While working as a civil rights lawyer in the Obama administration, Regina “Gina” Kline kept seeing the same pattern: talented individuals with disabilities being denied access to the tools they needed to compete in the global economy.

In this episode, she shares how that realisation led her to found Enable Ventures, the first venture capital firm dedicated to closing the disability wealth gap by investing in companies at the nexus of technology and disability.

We discuss:

• How Enable Ventures invests in disability-led innovation
• The “original sin” behind the disability wealth gap
• How the "ADA generation" is building the technology they need to compete

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About Regina Kline

Regina “Gina” Kline is the Founder and Managing Partner of Enable Ventures, the first impact venture fund dedicated to closing the disability wealth gap by investing in early-stage companies working at the nexus of technology and disability.

Investor, entrepreneur, civil rights lawyer, and thought leader, Gina has dedicated 15 years of her career to building the future of work by advancing the rights and interests of people with disabilities as innovators, entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers. Gina previously served in the Obama Administration and litigated landmark ADA cases and is nationally recognized for her legal and policy work in advancing the rights of people with disabilities. Gina is also the founder of SmartJob, an impact consultant and early-stage scout for the disability tech sector.

Follow Regina Kline on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/regina-gina-kline-b042054

Learn more about Enable Ventures: www.enableventures.vc

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The original sin that led to that global wealth gap has to do with bad design. And that is something we can fix. It's something within our control, within our lifetime.

This is Made For Us, the show where we explore how intentional design can help create a world that works better for everyone. I'm your host, Tosin Sulaiman. My guest today is Gina Kline, the founder and managing partner of Enable Ventures, a venture capital firm dedicated to closing the disability wealth gap while achieving competitive market rate returns. Before starting Enable Ventures, Gina worked for over a decade as a civil rights lawyer.

She served in the Obama administration and litigated landmark cases under the Americans with Disabilities Act. What she witnessed during that time made a deep impression. She recalls the astonishingly high unemployment rate of people with disabilities, the often Dickensian working conditions for those who did manage to get jobs, and the antiquated tools that many were given. This mismatch between worker and tool, she realized, was a core driver of the disability wealth gap.

And the solution was directing capital to the people who had historically been overlooked, innovators in the disability community. In this conversation, explains why she calls bad design the original sin behind the disability wealth gap and reveals how Enable’s portfolio companies are driving both profit and purpose. Here's Gina Kline.

I'm the founder and managing partner of Enable Ventures. And Enable Ventures is the first impact venture capital firm to invest in closing the disability wealth gap and doing it through market rate technology investments.

Just to set the stage for this conversation, you're connected to a few of the people that I've interviewed previously on the show and Enable Ventures is an investor in Be My Eyes. He's founder Hans Jorgen Wiberg I interviewed last season. So, you your work addresses the question of how to find and scale more companies like Be My Eyes that are developing inclusive services and products. We'll be talking about that in this conversation and how it connects to closing the disability wealth gap.

Fantastic.

First of all, can you take us back to before you became an investor and your first job after university? What were you doing then and how did you see your role in the world?

My goodness, well, I have had a nonlinear career pathway that I'm actually proud of all of the phases that I've had in my career, mostly with the really phenomenal mentors that I've had and opportunities for learning. But I started after university very early as a young person working on issues of inequality and how I could be supportive of people who were locked out of systems. And I started working after university with people that that experienced housing insecurity and other poverty issues.

That led me to law school where I trained to be a civil rights lawyer and worked after, you know, becoming a lawyer, in a number of different jobs, all of which culminated in working at the U S department of justice in the United States. That's the attorney general of the United States. And there are different sections of the Justice Department, one of which is called the Civil Rights Division that enforces the American system of civil rights. And I really cut my teeth as a civil rights lawyer in the disability rights section of the Civil Rights Division, the group of lawyers in the United States that enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act on behalf of the U.S. government.

What kind of cases did you work on and what did you discover during that time that most people don't get to see?

Well, I spent about fifteen years as a lawyer. I spent a good number of years at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration. And then after that, at a private law firm that was representing the interests of individuals like the National Federation of the Blind and its members. But at the Justice Department, the issues that were of paramount importance during the time was the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act to where people with disabilities worked and the systems that governed vocational rehabilitation, that governed how people accessed the core of the community.

We at that point were more than three decades after the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And yet we as civil rights lawyers understood that nearly two thirds of working age adults with disabilities still remain locked out of the labor pool and not employed. And that was true in American public where one in four adults had disabilities or strongly identified with disability. you know, we're having a global conversation today, rightfully so, but there's one in six people globally that identify with disability and far more arguably who don't self-identify, but who experience unmet needs related to disability.

