New Stanford MBA Club Envisions A World Accessible To All

Batu Demir, MBA ‘25
Club co-founder, incoming president

Please describe the circumstances of your disability and how it impacted your life: I was born and raised in Turkey. One of the different things about my childhood was that I was born blind, so growing up, that shaped my life from an early age. My first memories are from around the age of five or six because that’s when you start realizing you’re different from others. For me, this manifested in how my peers started playing in the streets: Two popular activities in Turkey were soccer and biking.

I think I’m very lucky because, one, I have an older brother who’s also blind, and two, my family wasn’t overly protective. When you are a kid with a disability, families can be overly protective, which can backfire because it takes away your independence. My family was good at being present at the moment, but they allowed us to do our own thing.

My brother and I explored different ways to do the same things our peers were doing. For example, we played soccer by putting the ball in a grocery bag so it would make a sound when it moved. For biking, we developed our own echolocation methods, making sounds with our fingers or mouth to navigate by the echo. We were just getting by because I already knew the neighborhood. However, things weren’t always in the same places, like when someone parked their car. This method works better with big obstacles. Detecting poles was not easy, but once you bump into a pole, you know it’s there. This was a good learning method through reinforcement, with a lot at stake.

I’m sharing this because it taught me important lessons. Being blind doesn’t mean I can’t do what others do; I just have to find different ways to do things.

The second big thing that changed my life was getting my first computer. I use a screen reader, which reads whatever is on the screen to me. It opened up a world of possibilities, it was a window opening up to the whole world. I started playing role-playing games, which required interacting with others, and that’s how I started teaching myself English. I had a dictionary in one window and the game in another.

Tell us about your professional life prior to pursuing your MBA: I went to college and studied political science because I was aspiring to be a diplomat. I realized I was making a mistake and pivoted to entrepreneurship and working at startups. During my sophomore and junior years of undergrad, I worked at a startup that was manufacturing a smart cane for the blind.

I did another exchange at Northwestern University during my junior year. In the summer following that exchange, I interned at Google in their sales department. After returning to Turkey, I went into consulting and worked at McKinsey as a business analyst for about three years.

Why did you want to pursue an MBA and why Stanford? I saw the MBA as a way to leave a larger footprint in the places I worked and to increase the impact I could have in the world.

I applied to only two schools, one of which was Stanford. I realized it was a gamble, but Stanford’s website and philosophy resonated with both my brain and my heart. The school’s motto, “Change lives, change organizations, change the world” – that’s what I want to do. I wanted to be part of a community that not only talked about impact but actively worked towards creating it.

Describe your involvement with the formation of the Disabilities and Caregivers Club. The thing about blindness, or people with disabilities in general and caregivers, is that as you go further up the ranks, you start realizing you’re more and more alone. This happens for a few reasons. One, there are institutional and societal barriers. When people have low expectations of you, you end up living up to those expectations. Two, is that sometimes people have limitations, which is totally fine. There are things that you need to be active and able to do.

The combination of these factors results in a lack of representation in organizations. In every organization I’ve been part of, I’ve always been involved with the resource group for people with disabilities. I was often one of the leaders pushing for more representation, more resources, more everything. When I got to Stanford, I realized we didn’t have such a group at GSB. I felt like creating this club could be my gift to the school. It’s part of who I am. I learned that Paulina and Sophia were also talking about this, so we got together and started planning. It just took off from there.

What’s been the most impactful or memorable experience so far from your work with the club? There are a few things. One, we actually did an event even before becoming an official club. The event was focused on universal design. One of our goals is to create awareness in the school and among our classmates. We also realized that this wouldn’t happen just by talking about disability rights. While it’s important to know about them, it’s more effective to show examples of how this concept can positively affect businesses. That’s what we aimed to do with the universal design event, turning it into a business case. Companies that pay more attention to accessibility actually perform better. Sometimes, innovations designed for people with disabilities, like text-to-speech or speech-to-text, end up benefiting everyone. Why don’t we start thinking about this from the moment we start to design products?

As the incoming president, what are your goals for the club in the coming year? I think my biggest priority will be sustainability. It was a natural transition because I was already involved when this club was being established, so I was able to take over from Paulina and Sophia. My biggest priority will be to determine who will take over this club next. I need to start thinking about that early because we don’t have the biggest representation, and not everyone with a disability or who is a caregiver will want to be involved. We’ll try to address that.

Second, we need to keep creating awareness at the intersection of business and accessibility.

Third, we need to improve accessibility at school. This might include having a case study about accessibility or disability as part of one of our classes or talking to people with different disabilities at school, whether visible or invisible. There is a big discussion about who gets more priority—people with visible disabilities or those with invisible disabilities. We need to make sure everyone gets the accommodations they need.

What are your plans for after Stanford? What are your career aspirations? Plans are always evolving, but currently, I want to go into AI. When I talk about life-transformational moments, one was playing soccer and biking, and the second was getting a computer. I think the next big thing is going to be AI because such simple things can be a challenge for me, and I think AI will be able to help solve them.

For example, in consulting, we dealt with a lot of slides, and my software isn’t good at making slides. I imagine having an improved AI assistant where I can describe what I want on a slide, and the AI will create it for me. Or, when I’m walking and the traffic light doesn’t have an audio signal, I could ask the AI to tell me the light’s color. In the future, AI could notify me when the light changes to green.I believe we’ll get there. The thing I always say is, if cars can self-drive, why can’t I?

These are the things I’m excited about. I want to be part of the AI journey and create AI products.

NEXT PAGE: Sophia Fang, MBA ‘24, Disabilities and Caregivers Club Co-founder, founder of Peachy Day, a care app for patients with chronic migraines