A Blind CEO on a Mission to Help Companies Prioritize Disability Inclusion

A conversation with John Samuel, CEO, Ablr 360

When I started this series, I knew I wanted to have leaders of all shapes and sizes. I was thrilled when Christie Williams introduced me to John Samuel, the CEO of Ablr who happens to be blind. We talked about how he struggled to advocate for himself despite having an MBA and career success, how he went from thinking his career was over to becoming a CEO, what keeps him up at night, and his mission to help companies prioritize disability inclusion. He has a book coming out in November, I can’t wait to read it.

We connected because I was talking with Christie Williams about the mission of the series and the mission of my work which is I want to show leadership in all different sorts of lights. And I said, "I haven’t had a leader yet with a disability." And she said, "Oh, I have somebody, I have somebody," and it was you. And so, I'm so grateful because I wanted to have a leader with a disability on the series. Thank you for being willing to be my first.

Of course. I'm so excited and I'm glad that Christie made that introduction.

I hope we'll have more leaders with disabilities be part of the series.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Before we get into your story, can you introduce yourself?

Yes. I'll try to make it quick. Usually, people tell me that I go on and on so I'll make this quick. My background is a big part of my leadership and who I am today. I'm originally from North Carolina. When I went to college in Richmond, Virginia, I was diagnosed with a degenerating eye condition. I was told I was going blind because of a disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa. As a young person hearing that, it was just devastating. I struggled with it. I ended up failing college, came back home to North Carolina, and moved in with my high school buddies. I didn't want to let them know that I had failed out or that I was going blind.

I enrolled at NC State University and after graduation, I went to India because I am of Indian descent, but also because I knew that I could get a car and driver. The cultural challenges of my living in India were overwhelming. I ended up coming back home to the US, and went to New York City because who wouldn't want to be there? The city has great public transportation and is walkable. I often say that the best thing about living in New York was that if I bumped into someone on the street, I could just put my head down and keep walking in true New York. So, that was the place for me as somebody who was losing their sight.

But when I started looking at my friends and looking at their career trajectories, and discovered that we were just on different levels. I was working for the city of New York, providing financial education, but I was living from paycheck to paycheck. By contrast, my friends were going to grad school, they were moving up in their law firms, going to hedge funds, and just lots of different careers. I just didn't see that same type of career trajectory for myself. That's when I reconnected with a gentleman named Steve Clemens. He was on the board of directors of a cell phone tower manufacturing company, and he wanted to start up operations in Cameroon, a West Central African country. I jumped at the opportunity, and said, "Send me out there." Steve knew I had an eye condition, but he said, "Okay, I'll take a chance on you." However, when I went to sign my contract, the board of directors found out that I couldn't see, and they said, "No, we can't send you out there."

I pleaded with them. I said, "Just give me a chance," and they said, "Okay, we'll give you six months and we'll go our separate ways." So, with a $20,000 investment, I left Manhattan to move to Douala, Cameroon, to start this company from scratch. I built a team around me and within the next 14 months, we generated $12 million in revenue, and 2.4 million in profit. We spread the company across the continent over the next three years. That was my first experience of being a CEO and building a business. It was a good one.

I moved back to the US to get an MBA. This was really where I was exposed as somebody who was blind. Up to this point, I was hiding the fact, but when I was at an orientation event for my MBA, I couldn't see where I was supposed to go. I turned to the person next to me, and it happened to be the associate dean of the business school. She was the one who recruited me, and had no idea I couldn’t see, but she could empathize with me because she had a child with special needs. She encouraged me to be open about my vision loss. That was the first time I could do it. It was also the first time I could open my heart. I met my wife in the program.

After my MBA, I joined a private equity crowdfunding platform to raise money for other startups, primarily in Africa and other emerging markets. Three years later, it folded, and I was out of a job again. I had a wife, I had a baby, and we had just built a house.

The stress of it all caused my sight to go really fast. I thought my career was over. 

That's when I heard about a data science company called SAS that was headquartered in North Carolina. They had designed a software to help people who were blind to visualize graphs and charts by using sounds. I thought that was really cool.