So we knew during that period of time that Americans with disabilities were working in by far a disproportionate number of manual skills jobs in industries that were using antiquated equipment, that were manual, that were rote, that were lacking in technology. And for some reason, technology seemed to be the holy grail, that there were some people deemed worthy of accessing technology and there were others that systems had locked out of technology. I remember representing individuals with disabilities where machines were de-automated because employers had interpreted their skills as being unworthy or incapable of using technology at work.

And so we were looking at whether the unemployment rate that was astronomically high was the net result of the endemic attributes of disability or was it in fact because people with disabilities were mismatched with tools, were given inadequate tools or no tools at all, were not at the starting line of work with the same access to innovation as other workers. I ended up after many years of representing the interests, the civil rights interests of people with disabilities, believing the latter that we had systematically kept people from the tools they needed to compete in the global economy.

And there was a landmark case that you worked on.

Yes. So during those years, there was landmark settlement agreements in Oregon and Rhode Island, that applied a 1999 US Supreme Court decision called Olmstead versus LC. Separate is not equal in the disability rights movement. It's very similar. It has resonance with a Brown versus Board of Education in that regard. That where people lived and worked, that people had the right to be fully integrated into their communities and have access to the tools and the supports they needed to stay at home and not be unjustifiably institutionalized.

When I was at the Justice Department, the lawyers that were enforcing Olmstead were undoubtedly brilliant, but they were enforcing it as to where people live. And there was a team of us that were involved in litigation in both of those states, Rhode Island and Oregon, that applied the Olmstead case to where people worked. And at the time, there were people with disabilities across the United States who were working in separate facilities, separate places of employment, who had a two-tiered system of wages where there were workers with disabilities who were earning subminimum wages on the basis of their disabilities and who had not been given the informed choice or information about alternatives to that employment.

And the lawsuits were protracted litigation in both instances, which resulted in landmark settlements. And where those two states really became the leaders in the nation of showing what the rival image to the discrimination looks like, and how you can support people with disabilities to enter competitive employment, and people with even the most significant disabilities with the right tools, with the right supports can thrive in any number of career pathways and fields.

And that was a really life-changing experience for me to participate in those cases and to see those formative changes in law happen. And at the end of it though, I was still really aware that there was a vulnerability to it all, that there were still not enough tools that were being created for workers with disabilities, even by people with disabilities for themselves. There wasn't enough co-creation and co-design iteration of new tools happening in the market to keep up with the demand for the number of people coming out of school, members of the ADA generation who, here in the United States, but also throughout the world, knew that they could and wanted to work in any number of industries and needed more tools to do it.

So when you look back at your time as a lawyer, was there a specific case or a client that you represented that made you think, I need to change tactics? And how did you arrive at venture capital as the answer.

I would say that consistently time and again, I saw, and this is like very personally as a lawyer, people for whom their tools were mismatched with their talent. I met people that were tracked away from competitive jobs, even though they were later, through the advocacy of loved ones and family members, able to enter law school, obtain higher degrees after working in subminimum wage jobs because the education system had deemed them unemployable. And so that's not just about technology, that's about tyrannically low expectations of disability itself. And so the combination of lacking tools and being in systems that lower the confidence level that people can contribute. You know, I saw what I would consider to be Dickensian work conditions in the 21st century. I saw workers that had the least amount of conversation in public policy circles about their interests and needs, but had the most abundant portrayal of talent lying in plain sight that was suboptimized.

And this is recent history. This was not speaking of a century ago, but I saw that there was an expectation that people with disabilities could be employed, but employed in industries that were exactly in the eye of the storm for disruption from technology. And I thought that, you know, observing this over a period, a great number of years, that instead of conversations about how people with disabilities could be hoisted into knowledge-based jobs and digital jobs that were growing, people with disabilities through public systems were by and large being channeled into manual jobs, into jobs that were being disrupted by that very technology. So technology had that equal propensity to liberate people in terms of being tools that make people competitive in the job market and also that propensity to ingrain discrimination.

We saw people that were plaintiffs in our cases that had MBAs were top of their class who got to their first day of work and either couldn't access the textbook in their institution of higher learning because it was not screen reader accessible or got to their first day of work and the workplace software was not accessible. And we started to realize, we as a culture are starting to realize that it has everything to do with disability truly being the environment and the tools and not an intrinsic attribute of the worker or the person.

