You could say disabled people have a knack for entrepreneurship, that our experience and skills uniquely qualify us for this role. Keely Cat-Wells, founder of C Talent and Making Space, writes, “I would never [have] become an entrepreneur if I didn’t become disabled. As disabled people, we are often very entrepreneurial in our day-to-day lives navigating a world that was not built with us in mind.”1 Cat-Wells also lists the general skills of a disabled person—“delegation skills, resilience, leadership, time management, inherent ability to adapt, problem-solving”—and observes that they overlap with the general skills of an entrepreneur.2
Add skills like innovation, flexibility, sensitivity, quick and critical thinking, determination, and resourcefulness—and the fact that disabled people are at the forefront of pioneering accessibility and coming up with new and better ways of living—and you have a formidable entrepreneur.
Diego Mariscal is the founder, CEO, and chief disabled officer of 2Gether-International, the leading startup accelerator run by and for disabled entrepreneurs. He tells me,
I oftentimes say that disability is a competitive advantage for business.… The story that I often use is: when I was a kid, I fell off a horse, and the coach was really surprised that I got back on it right away… for me, falling off a horse was just like every other fall that I had… apparently that’s very rare; usually people don’t want to get right back on the horse. But I feel like that’s an analogy of my life, particularly as somebody with cerebral palsy. But what people don’t know… or it’s not often discussed, is that, yes, even though we’re resilient and creative, there are systematic barriers that affect… people with disabilities.3
Many of us are part-time or full-time entrepreneurs. In the United States, disabled people are twice as likely as non-disabled people to be self-employed.4 However, we often find our way into self-employment or entrepreneurship because we’re forced to or don’t have a choice. “Disabled people have to become entrepreneurs because capitalism won’t give them flexible schedules, work from home, [or] accommodations that make them feel safe,” says disability awareness consultant Andrew Gurza.5 When the current ableist work system isn’t set up to support people like us because of inaccessible workplaces and infrastructure, not to mention biased and discriminatory attitudes, it’s no wonder many of us resort to taking charge of our own work in order to survive.
This happened to me. I was fired from a job at a real estate startup in March 2017. At the time, I was already working on Diversability as a side hustle and was even doing speaking gigs on the topic of the side-hustle generation and how it was a good pathway into entrepreneurship. But I had never envisioned that it would become my full-time hustle. After I was fired, as I was receiving unemployment benefits, I told myself that I would work on Diversability while I applied for jobs. During that period, I had to be creative in terms of supporting myself because Diversability wasn’t generating enough income. I listed my apartment on a short-term rental site and sold a lot of my furniture on Craigslist and eBay. During those first couple of years, I was the epitome of a scrappy entrepreneur. To attend conferences, I tried to get sponsor tickets or a scholarship, and I stayed with friends and used points to book my flights. While I was privileged to have access to savings during this time, this level of instability does not work for many disabled people, who may become unhoused and lose access to health care without consistent income.
In 2020, Diversability was accepted into Meta’s Community Accelerator Program. We received over $50,000, which we used to launch a membership community and bring in more partners. I also started to do more paid speaking engagements, and I made more content on social media to expand my advocacy. Soon I was bringing in brand partnerships, doing one-off consulting gigs, and participating in creator programs. Since its incorporation in 2015, Diversability has grown to ten team members at its largest, and we have been able to support our disabled team members’ livelihoods and also pay members of our community through speaking engagements and other paid opportunities.
Today, I’m proud to call myself a creative entrepreneur. I’ve even started doing some angel investing as a disabled investor in startups founded by underestimated entrepreneurs. While my journey into entrepreneurship wasn’t planned, I’m honored to have been able to support the disability community in meaningful ways. But it certainly wasn’t an easy road.