But the cool thing was that the guy who designed it was Ed Summers. He had the same eye condition I have, and lived in my hometown of Cary, North Carolina, the same place I never thought anyone blind could ever live. I tried for two to three months to get in touch with this guy, and had no luck. Finally, my wife said, "If he can live in North Carolina, maybe we can, too." So, we found a house online and told my folks. They got so excited that my dad jumped in the car to go look at the house we found. As he was driving, he started yelling at something, and I was like, "What are you doing, Dad?" He said, "There's a blind guy in the road, maybe it's the guy you're trying to get in touch with." I went, "Oh, Dad, please don't yell at blind people on the road.”

He got out of the car, walked up to the poor guy and said, "Are you Ed Summers?" The guy said, "Yes, I am." And that's how I got connected with Ed Summers. He introduced me to the world of accessibility, and showed me that my career wasn't over. He introduced me to an organization called LCI, which happened to be the largest employer of Americans who were blind, based right here in North Carolina. I joined the company tasked with creating a new business that would create technology-based jobs for people who are blind. This task eventually led to the formation of Ablr, where I'm currently the CEO.

What a great story. What was your eyesight like when you were in MBA school?

It was in a transitional phase. My visual field is like a donut with a lot of blind spots. There are some visual pockets that I could see through. Over time, those visual pockets have become smaller, and the acuity of what I can see in those pockets is also getting worse. But at that time, I had no cane, I just had lots of cuts and scars. At nighttime, my eyesight was pretty much gone. So, I went to Washington, DC because of the fact that it was a walkable city. I found an apartment right next to the business school, and the walk only took seven minutes. I memorized it. My routine was memorizing paths and things I had to do.

At that time, I struggled to see the screen, but I used the inverted colors function and I had magnification software. The dean told me to talk about my vision loss with other people, and being able to be open about it with other people helped me. My classmates all started to work with me to help me out. That's also how I met my wife – she read to me. So that worked out.

It seems as if you've become more comfortable over time being more open and direct about your vision. Was there a moment where you started to be more direct about it? Or, did it just gradually change as you went along in your career?

No, everything changed when I met Ed Summers. Up until that point, when I talked to the board of the cell phone tower company about going to Africa, being open about it scared me. It showed me that I had to prove myself to executives and companies, I had to prove myself to them. I didn’t have experience to fall back on, so I had to plead with them, and tell them I could do the job. But they told me “no” just because of my sight. It wasn't about my education or my experience, which may have been true. It was because I couldn’t see that they were not going to me out there. My vision was the issue. When I was completing my MBA, although I was open about it in my personal life and in my professional life, I was scared and didn't disclose it because I thought companies would see it as a liability.

After my MBA, I should have been at my highest level of my confidence. I started a $45 million company, and I had an MBA. But when it came to looking for jobs, I had very low confidence. I struggled to find jobs. Every phone interview I had went great, but when interviewers met me in person, I didn't know how to advocate for myself. I struggled to find a job for months after completing my MBA.

Ed Summers gave me a couple of pieces of advice. He said, "You have to learn to learn as a blind person." The second piece was, "You're going to have to be open about this. You need to talk to people and let people know upfront." I embraced those two pieces of advice. Whatever Ed Summers said became gospel to me, so I did what he said.

When we have something that maybe makes us different, or that makes people perceive us differently, we might want to try to obscure it or hide it. 

It can be hard, especially in a leadership role. It's sage advice that he gave to you. It seemed like his advice changed the trajectory of your confidence.

Oh, it changed 100%. My newfound confidence changed my trajectory because I could be myself. I had success not being myself, and now I could have success being myself. I like to say that it's like coming out of the closet as a blind person, and I carried a lot of stress on myself. I had back pain, pain all over my body, just because I wasn't being myself. When I met Ed, he introduced me to the screen reader, the technology that people who are blind use to read the computer screen. I started using that technology. Before, I had been relying on my weakest asset, which was my eyes, to get work done. That caused fatigue and pain. Learning the tools of being blind really helped me — using a screen reader, and also the white cane.

Once I started using a white cane, I had no more scars and cuts on my face or my legs. And I had a lot more confidence walking into a room because I knew I wouldn’t walk into anything. If I walk into something, that cane's going to hit it. It also indicates to people, “Hey, I am visually impaired.” That was a mental block I had to overcome. 

