Move Swiftly and Build the Right Team: My Conversation with the Move Swiftly Podcast

https://youtu.be/TiWEZ1OyWio?si=OZlDAuocou7i3cdD

On the Agency of Others, Why the Idea Is Only 15%, and How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy

I sat down with the Move Swiftly Podcast — a show about innovative teamwork — for a conversation that ran about 50 minutes and went places I didn't expect. We talked about my failed side businesses, why Gen X is the "Pottery Barn generation," why the U.S. patent system is quietly broken, why your success comes down to the agency of others, and why I now believe the idea itself is 15% of the equation at most. If you're mostly interested in the highlights, here's the map. Timestamps, the ideas at each stop, and the through-line that connects them.

⏱ [0:58] — The Level-Up: Building a Team Around What I'm Terrible At

"I hate spreadsheets. Building the team — that kind of was that breakthrough for me. It creates a wide opportunity to build a team around the things I'm terrible at."

The single biggest shift in my entrepreneurial life wasn't a product idea. It was giving up the fantasy of the solo founder. I'm not a spreadsheet guy. I'm not a finished carpenter. I'm not going to be the operations detail person or the logistics optimizer. Once I accepted that — actually accepted it, not just said it — I could stop trying to fill those seats with my own inadequate labor and start recruiting people who genuinely love those seats. That's the level-up. Not the invention. The team.

⏱ [2:49] — Grit, Ingenuity, and the Screeching Halt of Corporate America

"I always gravitate back to grit, problem solving, common sense, and practicality. That continued into the military. Then it came to a screeching halt when I got out in '98. Corporate America is not an innovative place."

The military rewarded exactly what I was wired for: limited resources, novel problems, and smart people improvising solutions on the fly. My privates would get in trouble because they were too smart — they'd solve a problem the Army hadn't sanctioned a solution for yet.

Then I got to corporate America and it stopped. Large organizations don't innovate anymore. They acquire innovation from smaller players. The insurance-and-benefits structure quietly creates a form of indentured servitude — people can't visualize a life outside 9-to-5 because they've been trained to see the paycheck-plus-medical as the only stable ground. It isn't. That ground is only stable until a tidal wave hits. And with AI, more of those tidal waves are coming, faster.

⏱ [4:47] — Side Hustles That Failed (and Why)

"None of them were as successful as they could have been, but I learned a lot about picking your team, getting a team, and getting help. Everything I tried to do myself — you have group-think in your own brain."

Before NULU, I tried two side businesses I want other founders to hear about.

The first: a piece of luggage with a kinetic charger built into the wheels. You walk through the airport, you're charging a battery, you plug your phone in. This was before airports had outlets everywhere. Cool idea. My team was full of good friends who just weren't committed at the level the idea needed. It fell apart.

The second: a disaster preparedness business. I approached it like an insurance survey — take a quiz, get a score, order the recommended supplies. What I missed is that the prepping market is tactile. Guys want to touch the cool tool. They want to hold the knife, the flashlight, the multitool. It's a Pampered Chef model, not an insurance model. I was in my own head. I never talked to my customer. I built for the model I imagined instead of the humans I was supposedly serving.

Both failures taught me the same lesson: the idea is 10-15% of the business. The other 85% is execution, teamwork, and being honest enough with yourself to admit when the model in your head doesn't match the market you're in.

⏱ [9:55] — Pivots Aren't Failures

"People really look at pivots as failures, and that's just not the best way to approach it. That's the battlefield thing — the enemy doesn't cooperate. Your competition doesn't cooperate. Your customers may not cooperate either."

Right before this interview I was with my partners doing a major pivot on our third product. And it struck me how often founders — especially first-time founders — treat a pivot as a defeat. It isn't. It's a battlefield adjustment. In the Army, we planned meticulously, and then reality showed up and we adjusted. Business is exactly the same. The pivot is the sign you're paying attention. The refusal to pivot is the sign you're not.

Inaction, when you're faced with something outside your expectations, is itself an action. Usually a bad one.

