“I don’t think I could go back”
How the president of Kenguru stumbled into entrepreneurship
By Mariel Williams
Editor
“I first did a Google search for, I think it was ‘wheelchair-accessible transportation,’ or ‘wheelchair car’—you know, I was just searching for what was out there.”
Stacy Zoern is president of Kenguru, Inc., an Austin-based startup company developing small electric cars for people in wheelchairs. But six years ago she was working as an attorney, with no experience or interest in a technology career.
That all changed when she started shopping for a new vehicle.
Zoern was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a form of muscular dystrophy. Although she can operate an electric wheelchair, she struggles to safely control a car. “I previously had a full size van that I drove . . . when I was 19,” she said. “I had it for about four months before I ended up getting into a car accident and I totalled the van.”
Wrecking her van only confirmed Zoern’s feeling that she needed more than hand-control adaptations in order to drive. “I’ve got weakened upper body strength,” she said. “I didn’t ever feel really safe with that large of a vehicle and at those high speeds that a car goes, so when I had that car accident I just decided the technology just wasn’t appropriate for me at that time.” Eventually, Zoern did purchase another van, but she had to rely on others to drive it.
But in 2010, Zoern’s ongoing car search suddenly produced a better answer: Kenguru (pronounced “kangaroo”), a startup in Hungary that was making an electric car for wheelchair users. The Kenguru vehicle, small and easy to control, looked ideal for Zoern’s needs.
“I found the [Kenguru] website and emailed; did not get a response,” Zoern said. “Emailed again; did not get a response. [I] called, and they had no idea what I was talking about.” Zoern had hit a dead end.
Istvan Kissaroslaki, a German national of Hungarian extraction, worked for many years in medical device manufacturing in Europe before he decided to start his own company. “The original concept was—in Europe you have to be eighteen years old to drive a car, so in Europe, driving a moped is very popular amongst teenagers,” Kissaroslaki said.
“You have to be between fourteen and sixteen, depending on the country, to drive a moped. The question that came up one day was, what do people, or teenagers, in wheelchairs do? Well, the answer is very sad, that they don’t do nothing.”
Kissaroslaki started hunting for a way to help disabled teens out of their homes and off public transportation. “And so the idea for the Kenguru was born.”
Zoern said that an equivalent of the modified Dodge Caravan she drove in her teens costs approximately $100,000. The Kenguru, in contrast, will be about $25,000. Instead of using a cumbersome and time-consuming lift to get the driver into the vehicle, it will feature a hatchback and a ramp that allows a chair to quickly roll in behind the steering wheel.
The design on the website looked like the best option for Zoern, so she kept trying. “I called back again, and they gave me Istvan’s cell phone number,” she said.
Kissaroslaki was on his way home in Hungary. “It was a nice afternoon in Budapest; I was like always busy doing many things,” he said. “I just pulled up in my driveway when the phone rang, and I saw it was a number from the U.S., so I picked it up. And then we spoke for 43 minutes.”
Kissaroslaki’s business had got off to a good start in Hungary—they had a design concept, they had funding, but then recession hit. Listening to Zoern’s story in 2010, all he could do was try to explain that he didn’t have a car to sell her.
“It’s so funny—I really liked her voice; and she was very eager to get her hands on a vehicle,” he said. “And I told her well, there’s [many] people in front of you, get in line, and by the way, I just shut down the company, well, I didn’t shut down, but I put the project back on the shelf because our funding source that was promised didn’t come through.”
It was a bad time to start a new business. Kissaroslaki was content to wait for the economy to improve, but Zoern had already been waiting for years.
“It was just ‘on the shelf’—he said that the funding had fallen through because the economy crashed,” Zoern said. “He had his family funding going into it, and also there was . . . a bank loan that was backed up by a government grant, and the bank was told that they couldn’t make any more loans.”
Kissaroslaki had no plans of going into production anytime soon. “He was just fundraising until he could raise enough money to bring it back to life,” Zoern said. “And he estimated that it would probably be four or five years before the vehicle would be on the market.”
This was not what Zoern wanted to hear. “I told her the whole story of where we started, what happened,” Kissaroslaki said. “And we agreed that she would call me back as soon as she has two or three million dollars.”
