(Podcast Intro with Music – 00:00) 

Kelvin Crosby (00:06)

Welcome to Investing In Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast. We are not waiting for change, we are investing in it. Join us as we speak with entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are focused on creating a more accessible world.

(Episode Begins)

Kelvin Crosby (00:25)

Hey, hey, hey, so good to see you even though I can't see you. It's another beautiful day in the neighborhood. My name is Kelvin Cosby and thank you so much for being at Investing in Accessibility at Samaritan Partners and my co-host is

Chris Maher (00:40)

Chris Maher here from Samaritan Partners. Kelvin, good to see you my friend. How are you today?

Kelvin Crosby (00:44)

I'm good man, I'm excited about today's episode. So I'm gonna let you take over because you're gonna be in you interviewing me

Chris Maher (00:50)

That's right. And welcome everybody. Today's episode, we're going to actually get into Kelvin's personal and entrepreneurial story. So, I'm going to be throwing a few questions his way and we're going to kick it off with Kelvin would love to just hear about your personal story and how your deaf blindness developed because I know you weren't born that way. Let's start there and then we'll get into other aspects of your journey

Kelvin Crosby (01:20)

Sound good. So, when I was born my parents had no idea that my hearing loss was what it is And it wasn't so I was one and half years old my mom and my dad They took me to the doctor and they said your son has a severe hearing loss you need to get some hearing aids or make your child a deaf child. If you can hear my voice, I got a little bit of a stuffy nose so this is somewhat what it sounded like when I was a kid having that nasal conversation like a deaf person. But as I matured, and I was able to master the art of speaking for a deaf person. So my parents put on me when I was my one and a half years old, my parents hearing aid and I developed a world of hearing. But it wasn't until was 13 years old and my mom and my dad, I said my dad had a soccer field and it was a game at night and the lights on the field went out because the circuit breaker on the lights went out and I didn't realize I couldn't see anything that night. And then I started panicking because I couldn't see what was in front of me. You know, your eyes started adjusting to when like the moon's out or the stars are out. Your eyes started adjusting. I couldn't see anything. My parents take me to the doctor. They find out that I had an Usher syndrome type two.

Usher Syndrome is a genetic disease that affects your hearing and your vision at birth. But the vision part tends to come later in life when you're 13 as night vision normally starts happening. And then the rest of the stuff that comes after that is really unpredictable. In my case, I was 19 years old when Usher syndrome took away my peripheral vision and 

My peripheral vision went from 180 degrees to 20 degrees causing me to be legally blind. And this was the beginning of the journey for me embracing deafblindness. And I have to say, that journey embracing deafblindness was not easy. It tried to take my life 12 times. 

But it wasn't until the 12th time you heard that still soft that said, “Kelvin. Kelvin, Kelvin, Kelvin. I have a plan for you. I want you to embrace deafblindness. And I want you to find joy in this challenge.” And that set me on the journey, embracing this new life of deafblindness. 

And for me, deafblindness is the life I live. It's not easy, it's not simple. And this would lead me to learning how to make pottery on the wheel without my vision. By the time I was 20 years old, I would be hit by a car three times.

This impact would set me on toward the future of what deafblindness would look like for me and entrepreneurship. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it on that end.

Chris Maher (04:35)

Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that. When did pottery come into play in your life? How old were you when you started?

Kelvin Crosby (05:47)

Yeah, so I was 16 years old when I started learning pottery. But when I went to Helen Keller National Center in New York, they needed something to help me heal. And I was extremely angry with my deafness/blindness. Like I didn't understand why, why.

And they said, Kelvin, you know how to do pottery from sight. Let us teach you how to do it by feel.

And then I slowly started learning how to feel it. And next thing you know, I was healing through my pain. And that's kind of what set me on a path to get a minor in ceramics.

Chris Maher (05:23)

And so was that somewhat therapeutic and cathartic for you and helped you work through the anger? I'm guessing there was some depression in there. Can you talk a little bit more about that, how it helped you through that? And then, how that led into becoming a multi-time entrepreneur.

Kelvin Crosby (05:46)

Yeah, I mean, I think what for me, when you lose your vision, you're trying to figure out where your purpose is. But between my hearing loss and my vision loss, I was really trying to figure out how was I going to do this? How was I going to do this thing called life? And clay allowed me to heal through that emotion. 

So, I'll never forget one day I was sitting on the potter wheel. I was throwing the clay, trying to get it centered on the potter wheel and next thing you know I'm taking the clay and I'm chucking it across the room because I'm so angry because I can't get it right. And now I can center clay all day now. I remember the teacher taking that clay and saying, “Kevin let's do it again.”