Cory Lee runs the accessible travel blog Curb Free with Cory Lee and has spinal muscular atrophy, type 2. While he is now on a mission to make traveling easier for wheelchair users around the world, he reports a similarly rocky trip to entrepreneurship. After graduating from college, he applied to hundreds of jobs in his field, disclosing his disability in each application in the hope of presenting his truest self. Months into the process, he tells me, he’d received “exactly zero responses, despite being fully qualified.” He says, “At that point, I started thinking that maybe disclosing my disability upfront was hurting me.” That all seemed to change when he got a call to fly to Pittsburgh for an interview. “Confidently, I rolled into the office, locked eyes with the hiring manager, and without hesitation, he looked at me and said, ‘Um, this job involves traveling, so you’re definitely not the best fit.’ As if I didn’t travel to get there! I was turned down before I was even given a chance to interview… once again.”6 Around the same time, he was preparing for a vacation to Australia to celebrate his graduation and found a gap in the market: very little accessibility information existed online for destinations outside the United States.
The day after realizing [there was] a lack of accessible travel information, and just two weeks after the doomed trip to Pittsburgh, I launched my travel blog.… Since then, I’ve traveled to over forty countries and all seven continents, launched annual group trips in exciting destinations, and started a nonprofit. It’s been more than I could’ve ever dreamed of, and now, I’m grateful that I didn’t get the job.… In the end, everything worked out for me, but unbelievable job discrimination still heavily exists against the disabled community, and that needs to change.7
Even after most of us have been forced out of traditional employment, disabled entrepreneurs continue to face our own unique set of barriers. According to Access2Funding, a study conducted in the UK, disabled entrepreneurs are four hundred times less likely to receive funding8 and hold just 0.1 percent share of voice (SOV)—meaning media mentions—despite being the largest minority group in the world.9 Eighty-four percent of disabled entrepreneurs said they don’t have equal access to the same investment opportunities and resources as their non-disabled peers (the remaining 16 percent responded, “Maybe”), and only 17 percent said they were treated equally in terms of investment opportunities. Some of the reasons cited for this gap were a lack of participation opportunities and support, inaccessible systems and processes, stereotypes or lack of awareness, and risk management misconceptions.10
Celia Chartres-Aris, cofounder of Access2Funding, explains why this might be the case: the misconception of seeing disability-owned businesses through the lens of charity rather than recognizing their commercial value. “There remains this pervasive mentality that if it’s anything to do with disability, and helping disabled people, it can’t be a for-profit business.”11 Her cofounder, Joseph Williams, adds that the typically risk-averse venture capitalist ecosystem is a closed shop that limits itself to historical formulas it is used to, such as funding Oxford and Cambridge graduates (who receive 70 percent of all investments in the UK), even if it doesn’t prove worthwhile. “The default social narrative around disability continues to be one of support and pity. As disabled people, we deserve an excellence conversation as well,” says Williams.12
Despite these misconceptions, the facts speak the truth. Disability-owned businesses in the UK, which make up one-quarter of all small businesses, contribute almost 10 percent to the country’s GDP. Based on estimations, these findings equate to a missed funding opportunity of £500 million annually.13 In the United States, self-identified disability-owned businesses have a total of $32.4 billion in economic impact. The number is underreported due to a gap in the data, but Disability:IN estimates that if one-quarter of all registered small businesses are disability-owned, a total of $5 trillion would be contributed to the economy.14 Once again, we see the same story of a vast but untapped pool of capable and competent disabled entrepreneurs who are excluded from the conversation due to ableism, which has both social and economic costs.
Unsurprisingly, it often falls to disabled investors to address this gap. Mariscal’s 2Gether-International was the first of its kind to focus exclusively on disabled entrepreneurs. Over the past ten years, the accelerator has supported more than eighty high-growth, high-impact companies, including talent management company C Talent (acquired by Whalar) and software startup YellowBird (raised $6.25 million in funding), and generated more than $40 million in revenue and acquisitions, with plans to develop a model that will support three thousand founders per year. Underlying its goals is the recognition that entrepreneurship is a crucial pathway to shrinking the gaps in wealth and employment in the disability community.15
“Funding entrepreneurs with disabilities isn’t an act of charity or just a DEI practice—it’s an economic imperative,” says Mariscal. “People need to see the unrealized potential of our underestimated community.” According to Mariscal, one way we can do this is for local governments to provide funding directly to disability-owned businesses or accelerators that support disabled entrepreneurs rather than yet another job placement program. Nothing about us without us. “We, as disabled individuals, are in the best position to address our community’s needs,” he says.16