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Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Rich and Brittany Palmer, Managing Partners, Adaptation Ventures
Manage episode 501281166 series 3605911
Podcast Commentator: Welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams, where we bring you powerful conversations with leading voices in disability rights, employment and inclusion. Our guests share their expertise, experiences and strategies to inspire action and create a more inclusive world. If you're passionate about social justice or want to make a difference, you're in the right place. Let's dive in with your host, Doctor Kirk Adams.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Welcome, everybody, to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. I am Doctor Kirk Adams, and I am doctor by way of my PhD in Leadership and change through Antioch University, I did an ethnographic study of blind adults employed in large American corporations. So I interviewed a lot of cool people working for a lot of cool companies. And I'm a blind person myself. My retinas detached when I was five years old in kindergarten. I became totally blind very quickly, and I went to a school for blind kids, Oregon State School for second third grade. Learn my blindness skills and my confidence and how to love myself as a blind kid. And then a long and winding road. Fourth grade on. I was the only blind student in any school I attended through my several graduate schools and the doctorate. So have had the experience of being a frustrated job seeker with a disability and a successful blind employee in corporate America and leader of a couple non-profits. I'm the immediate past president of the American Foundation for the blind. So I've had the privilege of employing it and and helping create career paths for for hundreds of blind and deaf blind people. I set up a consulting practice about three years ago, and I'm talking to you from my office in Seattle. I work with companies to help them accelerate inclusion of people with disabilities in their workforce.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I work with several nonprofits to help them scale past the founder stage. And kind of unexpectedly, I have been contacted by a pretty big handful of startups in the disability tech space. Innovative people who are striving to use technology to make the world a more inclusive place for people with disabilities, and to create more opportunities for us to thrive whatever way we choose. And in doing so, I've been learning a lot about startups and incubators and angel investors and venture capital. My my fundraising history is is long and and positive, but it's primarily been in philanthropy. So raising money for non non-profit causes. So I, I'm privileged to have met Rich Palmer. We had one conversation and I'm just meeting Brittany Palmer today for the first time. Rich and Rich and Brittany are co-founders of Adaptation Ventures. And I have invited them to join us today to talk about their their journey. Hopefully you'll go way, way back. And I would love to hear I want to hear the the love story, too, of of how you met and what brought you to create adaptation ventures and and what, what your strategically what what your initiative is focused on now. So so Brittany and Rich, I'm handing you the talking stick.
Brittany Palmer: Thank you so much, Doctor Kirk. We appreciate it. And we will give. Well, we will go way, way back. And we'll also talk a little bit about how we met to. So thank you first for inviting us on the podcast. We are so appreciative to be here and talking about our story and adaptation ventures. I I'll start at the, at the beginning of sort of my story. So I am a from birth, a bilateral below elbow amputee. So I'm missing both arms from a little bit below the elbow down. And so I at the time, a long time ago I was one of the youngest children to ever be fitted with my bioelectric prosthetics. And so those are prosthetics that actually move. A hand open and closed. And they've gotten a lot better today. But I wore prosthetics a little bit when I was younger, but mostly adapted to the world around me. Without them, and eventually stopped wearing them altogether. I had really amazing parents who pushed me to be as independent as my potential to be was, which is pretty much completely independent. And I'm super grateful for that. So things that people still ask me today, how do you write? How do you type? How do you drive? I do all of that without assistance. And And so again, like, it's just been a world of adapting and making things work for me.
Brittany Palmer: And I know a lot of other people with disabilities, you know, the world is not necessarily built for them, and we're always adapting to our situations. And so I grew up you know, doing sports, and I had an interest in science and went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For my undergrad in biology and management and and then went to law school. I really loved environmental law. And I got my J.D. and certificate from Pace Law School. And I started my career doing a clerkship at the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission in D.C. and and worked at the EPA as well. And then did international consulting as a principal and in-house counsel at a, at a firm in Boston. And and I really developed a love for, for travel there. I got to meet and work with tons of people all over the world and really enjoyed it. But really wanted to develop something and work in sort of the disability space. And Rich will sort of share his story in connecting and connecting those dots. But Rich and I met at the at the end of my law school time and and you know, and he moved down to Washington, D.C.. When I had my clerkship there. And excuse me.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I said he followed you.
Brittany Palmer: He did.
Brittany Palmer: He work was really It was tough to come.