She forced me to do it again. And I made a piece. It wasn't beautiful, but it was a piece. And I was able to take that moment, walk away from that day, and find myself healing. And this is something that is a dream of mine, is to start a healing pottery school. Where you come, you and I, get to heal your pain, your strugglea, your difficulties. And you and I get to make this piece together and you get to tell me your story. And you get to see the piece become your story. And to me, that is something that helped me and I had somebody support me. And I want to be able to do that for others. But I first got to finish a few other things first before that dream can come true. 

Chris Maher (07:34)

Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. I think that when Kelvin and I met, one of the first things we connected on was your pottery because my, which we'll talk about in the next episode, I have two daughters, both of them live with disabilities, one with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the other with physical disabilities. And my youngest who has, intellectual disabilities, her favorite class in school is ceramics. Loves it.

And she has a lot of sensory. So for her, it's very therapeutic. Because just feeling that clay and mushing that clay and working that clay. So, Kelvin, talk a little bit about, because I think a couple of things probably led you to becoming an entrepreneur. One of which was your lived experience. And as you said, you were hit by a car three different times. And so I know that was part of it, but was part of it also, because I saw this in my own daughters, when you're a person living with a disability, things are harder, right? Lots of everyday tasks in your life are harder. So you have to learn how to adapt. You have to be resilient. You have to be persistent. You have to try to live with patience, which can be very hard. But can you speak a little bit to that, how those things and your lived experience led to your entrepreneurial journey?

Kelvin Crosby (08:51)

Yeah, I mean I think when I think about my my career, I mean it started when I was 23. I started an advocacy. I got to meet President Obama in the Oval Office, shook his hand. And made change. I actually made change for people who are deafblind in advocating for telecommunication technology for those that are living with deafblindness. And this change then fuel me. I'm like, I can do this! I as an individual can make change.

And so I went to school and I went to college and I started making change on my campus. Making the bike lane more accessible, making sure we had text to 911, all these different things for people with disabilities. And I made those changes. And then the next thing you know, I find myself in a job trying to get blind people to work. I ended up working for the state of California. And it had become very difficult for people in San Diego, California, that are visually impaired, to get work. Because we're a very medical and biology, very visual type of career-oriented society here in San Diego. And the programs that were here, they were okay. But they never got you to that next level. And the thing is, I had learned the skills that I needed to be employed. And so I started going out to employers and saying, let me show you that I can do the same work that your people do. And I can do it two times to three times faster. And I would smoke them. And I said, now, can you hire my client?

They would  get hired. But one thing, the mistake I made was that they did not have the skills that I have.

So three months in to the job they let them go. They let my clients go and they were back to square one again. And this is where I realized I'm setting up my community for failure if I don't train them to be successful.

So, I decided, to found a non-profit that was willing to let me build a school inside their non-profit. So I got hired and built the school. Within six months I was completely full. I had more clients than I knew what to do with. And my students, within three months, were getting trained and getting placed with the County of San Diego. 

Chris Maher (11:30)

Can you talk a little bit about, I'm guessing it was part workforce development, upskilling job skills? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Kelvin Crosby (11:40)

Yeah. So a lot of time when you come in with a disability and you're wanting to go into the workspace, most employers, they don't have the workspace already accessible for visually impaired individuals or other disabilities. And so, being able to advocate for that, being able to carve out positions like that, being able to look at a job duty and saying, all right, this person can do all of this which makes you money. The stuff that doesn't make you money, that person can't do, so let's just take it off the list and make it a reasonable accommodation. Those are different things that I would do with different employers. And that's something I started learning in that period of time. This is a four year period of time I'm learning this process. Because making accommodations doesn't mean that you have to change your workflow.

What it means is that you're actually empowering your workflow to be more diverse and more flexible, but get the same results, which then also gets you better results than if you kept going in the one same direction. And we found that with the County of San Diego. You had a bunch of these people getting employed. They would go in, they get these desk jobs, and then they work up the chain and they realize that because they were hiring visually impaired people, it was making change in the county to be more accessible. I mean, like, this seems like common sense, but most people don't think in this way. And that's where this program that I built is still successful today, and I don't run it anymore. 

Chris Maher (13:25)

Well, you created something that's sustainable, right? Which is critically important. 

Kelvin Crosby (13:32)

Exactly. And the only way here in San Diego to have that funded, is through a nonprofit. You can't do that as a for-profit business. There’s just not enough money to be made in it. And It drives me crazy.

Chris Maher (13:50)

Yeah. Well, that's, that's something we're going to dig into, during future episodes on this podcast. You know, we chose to call it investing in accessibility, but investing doesn't only mean money.

