Enable Ventures, an AgeTech Collaborative™ investor participant, is the first impact venture fund dedicated to closing the disability wealth gap while achieving competitive, market-rate returns. By focusing on early-stage companies that both leverage disability as an asset and develop solutions using human-centered design, Enable Ventures aims to place resources in the hands of entrepreneurs with disabilities and break through barriers that have trapped people with disabilities in unemployment and underemployment.
We spoke with Gina Kline, founder and managing partner of Enable Ventures, who shared some searching reflections not only on the company, but on technology as a derivative of the human condition, the power of co-creation and human-centered design to break down silos, and the intriguing intersection between civil rights and the future of technology.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about Enable Ventures.
Enable Ventures is the first fund to come to market with a strategy of closing the disability wealth gap at a market rate through market rate impact investing.
Our approach is to invest along a four-part impact strategy. First, we invest in upskilling and reskilling American workers with disabilities through tech that fills skills gaps. Second, we invest in highly inclusive, work-related technologies. In the United States, there have been too few tools to help people with disabilities find, obtain and sustain employment, so we look for the most radically inclusive tools being built through co-creation and co-design with that community, and invest in them.
Third, we’re investing in the next generation of assistive technologies. This is really knocking on the front door of emerging technology as a category. There’s a rich opportunity right now to leverage artificial intelligence, neurotechnology and other cutting-edge developments to advance assistive technologies in ways that will help people with disabilities participate in the economy and enjoy the same benefits as anyone else in the community, at work and in education.
And fourth, we invest in founders with disabilities who have scalable startups that are driving social impact.
So you’re investing directly in people with disabilities who are entrepreneurs, and also investing in technologies that help people with disabilities with things like finding employment.
There’s a unifying force across those categories: We’re looking for iterative feedback from the community and from the end users. We actually care that the technology has been built with a design discipline focused on excluding the least number of people as possible — we seek out technology that has been stress-tested to include the manifold diversities in the community. And by “community,” I mean all of us: There’s an emerging understanding that as we live longer, disability has become an inevitability. We all face a future of participating in community life with some kind of disability, so the need for these inclusive tools is apparent and abundant.
At the AgeTech Collaborative, we talk a lot about the power of co-creation with end users, but it’s typically in the context of a startup designing their product or service. What does co-creation or human-centered design look like from an investment perspective?
For the first 15 years of my career, I was a civil rights lawyer, representing the interests of people with disabilities across the United States. It’s amazing how direct the line is between technology that was not built with people with disabilities in mind, and where discrimination exists in employment, education, access to skills training and other areas. The fact that such exclusive, discriminatory technology has been funded is a testament to the fact that capital markets have not been aligned to the needs of people who are nearest to the problems posed by inaccessible technology. I would call that a market failure.
To rectify that problem, Enable Ventures looks for founders, makers, dreamers and innovators who not only have had the experience of exclusion, but who also know what something that is “designed for all” looks like. They know what the product features, user experience and interactive design of technology should be, and they’re building it themselves.
It sounds like this strategy can really break down silos for both end users and innovators themselves.
There’s this problem where we’ve seen impact in these tidy little containers — innovators have sought impact for one group but not another. But disability is fascinating because it’s a horizontal, not a vertical. It deeply intersects with women, with people of color, with the aging population and with so many other different communities that one might argue that it’s a unifying thesis: There is an inevitability to the human condition where we all need support, augmentation, accommodation and tools.
In fact, that’s the only thing that’s ever been true in the technology market — that technology is derivative of the human condition and our need for tools. So what Enable Ventures is indexing on is the idea that if we center design around human needs, then we’ll have a greater impact in society. We’ll pick up more of the manifold diversities of the people who are in our community, and we’ll serve multiple demographic groups. For example, many different kinds of people could be well served by tools that aid mobility or speech recognition. That’s why disability is a unifying thesis and has the opportunity to bring people together.
This seems manifestly foundational and practical, yet forward-thinking, all at the same time.
There’s a long and storied history of civil societies viewing disability as “other” and the community’s technology as point solutions. Going back to the era of the Civil War, for example, the vanguard of innovation for rehabilitating veterans and treating people with mental health conditions was to segregate them from mainstream society. But society has evolved, and strategies like that need to be replaced with different approaches that formulate the idea of integration and that people with disabilities shouldn’t be “othered.”
In fact, the idea that we need to segregate and “treat” people with disabilities has been crushed by the evolution of civil rights. The generation that has come of age since the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 have a new attitude. They’re ushering in a new recognition that the most cutting edge ideas are not just “How do we create access to tools that will help people integrate into society,” but rather “How do we lead the development of technology in a way that will allow people with disabilities to thrive — and, in turn, how do we also contribute to the betterment of the general consumer and technology market?”
This approach to designing technology is one way of breaking down the “tidy little containers” you mentioned.
As an example — I think that there is no “AgeTech market” and separate “disability market.” The real question is, “How do we amplify the efficiencies of human-centered design so that we understand that we’re dealing with the same market?”
The most efficient thing in the world is to design with radical inclusion from the beginning. How can we afford not to do that? The most inefficient approach is to design technology without everyone in mind, then having to remediate it later on the back end. Another inefficiency of this noninclusive approach is opportunity loss: the lack of disabled talent in the labor force, in education and other places where that should be. That opportunity loss represents an enormous hole in GDP, and it’s a crisis that is all about inefficiency.
And in this way, you can trace a direct line between radical inclusion and financial benefits?
What we're inching closer to is the concept that when something is designed from the beginning to be accessible for all, it has better market penetration. It has better features for all consumers and can reach people that the markets have not been able to reach before.
There is this Hobson’s choice often presented that somehow if we want exponential growth of technology, we don’t have time to center ethical frameworks or human needs at the core of the next steps of development. I think that’s malarkey. Impact and market rate return are not a trade-off, and never needed to be. Quite the opposite: Enable Ventures is showing that there is exponential growth and market rate return potential in companies that center human needs in their technology. There’s nothing more human than the inevitability of disability, so when human needs are centered, we actually have more sustainable, viable, long-term solutions that are subject to less volatility in the market.
We believe that there is absolutely a choice in how technology is made. There are innovators out there who have been working in obscurity but who are going to change technology forever. They might be working on what today may be perceived as edge cases in aging, or in physical disability, or in mental health, but their innovations will fundamentally change how we use wearables, sensors, or artificial intelligence, for example.
As an investor, how do you go about finding such innovators?
These are people who have been overlooked by capital — until now. With the development of funding that is thematically aligned with finding founders with disabilities, there is capital seeking technology that’s been developed with co-design and co-creation with the disability community. That has sent a signal to the markets that we are aligned with the design discipline that comes from founders who are designing inclusively. This is more than just “checking the box”; this is creating a category in the markets that is brand new and has opportunities that we haven’t seen in a generation, all because of founders that have come of age in an era of both technology and civil rights.
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