What Sydney Brings to InclusiCare
InclusiCare exists because a special education teacher kept telling a manufacturing engineer that he was solving the wrong problem. Here's what my co-founder's classroom expertise has changed about how we build.
By William Kreitzer
People who meet me first usually assume I am the one driving InclusiCare’s design. I am the founder, I have a manufacturing engineering background, I am the one who wires up the systems behind it. The reality is that the most consequential product decisions we have made were not engineering decisions. They were classroom decisions, and they came from my co-founder and wife, Sydney.
Sydney is a special education professional and an ASU student. Before InclusiGear, her work was in classrooms and individualized education programs — figuring out, day after day, how to help students whose needs do not fit a default template. That experience is the reason InclusiCare looks the way it does, and it is the reason a lot of features we almost built do not exist.
The product changes when a teacher reads it
Early on, I built the kind of caregiver platform an engineer would build. There was a behavior log, a mood tracker, a medication tracker, an IEP repository, a calendar, a routine board. Every screen had its own schema. Every schema had its own form. From a system design perspective, it was clean. From a tired-parent-at-9pm perspective, it was unusable.
Sydney looked at it and asked a question I have come to rely on: “When is anyone actually going to fill this out?” In a classroom, she had spent years watching tools fail because they assumed the adult had more time and energy than they actually had. She knew the difference between a system that works on a calm Tuesday and a system that works on a hard Thursday. The first version of InclusiCare worked on the calm Tuesday. She made me delete most of it.
What replaced it was the open-notes-first design that InclusiCare ships with today. You type, dictate, or paste what you noticed, and the structure grows up around what you wrote. The schema serves the family, not the other way around. That single inversion came from her, and it is the most important architectural choice the product has made.
Why a special education perspective matters more than a clinical one
A lot of disability care software is built from a clinical lens — therapists, providers, billing systems. There is good work in that world, but it tends to optimize for the institutions that document a child rather than the people who live with the child. Sydney pushes us in the other direction.
She insists, for example, that InclusiCare’s profile language stay neutral and family-controlled. A child is not a diagnosis code. A behavior is not a deficit. A “trigger” is not a verdict. The way a tool labels a child becomes the way new caregivers perceive the child, and Sydney has watched that play out enough times in real classrooms to take it seriously. Our content review process now includes a pass that is essentially a teacher reading every default string and asking whether it would help or harm if a substitute aide saw it on day one.
She also brings the IEP fluency that InclusiCare needs in order to be useful at school. Most parents of children with disabilities are quietly running a part-time job in IDEA paperwork. Sydney knows where the leverage points are — what a parent should be tracking between meetings, what an aide actually reads in the morning, what a related-service provider needs in the first ninety seconds of a session. The product is shaped around those moments because she has been on every side of them.
What it means for InclusiGear
We are still a small team. Sydney is finishing her degree, I am still at Anduril, and we are building InclusiCare in the margins of full lives. But the partnership at the center of the company is doing the work it needs to do. An engineer alone would have built something powerful and unusable. A teacher alone might never have built it at all. Together, we are building a product that a tired parent can actually open at 9pm and a substitute caregiver can actually understand at 9am.
If you are a special education professional, an aide, a related-service provider, or a parent who wants to influence what InclusiCare becomes next, our early access list at inclusigear.com is open. The product gets better when people who have lived inside this work help shape it — and we are listening.
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