That's part of it, providing capital for, for companies that are innovating around accessibility and disability tech, product services, hardware, software, but it's also investing in people. It's investing in processes and policy. So we're going to dig into that as we get into future episodes on this Investing in Accessibility podcast. Talk a little bit, after that experience, where did your entrepreneurial journey take you?

Kelvin Crosby (14:34)

Yeah, I went to CES, as a reward, to build this program. I built this assistive technology training program for the visually impaired and they said, Kelvin, we're gonna send you to Las Vegas to see what you can find and learn. And I got to go. I got to see the autonomous vehicles. I'm like, that's not a lot of technology. Why can't I do that? So I went home the following week. And I put together a team of about 10 of us and we built, in 40 days, a prototype for a robotic blind cane. And this one didn't have brain communication yet, but it was on a cane. It had some sensors. You use a cane, it'll tell you when to turn left or right. It did all the things that you needed. I mean, it looks like a prototype. That was for sure. 

Chris Maher (15:25)

And Kelvin, what year was that?

Kelvin Crosby (15:28)

That was 2017. And I still was working for the assistive technology training program and so running both that and I had three people on my team and so I running that and running this at night. So I actually I had called students at night that I was hiring to build the robotic blind came. And so I started looking for investment. And so every lunch hour, I was always having meetings. Lunch wasn't in the future for me. And I always would look for people on the East Coast. So I could do meetings at five, six or seven in the morning to do meetings on the East Coast. And so I was always trying to hit those. And then those that were here local, I'd try to meet them in the evening.

And so I tried to run this business and got a lot of attention really, really quick with this robotic blind cane. And then you have to raise funds. And I go to investor after investor after investor, pitch this beautiful story.

What it came down to, is that it was going to cost me about three to four million dollars to finish this project, for one. And the other thing is, because the product wasn't finished, we did not know if we had a good market fit.

And this killed me in pitching to ambassadors. Like I couldn't get early investors to invest in this idea that I had. And so I kept going, kept trying. And I'm in 2019, the summer of 2019. One of the people that were helping me work on the robotic blind cane he said, “Hey, for another project, I'll pay you for this other project and I want you to build a lighted of blind cane. And I want you to do all these little different things and make it work.”

Chris Maher (17:41)

So, give the context of why you need a lighted cane.

Kelvin Crosby (17:48)

Yeah, so the idea was to create a cane that completely lit up so that you can see it from about 100 yards away. Because a lot of times, if you look at the data of blind people getting hit by cars, it's either in low light or at night.

Yes, there are some are reflections on the canes, but the reflection is not that that great. And the other thing is, blind people do not have products that provide defensive walking. We only have reactionary products. All of the smart canes out there, all the products, you have to react to the environment so that you can be safe. This changes that. The See Me Cane, the Lighted Blind Cane, is the first product where you can alert drivers ahead of time before you arrive. Just like a blinker.

Chris Maher (18:44)

Remind our audience how many times you were hit by a car.

Kelvin Crosby (18:48)

So, I was hit by a car three times. The first one was the most impactful time. I was in New York City, not too far from Penn Station. And I stepped off the curb, the taxi took my cane out, hit me with the mirror and just kept going. And then three weeks later, had a very similar incident, but not as impactful. It was just the cane, not my body. And then I got back home.

And got this guy did a California roll for a stop sign. And I had a seat on his hood. I mean, I was very thankful he wasn't going very fast, but the impact mentally is huge. And for me building this product, I was like, all right, I'm to see what this works. And I think this is why product research is so important. I'm building two products, right? I'm building this lighted blind cane and I'm building a robotic blind cane. I now have two functioning prototypes in 2019 in the summer. I take it to the National Federation for the Blind and I take both. I'm using the robotic blind cane going around being cool, but I had to see me cane because I don't want people to run over the the prototype. And so, and everybody coming up to me and they're only talking to me about the See Me Cane. Nobody asked me about the robotic blank. So I started interviewing people. Would you want a robot blind cane or would you want a lighted blind cane? And that blew my mind away.

Chris Maher (20:34)

Why did it blow your mind? Because hands down they wanted the lighted cane?

Kelvin Crosby (20:38)

because nobody wanted a robotic blind cane.

Chris Maher (20:40)

Gotcha. 

Kelvin Crosby (20:41)

Everybody wanted the lighted blind cane.

