Lexia Solutions - Giving Everyone a Seat at the Table

Some products are altruistic and some are shrewd. The best ones, like Uplift, are both. In this episode, Jeff Runnels, co-founder of Lexia Solutions and inventor of Uplift, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman for a conversation that starts in a childhood classroom and ends up rewriting how venues think about accessibility.

Jeff tells the story from the beginning: being pulled out of class into the "blue group" as a kid with undiagnosed dyslexia, a Quiz Bowl moment that made him question his worth, and a diagnosis in the tenth grade. Years later, a dinner with his wife Bliss and a formative friendship gave him the insight behind Uplift, a relocatable, battery-powered lift that gives a wheelchair user a real seat at the table without asking them to leave their chair or wait for a building to be remodeled.

Then it turns into a masterclass in go-to-market. Jeff walks through the genuinely clever business case: how Uplift restores dozens of ground-floor seats, disperses accessible seating into every section, and uses ADA equivalent facilitation so that accessibility becomes something venues are motivated to buy, not just required to provide.

What we get into:

• Jeff's origin: the "blue group," a Quiz Bowl gut-punch, and a dyslexia diagnosis in the tenth grade
• The dinner with Bliss, a friendship named Hal, and the dignity of meeting someone at eye level
• What Uplift actually is: the ClearSight seating system, a relocatable lift that sets up in under a minute
• The seat math: restoring roughly 45 ground-floor seats and dispersing accessible seats into every section
• The legal moat: ADA equivalent facilitation (Section 103), the swimming-pool-lift precedent, and why Uplift needs no construction
• Making accessibility pay: venue revenue, luxury suites, and accessibility as a sponsorship asset
• Building it safe: the multi-year UL and CSA certification journey, and why every test matters
• The unglamorous middle of hardware: a bad shop, a second mortgage, a U-Haul, and 72 hours to a patent
• Why fixed-bid hardware is impossible to estimate, straight from both sides of the table
• Assistive tech that ends up helping everyone, and why looking at the world a little differently is the whole point

A few lines that stuck with us:

"They don't really want to be picked up. They just want to be on your level."

"You're weaponizing capitalism to make the ADA happen."

"If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen."

"We named it Lexia Solutions. Dyslexia."

About the guest: Jeff Runnels is the co-founder of Lexia Solutions and the inventor of Uplift, a relocatable lift that brings wheelchair accessibility to bars, luxury suites, and concert floors with no construction required. The company name comes from dysLEXIA. Jeff was diagnosed with dyslexia in the tenth grade and has spent years building Uplift toward UL and CSA safety certification.

The Hardtech Podcast is hosted by DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman of Glassboard.