And so what made you decide to make that move into venture capital and how did you make that transition?

When we go back to the storytelling around the employment problem, that you cannot talk about employment without talking about tools. And yet we have a system of employment where some workers, it feels without question that they should be afforded tools and other workers have had to historically prove their worthiness to attach to tools. And I knew that in order to rewire systems, that when capital was available, some of the greatest makers and builders and innovators and dreamers would make the tools that they needed in their own lives to compete, and that they would be designed with the potential to add value at a societal level as well. So I was really interested in how entrepreneurs and makers could access more capital.

So Enable Ventures has this ambitious dual mandate, which is closing the disability wealth gap and delivering market rate returns. Before we get into how you're doing that, can you help us understand the landscape? And when you say disability, what are we talking about?

So our firm views disability as part of the human experience. We know that there's one and a half billion people with disabilities on the planet and growing. We understand at the societal level that there are people who have profound unmet needs in the way of technology. In fact, there was a statistic globally that only one out of ten people with disabilities globally have the technology they need to remove barriers in their lives. So we have a lot of work to do with distribution, with affordability, with access. And we understand that disability has been chronically politicized in terms of who's in and who's out from a legislative effort. That's a requirement of societies in making laws is to define who's in and who's out. That's sort of the art of political compromise. And the ADA certainly has a defining definition.

But our definition in investing is to look at people's needs and to assess a solution based on its efficacy and how many different people it can serve, meaning that we're looking for the designs that are most agile, that are most inclusive, universally designed technology that is built from the beginning to exclude the least number of people, which is a definingly different strategy than a strategy that tries to draw hard boundaries as to who you might serve.

What we believe is that a lot of people have unmet needs as it relates to technology that can benefit at the societal level from inclusive technology. And what we want to optimize towards is the broadest and most material impact footprint that we can find from a solution. I mean, the perfect example that comes to mind is captioning. Captioning done inefficiently is not very accurate and therefore might underserve people who really need it. But captioning that's ninety-nine percent accurate or as we've seen in the market today with a portfolio company, Ava, that has ninety-nine point nine percent accuracy is that it is taking real-time AI transcription technology, putting human in the loop quality assurance, and it is built with a sort of cultural competency derived from the organized deaf community to say that some of the product features like name ID and multi-speaker identification can actually help produce a more elevated customer experience.

But the interesting corollary benefits of the product is that we've heard from students in higher education who have dyslexia, that they prefer Ava because of its accuracy and because of its clarity in product design with this multi-speaker feature, which is a gift from the concept of universal inclusive design, that this product, which was developed for very hard edge case, high accuracy for the organized deaf and hard of hearing community, has bestowed benefits to other disability groups and has some societal level benefit for anyone that is note taking. So we view our approach to the market in these terms, which is that we're looking for the best designed products in the world. And we believe that the best makers in the world of such design are people with disabilities or those that are co-creating, co-designing with them.

We'll be back to the conversation in a minute. But first, I wanted to take a moment to say thanks to you, our listeners. Made For Us is now listened to in over one hundred countries around the world. And that's because many of you have told others about the show. Over the past few months, I've had the chance to chat with a few of you. And I'd like to say a special thanks to Travelle Barksdale, Daosuda Boonprasert, Camille Cerrado, Hector Terrero and Jess Vice for taking the time to share their feedback. Here's a voice note from Camille.

Hi, Camille Cerrado here from Oakland, California, program manager. It's really eye-opening to have a space like Made For Us. It shows how important it is to keep having conversations about designing inclusive, empathetic, and safe technology that can truly improve the quality of life for everyone. Topics such as why advancements in medicine and healthcare that addresses health disparities and population health isn't just important, it's necessary.

If you'd like to share your thoughts or ideas for topics you'd like to hear on the podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Now let's get back to the conversation with Gina Kline.

And so let's talk about the wealth gap itself. What does that actually look like in numbers and more importantly in people's lives?

Well, we know that there's a two trillion dollar hole in global GDP where the talent of people with disabilities should be. We know that this is a global matter. It's not a parochial issue. This is a global issue. We also understand that the world has interpreted this to be a global issue for some time. After the ADA, there was a UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. There's been the European Accessibility Act. There are matters that involve nations across the world that have figured out that this idea about design is common sense and is good business. It is also the good business of government too, not just the private sector, to close wealth gaps. That social realization that I had individually has come about that we understand that this two trillion dollar hole in global GDP is not about the endemic attributes of people and on a basis of disability.