Chris Maher (20:43)

Yeah, and we're going to get into this in future episodes. I think this is a great example of lived experience and inclusive design and how important those are when you're developing assistive technology for the disabled community. And we're going to get into that in probably in many of the future episodes that we have, but you're a fantastic example of that. And I think the other example is that there's a dearth of venture capital, you know, private capital going to disability. Historically, it's largely been supported by nonprofits and local and federal government, which is great, but there are limitations to how much those groups can really elevate the community. And so there is a huge gap for private capital to come in and that's where Samaritan is playing and hoping to work with entrepreneurs like you who have a real personal connection to the problems they're solving and you and leveraging inclusive design. And if you're doing those two things, there's a much greater chance of having product market fit in my estimation, but that's another conversation. But back to you, give us the state of where you are with you being a master Potter, being an entrepreneur, you've got nonprofits. I'm also going to share with our audience, you and your wife are foster parents. I don't know where you find the time in the day to do everything you do. I mean, it's amazing Kelvin. But give the audience a status of where you're at with your various areas of your personal and professional life.

Kelvin Crosby (22:27)

Yeah. So my vision today is like looking through wax paper. I lost all the clarity in my vision of June of 2020. And because of that, I needed to heal through that grieving process. So for people that lost their vision, they lose stages vision, you need to heal through that process. And by the grace of God, one of my friends who, the Harding family, which they have a son that has SYNGAP, a lot of intellectual disabilities, autism and downs and a couple of other different types of intellectual disabilities all mixed together.

But I got the, they said, Kelvin, why don't you bring your potter wheel over and we'll do pottery. And they put me on TikTok. And that's how I became the DeafBlind Potter. That funded. I had lost all the funding to finish my lighting blanking during COVID. I had two investors that were willing to invest, but they lost their funding in March. And so I was solely by myself. So the DeafBlind Potter took me on a journey where I would find the engineer who has disabilities herself. She served in our military and she was an engineer. And so she commissioned a piece for me and that's you know she's helping me make the Lighted Blind Cane and the See Me Cane. And this journey essentially would take us to where we are today. The deafblind potter, he’s done his work. Now I just make potteries for fun and I encourage people.

See Me Cane is in its last final stages to mass produce. We've already sold 120 See Me Canes. We sold them literally within two months. I didn’t think I could sell 3D printed handles and the Lighted Blind Cane so fast, but we sold out. And then we had to go through some testing, we had a lot of failures in some of these areas of our design so we needed to fix that so we can scale. I got some investment from a really wealthy man who supported me and then next thing, you know I’m finding myself in front of the Louisiana Association for the Blind. Facing the dream that I've always wanted. And that was shaking hands with the CEO of Louisiana Association for the Blind and them saying, we want to build your See Me Canes and have blind people, visually impaired individuals, manufacture your product.

That to me made sure that my dream of my product goes from not just me needing the cane, not just me inventing the cane, not just me developing the cane. Now I get to hire visually impaired people to make it and get to hire visually impaired people to sell it. And, we're selling directly to the community. And that's where I'm at today. And I tell you, it is an amazing journey that I've been on. And I wish Samantha Partners was here early on in my life. It would have saved me a lot of headaches. But I'm at a point now where this year we will launch a full-scale version of the See Me Cane.

Chris Maher (26:27)

That's awesome. And Kelvin, you're such a wonderful example for other entrepreneurs because your experience of that roller coaster ride of the ups and downs and having to adapt and adjust and be resilient, that's not unusual for any early-stage entrepreneur, much less doing it with disabilities. And so, you're a wonderful example for any entrepreneur in terms of how to navigate that journey and you can get to the other side, but it's a lot of hard work and it's a big emotional roller coaster. So congratulations, my friend. Your, a great example for the rest of us. And I know we'll dig into more of your journey and other entrepreneur’s journeys as we move forward with more of these episodes. But I'm so glad that our friend Troy connected us a couple of months ago and we just connected right away and really felt like I met a kindred spirit and so happy. And listen, I'm giving you the credit, you deserve the credit because I've never done this before. You've got a lot more experience than me. You've got a radio show and you do two other podcasts and you're the media guy. I'm not. So it's, I'm glad that you pushed me out of my comfort zone to jump on this journey with you with doing this podcast, Investing in Accessibility. So I'm super excited and very grateful that you've come into my life, my friend.

Kelvin Crosby (27:58)

Yep, I'm excited. I wasn't gonna let you sit around because I believe in Samaritan partners because honestly, the more we can give access to people like myself to invent, to develop and create a more accessible world, it's gonna change so many lives.

So that wraps up Investing In Accessibility. We will see you in two weeks!

(Episode Closing with Music)

Kelvin Crosby (28:31)

Thank you for listening to Investing In Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast, where we invest in change for accessibility not wait for change. If you want to follow up, you can find us on YouTube or LinkedIn @SamaritanPartners. If you would like to invest in Samaritan Partners you can email chris@samaritanpartners.com. If you would like to learn more about us, go to www.samaritanpartners.com. You can take the first step in investing in change by giving us 5 stars and sharing this podcast with everyone you know so we can spread the word so we can give access to all by Investing In Accessibility.