At the time, Zoern was living a few blocks from her job. Without a car, she had to live in an expensive downtown apartment in order to get to work on her own every day. Transportation hampered her social life as well. “I miss out on a lot because I can’t get there,” she said. “It’s hard to be spontaneous, and it’s been difficult to feel like a burden because you already need a lot of help, when you have a disability, with things in your life anyway, so when you add transportation to that it’s a pretty big deal.”
In bad weather, in the Texas summer heat, Zoern lived her life traveling the downtown sidewalks in her chair. She was able to find groceries, a dry cleaner, and restaurants within an easy distance from her apartment, but there were still complications. “It’s dangerous because I’m low to the ground, and constantly crossing busy city streets,” she said. “I had many near misses, [almost] being hit by a car as a pedestrian.”
Even public transportation came with unpredictable difficulties. “I actually had a horrible experience once where I got on a bus—alone—to a new destination, and when I got off, there was not a curb cut where I needed it to be to get to my destination, so I was stuck,” Zoern said. “I also couldn’t get down to cross the street to get on a bus to go back home, and it was a nightmare. I had to call a friend to go to my house, find my car keys, get my van and come pick me up.”
Zoern needed a car.
“Just imagine the excitement I felt when I found this vehicle, and all the daydreaming I was doing about how my life could be different and improved with the use of it—as he was uttering the words, ‘You know, you can’t have this for five more years,’ I was just devastated,” Zoern said.
So she turned her attention to the company’s struggles. If Kissaroslaki couldn’t sell her a car without capital, she would find capital. “I think it was actually that evening that I was at an event with one of the partners at my law firm, and I told him about what I found,” she said. “He had been an entrepreneur, had started several . . . startup companies that had become successful, so I knew he had that knowledge base and would know where to start.”
Zoern’s colleague was happy to help. “I called Istvan back,” Zoern said. “It was like a Thursday or a Friday, and then I gave it the weekend and I called him back on Monday.”
Zoern was willing to do whatever it took to get the Kenguru car on the market. “She didn’t have the two or three million dollars, but she kept on calling,” Kissaroslaki said. If money was needed, Zoern would find money. If contacts were needed, Zoern would find contacts. “Several months went by of me kind of badgering [Istvan] about where I could get a vehicle and what their needs were,” Zoern said. So Kissaroslaki began looking into ways to get up and running again.
“First, I told her I want research some opportunities in Europe, but eventually I said no, let’s get on the flight and come meet you,” he said. “And I met her, and I really, really liked her, and I was like, you know what, if you help me raise the money, you can have a piece of the company.”
Kissaroslaki relocated his family and his business to Texas. Since then, he and Zoern have continued to recruit investors wherever they can, prototypes have been built, and they keep getting a little closer to their goal. Recently, Kenguru was acquired by KLD Energy Technologies, an Austin-based company that develops electric vehicle propulsion systems. And in 2013, Zoern was able to meet U.S. President Barack Obama at an event organized by an Austin think tank.
“He was very supportive and actually pretty excited to learn about what we were doing,” Zoern said. “Overall, it’s actually kind of a blur, because, you know—meeting the president—but I remember him saying that he looked forward to seeing these on the road.”
The Kenguru team hopes to have their product on the market in 2016. Meanwhile, they continuously hear from hopeful customers ready to buy a car as soon as they are available.
“I just talked to a gentleman recently who is a double amputee, and his wife is in a nursing home because he can’t help care for her,” Zoern said. “He lives less than seven miles away, but he’s got no way to visit her unless he finds people to take him, and so he really wants one so that he can go all the time, whenever he wants, to see his wife.”
Oddly enough, the 2016 product release still won’t entirely fit Zoern’s needs. “I’m not strong enough for this one yet, the first model. You have to have normal upper body strength for it,” she said. “The next generation model that we’ve applied for funding for, it will be driven with a joystick that will allow people like myself that have less upper body strength to drive it.”
It’s been more than the five years that Zoern originally thought was much too long a wait, and she will have to wait still longer for the joystick model of the Kenguru to go into production. But in the meantime, while shopping for a car, she found her calling. She has no plans to go back to work as a practicing attorney.
“I’m very grateful that I chose [the law], but this path that I’m now on, with this vehicle and the lives that are going to be changed by it—I’m just so much more passionate about it,” Zoern said. “It can’t even compare. . . . Just the meaning that that brings to my life, and the ups and downs in the life of an entrepreneur—it’s just a whole other world. . . . I don’t think I could go back.”