This is about having the wrong tools, the wrong design. The original sin that led to that global wealth gap has to do with bad design. And that is something we can fix. It's something within our control, within our lifetime, we can create tools that begin with everyone in mind or that exclude the least number of people and that can create economic development and economic gains. And we're seeing that happen. So there is a very porous marketplace with sharing of innovation across borders.

You mentioned Be My Eyes, its point of origin being in Western Europe, but then ultimately coming to the US venture market, raising capital in the United States, having distribution across many countries across the world with nearly ten million people having used that app from everything in their life, from opening the refrigerator and reading labels to helping them day to day at work. There are blind students at Stanford that I have talked to who have said they probably wouldn't have had the confidence to end up at Stanford if it wasn't for the daily use of that app. So we put all kinds of testimonials all over the world as to what the right tools can do at the right moment for people who experience disability.

And you're the first to build a fund like this. Why do you think this hasn't been done before? What have other investors been missing?

I think that there is an interesting notion that demography is destiny. And the Americans with Disabilities Act being 1990, the folks that grew up in a world with civil rights also grew up in a world with astronomically burgeoning technology. So we have this generation that we refer to often as the ADA generation. And that generation, thirty-four, thirty-five years old, has really entered prime working age years with a different ethos and attitude about expectation of what they should be entitled to in the way of access to tools. That they're demanding inclusion in a way that's smart, that's appropriate, that is furthering civil rights, and that includes technology.

They are saying to the institutions of higher ed, let's get the best tools that we can find for reasonable accommodations on the table that will drive new cost efficiencies, it'll be affordable, that will get the job done well so that I am competing on equal learning ground. They're saying to employers, let's improve worker productivity across the board.

And how to do that? Some of the learnings of reasonable accommodations. Let's give productive workers tools for them to be even more productive to increase their contributions to the workplace. So I think that there is societal level learning from the experience of ADA and accommodation, and that that's being driven most fundamentally by this ADA generation. And I think that this is probably a sensational thing to say, but I'm not sure that we could have had a fund without that generation creating that demand. I also think that generation is some of our greatest innovators that are coming up who are willing to leverage their lived experiences into product design and into the way that they think about how technology should collide with the human spirit. Like, how do we negotiate space between our human needs and what is appropriate for technology to take on?

Yeah, it's such an interesting way to look at it from the point of view of a generation. And I guess it's also the generation that would have grown up with the iPhone and that also raises expectations.

We had a system before those tech innovations, whether you're talking about the iPhone or the use of the cloud or the pervasive use of apps, or now we're transitioning into the next age, which is of AI and agentic AI in particular. We're moving into what I see as a golden age of neurotechnology. So before these, this moment that we're in, we had a moment where in the before times, technology was really created to rectify the failures of other tech. It was almost derivative market where we created point solutions that remediated or fixed other technologies problems.

The revelation now is that there we have young early thirties founders who are ADA generation or even late twenties founders who are saying, I am going to create something the world hasn't seen before, that'll do it right from the very beginning, leveraging tools that are cheap. I mean, it's inexpensive, it's the most affordable time in the history of the human experience to be thinking about some of these issues with a backend, with a data predicate, with AI, with cloud computing, with iPhone, that we have had.

And I stand by, you we've had once in one hundred year problems that we are trying to fix where the tools are now available and building companies that will be the solutions is thoroughly doable, is reasonable to assume that we will see people who have genuinely created technologies that we'd never thought of before, not as a derivative experiment, but out of whole cloth.

So I understand that your investment approach focuses on four areas and you talked about once in a hundred year problems. How does that connect to your investment approach?

Yes, we give ample focus on four areas in our work. We're really seeing a lot of innovations in work, how people work, in what industries they work in. And the thing that's formative here is that there's a lot of innovators who are working on how to hurry up and fill ever-widening skills gaps. I mentioned at the outset that there is an over-representation of people with disabilities in manual skills jobs at the exact moment that we're having epic levels of disruption from technology. We're also having a huge epic disruption of higher education and traditional education and all of its modes of learning. What this presents is not only the disruption, but a very unique opportunity for people with disabilities to access credentialing, in asynchronous learning content in any number of fields and to do it in a way where you're not on a wait list for public services, but you're able to access content that can help anyone with zero screening out, help anyone really coordinate access to fields like IT security, cybersecurity, graphic design, logistics training.

How do we get people into the industries where there is demand and growth but require a certain skillset, skills training that one might not even access in traditional education settings. And how do we expose people to align with the soft skills that are very helpful in getting people into work in the first place and retaining employment in the long run?

