Although Chad E. Foster lost his eyesight as a teenager, that didn’t stop him from becoming an executive for Red Hat, the world’s largest open source software company and securing over $45 Billion in contracts throughout his career.

He is the first blind graduate of the Harvard Business School leadership program and did what Oracle said could not be done; he built a software solution that created job opportunities for hundreds of millions of people. His direct and confident style, combined with a go-for-it inspiring belief system (he is an avid downhill skier… and that’s not a joke), has made him a high-impact speaker for leaders at companies such as Google, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, GE and Microsoft.

An inherited retinal disease robbed Chad E. Foster of his eyesight as a young adult, but it could not take his ambition. He refused to live life on anyone else’s terms. While enrolled at the University of Tennessee, Chad was forced to relearn how to learn without the benefit of eyesight and his grades actually improved.

He made the Dean’s List with straight-A’s and was hired by a Global Fortune 500 consulting firm out of college. In his spare time, with determination, ambition, and drive, he taught himself how to write code in order to program his screen reading software. As a result he did what Oracle said could not be done – building a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solution that created job opportunities for hundreds of millions of people.

Chad is currently the Senior Director of worldwide deal management at Red Hat, the world’s only multibillion dollar open source software company, and continues to shatter traditional notions of what people think is possible.