I had never seen a leader with a disability so I mirrored what I saw as a leader — somebody without a cane. Somebody who doesn't use a screen reader. Somebody who is able-bodied. That's what I tried to pretend to be. The moment I was able to be myself, there was a confidence and a happiness that I'd never had before.

There’s a bit of coming out you have to do. We talked before that I have a chronic illness that leaves me unable to get out of bed at times. I’ve struggled with “Do I tell people? Are they going to think I'm capable? Are they not going to want to send business to me because they think I can't handle it?” Meanwhile, I don’t cancel client calls or miss  deadlines. But I still had this anxiety of trying to look the part.

Yup, right. That's the thing. It's almost like you don't want to be outed. You don't want people to know. You're just hiding in this hole, putting up this shield. It's so heavy to lift. You're worried you're going to drop it, that someone's going to find out. Then people are going to judge you.

I think that's what happened when I applied for that job in Africa. They scared me because they saw, for a moment, that I was vulnerable. It left a lasting scar that took me years to heal. Even when I was working with the private equity crowdfunding platform after my MBA, I had that scar. I allowed people to take advantage of that scar. The moment you are open about your disability, no one can use it against you.

Yes, I felt that too. We talked before we got on our call that my partner is severely hard of hearing. I thought about adapting for the physical aspect. One of the things I missed was the psychological aspect of how others treat you. That it can be quite scarring and just as difficult as trying to physically maneuver in an able-bodied world.

Oh, for sure. Those are the scars, that’s the mental anguish you go through in this able-bodied world. You come up against these unconscious biases that people have. But they’re just a lack of exposure to people of varying abilities. Proximity builds empathy. For 17 years after I had been diagnosed, so 37 years of my life, I had never met another blind person. Then, all of a sudden, I meet this guy, and it changed my whole perception of what it means to be blind. Because, in my mind, a blind guy was this poor person who wasn't a leader, who just needed help. That's what was in my mind because that's how blind people were portrayed in society in many ways. They were never leaders. Ed was an executive of a huge company and doing amazing things.

When I met him, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, there are so many more Ed Summerses out there. There are so many amazing leaders out there and I'm not alone anymore.” For too long, I thought I was alone. I don't think people are intentionally trying to put down people who are blind or people with disabilities, but they have a lack of exposure to people with disabilities. And I think participating with you right now, Suzan, is the perfect example. It's showing that leaders can have disabilities, and there are so many out there. And like you said, there are going to be so many more that you don't even realize, and maybe they're not yet sharing their own disabilities.

I have a mission about leadership. I believe that lots of different people can be leaders. Let me show you this type and this type and this type and this type.

Yeah, it shows you that leadership can be inclusive of all people. Having those differences is what makes each person a good leader. I don't think there's one cookie-cutter, good leader. What you're doing is great.

100%, there is no cookie-cutter leader. If we don't fit what we think the stereotype is, what do we do to ourselves to try to contort ourselves to fit that stereotype? And are we as effective when we're trying to contort ourselves? It's like being a cat who's got itself into a little jar. "Okay, now I'm here, how do I operate while I'm smushed into a jar?"

Exactly, right? It's not comfortable for anyone. It's not comfortable for the cat, it's not comfortable looking at that cat in the jar. We don't want to see that.

Right, right. The people we lead are like, "Is that comfortable?"Are you being yourself?

I want to get onto you as a CEO but I have one more question for context. Before you started using the white cane you had cuts and bruises on your legs because you were running into things. Were you not using the cane because your illness had not progressed or because of another reason?

I think the reason I didn't use a cane was that mental anguish. I didn't want people to see me with the cane. It was because of other people’s reactions.. When you use a white cane, you let people know, “I'm blind.” And so, when I was in Africa, I didn't want to do that. I said, "Oh, because of safety issues, I don’t want to use it." Then in grad school, it was trying to fit in with my classmates. It took me three tries to use the white cane.