Brittany Palmer: By when I.
Brittany Palmer: Graduated.
Brittany Palmer: And I was very lucky to have that job.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. Good.
Brittany Palmer: And so I I started a company called Beyonder. That was live and interactive virtual tours by guides around the world.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Oh, wow.
Brittany Palmer: For, you know, people that had limited mobility or other conditions that prevented or inhibited them from travel. And, you know, at the time, there was a lot of companies focused around wheelchair accessibility and travel and which is great. It's definitely super needed. But I really wanted to create something that everyone could enjoy. To, to the maximum extent possible with, with the virtual tours. And so when I was raising money for that, I thought, this market is huge. I'm, you know, hopefully this is something that a lot of people will want to invest in. And when I started talking to venture capitalists, I got responses like, oh, this is a niche market or this market's not big enough, or we don't believe this market is big enough. Even though I provided them with all the statistics and everything like that.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right.
Brittany Palmer: And gave examples and it was angel investors who really you know, understood my, my company and what I wanted to do. I understood that seniors were a part of that, and a lot of them have limited mobility as well. And, and so when I continued on my journey and advising companies and talking to founders, I heard the same thing from them. Venture capitalists, like, they don't understand the space. They think it's niche. They you know, they just really don't understand the opportunity. They don't know how to evaluate my company. And and they really needed first money in. And there's some other VCs in this space, which is wonderful. But they focus on, like, particular areas in the disability community or our later stage investors. Yeah, right. So we really wanted to to put something together that could be that first money and, and and sort of jumpstart these companies that were doing amazing things. And so before I talk more about adaptation, I'll let Rich kind of tell his story.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. And I'd like to just emphasize a couple things before. Before. Yeah. Go back to Rich. So you touched on the fact that living with a disability gives us ample opportunity to face challenges and overcome challenges and be creative and be problem solvers and be innovative. Yeah. So I'm really finding that with disabled entrepreneurs that entrepreneurship can be a great fit. A great, great occasion for a person to thrive economically is to be an entrepreneur, be self-employed, be a business owner. Because we can we can create the fit between ourselves and the workplace in ways that are somewhat more challenging. If you're if you're trying to create that good, good fit in the, you know, for instance, in a large corporate environment and a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity in the disabled entrepreneurs I've been getting to know. So I wanted to note that I also wanted to note the size of the market. And you mentioned seniors. So one of the enlightening conversations I have with people is the fact that I'm blind. So I tend to look at look at things through the blindness inclusion lens. But you know, if you, if you graph the percentage of people who are legally totally blind against the age, as age increases, that percentage increases. Pretty dramatic actually. So, you know, over 60% of people who are legally blind are over 60 years old. And if you look at 16% of people over 65 are visually impaired. 23% of people over 80 are visually impaired. And we're aging more and more. There's going to be millions and millions of people reaching those later stages in life who will acquire their disabilities, and they are consumers who have grown up being used to getting what they want, how they want, when they want. And you know, those companies that provide products and services that can make that frictionless for people with disabilities are going to be in a great position. So I just wanted to emphasize that. And Rich. Yes.
Rich Palmer: Thank you. Doctor Adams, thank you for everybody listening. And I'm going to steal one of your phrases. And, you know, Brittany is my better 7/8. So you're not getting the just the better half here. But we are. We are married. Same last name. And I'll start my journey. Sort of picking up where Brit left off or where Brit started. Excuse me. So we both went to RPI, and I was there about two years older than her, and so we should have met much earlier than we did. But I was in a fraternity, and it was the the nice fraternities and nice, nice folks. Nice guys. So, yeah, nobody, you know, we we didn't have the craziest parties or anything like that. So Brit and I should have met earlier, but I think we met at the appropriate time. We'll say that, I think. And so I went from there to to Wall Street. So basically I was a computer science and economics major. First career down doing portfolio analytics for a fintech company. It was a kind of a startup within S&P. Like the S&P 500. And then within that they were owned by McGraw-Hill.
