Users Audemy reaches, from a company Crystal Yang started at 17.
Crystal Yang was in high school in Houston when she met Kelsie, a blind classmate who was clearly brilliant but falling behind in math and language, not for lack of ability, but because the tools were not built for her. Around the same time, Yang watched a blind friend get shut out of a Wordle craze everyone else was playing. The unfairness stuck with her.
So she did something about it. Over a summer, Yang built an audio version of Wordle she called Heard-le, then kept going, turning it into Audemy, a nonprofit making learning and gaming accessible for blind and visually impaired students. She was seventeen.
It grew into real infrastructure. Audemy now has more than 50 educational audio games used in every state school for the blind, plus over 100 accessibility toolkits that unlock mainstream titles like Minecraft, Valorant, and Roblox, reaching more than 200,000 users. She has raised over 200,000 dollars from backers including Intel, Google, and the Taco Bell Foundation, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Games list. Today she is a student in Penn's M&T program.
"She saw one friend left out and built a company so no one else would be."
The lesson is where it started: not with a market or a business plan, but with one person she cared about being excluded, and a refusal to accept it. The best products often come from exactly that place, a specific unfairness someone decided to fix instead of tolerate.
This is the builder instinct ANF loves to spotlight. Notice who is being left out, then build the thing that lets them in. Yang did it at seventeen and has not stopped.
She turned one friend's exclusion into a door for 200,000 people.