Photograph: Splitshire
Disability Connection: The Builders Behind Charles Schwab, Sam Maddula, Romesh Wadhwani and Sean Callagy
A refugee rejected by 124 investors. A blind toddler given sight by a stranger’s corneas. A car wash built so one son would always be cared for. Seven more founders for whom disability was not the end of the story — it was the reason for it.
Produced and Edited by The Bourgeois Society Staff
Part two of our two-part Disability Connection list: seven founders and owners — in technology, pharmacy, car washes, law, home care and self-storage — who built companies that carry families, workforces and whole industries with them.
Selected on the obstacle climbed, the thing built, and the good given back — and fact-checked line by line, with sources linked under every profile.
The full list: Part 1 · Part 2
Founder & Chairman, Charles Schwab Corporation — Woodside, CA
Official links: Website
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Why We’re Inspired
We’re inspired because Charles Schwab built one of the largest financial firms in America while privately working around a disability he could not name — slow reading, dreaded schoolwork, strategies invented on the fly.
When his son’s diagnosis finally explained his own, he said it out loud, and put his family’s money behind helping other kids with learning differences.
“I’m dyslexic, very dyslexic. I didn’t know until my son was diagnosed, and I was about 40. And that was a great 'aha’ moment for me to understand why I was so slow in reading.”
The Story
Schwab borrowed $100,000 from his uncle to start his firm and pioneered the discount brokerage — cutting commissions and opening Wall Street to ordinary investors.
The Charles Schwab Corporation now serves tens of millions of client accounts and holds trillions in client assets; Forbes estimates his net worth at about $13.5 billion, and he remains the firm’s chairman and largest shareholder. His dyslexia stayed hidden for about 40 years, until his son was diagnosed and he recognized himself.
The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation funds research and education for children with learning disabilities, including the Schwab Learning Center at Children’s Health Council, which evaluates and supports children with learning differences.
Sources
Marketplace — “Charles Schwab on Zero Commissions, Dyslexia, and How He Invested”
University of Michigan Dyslexia Help — success stories: Charles Schwab
Forbes — Charles Schwab Corporation profile
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Sam Maddula · Sean Callagy
Founder, Bank’s Apothecary; Founder, Workshop Strategy — Philadelphia, PA
Official links: Website
Image: Workshop Strategy
Why We're Inspired
Sam Maddula was born legally blind in a poor rural village in India, facing, in his words, a future clouded with uncertainty. When he was about two, his family found an eye camp run by the Eye Foundation of America; its founder, Dr. VK Raju, performed a free double corneal transplant that restored his sight.
He says he could see his life go from literal darkness to pure sunlight — and he built his career as a repayment.
He earned a Doctor of Pharmacy from Rutgers, and in 2010 founded Bank’s Apothecary in Philadelphia, a specialty pharmacy focused on patients with behavioral-health and substance-use needs, run on a people-first philosophy that paid staff well above market.
“I was born in a rural village in India, poor and legally blind, faced with a future clouded with uncertainty and with no opportunity to exist.”
The Story
Bank’s Apothecary grew into a $300 million enterprise serving more than 150,000 patients across sixteen states — the largest independently held behavioral-health specialty pharmacy in the United States — before Maddula sold it to a private equity firm in 2022 at an industry-leading valuation.
He now leads Workshop Strategy, and through the Maddula Foundation he funds the same cause that saved his sight: he supports the Eye Foundation of America’s work to prevent childhood blindness, and tells his transplant story at its fundraisers. A stranger’s donated corneas gave him sight; he has spent his career passing the gift along.
Sources
Listen Notes / Don’t Be a Jerk Podcast — “From Blind at Birth to Million-Dollar Founder: Sam Maddula’s People-First Playbook”
Workshop Strategy — “Sam Maddula: Revolutionizing Healthcare with Innovation and Compassion”
Malayalam Daily News — “Sam Maddula On A Mission To Create A Transformative Impact On Healthcare And Society”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Romesh Wadhwani · Charles Schwab
Founder, Symphony Technology Group / SymphonyAI (SAIGroup) — Palo Alto, CA
Official links: Website
Image: Financial Express
Why We're Inspired
Romesh Wadhwani was born in Karachi ten days after the 1947 Partition, and his family fled to India as refugees while he was still an infant. At two he contracted polio, and schools in India rejected him for it.
