Tim Springer and the business hidden inside a failed idea

Tim Springer’s original business idea came with an awkward discovery: other people had thought of it, too. In the late 1990s, while he was at Stanford, a conversation about travel suggested a website that could help people find accessible places to visit. It was a practical proposition. It also had company. At least four other firms were pursuing similar projects. The young entrepreneur had found a problem worth solving and a queue of people already trying to solve it.

What happened next explains more about Springer than the dorm-room setting does. Building the site had exposed his team to the difficulty of making websites accessible. The work was cumbersome. The tools disappointed them. Here was another problem, hiding inside the first. They changed direction, from publishing travel information to helping other organizations make their own technology usable. The detour became the business.

A holiday idea acquires a toolbox

By Springer’s account, his work in accessibility began in 1999. The early travel project taught him that developers needed better support for producing accessible code. His team had tried what was available and found limitations. Rather than keeping those frustrations in a private collection, they built software to address them.

Springer led the development of InFocus, an early commercial tool for testing web accessibility. His technical work also included writing the Document Compliance Query Language, or DCQL, for Level Access. Beneath the executive title was someone who had worked on the machinery. That matters in a field where a statement of good intentions still leaves a developer staring at code, wondering what to change.

The emerging business combined tools with training and consulting. A customer could need software, help interpreting a problem, or people who understood how to fix it. Springer's early answer allowed room for all three. It gave the company several ways to help, and several ways to learn what customers actually needed.

The people doing the testing

The company became known as SSB BART Group before adopting the Level Access name. By 2014, its work had brought Springer to the White House’s Champions of Change program. The recognition concerned employment and access to technology, subjects that were connected inside his own business.

At the time, nearly half the company’s accessibility analysts, developers, and consultants were people with disabilities. Springer described their expertise as a competitive advantage. Their knowledge helped the company understand whether a solution worked in practice. The people evaluating a digital experience brought something a checklist alone could not supply: direct familiarity with the barriers under discussion.

His archived White House biography makes the distinction concrete. Meeting regulatory standards was part of the job; supporting actual use was also part of it. For Springer, the reason to make technology accessible extended to participation in society. The business had traveled some distance from helping someone plan a vacation, while staying close to the question that had started it: can the person who wants to use this actually use it?

Twenty years before the growth cheque

In April 2017, JMI Equity announced a $40 million growth investment in SSB BART Group. The company was preparing to launch its Level Access brand. It already had two decades of experience, with customers spanning businesses, education, and government. The dorm-room enterprise had become an established supplier before that investment arrived.

Its Accessibility Management Platform, known as AMP, gave organizations a way to manage accessibility throughout software development. Springer said the capital would help expand the team, reach more customers, and develop features faster. These were specific uses for the money. Growth meant more capacity to deliver a service the company already understood.

There is a useful correction here to the familiar startup timetable. The investment came in the company’s twentieth year. A round of funding makes a convenient headline, but the years before it contained the work of becoming a business someone wanted to fund. Springer’s career leaves room for the less photogenic milestones: learning a market, keeping customers, and coming back the next year.

Learning to run the larger version

In August 2022, Level Access completed its merger with eSSENTIAL Accessibility. Springer became CEO of the combined company; eSSENTIAL Accessibility co-founder Mark Steele became president. KKR and JMI Equity continued as investors. The combination joined two businesses organized around a shared problem, bringing their software and services into a larger operation.

The ambition was ongoing accessibility management. An organization could be starting its first program or trying to sustain an existing one. Either way, the job continued as its technology changed. That made the combined company's promise a relationship over time, with all the operating demands that a relationship entails.

Springer was also named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Mid-Atlantic finalist in 2022. Looking back at the company’s development, he emphasized repeated effort over time. The award announcement recalled his decision to leave Stanford to pursue the venture. More than twenty years later, he was still running it. The youthful leap had turned into an extended appointment with the details.

The founder changes his own job

On October 8, 2024, Level Access announced Mark Zablan as its next CEO. Springer would remain on the board and support the transition. Zablan brought experience at Adobe, Experian, Sitecore, and Emplifi. Springer explained the appointment in terms of what the company’s existing scale and future growth required from its leader.

In his own message that day, Springer remembered an early operating system of “ramen, caffeine, and moxie.” The phrase is affectionate, and it supplies an unusually honest specification for a young company. None of the three comes with an enterprise service agreement. Eventually, a larger organization needs a different arrangement.

“ramen, caffeine, and moxie”

Tim Springer, recalling the early Level Access

He also identified the work he wanted to return to: strategy, advocacy, and domain expertise. The board seat kept him connected to the company while the daily executive role passed to someone else. A founder’s relationship with a business can change without erasing the years that came before it. Here, Springer put that change into words and then into an organizational chart.

A calendar can tell on you

Through One to One Hundred, Springer now works on the problems other technology founders encounter as their companies grow. His material covers sales, organization design, execution, and the changing responsibilities of a CEO. Read it for long enough and a particular irritation becomes apparent: time spent looking busy without accomplishing much.

His January 2026 writing on meeting calendars compares an unmanaged schedule to a house expanded by residents each attaching another room wherever they please. The result is a place nobody designed and everyone has to inhabit. A manager adds a sync; another team adds a check-in. Eventually the calendar has tenants, corridors, and very little daylight.

He recommends deliberately designing how information moves through a company and preserving time for focused work. It is an engineer’s way of looking at a management problem. The system has inputs, routes, bottlenecks, and costs. A calendar invite may be cheap to send. The hours it claims from everyone else deserve rather more respect.

His companion Meeting Bill of Rights gives employees grounds to decline meetings without an agenda or a defined role. There is something pleasingly concrete about this form of leadership advice. You can inspect tomorrow’s invitations and try it. The reader is spared a pilgrimage to discover their inner executive.

When the dashboard gets too polite

Another strand of Springer’s recent work concerns what happens when a growing company’s leader gets further from the people doing the work. Managers hire managers. Reports become summaries. Details disappear on the journey upward. The executive can receive reassuring information while a team has been discussing the same unresolved problem for months.

His proposed remedies include skip-level conversations, observing work directly, and office hours. He adds rules: protect confidentiality, explain the purpose of the conversation, and coach managers rather than bypassing them. Listening carries an obligation to follow up. Otherwise, the invitation to speak becomes one more organizational disappointment.

That attention to evidence also runs through his writing on performance data. He recommends agreeing on benchmarks before debating results, and comparing a company with peers at a similar stage. A persuasive explanation can make a missed target sound comfortable. Springer wants the number to remain visible while the explanation is being offered.

The work after the title

Springer brought these operating questions to Brian Ondrako’s Just Get Started podcast in October 2025, discussing product-market fit, sales, and how the founder’s job changes at different revenue stages. In April 2026, he appeared on The Next Decision with Jarie Bolander to discuss the structures and decisions that support growth. His new work keeps returning to the mechanics behind the milestones.

That emphasis suits the route he took. The original website changed purpose. The programmer became a chief executive. The chief executive became a board member and an adviser to other founders. Each turn required a judgment about what the work needed next. Springer now spends time helping others make those judgments, including the deceptively small one of whether eight people really need to attend the meeting.