Meet The Google Dealmaker Advocating For Disabled Employees

Growing up in the south German city of Tuttlingen, Patrick Schilling couldn't use his local library.

Born with shortened arms and legs, Schilling's disability left him reliant on an electric wheelchair from an early age.

But the nearest library to Schilling's family home was only accessible via stairs, meaning he had to use the internet to hunt down reading material.

Speaking to Insider from his home in Zurich, where he has worked as a strategic dealmaker at Google's cloud computing division – although he recently made a sideways move into product development – Schilling said this experience was emblematic of the unique dynamics that drove his early passion for technology and innovation.

"There's two angles to it. The first is that if you use an electric wheelchair, the first time it breaks down, you develop an intrinsic motivation to make sure that technology that's being built for millions of people actually works," he said.

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"On the other hand, I enjoy the benefits of technological advancements pretty early on. My local library was only accessible via stairs. When the internet came along, I could suddenly read almost anything I wanted to in the digital realm."

According to the World Health Organization, close to a billion people worldwide are in need of assistive devices to go about their day, but only a fraction of them have access to such technology.

Growing up in a working-class family with little "intellectual exposure to this area," Schilling said he could have a hard time navigating an unkind world.

"I got faced with the good, the bad, and the ugly of growing up with a physical disability pretty early on," he said. "I was born to two wonderful parents, who were not prepared for this to happen at all. But ever since day one, they took this approach where they said: 'You can either make your life count, or don't.'

"I try to make every day count."

Schilling says living with disability has taught him invaluable life skills.

Four years into his career at Google, Schilling attributes much of his success to an internal "narrative shift" he started working on in his teenage years.

In his late adolescence, Schilling found himself "in a not-so-great spot." "I was like, 'Why is it me? Why do I have to live through this?'"

But disposing of a broken-down wheelchair prompted a rethink. "This chair had let me down a couple of times. It had prevented me from taking the bus, or jumping in a cab and meeting a friend for dinner," he said.

"But everything I'd done over the years – from living and studying abroad to just maintaining great friendships – was only possible because of it. That shifted my thinking away from a narrative focused on the negatives."

Schilling's realization – that a lifelong dependency on a wheelchair had helped him build an impressive roster of life skills – helped him meet his potential.

"If you're in a wheelchair and you wanna take a train, that's a whole project in itself. Is the train accessible? Is the station accessible? That's project management," he said. "If you're going to have to ask people on the street for help, you're going to need communication skills.

"These are strengths, and they're strengths that both companies, and society at large, can benefit from."

Schillings is hopeful for the next generation of disabled employees.

While Schilling's experience at Google has been overwhelmingly positive, he is far from complacent about the continued need for activism in the workplace, admitting "hardly a week goes by" without him being invited to speak on one panel or another, or meet another young person facing similar challenges.

Based on regular meetings with the "seven or eight" mentees he meets with regularly, Schilling feels the future of workplace disability advocacy is in good hands.

"I'm 27 now, right? I was the first person ever with a disability to attend my high school. But the folks that are 10 years younger than I am and, well, they are not taking it."

He recounts the story of one young person he knows. This person was interviewing for a job, and felt the recruiter wasn't at ease with the fact he didn't have arms.

"So he looked at the recruiter, and he said: 'Alright listen. I don't have any arms, and guess what? I don't need them to excel at this job. So why don't we just take a second and get over that, and then focus on how I can make your company better.'" Schillings can't help but laugh: "When he told me that, I was like, 'Wow, bravo.'

"It's great to see how these younger people are growing up, and they're not taking 'no' for an answer."