Episode Details

David welcomes Dan Feshbach, founder and board chair of Multiple, a nonprofit autism innovation platform connecting families, entrepreneurs, funders, mentors, and community members. Dan shares his personal origin story after his son Reed’s early language regression and autism diagnosis in the 1990s, describing scarce services and the practical challenges of daily life, which later led him and other families to help start Oak Hill School. Drawing on his entrepreneurial background, Dan co-founded TeachTown to address gaps in autism education and speech-language resources; the platform now serves over 170,000 students across 3,000 districts. Dan explains Multiple’s 12-week accelerator, Launchpad pre-accelerator, Demo Day, and its autism tech database of 600+ companies across 15 categories, noting roughly 60 companies supported and significant capital flowing to cohorts. He emphasizes impact-first innovation built for dignity, access, communication, and “speed of families,” with special concern for lower-resource caregivers.

Find Dan at https://www.multiplehub.org/

Topics

Autism Innovation at the Speed of Family: Dan Feshbach on TeachTown, Multiple, and Building for Dignity

Host David Kaufer welcomes Dan Feshbach, founder and board chair of Multiple, a nonprofit autism innovation platform connecting families, entrepreneurs, funders, experts, and community members. Dan shares his personal origin story after his son Reid’s 1993 autism diagnosis, the scarcity of services, and how families co-founded what became Oak Hill School. He describes building TeachTown from a gap in speech and language resources, growing it into a digital education platform serving over 170,000 students in 3,000 districts, and later shifting to launch Multiple. Dan explains Multiple’s 12-week accelerator (and Launchpad pre-accelerator), its autism tech database of 600+ companies, and how rigorous selection emphasizes impact, strong founders, traction, and scalable solutions. The conversation covers why autism innovation is growing, the need for more federal funding, and Dan’s “speed of family” focus, especially for underserved families and nonspeakers, including Reid’s recent spelling progress.

00:00 Podcast Welcome

00:40 Meet Dan Feshbach

03:13 Reid Diagnosis Early Days

06:44 Starting Oak Hill School

08:33 TeachTown Origin Story

11:21 From Exit to Multiple

14:09 What Is an Accelerator

17:56 Cohorts Success Stories

21:55 Why Autism Innovation Grows

27:50 AI Tools for Parents

30:54 Research to Real Products

33:16 Autism Investment Landscape

33:51 Pushing Federal Funding

34:51 Vote Autism Across Aisle

37:04 Impact First Investing

39:13 How Multiple Picks Startups

42:11 Scaling and Visibility

43:36 Launching a First Mile Fund

44:59 North Star Serving Families

46:58 Speed of Family Access

50:02 Lessons from Reid

53:56 Autism Tip Try Tech

56:52 Light on the Spectrum

58:53 Early Testing New Tools

01:01:47 Closing Thanks and Resources