Rich Palmer: So the reason I bring that up is knowing sort of that entrepreneurial ethos and what it's like when you are, you know, properly capitalized was really important for that company to succeed. And I got to learn that at a really, really early age. But if you can't tell from the intonation here, I am not your typical Wall Street kind of guy. Very much on the the other side of things. So I spent about four years there before I decided I wanted to do a startup. And, you know, one of the things we talk about when we talk about startup creation is like, you know, work on things, you know, with with a strong network around you and all the resources that you could possibly possibly need. So instead of starting a company in New York City, maybe in finance with people I knew, I moved to Berkeley, California to start an online homemade food company. Okay. And that, you know, I started with a computer science friend of mine. So two technical co-founders trying to make effectively Etsy for food.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Were you doing Brittany together at this point?
Rich Palmer: Brittany and I were not together yet. Okay, so this is she.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So she did her startup beyond renewed years.
Rich Palmer: Yeah. So Brenda did her startup after I did mine, which I'll. I'll share this other one. She she thought I was crazy for being a founder and then, you know, drank the Kool-Aid a little. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, we bootstrapped this company, and it wasn't, you know, the right use case or the right founders, and it was bootstrapped. So ultimately I went, you know, it didn't succeed, and happily so, because I learned a lot about how, you know, to put the right resources together to solve the right problems, to talk, to talk to clients and, and users and without, you know, ran out of money, spent a couple of months in Denver, Colorado, trying to find myself and then came back to New York City to the founder of the company I worked for was starting a new company, and the primary goal of that company was to take on LinkedIn. So they raised about $120 million to take tons of public data sources and say, you know, Doctor Adams, if you're, you know, trying to meet Brittany and you know me, how could you navigate that pathway using real data? You know, on LinkedIn you can say whatever you want, right? And so how do you trust the data source to to go through that. What happened with that company is that it is a use case. You know, it's not a narrow use case. It's kind of very, very open ended.
Rich Palmer: And they ultimately ended up selling the company years and years later for $7 million. So from 120 million raised to a $7 million exit. So the reason I bring that up is if you have, you know, too much capital, but not the right use case or focus, it also kind of, you know, was a lesson learned for me personally. And that's where Britt and my stories collide. So I was running product for this company. It was based in New York City. Brittany and I had just met in March of 2012. Brett I think so, yeah. And she gets this job in a terrible job market for environmental attorneys and had to make this decision of whether you know, this isn't going to work out. I stay in New York or do, like you said, you have Florida, D.C., and I am so happy. We made this decision. The story will get a little intense for a second, and then I promise you, I promise to bring it back. So, about a year into being a pioneer and working remote down in DC. Yeah. I was on a stationary bike in my apartment complex, and, you know, trying to stay in shape and all that kind of stuff and had, of all things, a brain aneurysm, hemorrhage. And I was 28 at the time. So all this life lived before, you know, that and a lot of exposure to a bunch of different business models and entrepreneurship and everything.
Rich Palmer: Came screaming to a, you know, needing emergency open brain surgery. Having to learn how to walk and talk, read and write, think all over again. Wow. And you can imagine, you know, I've met a lot of people in that situation since. And a lot of them. Take a minute to you know, reflect on the second chance of life and really appreciate and slow down a little. Maybe things are too stressful. Before I had an existential need to start a company from this. Okay. And started studying for the, you know, the GMAT with births help. Like one tenth my normal speed. Like ended up, you know, applying to schools and mostly focused on entrepreneurship because I wanted a new network, I wanted a fresh start and ended up applying to and interviewing at Babson College, which has been number one in entrepreneurship for about 27 years maybe 28. Now we're in a new year and I roll up in. Britt's driving. I can't drive at this point. Tons of medication, but we have to narrow it, find the window to, like, you know, of being focused. And I come up with a cane and a shaved head and and somehow they were like, all right, cool. This guy's got something to offer. And ended up giving me a full ride to the school, which is awesome.
Dr. Kirk Adams: That's great. Well, where is that? Where is Babson?
Rich Palmer: Babson is up in the northeast in Wellesley, Massachusetts. So 20 minutes or so outside of Boston. Okay. And that's their focus. So every single year, accounting class, your marketing class, your HR, everything is focused on entrepreneurship. It's it's an incredible, incredible organization.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Sounds great.
