I had a head for problem-solving in high school and ended up going straight into the trades. Machining and machine programming — I was good at it, the work paid well, and college didn’t feel like the right kind of investment when I was already making things for a living. So I dropped out.
Life made the case for me to push for something bigger. When both of my parents passed away, I took custody of my daughters. Around the same time, we learned that our daughter Catie has profound autism. Two enormous changes layered on top of each other, and they reframed the question of what I was supposed to be doing with the rest of my career.
Going back at thirty
In 2016 I went back to school. I was thirty. I spent three months teaching myself the SAT from scratch, scored 1400, and applied to the engineering program at Arizona State. My old transcripts still followed me, so I had to pick up some classes to make the case. I tried. Calc 2 broke me. Working full-time and raising a child with significant needs and trying to push through differential calculus at the same time was honestly not survivable, and I respected the math enough not to fake it.
I shifted lanes into the entrepreneurship and management track inside the same engineering school — same building, different toolkit, oriented toward early product development and finance. That decision turned out to be one of the most important ones I’ve made. The COVID-era labor shortage and the experience I’d built on the shop floor opened doors that a different degree never would have. I climbed into engineering roles, and today I still work full-time as a senior manufacturing engineer while building InclusiGear in the margins.
The pivot in Seattle
InclusiGear started in the Seattle area, after the third time we’d moved with Catie. Each move meant rebuilding the care infrastructure from zero — new providers, new IEPs, new therapists who needed to be onboarded into who our daughter actually is. I kept running into the same broken seam: the system kept asking us to translate, and we kept losing critical context in translation.
My first instinct was hardware. I thought InclusiGear would build adaptive technology that could read biometrics and turn them into observable behavior insights. That was the original pitch. I still believe in it. But the more parents I talked to, the more I realized I was solving the wrong problem first.
What was most frustrating for caregivers wasn’t understanding their own child. It was sharing that understanding with everyone else — grandparents, sitters, schools, substitutes. Continuity, not comprehension.
The 10 p.m. rule
Around that time, I started a master’s program at OneDay University — accredited through William Jewell College — specifically because of the community of startup mentors and entrepreneurs it gave me access to. The customer-discovery work I did there reframed the whole company. I came out of those conversations knowing the product had to be about continuity and trust handoffs between caregivers, not about decoding the kid in your living room.
So I built dashboards. Routines, daily logs, structured profiles, the whole thing. Then I watched one of my mentors try to use them, and the truth landed: this would never work for an exhausted parent at 10 p.m. That was the moment the mission got short enough to hold in one sentence.
If a parent can’t get value or finish something in less than five minutes, it’s out. Period.
That rule produced CARLA, the conversational care assistant inside InclusiCare today. You talk to her in casual language — out loud, in fragments — and on the back end she turns that into structured, clinically usable context you can share with anyone in your care circle in seconds. The dashboards are gone. The five-minute rule is still there.
Sydney
I can’t describe InclusiGear without describing my wife. Sydney is a paraprofessional in special education and a parent — meaning she holds the two perspectives that matter most for this product at the same time. She knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a parent’s carefully written note about their child, and she knows what it’s like to be the parent writing it. That dual lens shows up everywhere in the product, whether or not we name it.
She also gives me the freedom to disappear into this work in a way that most founders’ partners do not. That is its own kind of co-founding.
The shape of the next ten years
I still work full-time as an engineer. That’s the honest version. Two-paycheck household, blended family of five teenagers, a house of cats and a dog and a hedgehog and a snake and a spider — we live full lives, and that fullness is part of the reason I’m building this for the families who live like we do.
The five-to-ten year version is straightforward. InclusiGear becomes a sustainable business and my full-time work. We build advanced technology for caregivers and the people they care for — not just InclusiCare, but the wearable and adaptive products I started this company to build. And along the way we employ a healthy number of people with disabilities, because a company built around inclusive care should look like that on the inside too.
If you’re a caregiver, a therapist, an educator, a clinician, or an investor who cares about this — say hello.
— William Kreitzer, Founder & CEO, InclusiGear