He topped his classes anyway — through fevers and a series of surgeries, as his brother Sunil recalls — graduated from IIT Bombay, and arrived in Pittsburgh in 1969 with $2.50 to earn a PhD in electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
Then came the rejections that would break most founders: 124 of 125 venture firms turned down his first company before one said yes.
The Story
The company they funded was the first of more than forty. His Aspect Development was acquired by i2 Technologies for $9.3 billion in stock in 2000, one of the largest software deals of its era; he went on to found Symphony Technology Group and SymphonyAI, into which he has invested $1 billion of his own money.
His second act is giving at the same scale: through the Wadhwani Foundation, founded to create jobs and entrepreneurs in emerging economies, he has donated and pledged over $1 billion. A refugee with $2.50 who was turned away from schoolrooms and boardrooms alike ended up building the rooms.
Sources
Global Indian — “Romesh Wadhwani: Force to Reckon With in the World of Tech Startups”
Grokipedia — “Romesh Wadhwani”
Commonwealth Union — “Romesh T. Wadhwani: Redefining Success Through Innovation, Impact, and Inclusion”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Naveen Vinta · Sam Maddula
Founder, Callagy Law; Co-founder, ACTi — Paramus, NJ
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X
Image: Grit Daily
Why We're Inspired
Sean Callagy was diagnosed at age five with a degenerative eye condition that erased his central vision. Today he is legally blind, left with only narrow fragments of peripheral sight — and he has built one of the most improbable legal careers in the country.
Six months out of law school, while going blind, he quit a prestigious firm and within two years had built his own forty-person law firm, which he later sold.
He is one of only two attorneys in America to win two Top 100 National Jury Verdicts in a three-year span — and the only one who was blind — and his healthcare revenue recovery work has collected more than a billion dollars on behalf of his clients.
The Story
Callagy Law, his Paramus, New Jersey firm, now employs more than a hundred people, and he co-founded ACTi, an AI voice-technology company, alongside his Unblinded movement, which teaches the formula behind his own rise.
The company he built in medical revenue recovery has been reported at a valuation above $500 million — a company-reported figure, but the courtroom record underneath it is public. He funded his own Callagy Christian Foundation with a personal donation of more than seven figures.
His stated mission could double as this list’s motto: to show the world that blindness is not a limitation, but a lens through which to see infinite possibility.
Sources
ACCESS Newswire — “The Blind Founder Who Built a Half-Billion-Dollar Company” (company press release)
Business Wire — “Visionary Entrepreneur and International Speaker Sean Callagy Shares Top Principles for Achieving Extraordinary Success”
Business Wire — “Sean Callagy / Unblinded Podcast Interview Release” (About Sean Callagy)
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Charles Schwab · Shelly Sun Berkowitz
Founder and Executive Chair, BrightStar Care — Chicago, IL
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook
Image: Home Health Care News
Why We're Inspired
Shelly Sun Berkowitz built the care company her own family could not find. In 2001 she and her husband JD searched for complete care for his grandmother and discovered no single company could handle the whole continuum; so the CPA with no healthcare background founded BrightStar Care in 2002 to be that company.
She wrote the franchise operations manual in 2004 while on bed rest awaiting the birth of her twin sons, and franchising launched days before the twins arrived. One of those sons is autistic — a fact that would, years later, reorder her own career.
“During COVID, I really had to put the business ahead of myself and my kids in many ways, just because it was 24/7 and seniors’ lives were at stake.”
The Story
BrightStar grew past four hundred locations with $750 million in system-wide revenue, and Berkowitz — named the International Franchise Association’s Entrepreneur of the Year — worked twenty-hour days through COVID keeping seniors safe.
As her twins reached college age, she stepped down as full-time CEO to be where her autistic son needed her, most of the time; she walked away from a near-sale buyer whose values did not align, and ultimately sold a majority stake to Peak Rock Capital while retaining over thirty percent ownership and the executive chair.
