made me take responsibility for what I want in life. If I didn't want to go do something, they'd have me call the friend or the parent. I think that's what has made me super confident to take really, really big leaps because I always feel that I'm in control and if it doesn't work out, I'll fix it. I got that ethos from them. 

When I started my first company I was so junior that I didn’t really have mentors quite yet. The people who have really gotten me to where I am today are my peers who were able to empathize with what I was going through and provide support. Their support always made me feel like I could keep going because other people are experiencing the same things. How I pay it forward is by trying to be that person for other people. I try to support others in whatever way I can, especially other founders because I've been there. I'm always sharing my war stories because I know how much it makes you feel like you're not alone.

How do you hire? What do you look for in people to join your team?

My skill set is definitely finding what people are really good at. I always make sure there are other people that are involved in the hiring process because I know I will gravitate towards the good stuff. I can always find something about somebody that I like. I also make sure that people understand what it’s going to be like to work at a startup. I try to hire people who are excited about the challenge and opportunity and don’t necessarily think they know all the answers already.