Rich Palmer: And, you know, basically, I'll speed up the story from here. From there. I met a met a fundraiser at Babson. So somebody in charge of getting philanthropic dollars in. So you and I should have a conversation. Conversation about that. And it's really hard to do, as you know, and you have small teams with a massive goals in mind and be massive groups of people that they need to reach out to and figure out, you know, who do I. Who do I talk to? What do I say? Especially if I'm trying to fundraise. It could be a new engagement or a, you know, someone who's going to give their, you know, their a bequest or any of this kind of stuff. It's some of them are heavy duty conversations. And I was not yet applied to this industry. So how do you leverage technology and prediction to do things at scale? And that's what we ended up doing. So I ended up creating the first AI company focused on philanthropy, on social good. And we grew like hotcakes because this was, you know, a a really pressing need for every nonprofit and sold to a private equity firm in November of 2019. So if you know your your recent history, something crazy happened a few months later and ended up running that, you know, for another 18 months or so before stepping down to become a full time angel investor. And then I led the third largest angel investor group in the US and joined the association that basically represents all angel investors. So it's the Angel Capital Association doing public policy work primarily.
Rich Palmer: So the you know, I tell the story about AI and social good, you know, a young guy with an aneurysm that really resonates on both sides of the aisle. And to talk to congresspeople and policymakers about how to get more capital to sort of overlooked founders was it sort of piqued when I got to do that in front of To Congress doing testimony on on providing early stage capital to to founders. So long story short, the the whole sort of, you know, parallel paths that Britt and I had. You'd think with the technical, non-technical co-founder combination with Brits resilience and law background that VCs and traditional capital would would be, you know, knocking down our doors. Yeah, I had to raise from 43 individual angel investors because nobody had ever made raise money in the non-profit tech space before. And I can't remember if Brit mentioned, but I think she had 80 people on her cap table. Oh, and this is not, you know, until a couple months ago when we launched Adaptation Ventures. This this was one of like the hardest things for us to do is talk to founders focused on the disability market and realize that, oh, wow, they're in the same spot we were in a decade ago, and nobody kind of filled in that gap of the first capital and focused on an awesome market with critical needs. So that's why we exist. And I know we've been holding the mic for forever, so I'm passing. That was great. Right back to you.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So Adaptation ventures, I assume, emerged from these various strands you just talked about and the realization that founders and disability tech were in expecting the same set of dynamics that you had both experienced in your startup lives. So did it. Did it, did it crystallize pretty quickly that you should start a angel fund? Focus on disability tech? Did you analyze different structures and different approaches, or did you? Did you settle on the adaptation ventures as is fairly quickly or not.
Brittany Palmer: We. We had an idea.
Brittany Palmer: Of what we wanted to create, and we knew the general direction. But it took about, you know, I'd say 6 to 9 months of talking to a lot of people. To define our end game with adaptation. And we really found that people in this space that understood the space, wanted to be involved, that you know, high, high fun, like, traditional funds require sometimes $100,000 or more to, to join, which makes it inaccessible for a lot of people. And that people felt strongly about this space and wanted to be involved. And given our experience with angels. Rich and I felt that the best path for adaptation was to be an angel member based fund. And when you look at this space, also talking of just impact and we're we feel very strongly about, you know, venture level returns being provided in this space and and that we don't need to be concessionary in, in order to invest in this space and be successful.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Can I, I heard the word concessionary, but I don't know. I don't know what you mean by that. So if you could explain, that would be helpful.
Brittany Palmer: So most people look at that as, like, their they think that in order to do good in the disability and accessible spaces, that you have to be a non-profit and accept donations and that like money can't be made in this, in this area and therefore that it's not ripe for venture capital. And we very much we vehemently disagree with that. And there's a lot of there's a lot of people out there that that feel the same way. And it is, you know, companies currently in the market are are proving it. And so we felt like it was important to create this, this group of members who some have experience investing, some don't. The the bar for entry is, is much lower being an angel group. And And so we've just met some really incredible people. And and our goal, of course, based on, you know, our past experiences is to lead, precede rounds of funding and, and also invest in seed rounds. So the earliest stages of of these companies is, is what we're looking to invest in.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. So I've been for the last three years accumulating a list of investors, investment vehicles, funds that have some interest in the disability tech space. It's not a very long list. Most of them are a couple that are very disability disability focus. But their their later stage investors. There are some funds that I guess kind of look at social impact writ large and would include disability considerations and what, they look for, but again later stage. I've looked at a number of crowdfunding platforms and been involved in a couple of crowdfunding campaigns that were not not successful to very modestly successful. I've encountered a small handful of angel investors who are interested in the disability space, primarily because they were already investing, and then they had a child with a disability. Now they've become very interested. But I haven't encountered anyone who's doing what you're doing. Which is super exciting to me when I, when I read about adaptation ventures and reached out to you both on LinkedIn, and Rich was kind enough to get on a call and, and talk to me about what you're doing, but eager to learn more. The what? My my Understanding. And Please, please correct me if I'm wrong is you're you're you're you're fairly close to the beginning of building the initiative. You're looking for people who want to pool funds with others, to invest in technologies that would accelerate inclusion of people with disabilities in various aspects of society. You have a a manageable minimum for many people. So you have a barrier to entry into the fund is just relatively low to other things I've seen. And you're you're starting to look at companies. I think I read that you're going to look at funding for companies a quarter initially. I have that right at I think I wrote down 250,000 levels target. So if you if you could correct any of that, that's wrong. And perhaps just talk a little bit about the, structure and how how you strategically strategically what are the what are the 2 or 3 things that you're really focused on in the short mid-term term in order to grow your venture?
