Q&A
Howe Innovation Center community profile: Molly Lazarus
Remarkable's Molly Lazarus brings experience as both a DisabilityTech startup founder and accelerator to the Howe Innovation Center community
Molly Lazarus heads up the U.S. arm of Remarkable, a startup accelerator built specifically to support, nurture and launch DisabilityTech companies. That’s what makes her a perfect fit for the Howe Innovation Center community.
Get to know her in this community profile.
Tell us about Remarkable and how you came to work with the Howe Innovation Center.
Remarkable started in Australia in 2016 and is one of the longer-running assistive tech accelerators in the world. The mission is to empower DisabilityTech innovators with the training, capital and networks they need to create a future that is accessible, equitable and inclusive for all.
I’m the director of the U.S. arm, which has been running for the last three years. Every year, we take in anywhere from four to seven companies and give them $55,000 in funding, plus 16 weeks of mentorship and support.
The program wraps with a Demo Day, where we bring together folks from all around the DisabilityTech ecosystem to celebrate and showcase the startups in the cohort, supporting their next stage of growth.
Our most recent Demo Day actually took place at Perkins in partnership with the Howe Innovation Center.
Because there’s so much alignment with our mission and the work that Howe Innovation Center is doing. And – in a space that honestly just needs more of that – we’re lucky that the organizations generally want to build each other up, as opposed to being in competition with each other.
So we’ve really appreciated being able to work with the team at Howe, and being able to have our Demo Day there was amazing.
What sparked your interest in DisabilityTech?
I have worked with the disabled community my whole life, and also identify as someone who’s neurodivergent.
I started my career as a teacher – I thought that was the way that you work with people with disabilities. And while I was teaching, I built some software that allowed me to better support kids with disabilities in my classroom, and that ended up turning into a startup.
As the founder and CEO of an EdTech startup, I went through a bunch of accelerators, including Mass Challenge and Y Combinator – so it gave me insight across a lot of the different aspects of accelerators. And in 2020, I decided to start my own.
I cold-emailed Remarkable Australia, and was just like, “Hey, I’d love to learn from what you guys are doing in Australia and would love to bring something like this to the U.S.”
I couldn’t find any others that were doing it the way I wanted to do it. There were some, but they were smaller operations. So after a few conversations with the team in Australia, we got to the point where they said, “We actually have a U.S. arm and would like to build Remarkable out there. Are you interested?”
Without hesitation, I said yes.
What do you enjoy most about working with the Howe Innovation Center?
We’ve worked with the team in a number of different ways, mostly as thought partners. Everybody is committed to the same values and goals, and it’s been great to share ideas and have those important conversations with other folks who are so deep in this mission.
Being connected to the Perkins community also makes such a difference – like when it came to our recent Demo Day, I was having so much trouble finding an accessible, affordable space in Boston.
Connecting with Sandy to secure the Howe space clicked everything into place, because being among like-minded people made it so easy – we could be confident that it would be accessible. For example, they’d already thought about how we’d need captioning and other accommodations built into the program. It felt really seamless and it’s so rare to be able to work with an event space that just gets it.
What is a book that’s had an impact on you?
I give every single founder I work with Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau – and I’ve found that most of those founders now give it to their teams.
For some, it might seem like the basics, but it’s really important for everyone to have that baseline knowledge that there’s a lot of history and a lot of work has been done to get the perspectives of disability this far.
We need to know and respect that if we’re going to work in this space.
What do you like to do for fun?
We moved to Rhode Island with the sole purpose of being closer to the beach – and I love boogie boarding.
If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Right now, I’m very into watermelon with Tajin on it. Feel like I could eat that for one snack every day for the rest of my life.
What are you looking forward to most in DisabilityTech and your work with Howe Innovation Center?
There’s so much ahead for this space. And I feel like the team at Howe brings a similar rigor and intentionality to this work, and that’s a perfect combination to move forward together and to grow this space in the way that it deserves to be grown.
Stay in the conversation
Innovation can’t happen without all of us. Together, we can solve real accessibility problems.
If you want more from-the-front-lines perspective on what’s happening across the DisabilityTech market, join the Howe Innovation Center community. You’ll get members-only access to resources and insight that’s not available anywhere else, including our white paper, Defining DisabilityTech: The Rise of Inclusive Innovation.
