From West Point to NULU: Rethinking Disability, Innovation, and the Ability Curve
- dougkatz8
- Jul 14
- 12 min read
My Conversation with the Vet SOS Podcast
I sat down with the Vet SOS Podcast for a conversation that started with "who is Doug?" and ended somewhere much bigger — the ability curve, ADHD as a superpower, why corporate America broke me, and why I now believe adaptive design is one of the most under-appreciated leadership disciplines of our time. It ran a little over an hour, and anyone who knows me knows I can talk. If you're mostly interested in the highlights, use the article below to find the parts that matter to you. Timestamps, the ideas at each stop, and the through-line that connects them.
⏱ [2:42] — Who Is Doug? (I Didn't Know Until Four Years Ago)
"I didn't really know until three or four years ago when I started doing this — in the invention space, in the entrepreneurial space. You can't be successful in anything unless you know who you are."
West Point, five years in the Army, two decades in corporate America and lending, and it took me until my late 40s to figure out who I actually was. That's not a failure of self-awareness — it's a failure of environment. I was wired for a specific kind of work, and I kept trying to fit into environments that punished the wiring. Once I stopped doing that, the answer showed up quickly: I'm a problem solver. I need autonomy. I need uncertainty. The Army gave me that. Entrepreneurship gave me that back.
Who you are can change over time, and that's okay. What shouldn't change is your value system and your character. But the identity — the job title, the uniform, the industry — that's just what people see. It isn't you.
⏱ [6:04] — The Military Was Water to a Fish. Corporate America Was a Closet.
"The military was like water to a fish. High uncertainty, quick decision making, novel experiences. I was a fire support officer — you're on five radios at a time. Someone with ADHD can have five conversations."
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and it answered a lot of questions. The Army wasn't a struggle for me — it was the natural habitat. Then I went to corporate America and everyone told me it would translate. It didn't. Large organizations optimize for risk aversion. They limit rapid decision-making through regulatory capture, through hierarchy, through the mortgage-and-kids anxiety of the person you report to. That's not a moral failure of corporate America — it's just a different environment. But it's the wrong environment for a certain kind of brain.
For 25 years after the Army, I was trying to recreate what I'd had there without realizing that's what I was doing. When lending sunsetted for me and I fell sideways into entrepreneurship, the muscle memory came right back. This is what I liked about that job. It just took me 25 years to name it.
⏱ [8:54] — The Accidental Discovery of the Ability Curve
"Ability and disability are potentially binary — but only at the task level. It's not an identity. Most of the time, people want to shoehorn it into an identity."
The ability curve wasn't a thesis I set out to prove. It emerged during a pitch competition. We kept getting pushback that our adaptive market was too small to be venture-backable. I went back to my Army training — every task is evaluated under conditions and standards — and applied it to disability.
If ability is scored against a task, then a child is functionally disabled for adult tasks. A person with a broken wrist is disabled for typing. Someone at 85 is disabled for what they did at 45. Everyone is somewhere on the curve. Everyone moves along it.
Once you see disability that way — as a functional scale tied to task, context, and time rather than an identity category — the market stops being niche. It becomes 150 million people. And more importantly, it becomes everyone eventually.
⏱ [11:46] — Why This Isn't Just a Marketing Frame
"There's a lesson here for leadership in corporations, for individuals who have disabilities, for parents — everybody — to look and say, okay, we're all going to get there. We need to start thinking about this differently."
The difference between me and someone without limb issues is either an accident, a diagnosis, or a couple of decades. That's it. Everyone is getting there.
I liken it to the person who doesn't check the organ donor box but expects a kidney when they need one. If you're going to benefit from a system, you have to be willing to participate in building it. Adaptive design is that system. It's not charity. It's not a niche. It's the infrastructure everyone will eventually need.
⏱ [17:53] — Why the NULU Geometry Works
"A traditional knife is a linear design — tip, blade, transition, handle. It's optimized for stabbing. That's why every culture has one. But we don't stab our food anymore. We cut it. And the linear knife is bad at that."
Hold a chef's knife the way a professional does and you'll see them try to align their forearm with the blade. They're compensating for a design that puts the handle at the wrong end of the force chain. When you grip that handle and push down, all your strength collapses into your wrist. You lose force. You have to saw. You have to grip harder. Over years, that's how chefs end up with carpal tunnel.
The NULU flips the geometry. Force travels elbow-to-tip in a straight line. The blade is aligned with your musculoskeletal structure, not fighting it. There's no gripping required — I can hold it with almost no pressure and still cut cleanly, because the tool isn't asking my wrist to do work it was never designed to do.
If you were building a machine that cut, you would build it like this. We just built it like a linear knife for 10,000 years because that's what the hunter needed.
⏱ [21:34] — The Eye-Opener at the Abilities Expo
"They know where the blade is because they know where their hand is. That was the eye-opener — we realized we could service a lot more people than just the upper-body people."