The first time I was introduced to a cane I was studying for my GMAT, the entrance exam for the MBA, and I was staying at my sister's house in Wisconsin. I'd walk to this Brewer's Bagel where I studied every day. My sister saw new scars on my shins when I walked back, and so she ordered a cane for me. When I saw the cane, I didn't say anything to her. I threw it underneath the bed and I never looked at it again.

The second time was when I was completing my MBA in DC, and the school recommended that I should register with Services for the Blind, and get a free Metro card. I said, "All right, perfect. I'll get a free Metro card." As part of that, I had to go through orientation and mobility training, where they teach you how to use the cane. I remember using the cane and walking to this restaurant that I went to on a regular basis. I had practiced with the cane and did great, and then, one day, I didn't have the cane and I tripped. I blamed it on the cane. When I went back home after dinner, I saw the cane sitting in the hallway of my house and I tried to break it on my knee. I didn’t know that it was made of graphite or titanium or whatever material, and it hurt me so much I even started hitting the walls because it got me so angry.

I bent the cane just enough that when I tried to throw it down my garbage chute, it got stuck. Now I had this cane sticking out of my garbage chute. So, every day when I went to throw out the garbage, I had this cane that reminded me.

Finally, when I met Ed Summers, he said, "Hey, we're friends now, you got to get a cane." I got it and I adopted it and I haven't let go of it since. That was February 2018.

Where is your vision today?

Oh, that's an interesting question because my sight had been diminishing and deteriorating over the course of several years. Three or four years ago, after working at LCI – the parent company of Ablr — a nonprofit provided a lot of money to organizations that are fighting blindness. They donated to the Duke Eye Center, and helped build the new hospital. Some of that funding went to new research and doctors coming on board. One of those doctors was a gentleman named Dr. Iannaccone. When I met with him, he looked at my records and he said, "I have a treatment for you." In my entire life, no one's ever said they had a treatment for me.

He said, "Come back in a couple of weeks.” He started giving me injections in my eyes, and my vision loss started to stabilize. As I mentioned, I had this donut of vision, but in the middle my vision was clouded by cataracts. He said, "Your eyes are healthy enough now, we can at least take the cataracts on. You may get some more usable vision." So, on January 6th, 2021, I had cataract surgery. A couple of weeks later, I was looking in the mirror, getting ready. Usually, I see in a brown blob in the mirror. All of a sudden, I could see my eyes and I was like, "Oh, my gosh, what is that?"

So, I called my wife. She's got beautiful, bright green eyes and I looked at her eyes and I could see them. Then I called my son over. I could see his eyes, I could see the crease around his mouth and his lips and his nose. It was the first time I could see my kid's face. Since then, in the right light, I can catch glimpses of things but, for all intents and purposes, I'm still legally blind. But in the right light and moving my head around, I can put together pieces. What I've learned is that our brains are so amazing, it's like our brains are supercomputers and what they're doing is taking pieces and putting pieces together for us to be able to recognize things.

That's incredible. What joy to be able to see your wife's green eyes and the crease of your son's smile. (tearing up)

How did you become the CEO of Ablr?

When I was at LCI, the task was how to create technology-based jobs for people who are blind. Based on my own lived experiences, I knew that we had to eliminate the digital divide. We had to remove the digital accessibility barriers. When I was trying to apply for jobs, I could barely complete the applications sometimes. Sometimes I got timed out, or I couldn't see which fields needed to be completed. I didn't know which fields I may have answered incorrectly, or where the errors were. I realized that if the systems aren't accessible, how are we going to get people to get them into jobs? So, that was the first thing we needed to address.

So, we launched a digital accessibility business. We spent a year training to learn how to be actual testers to the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG prescribes 70 plus criteria that need to be evaluated for every page or screen to make sure that they are accessible. I hired my first couple of people. We started to train and learn how to test. It became our first line of business.

I realized that there were two other lines of business we had to address. One was to change the mindsets of people about individuals with disabilities. We had to change the mindsets of organizations like that same board of directors who didn't want to hire me. We had to change the perception they had of me. So we created a Disability Inclusion training module. The third piece was getting companies ready to hire people. But if the people aren't ready, that’s not going to be be a success. There's supply and demand. The demand's going to be there but there's not enough supply of talent. So, we also have a workforce development program.