Rich Palmer: For sure. Doctor Adams, the let me I'll start broad and then we'll go a little bit narrow. So there's, there's two there's two stats that like probably at the core of why we're doing this and the core of why, I'll tell you who the types of people involved and then how it works for sure. Yeah. One is on the angel investment side. So I've mentioned this sort of congressional testimony. And one of the stats that I, I thought it was crazy until there was an economic impact study that did this. And I was we met the people who put it together. And it's that for every dollar invested by an angel investor, there's a 21 x economic return. And what that means is, you know, yes, investors and the founders and the early employees, you know, make make money on an exit and all that kind of stuff. But the, you know, the management team, people start buying houses. They are able to be out in the community, they're able to raise families, they pay more in taxes. It's this crazy, crazy leverage that's just on, you know, the it's like revenue side of of society, right. And then the other statistic that intersects with it is for every dollar, a user, someone human spends on assistive technology, it's A9X economic return.
Rich Palmer: So the opportunity for that person to, if it was acquired disability to get back to some semblance of what they want to do, you get out. You can be mobile, you can get back into the workforce, you can raise children, you can do whatever you want. And it's these two ridiculous levers that sort of make up the fulcrum points of what what we're doing. And to your point, yeah, you there's people scattered all around, and actually, 1 in 5 US households reaches accreditation levels. Where you can be an accredited investor over a certain threshold. So it's it's crazy that these numbers are that large. And we're finding the folks that usually come to us hadn't thought of themselves as investors before. It's you know, executives who have raised a child with a disability is people with disabilities themselves. It's Paralympic athletes. It's book authors. It's folks who like, you have a big, you know, sort of the community trust you, you have an influence and sort of that megaphone to share new ideas and new ways to improve things as well as, you know, my background is in Angel and. Traditional angel investors, family offices, traditional capital, and everybody's kind of coming under because they've never had this opportunity before. Yeah. There's some elements of age tech in what we do.
Rich Palmer: There's some elements of deep tech in what we see. There's some elements of underrepresented founders in what we see, but there's never been a carve out for literally the world's largest market, which you can join at any time. And you will join at some time, if you like. Live long enough. Right. And so you have this, this huge pool of stuff. And so the way we sort of structure it with, with all these folks, it's new, new people and, you know, experienced investors coming together is as a fund. There's yeah, we are able to basically pool capital to tell startups when they come to pitch us. So startups apply. We do diligence on sort of a certain number of, of the top ones that apply. And for are going to come in every quarter. So 16 potential opportunities per year, likely more. But as those those companies come in, this group of people are listening to the pitches, they are able to sort of provide feedback to the startups, vote together on whether we move forward with diligence or not. They're able to join diligence teams. So let's say you have a specific background in marketing or sales or tech or an affinity with, you know, lived experience with the disability. So you can represent the user. Any element usually everybody who gets involved in this has some awesome superpower.
Rich Palmer: So we really welcome that, that sort of element to it. And then we deploy. And I like that you said the 250 K because that matters, right? In some angel groups it's individual members making the decision on whether to invest or not. So you end up back where Brett and I were with 43 individual people, or C individual people or, you know, or you mentioned crowdfunding and I'm not knocking on different models, but with crowdfunding, there could be so many people that no one person's like sort of completely bought in. And so you don't have this big coalition of people who put their capital behind you. You as a founder know how much you're getting in at a minimum. And I keep saying it that way because I want to add one more thing to that. And here's the raw reality, right? Most startups, if you're going to have a 10 to 20 x exit, take 7 to 9 years to achieve that exit. So it's really not about the capital only. It's about how do you help these companies through that time, through a pivot, through hiring and firing and competition and all that kind of stuff, the human mentor championing them, being a shoulder for them to lean on.
