VisionSpring sold reading glasses door to door, skipping the eye exam

Jordan Kassalow, an optometrist, encountered the scale of the problem directly during a vision-screening trip to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where a boy who appeared to have a learning disability turned out simply to need corrective lenses. Presbyopia, the age-related loss of near vision that typically begins around 40, is one of the most common and cheapest-to-correct vision problems worldwide, yet it went undiagnosed and uncorrected for hundreds of millions of low-income adults.

The conventional response -- clinics offering individualized eye exams followed by custom-fitted glasses -- could never reach that population at scale: credentialed optometrists were structurally scarce in rural and low-income regions, and a custom pair of glasses cost far more than a day's wages for people earning around $4 a day. Kassalow founded the Scojo Foundation (later renamed VisionSpring) in 2001 to test a different starting assumption: that most presbyopia correction did not need a clinical process at all.