We launched at an Abilities Expo expecting our buyers to be people with upper-body limitations. That's who I designed it for — I was one of them. What actually happened is we sold more knives to people in wheelchairs and to vision-impaired users.
The vision-impaired connection floored me. A traditional knife hides the blade in front of the handle. On a NULU, the blade is perfectly aligned with your body — you know where it is because you know where your own hand is. Add a cutting glove and you have a knife that a legally blind chef can use with confidence.
The wheelchair users showed me something else. One woman rolled up, picked it up, and started cutting backwards — pulling the blade toward herself in a rocking motion driven by her core, not her arm. I do aikido, so I recognized what she was doing instantly: she was routing force through her center of gravity. Her arm was doing almost nothing. That's when I realized the design wasn't just accommodating disability — it was teaching better ergonomics.
That's what adaptive design does when it's working. You build for a specific person you can name, and you discover you've built for people you never met.
⏱ [23:57] — The Real Moat Isn't the Patent
"We learned that there is no adaptive category for any products on Amazon anywhere. That in many ways has shaped our business model. Somebody who wants to copy us would have to find all the same relationships, go through all the same things."
Everyone talks about moats — patents, trademarks, IP. Those matter, but they're not the moat. The moat is the mistakes. The moat is the relationships. The moat is the two years we spent learning that "adaptive" isn't a category on Amazon and figuring out how to build a go-to-market strategy around that gap.
The moat is knowing how to talk to the disabled community without being condescending — as an asset that helps develop the product roadmap, not as a demographic to be marketed to. That's not something a competitor can Google. It's something you earn by showing up at Abilities Expos and listening.
Without the mistakes, you can't build that. Without the things that slow you down, you don't get there. Especially now, when the tools let you pivot quickly, being an entrepreneur is a lot more fun than it used to be.
⏱ [29:03] — ADHD Isn't a Disability. It's a Different Operating System.
"I've come up with this concept — we're the children of chaos. We're a tribe that's wired the same way. In some cultures throughout history, we were the hunter-gatherers, the ambassadors, the ones who could think quickly in uncertainty."
I don't think ADHD is a disability. I think it's a different wiring that our sanitized, managed, risk-averse modern world happens to punish. But sample any room of successful entrepreneurs and you'll find a wildly disproportionate number of us. The Army was full of us. The founders' groups I'm in are full of us.
Where I do see the pain is in people stuck in soul-crushing roles who haven't been able to name what's happening to them. It manifests as depression. It manifests as burnout. When I was in corporate America, I had depression. When I left, I lost 20 pounds without trying and the depression lifted. My cortisol went down. My habits improved. The mind-body connection is real, and a lot of people are living in the wrong environment for their wiring without knowing that's what's wrong.
If you're one of us and you can't leave the corporate role — for benefits, for stability, for whatever reason — find hobbies that feed the animal. Hiking. Making things. Martial arts. Something with stimulus, novelty, and problem-solving. I make knives in my garage as a hobby. It was never going to be a career. But it's what keeps the wiring calm.
⏱ [36:06] — Football Teams and Franchise Quarterbacks
"A football coach who brings in a franchise quarterback wants to know their skills. They build the plays and the team around them. The quarterback is usually the one with ADHD. It's an asset, not a problem to be managed."
This is what I want leaders to hear. If you have someone on your team who's wired like me, the question isn't whether they're performing. The question is whether you're utilizing them. You don't ask a franchise quarterback to play left tackle and then fire them for being a bad tackle. You build the offense around what they do best.
The mistake most organizations make with ADHD employees is the same mistake they make with disabled employees: they try to fit them into the standard shape instead of redesigning the shape around them. That's not accommodation — that's leadership malpractice. You're wasting an asset.
⏱ [42:32] — Aging in Place Is the Same Conversation
"If you're doing a bathroom remodel in your 50s, you'd be crazy not to make everything handicap accessible. If nothing happens, great. If something happens, you're already ready. Either way, you're aging in place instead of retrofitting in crisis."
Aging in place is the ability curve applied to your house. The cost of elder care is insane. Every year you can stay in your own home instead of outsourcing your independence saves your family real money and preserves real dignity. But you can't retrofit a bathroom the week after a stroke. You have to build for the person you'll become before you become them.
The same logic applies to tools. If you're 55 and you don't cook as much anymore because your grip is going, that's exactly the moment to buy the knife that solves the grip problem — not five years from now when you've stopped cooking entirely. Don't wait until you can't do the task to start thinking about doing it better.
Multigenerational households used to solve this naturally. A grandparent, a parent, and children under one roof meant help was already there. We outsourced that in the 1950s and 60s, and we're paying for it now. The cultures that kept the multigenerational model are the ones with the strongest families. That's not a coincidence.