Rich Palmer: And what's really unique about our model, which we love, is, you know, I mentioned all these different kind of personas of people that are joining us. Yeah. It's not lost on us that you usually, you know, the fund provides a diversified view of the disability market as a whole. One of the things we're very intentional about and people people call us crazy for this, but I don't know, we very much like it is let's say there's a company that comes in and you're really focused on mobility startups, for example. That's that's the like that's your that's your jam. And there's a awesome mobility company comes in to 250 K goes into the company, and there's a concept called co-investment where the fund invests and you kind of co invest and you put more money in. Which in our case co-investment has no fees and no carry. We take no cut. We want that money to go straight into the things that our members care about and straight to the hands of the of the founders, which is which is quite unique. In our world, usually the fund likes to hold all the capital in one spot, but we wanted people to both have a diversified view as well as be able to double down on the things they really liked.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So, just so unclear if if a person is a member of Adaptation Ventures and Adaptation Ventures chooses to invest in a startup, that individual could also invest as themselves, as an individual. Is that what you're saying?
Rich Palmer: Yeah. Okay, cool. Our hope is that in general that for anybody who knows the details of this, if the larger the check, the more likely they'll just go on to the cap table of the company. And then there's the concept of of spvs, where if a bunch of people want to roll in small amounts just to kind of make it easier to manage would likely go through an SPV, but still there's, you know, no, no fees, no care on our side.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. And SPV is what.
Rich Palmer: A special purpose vehicle. It's a way to roll up smaller checks. Just honestly make it easier to manage okay. For both the founder and whoever's managing it.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. I'm learning. I'm taking notes.
Rich Palmer: No, you're doing great. You're doing great.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So you're at the stage where you have some members. You're obviously wanting more as members. The right term.
Brittany Palmer: Yes.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. So you're wanting more members. You're looking for companies to evaluate. Evaluate. So so strategic objectives. The most important things you, Rich and Brittany need to accomplish here over the next six, nine months. Would that be members and companies? Are there other things that you're.
Brittany Palmer: Yeah, those are the two big companies. Yeah, the.
Brittany Palmer: Two big things. We're hoping to have our first meeting. Planning for mid-October, early November this year, which we're super excited about. And Rich and I will also be at a couple of conferences this fall. And you know, people can, but we have a LinkedIn page where we talk about what we're doing adaptation ventures, and then we of course, our website provides a lot more information on group, which is adaptation.vc.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. And what is the commitment that members need to make?
Brittany Palmer: So we can't discuss that openly. But it is the size of a smaller angel check for For a certain period of time.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay, but people can reach out to you and talk. Talk to you?
Brittany Palmer: Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. And the best way is through the adaptation. Avc. Is that the best way for people to get it?
Brittany Palmer: Yeah. If you go to our approach.
Brittany Palmer: To learn more on the website, there's a member interest form that you can fill out. And it provides a form that provides some more information and gives us some more information about you when you submit your, your form. And people can also send emails to members at adaptation via email [email protected].
Dr. Kirk Adams: So, you know, again, I'm, I'm on a steep part of my learning curve. But as I talk to founders of disability tech companies that have reached out to me most mostly questions about the market size and how to connect across the government, corporate, non-profit and community sectors. I find a couple of things. I founders, I don't think oftentimes think big enough. We already talked about the aging population and the relation to disability and how big that market is. And then the other thing is the curb cut effect. You know, when when things are made to designed universally and made accessible for people with disabilities, that it benefits everybody. And, you know, we talk about the first example that always comes to mind is the talking book because I, you know, I led American Foundation for the blind. And they in the 1930s, Helen Keller and Eleanor Roosevelt, you know, pioneered the talking book and got Library of Congress to fund talking books. And, you know, the the 33 and a third rpm long playing record album was created specifically to record books for people who are blind. And there was a nice New York Times article in 1947 interviewing the president, Robert Irwin, the president of AFP, who said, you know, there's the the the market for the talking books is very limited because there's no reason a person who could read print would ever want to listen to a book.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So we, we, we know what's happened there. And then, of course, the curb cut cuts in our, you know, our, our friends with mobility impairments who occupied the federal building in San Francisco and protested at the Capitol and got got curb cut legislation implemented, and now something less than a half a percent of people using curb cuts are wheelchair users. It's cyclists and skateboarders and parents with strollers and people with grocery carts and etc. and then, you know, closed captioning. The legislation was passed in 2010, requiring a certain amount of television program to have closed captioning, and now more than half of the people who use closed captioning do not have a hearing impairment. That was created, spearheaded by the deaf community. So, you know, I don't know you know, really how to quantify that for people. But it is an interesting conversation that I've had multiple times, and I, I know you, you you were all fully aware of all of this, but I'm, I'm just kind of kind of coming to realize.
