The great Jack Chen stops by to share his sight loss story and how a simple podcast episode with Dan Berlin turned into a documentary film and bold social action campaign to fundamentally alter the way that employers think about talent in the blind c...
The great Jack Chen stops by to share his sight loss story and how a simple podcast episode with Dan Berlin turned into a documentary film and bold social action campaign to fundamentally alter the way that employers think about talent in the blind community. Both blind, Jack and Dan knew that their positions as Assistant General Counsel for Facebook and CEO of a large food company were not aberrations. They set out to prove to the world that people who are blind could be successful both on and off the bike, in the saddle and in the boardroom.
The gripping documentary film, Surpassing Sight, parallels their journey of building a team to tackle the toughest cycling race in the world, RAAM (Race Across America), with their equally grueling journey through the employment world.
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Associate General Counsel @ Facebook (Meta)
Jack is an associate general counsel for Facebook (Meta) and happens to be blind. Jack received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Harvard and Berkeley, respectively. Following grad school, Jack joined Xanboo, a startup building home automation products, as an computer engineer and received forty patents on a range of technologies. While working for Xanboo, Jack attended law school in the evenings and went on to work for two large law firms, joined google as legal counsel in 2010, and transitioned to his current role as Assistant General Counsel for Meta in 2021.
Jack and his team are setting out to tackle unemployment in the blind community. They produced a full length documentary based on their cross country cycling race. They will demonstrate the full capabilities of people who are blind, both on the bike and in the workplace. Success in plain sight is their motto. They plan to drive the 70% unemployment rate in the blind community to 7% or lower.
Jack is married with four boys.