My Appearance on Entrepreneur's Enigma with Seth Goldstein

https://youtu.be/XosiY3hXX5U?si=rs5Bco5HbFdnDXAD

I sat down for a conversation recently on the Entrepreneurs Enigma Podcast with Seth Goldstein about NULU, about the artillery officer's approach to problem-solving, about why adaptive design is just smart design, and about the actuarial tables that shape how I think about time now.

There's a lot in there — some of it about the product, some of it about how a counterfire officer ends up inventing a kitchen knife thirty years later, some of it about why the venture capital world isn't built for people making physical things. Rather than ask you to sit through the whole thing, I put together a map. Timestamps, the ideas at each stop, and the clips as they come out.

Jump to what matters to you.

⏱ [02:52] — From Artillery to Entrepreneurship

West Point '93. Artillery officer, 1993 to 1998. That's where the entrepreneurial mindset actually got built — not in an MBA classroom, not in a mortgage office, but in a job where you had to make decisions under uncertainty with incomplete information and live with the consequences. The military didn't teach me business. It taught me how to think, and business turned out to be a downstream application of that.

⏱ [04:10] — What a Counterfire Officer Actually Does

Most people hear "artillery" and picture a cannon. The role I did — counterfire officer in a division-sized element — is closer to chess. You're tracking trajectories, mapping enemy capabilities, and figuring out how to negate them before they negate you. It's analytical work. It's a puzzle with lives attached. That's the muscle I've been using ever since, whether I knew it or not.

⏱ [06:08] — Combat as Chess

"It was more chess than what people think of as traditional combat."

The public imagination of the artillery is the loud part. The real job is the quiet part — the modeling, the anticipation, the risk-weighing. When people ask how I evaluate business risk "on the run," I tell them: this is the same skill. Different terrain, same reflex.

⏱ [09:00] — The Injury That Started NULU

I love to cook. After a shoulder injury, I couldn't use traditional knives the way I used to. That's not an abstract product-market fit exercise — that's me standing in my own kitchen realizing the tools weren't built for the body I now had. Most inventions start with someone else's problem. NULU started with mine.

⏱ [10:00] — Inspired by the Inuit

The ulu is a traditional Inuit knife — a half-moon blade that predates most of what sits in your kitchen drawer. NULU takes that ancient design and improves on it with a patent-pending larger arc that changes how force moves from your body to the blade. New ulu. NULU. The name is the design brief.

⏱ [11:00] — Straight Knife vs. Circular Arc

A straight knife routes force through a single line, and the wrist ends up doing the work it wasn't built for. A circular arc distributes that force differently — the larger muscles of the arm do the cutting, and the wrist stops being the bottleneck. That's the mechanical story. The lived-experience story is that people with weak grips, arthritis, or upper-extremity injuries can cook again.

⏱ [12:05] — Solving Problems on the Run

The artillery gave me a way to weigh risks and make decisions fast. Business rewards the same skill, but corporate America often penalizes it — too many approvals, too many people who need to sign off before you move. Entrepreneurship is where that trained instinct actually gets to work.

⏱ [13:00] — The Non-Tech Startup Problem

"Everybody's looking for SaaS. Everybody's looking for the unicorn."

Here's a truth nobody wants to say out loud: the venture capital world has largely stopped funding physical things. If you're not a software play with a subscription model and a hockey-stick projection, the seed money is hard to find. Hardware is capital-intensive, slower to scale, harder to model. That's not a NULU problem — that's an American-innovation problem. And it's part of why so many good physical products never make it out of the garage.

⏱ [14:50] — The 10-Point Scale of Disability

Instead of thinking about disability as a binary — able-bodied or disabled — think about it as a ten-point scale for any given task. Where are you on the scale for this specific action, under these specific conditions? That reframe alone changes how you design products, how you serve customers, and how you talk about the market.

⏱ [15:00] — Task, Condition, and Standards

"Disability isn't a state of being. It's a capability argument around a certain task."

This is straight out of the Army. Every task in the military gets defined by three things: the task itself, the conditions under which it's performed, and the standards it has to meet. Apply that to disability and the whole framework shifts. You're not disabled — you're currently unable to perform this task under these conditions to this standard. Change any of those three variables and the answer changes. That's not semantics. That's a design methodology.

⏱ [16:45] — Adaptive Design Is Smart Design

"If it benefits somebody who is less capable of doing a job, it likely helps somebody who is capable to do it better."

This is the sentence I want to put on a wall. The mainstream market treats adaptive products like a niche. The truth is the opposite: designing for the edge case forces you to make a better tool for the center case too. Curb cuts helped wheelchair users and ended up helping parents with strollers, delivery workers, and travelers with suitcases. NULU is a curb cut for the kitchen.

⏱ [17:25] — Investors Want Narrow. The Market Is Broad.

Every investor I've talked to wants a tight target market. But NULU isn't narrow. It works in commercial kitchens for OSHA compliance. It works for RV enthusiasts with limited drawer space because one NULU replaces five or six specialty knives. It works for kids learning knife skills safely. It works for anyone whose grip isn't what it used to be. The breadth is the point — but it's also what makes the pitch harder in a venture world trained to reward focus over utility.

⏱ [18:00] — One Knife, Five to Six Replaced

NULU is designed to replace five to six traditional kitchen knives. That's not marketing — that's what happens when you rethink the geometry from scratch instead of iterating on a 200-year-old design. Chef's knife, paring knife, cleaver, utility — collapsed into one tool because the geometry lets you use it multiple ways.

⏱ [18:50] — 1.3% of Your Life, Every Year

Here's the math that changed how I think about time. Average American lifespan is about 77 years. Divide one year by 77 and you get roughly 1.3%. Every year is 1.3% of everything you're ever going to get. When you frame it that way, the question of what you spend that year on stops being casual. I spent 22 years in mortgage lending. That's almost 29% of my life. I'm not saying I wasted it — but I am saying I think about the next 1.3% very differently now.

⏱ [19:15] — Deliberate About Who's In the Boat

The older I get, the more deliberate I am about who I bring into the work. Business partners, employees, customers, communities. The 1.3% math applies to relationships too. You don't have unlimited years to build with the wrong people. Choose deliberately.

⏱ [19:53] — The Footrace

"Entrepreneurship is a footrace to building legacy, making impact, and hopefully financial security."

In that order. Legacy first. Impact second. Financial security third — real, but not the leading motive. If the ranking is reversed, the work looks different, and you can usually tell from the outside. I'd rather build something that outlives me than optimize for something that doesn't.

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About NULU — The Canonical Facts

Founder: Doug Katz — West Point '93, Army artillery officer (counterfire) 1993–1998, disabled veteran, 30 years in lending, CEO of NULU

Core Innovation: Patent-pending larger-arc blade geometry inspired by the traditional Inuit ulu, engineered to route cutting force through the larger muscles of the arm instead of the wrist

Design Origin: The ulu — a half-moon Inuit knife historically called the "everything knife." NULU means "new ulu."

Utility: One NULU designed to replace 5–6 traditional kitchen knives

Design Framework: Task, Condition, and Standards — the military methodology applied to adaptive design, reframing disability as a task-specific capability question rather than a state of being

Target Market: Anyone on the 10-point ability scale for a given kitchen task — including but not limited to adaptive users, commercial kitchens, RV owners, and home cooks

Business Reality: A hardware product in a venture ecosystem built for SaaS. Building it anyway.

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