Brittany Palmer: Yeah.
Brittany Palmer: No, I think the more people that are aware of how inclusive design and like, human centered design really benefits everyone, not just people with disabilities, I think the better off we all are, because the more people keep that in mind as they design things, whether it's for a large company or a small company or their own company. It's it's a super important aspect of design. And it truly goes to show that if you do that the impacts can be really great and far reaching.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, absolutely. And we see. Yeah.
Rich Palmer: So yeah. Doctor Adams, if you don't mind, is probably about 80% of what we've seen so far. And what we would likely see would be founders directly targeting the disability market. As it stands, solving a use case like you were mentioning that our goal is to help them scale past the founders stage and think way bigger, but they do some thinking bigger. The the market numbers are staggering and they're growing. You know, like you said on the aging population, 10,000 people a day are turning 65 or older. The number of pick a element of the disability world. That's tens of millions of people both in the US and abroad. And what we're kind of seeing. So that's on one side. And founders, you know, this is a call to action for founders. Those numbers are great and they look nice on a pitch deck. But it's the bottoms up numbers that make investors years perk up. Like, how do you know that your product solves the problem for the people you've actually come in direct contact with? So rather than just a top down, which we know, what we don't know from you is like, how did you prove that your technology is like going to be helpful for somebody? And that intersects with the other 20% of companies we're seeing. And I think we'll continue to see. Right. Brett is like they're startups not focused on this market. But if they did if they just took a five seconds, and usually it's not even a product change. It could be just like a marketing change. It opens up a massive eager. Deep pocketed, if I can say it that way.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Rich Palmer: Like, they're just like community and caregivers represent. I don't know the numbers. Now is like $18 trillion. It's like, what? Or I don't know what. It almost shocks us that we exist, to be honest. Like we're not doing adaptation because these numbers just makes so much sense to us. But yeah, probably 80% will be directly focused on the disability market. And then the other 20 will be the curb cut effect. Like in reverse. Like Like the number of companies we've talked to that we say, hey, have you thought about this for, you know, the deaf blind community, the deaf community, the blind community, the mobility, prosthetics, amputation and the the companies like, no, would they like that? And we're like.
Rich Palmer: Oh my gosh, why? Why do we have to tell you that?
Rich Palmer: But it feels really good to see companies like that deliver, so we'll be doing that as well.
Dr. Kirk Adams: That's awesome. So I look forward to meeting you both next month and Washington DC at the Disability Innovation Forum. That'll be a great day and I really appreciate your time, and I look forward to having a conversation with you on the podcast in the future to check in on, check in on progress so people can reach you through your website adaptation BC or members at adaptation VC. If people want to reach me, my website is just Dr. Kirk Adams. So Doctor Kirk adams.com I'm on LinkedIn every day and it's Kirk Adams PhD on LinkedIn. So thank you Rich. Thank you Brittany, I learned a lot today and I am going to learn a lot more from both of you as time goes on, I'm sure, and just really appreciate your insights, your passion, Dedication and the disruptive dynamics of adaptation ventures. So it's a it's a need that has not been met yet, but you're doing it. Thank you so much.
Rich Palmer: Awesome. Thank you for having us.
Rich Palmer: Appreciate it. You bet.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And we'll see you next time on the podcast by Doctor Kirk Adams. Thanks so much.
Podcast Commentator: Thank you for listening to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Don't forget to subscribe, share or leave a review at. Adams.com. Together we can amplify these voices and create positive change. Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep making an impact.
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