⏱ [11:09] — The Pottery Barn Generation

"I'm calling Gen X the Pottery Barn generation. We broke a lot of stuff and we've got to fix it. A lack of failure gets rid of resilience."

I've been writing about this. My generation — Gen X — quietly broke a lot of things and now we have to own the repair. Part of what we broke is the resilience of the kids coming up behind us. We removed failure from their environment because we wanted to protect them. But failure isn't the enemy of childhood — it's the training ground for resilience. Without it, you don't build the muscle to look at a setback and call it a lesson instead of a verdict.

And this connects to caretaking. My wife and I have been caretakers — I took care of my dad until he passed last year, and we're taking care of her folks now. A lot of people in the boomer generation are in rough shape. You can blame them, or you can recognize the landscape they aged in: processed food, pharmaceutical-first medicine, technology sold to them as a lifestyle. They're products of that environment. Our kids will be products of ours. Which means we have a responsibility to shape it better.

Scott Galloway — Prof G at NYU — has been the sharpest voice I've found on this. If your listeners are entrepreneurial and thinking about young men in particular, he's essential listening.

⏱ [14:03] — Get in the Room with Young People

"When I go visit my son at college, his friends respond to some of the cool stuff. 'Wow, you're making a knife — that's the coolest thing ever.' When you get that opportunity, you have to take it."

You can write a check to an organization. That helps. But time is the higher-value currency. I'm exploring some adjunct professorships specifically because I want to be in the room with young people who don't know yet that they can build things. The credentialing industry has convinced a generation that value is unlocked by another degree. It isn't always. Sometimes it's unlocked by seeing someone who actually made a thing with their own hands and said you can do this too.

⏱ [16:44] — The Innovation Happening in the Disabled Community

"The innovation down there is amazing. What they do with pool noodles and PVC and duct tape to solve real-world problems — these people are not engineers. Everybody has that."

One of the reasons the disabled community is a core part of our market isn't just demographic — it's inspirational. Some of the most creative problem-solving I've ever seen happens in that community, done with pool noodles, PVC pipe, and duct tape. People solving daily-living problems out of necessity, with off-the-shelf materials, without formal engineering training.

That's the raw innovation talent that our current economy doesn't know how to commercialize. If we could build the pipeline that turns garage innovations from disabled inventors into real products, we'd unlock a market — and a wave of livelihoods — that the venture world hasn't even noticed yet. That's part of NULU's bigger vision.

⏱ [17:01] — Creation Versus Consumption

"The attention economy is consumptive. We've gotten pissed off at food producers, at pharma, at insurance — the next one is the attention and addiction economy. If we can get back to creation…"

Every generation has an economy that eventually gets called to account. Food producers had their reckoning. Pharma is in one. Insurance is next. And after that comes the attention economy — the platforms that have monetized our focus and our kids' focus at scale.

The antidote isn't regulation. It's individual choice. Move from consumption to creation. AI has collapsed the barriers to inventing something. You can research a market in twenty minutes that used to take twenty hours. You can search prior art on Google Patents (skip the US government's — it's terrible). You can prototype with a 3D printer that costs less than a nice pair of running shoes. What's stopping people isn't tools. It's the habit of consumption over creation.

⏱ [19:03] — Force Transfer Geometry, Explained

"Think of a circle, and this is the point of engagement. You get the whole arc for cutting. I can cut without having to bend any of my extremities."

For anyone new to NULU: the design is built around what we call force transfer geometry. Instead of a linear blade that routes force through your wrist as a pivot point, the NULU uses a circular geometry that lets force travel elbow-to-tip in a straight line. You can chop, slice, cleave, or precision-cut — same knife, different grip. We say "how do you NULU?" because the blade adapts to your body, not the other way around.

And to any student who tuned out when I said geometry — the math is trivial. It's not trigonometry. It's a circle. That's it. Don't let the vocabulary scare you off from thinking about how objects work.

⏱ [20:36] — Your Perceived Limitations Are the Real Cage

"With a Harbor Freight near you, you can buy about any tool cheaper than anywhere else. If you're like 'hey I want to start making stuff' — buy some cheap tools, get started, go from there."