In 2019, I was at this tech conference, where I heard about a gentleman named Donald Thompson, who was the CEO of a digital agency. He was talking about the business case for DEI or Diversity Equity Inclusion. He offered to meet anyone for coffee. I jumped at the opportunity, and he agreed to meet me. When we met, he told me, "I never thought about people with disabilities in tech or DEI.” He stayed in touch and had people from his team come and meet me. Later that year, he introduced me to Mike Iannelli, who ran strategic partnerships for him. Mike and I hit it off, and we decided to co-found something different and take it to the next level. And so, LCI Tech, that initial company I started, became Ablr. That's where we are today.

So LCI Tech became Ablr?

Yup, as a joint venture between LCI and Walk West.

Was becoming a CEO of a company something you ever hoped for?

Oh, yeah. It's so funny because, as a kid, I wanted to be a CEO. My dad was an executive of a large organization, so I had grown up seeing and talking about what it was to be a leader. My dad was a leader. He interacted with CEOs of large organizations, and I saw that and thought, "Yeah, that's what I'm going to be." And so, my first time as CEO was when I was in Africa, when I launched the company in Cameroon.  Then I thought that was going to be the only time in my life I'd ever be a CEO. I'm not really into titles, but to be the CEO of Ablr is something that I never thought I could be. Just to be the leader of a growing team is what makes me super excited.

How big is the company now?

We call ourselves small but mighty. We have seven people on the team, but we have the three lines of business I mentioned. Just last week we secured a contract with the state of North Carolina to launch that workforce development program I mentioned. That's going to be a game-changing line of business for us, because we will now be able to create customized training programs to get people who are blind into tech jobs. From a revenue standpoint, we're on track to maybe around 1.5 million this year, so we're super excited about that.

That's fantastic. The mission of your business is just incredible. I'm curious, how have you woven accessibility into your business to support you as a blind CEO?

It's interesting because one of my colleagues, the director of accessibility, a sighted woman, had been working with a gentleman named Mike May, who was one of the luminaries in the blind community. She worked with him for 22 years. I’d been partnering with Mike when I met Kim. She joined my team. When she came in, she set the stage for us to say, "We are going to be focused on accessibility." She thought about how we set ourselves up. How to make sure that I could access all this information. We needed to make sure that everyone on our team could access information. So, while we started out thinking about me, this now allows all the other blind individuals on our team to access information. 

The moment I learned about using a screen reader was the first step. I had to learn that first. It doesn't matter if Kim and the team make things accessible for me if I don't know how to use the technology that I need to access the information. When it comes to using different software and content, that's something we're really intentional about. We use Microsoft 365 because Outlook is so much more accessible to me than Gmail or some of those web-based email accounts. Microsoft has invested a lot in accessibility, so we use that a lot. We make sure that we're intentionally procuring products that are accessible. Before we procure products now, we do accessibility testing to make sure that we’re not just going by reputation. We make sure the software is accessible for everyone on our team to use. It goes back to intentionality.

What's your biggest challenge as a leader overall? What keeps you up at night?

A couple of years ago, I worried about how we were going to grow. As a leader, you feel so responsible for your team. It's how I make sure that the team is growing, and getting everything they need to be successful. We launched Ablr in October 2020. Now, two years later, we're talking about scale. So, that's what's keeping me up at night — how are we going to scale this business? Because it's great as a startup. In the first couple of years, we were just trying to get our feet on the ground, we were just trying to find our footing. But now, we have something to build on. The concept is now proven, and now we have to grow this, and we need to grow it in a responsible way.we 

A year ago, we thought we found our footing, and we started growing really fast. We hired all these people and realized that while they may have great resumes, they just weren't the right fit for our team. So we had to get smaller to get bigger. For the last year is where we really saw this growth, and now I'm thinking beyond the short term. I'm not just looking at the next five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour growth schedule, but I’m thinking about that long term right now, and that's the scale.

Scaling is a universal problem for leaders. Do I have the right people? What do we need a business to fulfill our mission? You have the same problems that lots of us have as we scale.

It's all universal, right? So, being a blind CEO, it's all universal because, at this point, I've taken care of the accessibility issues, that's not even an issue for me. I face the same universal issues that we all face as leaders of organizations. 