So we're seeing companies that are like Daivergent here in the United States that are working on the basic hard skills around new industries, but also the soft skills around interviewing skills and skills around negotiation. We're seeing companies like Inclusively that are working on employee retention. mean, one of the things that the company Inclusively that has over 135,000 people with disabilities on its platform and employers like Salesforce, who are its customers, is that it's learned that there is a kind of a conversational void sometimes between the workforce and the C-suite at a business.

Global industries sometimes lack awareness and knowledge as to what their employees really need. What investments should the C-suite be making to help agilely retain its highest talent or its highest diverse talent, people with disabilities? And what Inclusively has done is created the bilateral conversation where analytics feedback is going equally to the C-suite about the mismatch between what a company is invested in the way of accommodations and what they have signaled to the company through the Inclusively software that they really need, which is a very interesting layer of information sharing that wasn't possible before the types of technology that we have today in employee software.

We are also focused on other categories that are really exploding with opportunity, like the very next generation of assistive technology, and also backing founders with disabilities who are raising venture capital themselves and have been shunned to decide historically by the capital markets and looking to grow their own businesses.

What is the good news story in all of this is that over the last six years, we've seen more and more people stepping forward to initiate, to deploy capital into companies' venture fundraising rounds. We've seen more traditional investors who are backing and supporting founders with disabilities. So we've seen a change in behavior in the capital markets that we only expect to continue. And having strategic capital at the table is very helpful in signaling those opportunities to other investors.

And you're embedded in the disability community in a way that most investors aren't, which must give you a unique vantage point into the future. I'm curious what you're seeing that others aren't seeing yet and what's coming that we should be paying attention to.

What we're seeing in the way of assistive technologies are things that we hadn't dreamt of before. We're seeing the advent of brain-computer interface technology that is effectuating communication with people who are non-speaking. We're seeing mobility solutions like the Cionic neurotechnology sleeve that's in the Enable Ventures portfolio, where people with cerebral palsy or Parkinson's are able to improve mobility through remote rehabilitation, wearing a very light neurotechnology sleeve that looks kind of like a Nike Spandex, where half a generation ago, when we were talking about rehabilitation, we were always talking in terms that involved walkers, wheelchairs, canes, in those types of situations. Now we're seeing wearable clothing that is bionic, that is able to do remote rehabilitation. So we're seeing step changes in how we view the tools that are necessary or the tools that would be most agile in any particular situation.

Looking ahead to a decade from now and Enable Ventures has done everything that you hoped it would do. Could you paint a picture of what's different and how that will change how we all live and work?

In a decade from now, we will see innovators and creators with disabilities who have created intergenerational wealth through the success of their scalable companies, who have become business leaders, who've hired in a way that has promoted people who bring lived experiences into the business to promote a better understanding of their customers, to promote stronger designs and technology, to promote more ethical business practices overall that have scaled highly rewarding full-time employment to the disability community within those businesses.

I believe that we'll see a whole number, any number of technology products that have served millions and millions of people to improve education, to improve skills training, to improve access to employment, to improve the daily experiences of removing barriers in people's lives. I believe that we will see more nonprofit and non-governmental organizations that are supporting entrepreneurship as a viable career pathway for people with disabilities. I believe that we will see as a matter of civil and human rights across the world that technology is inherently linked to the full realization of rights and that we will see shifting public support for technology development.

And I also believe that we will see a culture that rewards and honors entrepreneurs as problem solvers and leaders. And that is sort of a new pathway as work continues to be disrupted by AI, that entrepreneurship will have a premium and it will be a viable career pathway. I think all of those things, we’re already starting to see that happen. I think we're going to see it with greater intensity as the years go by.

And how can people learn more about Enable Ventures? How can they follow you?

Anyone is welcome to follow Regina Kline on LinkedIn. Boy, it's such a pleasure to connect with people all over the world. And I'm very excited as to how many people are working on these problems all over the place. And then enableventures.vc online and happy to hear from folks.

Thank you so much for your time, Gina. It's been a pleasure speaking to you. I appreciate you taking the time to do this.

Thank you so much.

That was Gina Kline, founder and managing partner of Enable Ventures. If you'd like to learn more, you'll find links in the show notes. This is the second conversation in our series on investing to close gaps. The first was our two-part interview with Ellevest CEO Sylvia Kwan. Be sure to check that out if you missed it. Later in the season, we'll hear from Eric Collins, co-founder and CEO of Impact X Capital Partners, which backs underrepresented founders across the UK, Europe and the US. I'm Tosin Sulaiman, thanks for joining me on Made For Us.