I keep meeting people whose only real barrier to building something is their conviction that they can't. The tools have never been cheaper. Harbor Freight will sell you a functional belt grinder for under $100. Chicago has shared workspaces with CNC machines. Every major city does. The only thing stopping most people is themselves.

If you have an inventor impulse and you've been telling yourself the setup cost is too high — go price it. You'll be shocked how wrong you are.

⏱ [22:00] — Why I Built NULU: A Bad Shoulder and a Circular Saw Blade

"I was having a bad flare-up before I had my shoulder reconstructed. I couldn't swing a hammer. I couldn't work on knives. I like to cook — I like to own my nutrition. I saw a circular saw blade in my shop and thought, 'wait a minute…'"

The origin story of NULU isn't heroic. I was in pain. I couldn't do my hobby. I couldn't cook the way I wanted to. I was starting to eat more processed food because prepping ingredients had gotten too hard. I refuse to throw scrap metal away — every knife maker keeps a stash — and one of the pieces of scrap in my shop was a circular saw blade. I'd made a pizza cutter out of one earlier. I looked at it and thought: there's more to this shape than a pizza cutter.

That's the whole spark. No business plan. No market research. A bad shoulder, a circular saw blade, and a stubborn refusal to eat frozen dinners.

⏱ [24:44] — Innovation, Invention, and Commercialization Are Three Different Things

"Innovation may not be invention, and invention may not be commercialization."

I want first-time founders to internalize this distinction. Innovation is seeing an old problem differently. Invention is building the thing that solves it. Commercialization is convincing someone to actually pay for it. These are three different disciplines, three different skill sets, three different failure modes.

When I invented my magnet-and-level jig for grinding blades, I thought I had a product. Then I asked myself: would a knife maker actually buy this, or would he just glue a level to his existing magnet? He'd glue it. The innovation was real. The invention was real. The commercialization wasn't there.

Don't get so attached to your invention that you lose the ability to ask that third question honestly.

⏱ [25:26] — Don't Eat the Whale in One Sitting

"If you're just passing time consuming, you're never going to get there. Pick something to work on a little bit every night."

The founder who works in two-hour focused sprints, five nights a week, will outrun the founder who binges on weekends. Small steady progress beats heroic Saturday grinds. I use a CRM. Some nights I just research and send three cold outreach emails. That's it. That's the night's work. Do that four hundred times and you have a business.

The alternative — the "I'm tired, I'm just going to scroll" two hours that turn into Facebook and TikTok — that's on you. Not your governor. Not your mayor. You. Condition your mind to do one thing every day. Just one. It compounds.

⏱ [27:00] — Every Year Is 1.3% of Your Life

"Each year you're born is about 1.3% of your life on actuarial tables. Five years is roughly 5%. When you think of it that way — as spending, not as an amorphous journey — you can be more deliberate."

I wrote an article about this recently. Time doesn't feel like a resource until you start doing the math. And once you do, procrastination becomes much harder to justify. If you're 40 and healthy, five years of TV-scrolling is a real percentage of the life you have left. You wouldn't spend 5% of your money on nothing. Don't spend 5% of your remaining years that way either.

And you're never too old. I'm 54 and having the best professional run of my life. Age is a resource, and it can be squandered or spent well — but it can't be reclaimed.

⏱ [28:19] — The Beginner's Mind and the Coachable Founder

"I did martial arts — iaido, for a long time. There's a concept called the beginner's mind. Bring the beginner's mind to what you're creating, with the wisdom of your experience."

Two Achilles' heels I see in first-time founders: fear of talking to anyone, and being uncoachable when they finally do. Both come from the same place — the belief that your idea is fragile and that outside input will damage it. It won't. Outside input will either strengthen your idea or reveal that it wasn't strong enough. Both outcomes are wins.

I cold-reached out to a Forged in Fire judge from the early seasons and he gave me hours of his time. I reached out to the CEO of Buck Knives — he loved the design, told me honestly his machines couldn't make it, and later reached back out with introductions. Another cold outreach became a member of our team and has probably saved us from making catastrophic decisions.