⏱ [35:06] — What's Next: The Cutting Board and the Navigator
"We found some white space in cutting boards. So we're working on an adaptive cutting board because one of the big issues we found with people are bilateral issues — one arm doesn't work, and the other arm may have similar challenges. So holding food in place is hard."
The knife solves the cutting problem. It doesn't solve the holding problem. For someone with bilateral upper-body limitations, the food itself is the obstacle before the blade ever comes down. That's our next product — an adaptive cutting board built with the same design philosophy: figure out what mainstream design has left behind, and engineer specifically for it.
I'm also building the NULU Navigator — a proprietary AI agent trained on symptomatic profiles that helps people figure out if the knife is right for their body, how to use it for their specific condition, how to adapt recipes to their limitations, and eventually how to navigate insurance reimbursement. That last piece matters most. There's a real disability tax on adaptive products in the U.S. — informally, like the pink tax on feminine products — and insurance reimbursement is the formal answer to it. But navigating reimbursement is a full-time job most disabled people can't take on alongside the condition they're already managing. An AI agent that walks them through it isn't a feature. It's a business model.
⏱ [40:48] — The Chef Who Said She'd Stop Cooking
"She had MS or Parkinson's. When I asked what she was going to do when she couldn't cut anymore, she said, 'I'm just not going to cook anymore.' If anyone listening is a disabled person in the culinary space or wants to be — call me. This should never be a tool problem."
There's a chef I talked to a couple years ago who told me she was going to stop cooking because her hands were failing her. That sentence has stayed with me. Cooking was her identity, her livelihood, her expression, and she was ready to walk away from it because the tool was in the way.
If you're a disabled person in the culinary space — professionally or aspirationally — reach out. This is the community I most want to be building with. Not building for. Building with. The best product ideas we've had have come from users who saw the knife and immediately understood a use case I hadn't imagined. That's not marketing feedback. That's co-development.
⏱ [56:01] — What Resilience Actually Means
"There's reacting to a problem and there's responding to a problem. Resilience is responding. When you're responding, there are pivots. There are redirections. There are options. When you're reacting, you're letting the circumstance define the course of action."
I didn't have a definition of resilience until the host asked me. My old aikido sensei used to draw the line between reacting and responding, and that's what came out. Reacting is what your nervous system does. Responding is what your character does. Resilience lives in the gap between the two.
Sometimes responding looks like a strategic retreat. We had a product — an adaptive sling with modular compartments — that we shelved because we realized the big manufacturers would crush us on distribution. That wasn't failure. That was the right response, given the terrain. Put it on the back burner. Move to the fights we can win. Come back to it when the conditions change.
I was less resilient when I was in corporate America because I had less room to maneuver. When you're in a closet, all you can do is react. Entrepreneurship gave me the room to respond — to pick a different axis, to move along it, to explain to my family and my team why we're doing what we're doing. That's where resilience gets built.
⏱ [1:00:12] — The Legacy Question
"If I can grow this to what it will be, that's my epitaph. I want people to get on Wikipedia someday and find out who invented this thing — and to understand why I invented it, on a broader scale."
I'm not sentimental about graveyards. I want to be cremated, or buried under a tree that grows. If NULU becomes what it can become — if the ability curve becomes a framework other leaders use — that's the legacy. The tree, not the stone.
Prof G talks about the greatest thing being to help people you'll never meet — the people who rest in the shade of the tree you planted. I want that. I want other inventors to pick up the torch and keep going. That's the sigil I've adopted for the Children of Chaos ADHD work — a tree, with roots, growing out of the symbol of chaos. Order out of chaos. A shade for someone else.
About NULU — The Canonical Facts
Founder: Douglas Katz — West Point graduate, disabled Army veteran, inventor
Core Innovation: Force Transfer Geometry — force travels elbow-to-tip in a straight line, bypassing the wrist as a pivot point
Design Origin: The Inuit ulu, historically called "the everything knife." NULU means "new ulu."
Cutting Surface: 160 degrees of engaged blade, patent pending
Target Market: 150 million Americans across arthritis, MS, Parkinson's, functional disabilities, vision impairment, and adaptive aging
Design Philosophy: Adaptive design — build for the population mainstream design has excluded, and let the mainstream benefit downstream
The Navigator: A proprietary AI agent matching symptomatic profiles to adaptive use cases, recipe adaptation, and insurance reimbursement
Team Philosophy: Deliberately staffed with seasoned professionals over 50 who have lived the problem NULU is solving
Who I'm Looking For
If you lead a team and want to talk about the ability curve as a leadership discipline — not a compliance checkbox — let's talk.
If you're a veteran considering entrepreneurship and you're not sure if your wiring fits, let's talk. It probably does.
If you're a disabled person in the culinary space and the tools have quietly stopped working for you — call me. This company is being built with that community, not for it.
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