She has since founded Next Phase Capital. The founder who built a company around being present for other people’s families made sure, in the end, to be present for her own.
Sources
Libsyn / Million Dollar Relationships — “From Personal Mission to National Impact: How Shelly Berkowitz Built and Sold a $750M Care Empire”
Home Health Care News — “How BrightStar Care, Family Tree Became Attractive Targets For Acquisition”
Franchising.com — “Grow Smart, Risk Less: BrightStar CEO Builds On Her Rapid Success”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Sean Callagy · Tom D’Eri
Co-founder, Rising Tide Car Wash — Parkland, FL
Official links: Website · LinkedIn
Image: CARD Conference
Why We're Inspired
Tom D’Eri’s brother Andrew has autism, and as Andrew approached the end of high school the family faced the statistic every autism family knows: the vast majority of adults with autism are unemployed or underemployed. Tom and his father John decided to build the job themselves.
They studied what many people with autism are genuinely great at — process-oriented work with fierce attention to detail — and picked an industry that was structured, repetitive and chronically short of good employees: car washing.
Rising Tide Car Wash opened in Parkland, Florida, in 2013, designed from the ground up with one guiding goal: eighty percent of its staff would be people with autism.
“We knew we needed to do something to help him lead a full adult life that we knew he was capable of.”
The Story
The bet paid off in the wash’s own terms: Rising Tide became one of the highest-volume car washes in Florida, with an employee retention rate five times its competitors’, and grew from Parkland to Margate and Coral Springs, washing more than half a million cars a year across its locations.
Tom told the lessons in his book The Power of Potential — the wash’s excellence, he argues, is not in spite of its neurodivergent workforce but because of it, and the management systems the family had to invent to help their team thrive made the whole business better. Andrew got the full adult life they wanted for him.
So did dozens of his colleagues.
Sources
Adam Mendler — “Context Drives Behavior: Interview with Tom D’Eri, Co-Founder of Rising Tide Car Wash”
WPLG Local 10 — “The Bold Bet on Autism That Sparked a South Florida Movement”
Brilliant Thoughts (SUCCESS) — “Employing and Developing People with Autism with Thomas D’Eri”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Shelly Sun Berkowitz · Wayde Elliott
Founder, StoreIt — St. Helens, OR
Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram
Image: Inside Self-Storage
Why We're Inspired
Wayde Elliott spent more than twenty years as a dentist — a good living, earned one patient at a time, with his hands in someone’s mouth.
Then his spine gave out: blown discs led to spinal fusion surgery, and the career he had built his life on was simply over, with no solid Plan B. The plan he did have came from his own dental chair: a patient who owned about seven self-storage facilities and seemed to live a life of freedom — fishing trips, travel, no trading time for money.
Elliott had spent years picking that patient’s brain at every appointment, hygienists hovering, because he believed in learning from people who had already done it.
“I’m a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. If it’s been done and it’s been done effectively and efficiently, I wanna learn from that.”
The Story
Forced into the pivot, Elliott founded StoreIt in 2009 and started with a ground-up development in St. Helens, Oregon — ground-up developments and tricky conversion projects, including a newspaper-building conversion, became his specialty.
StoreIt now operates eleven self-storage facilities across California and Oregon, a portfolio valued at more than $50 million, with more than $92 million in developed properties behind it, much of it financed through the SBA loans he now writes about.
In Inside Self-Storage columns and podcast chairs he teaches other investors the playbook he had to learn the hard way — the dentist whose body ended his first career, passing along the second one.
Sources
Inside Self-Storage — “How I Use Small Business Administration Financing to Fuel the Growth of My Self-Storage Portfolio”
Inside Self-Storage — “From Dental Chair to Self-Storage Development: StoreIt Owner Shares His Unique Investment Journey”
Listen Notes / Retire on Rentals — “From Dentistry to Self Storage Development and Beyond — Wayde Elliott”
More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list · Tom D’Eri · Alvaro Silberstein