I've learned in my career to surround myself with the right people, and people with the right mentality. As I said, a year ago, we honed in on our core values — growth mindset, relationships, initiative, and trust. It spells out grit. We evaluate anybody now joining our team on that grit. We'd rather not bring on anyone just for the sake of hiring. We're looking for people who have that grit, and can wear any hat that we need at the moment and help us grow. So, I think the team is focused on that mission right now, and it's really cool to see.

You grew and then had to shrink a little bit. How did that happen? Was it attrition or was it letting people go? I'm sorry to ask such a direct question but it's the reality of business.

It is. And at the time, it was difficult because the board was saying, "Your numbers are not showing that you can sustain this growth." I remember them asking me, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I'm going to let go of people.” It was a tough decision to make, and to say out loud. I was hesitant. The board said, "Okay, that's what you're going to do," I said, "Okay." Luckily, the day I was supposed to do it, one of the people probably knew what was coming, and put in their papers. I thought to myself, "Whew, that's one less I have to do, that's one less."

Letting people go is painful.

Letting people go is painful. Especially when you have a small team. I think that's one of the things about startups. That initial startup team, you become very close because you are putting all your trust in these people, you have to. As a leader, you’ve got to make those decisions. It's not the most popular decision sometimes, but I think that's just part of being a leader. That's why we choose to do this, right?

Right, we’re in service of the business and the mission. I believe that as a leader, the business is your boss. What does it need from you as a leader? And what that business needed unfortunately was to let go of some people so that you could be the right size team to achieve your mission.

Exactly. And our mission's so personal to me because we're serving the disability community. A community that's been overlooked. A community that hasn't been served. And so, in many ways, I feel that the only way I can do justice to that community is if we got smaller and grew in the right fashion, not just because we wanted to look bigger. I think sometimes a detriment of some companies is that they grow too fast because the leaders want to show that they are at the head of a large organization. Whereas, if you get that right team and it can be smaller, you can do a lot more.

My organization is unique because it's two organizations. In many ways, I'm an entrepreneur. I started a company within an organization. I have two investors who are two organizations and they're proven organizations. I also had a co-founder. When we created this joint venture, my co-founder, Mike Iannelli, and I, had to figure out how to work together, and what our relationship was going to be. That also took time, there are growing pains in that. But when you start to put that trust in one another to do what's best for the organization and the mission, that makes it much easier. I think when it just really came down to Mike and me and Kim, we really found our groove.

Given the kind of work that you do and the mission, what advice might you give to leaders who want to improve disability inclusion at their company? As you pointed out when we think about DEI we don’t necessarily think about disability and inclusion perhaps as much as we might other things. What advice might you give them?

Spend time talking to people. I talk about how proximity builds empathy. Talk to people with disabilities, and talk to leaders with disabilities. Start to open your eyes and be intentional about identifying candidates. Talk to people with disabilities, understand what it means to have a disability, and what adaptations people will need.

There are so many leaders who have disabilities. It's amazing how many leaders there are, it's just they're not talking about it. The moment we start talking about this and being more open about it, you see there are so many people out there. The first step is being intentional and talking to people. Being open and vulnerable. Saying I don't know what I don't know and I want to learn.

When you start to do that, you'll realize that people are more open to sharing with you. If you're open to listening and learning, you'll get some loyal and amazing people who are going to help you, and think differently from you. They'll help you connect the dots that you just might not have been able to see yet. I think we need to be intentional about wanting to be inclusive of other people, and understanding people's decisions. I'll do a shameless plug here. I’m releasing my book on November 1st called Don't Ask the Blind Guy for Directions: A 30,000-mile Journey for Love, Confidence, and a Sense of Belonging. I wrote this book because I wanted other people to get a new level of empathy and understand the challenges that people with disabilities face in the workplace.

It's written for people with disabilities to say, "Okay, here's somebody who's done it." I want employers, companies, organizers, and leaders to say, "Look, there are some needless barriers that we have in place. What can we do to remove them?" I hope that by sharing my own story, we can remove the barriers, and still attract some amazing talent, create an inclusive environment, and build a sense of belonging for all people. That's what being a leader is all about.

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