Reach out. Assume goodwill. Be coachable when it shows up.

⏱ [31:23] — Founders Events Are Free Consulting

"At founders events, most people there have their own idea they think is better than yours. So they'll give you all sorts of great feedback because they're not competing with you — they're diagnosing you the way they diagnose their own thing."

This is a hack I wish I'd known earlier. Founders events — accelerator open events, meetups, pitch nights — are secretly the best free consulting available. Because everyone there is running their own project, they're not threatened by yours. They'll critique your business honestly because critiquing is what their brains are already doing all day for themselves. Show up. Present. Listen.

⏱ [32:46] — If You Want to Help the Younger Generation, Hire Them

"Stop complaining and criticizing and teach them how to do it. Meet them where they are. They're pretty smart, and they're not putting up with a lot of the stuff we complained about in our own jobs."

The kids coming up saw us get screwed in '08. They saw us get screwed in the early 2000s. They're not naive — they're skeptical, and rightfully so. The best thing older founders can do isn't to write op-eds about work ethic. It's to hire young people, mentor them directly, and meet them where they actually are. They're smart. They're willing. They just don't want to repeat our mistakes.

⏱ [33:16] — What's Next for NULU

"We want to be the Glock of knives — people pick it up and know it works."

The roadmap:

NULU accessories — including a cutting board with a NULU-shaped bowl so cut vegetables actually stay put instead of scattering across the counter. My dogs love carrots, but not when they fly across the room.

Handle variations — higher-end wooden handles for gifting, ergonomic variations for different grip challenges (mine is arthritis in the hand, not weakness in the arm — different handle geometry solves different problems).

Adaptive, assistive, adjacent — every product we develop goes through that three-part filter. If it's adaptive (for people with limitations), is it also assistive (for people who benefit)? Is there an adjacent application we're missing?

NULU as a venture studio — shared legal, operations, marketing, strategy, business development, and finance across a portfolio of adaptive products. The dream: bring young veterans — especially disabled ones — through accelerators with our products, and end with an executable, fundable business they can lead as founder-in-residence.

⏱ [36:35] — Disability Is a Spectrum, Not a Switch

"Disability really means an inability to accomplish a particular task or set of tasks. That's where I went back to my Army training — task, conditions, standards. If you can't complete the task under the conditions to the standards, you are by definition somewhat disabled."

This is the ability curve, which we've talked about elsewhere but bears repeating here. We started with a binary model — disabled/non-disabled — and quickly realized that's not how the world actually works. A child using a chef's knife is functionally disabled: not enough strength, dexterity, coordination, or judgment about danger. An 82-year-old with arthritis is somewhere else on the curve. Someone with MS or Parkinson's has a steeper trajectory. Someone like me — 54, disabled vet, arthritis flaring in and out — moves up and down the curve month to month.

Once you see disability as a scale tied to task rather than an identity tied to a person, the market gets bigger and the message gets kinder.

⏱ [40:08] — Use AI Like Tony Stark

"Start thinking about your AI like it's Tony Stark. I have a hot tub — I call it my Think Tank — and I'll have AI running voice. I'm not saying I'm Iron Man, but if people can channel that, creative capabilities come out of the walls."

The single biggest force multiplier available to a small founder right now is AI, used correctly. Not as a fact machine. Not as a copywriter. As a thinking partner. I use it as a proofreader when I write, but where it really shines is ideation — bouncing ideas back and forth, being challenged, having it surface what I don't know I don't know.

I have ADHD, so the back-and-forth suits my brain. And the more I use it, the more the model learns how to work with me. That's the compounding advantage nobody talks about: AI gets better at you the more you use it as you.

⏱ [42:35] — Rebuild the Small Business Economy

"After World War II, 85% of businesses were owned by small businesses. We can recapture that if we want to. I would love to hear somebody talk about that in the political arena — because that will be the new economy."

If we could untangle health insurance from employment, you'd see a Cambrian explosion of small business formation in this country. The thing keeping most would-be entrepreneurs in corporate jobs isn't the paycheck. It's the medical coverage. Solve that and you unlock the small business economy that made America what it was in the postwar decades.

That's not a partisan point. It's an economic one.

⏱ [43:14] — The Patent System Is Not a Force Field

"Your patent isn't a force field. The PTAB — the patent trial and appeal board — was created with good intentions during the Obama administration, but it got captured by big business through the revolving door."

This is the section I most want your listeners to hear, because it's the least discussed and the most dangerous assumption founders make. You get a patent, you feel safe. You aren't.

The PTAB can be triggered by anyone who wants to challenge your patent on grounds of "obviousness." You don't get to choose whether to defend it in the PTAB or in a court of law — you're dragged in. Defending yourself can cost $100,000 or more, on top of what you already paid to get the patent. And the appeal judges often don't understand the art. What looks obvious to a non-expert after invention almost never looked obvious before it — but that distinction gets lost.

Molly Metz, a world-class jump roper, invented a revolutionary jump rope. Won world records with it. Built a company with 40 employees. Rogue Fitness challenged her patent in the PTAB on obviousness grounds. She lost. Her patent was invalidated. Her business collapsed. Look up her story. She's spent close to a million dollars fighting a system that was supposed to protect her.

What to do instead:

Build a business model that's hard to steal — one where the model itself is the moat, not just the patent.

Lean into being the founder. Storytelling and personal brand are increasingly what protect a business, because they can't invalidate who you are.

When you do file, make sure the attorney knows your specific art. A generalist patent attorney can leave you exposed in ways you won't see until it's too late.

Join US Inventor.org. Learn how the system actually works before you bet everything on a document that isn't the shield you think it is.

⏱ [47:54] — Where to Find Me

LinkedIn — always the best starting point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're not on LinkedIn, fix that.

nuluknives.com — the company site, Kickstarter still live until fulfillment

YouTube — knife demos and product walkthroughs

douglasmkatz.com — writing, white papers, and the master link tree

⏱ [49:00] — Final Advice: Your Success Is in the Agency of Others

"Your success will be in the agency of others. Period. I went through the academy and served with amazing people. Every one who succeeded — it was through the agency of others. Find people who can help you."

Aswand closed the show by asking me to give advice to the version of myself who was walking into West Point on day one. Here it is: every business I tried before NULU failed, and they all failed for the same reason. I was trying to do it alone. Every time I've succeeded — at West Point, in the Army, in NULU — it was because I found the right people, shared the vision, and let them do what they do best.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Find your people. Share the equity. Share the credit. Trust the team. Your success is in the agency of others.

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About NULU — The Canonical Facts

Founder: Douglas Katz — West Point graduate, disabled Army veteran, artillery officer

Company: NULU — adaptive product company and emerging venture studio for adaptive innovation

Core Innovation: Force Transfer Geometry — routing cutting force from elbow through blade in a straight line, bypassing the wrist as pivot point

Design Origin: The Inuit ulu — "the everything knife." NULU means "new ulu."

Cutting Surface: 160 degrees of engaged blade, patent pending

Product Philosophy: Adaptive, Assistive, Adjacent

Framework: The Ability Curve — disability as a functional scale tied to task, not an identity category

Team Philosophy: Deliberately built with people over 50 — wisdom, patience, lack of greed

Structure: Venture studio model — shared legal, ops, marketing, strategy, BD, finance across a portfolio of adaptive products

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Who I'm Looking For

If you're a first-time founder who's been burned by the "just get a patent" advice, let's talk. There's a version of this conversation about IP strategy that most accelerators aren't having.

If you're a young veteran — especially a disabled one — with a product idea and no pipeline to commercialize it, NULU's venture studio model was built with you in mind.

If you're a caretaker in the sandwich generation, and you're watching a parent lose independence because the tools stopped working, reach out. There's a knife (and a cutting board, coming soon) that changes the math.

And if you're an inventor from the disabled community whose innovations are currently sitting in a garage in PVC and pool noodles — that's exactly the pipeline we're trying to build.

Find me at douglasmkatz.com, nuluknives.com, or on LinkedIn.

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