My Discussion on Entreprenuer Among Other Things with Alexander V. Johnson

https://youtu.be/Ha9VxHFcnII?si=fjMC0xAXeYOvzLnJ

Veteran Founder on Servant Leadership, the PTAB Problem, and Building NULU for the 150 Million-Person Market

I sat down for a long conversation recently on Entrepreneur Among Other Things with Alexander V. Johnson about NULU, about West Point and the artillery, about leaving the mortgage industry after 22 years, about why the patent system is quietly strangling independent inventors, and about why the chef's knife in your drawer has been wrong for 200 years.

It ran about eighty minutes. There's a lot in there — some of it about the product, some of it about how a native Clevelander with a West Point ring ended up inventing an adaptive knife at 50, some of it about the intellectual property crisis nobody talked about during the last election. Rather than ask you to sit through the whole thing to find the parts that matter to you, I put together a map. Timestamps, the ideas at each stop, and the clips as they come out.

Jump to what matters to you. The full transcript is at the bottom if you want it.

⏱ [00:29] — West Point, 1989: The Guidance Counselor Who Changed Everything

"I was going to go in the military anyhow and had an ROTC scholarship, but I also had a very, very good guidance counselor. She asked me, 'Have you thought about the service academies?' And I said, 'The what?'"

I grew up planning on the military, but I didn't know the academies existed until someone put them in front of me. I wanted to be a Marine. My congressman had already picked someone for Navy, so he said, "You can go to West Point or Merchant Marine Academy. Which one do you want?" I said West Point. I had never visited the school until I rolled through the gates on R-Day in 1989. That's how these decisions actually get made — not by a five-year plan, but by one adult who bothers to open a door for you.

⏱ [05:13] — Run the Academies to Ground

If any listener has friends, family, or anybody who might be interested in the service academies, run that to ground. Find out if it's right for them. My daughter is at the Coast Guard Academy right now, and I'm getting to experience the whole thing again from a different angle. Every academy has a different mission — Coast Guard doesn't pick up a firearm the way West Point cadets do — but the service, the training, the life experience is unmatched. I wish more kids would consider it. They're national treasures.

⏱ **[07:22] — The World's Biggest Leadership Lab

"If my person beneath me screwed up, it's my fault. My peer screwed up, it's my fault. That's the basis of that leadership. That servant leadership where it isn't about you. If you're becoming a leader for it to be about you, you're not becoming a leader for the right reason."

West Point gets called the world's biggest leadership lab, and it earns the name. After your first year of learning to be a follower, everything is a test of leadership. It becomes muscle memory. And it's why servant leadership isn't a trend I picked up from a business book — it's a reflex that got installed in me thirty-five years ago and never left.

⏱ **[09:00] — Why Servant Leadership Can Actually Hurt You in Corporate America

"The leadership lessons I learned at West Point potentially even hindered my success in corporate America because you don't manage up, you manage down. You make sure your people are taken care of and you think of yourself last. And when you do that in corporate America, sometimes you don't come in first, because other people are running a different race."

This is the hardest thing I've said out loud about my own career. The people who manage up get promoted. The people who take care of their teams sometimes get passed over. I don't regret how I led. But I want younger veterans coming out of service to know the terrain is different, and the incentives are different, before they walk into it thinking corporate America will reward the same things the Army did.

⏱ **[16:04] — The Empty Kind of Being Gone

"I had a job with Citigroup where I was traveling three to four days a week, three to four weeks a month. It wasn't any better. I wasn't in harm's way, but I was still gone. And in some ways, it felt like more of an empty being-gone-ness."

What keeps you going in the military is appealing to a higher cause. Traveling to sell mortgages isn't that. As much as I'd love to say mortgages transform lives — they enable people to buy houses, sure — at the end of the day, you're selling money. When I was deployed, it sucked. But you knew you were doing something meaningful. That gap between "gone with purpose" and "gone without it" is one of the things nobody prepares you for when you separate.

⏱ **[23:23] — 2020: The Gift That Started Everything

"My wife gave me a gift of a really, really nice knife. That led to a personal relationship with the guy who made it. He had a class where he taught knifemaking, and my son and I went through it."

I wanted a hobby. I make decent knives — but I'm a much better inventor than a knifesmith. I had a torn-up shoulder and chronic tennis elbow, I couldn't swing a hammer, and I still wanted to cook. So I grabbed an old circular saw blade, worked with a grinder, and made the first prototype. It was patterned after the Inuit ulu with elements of other knives. That was 2020. That was the beginning.

⏱ **[25:20] — Force Transfer Geometry, Explained

A normal chef's knife is linear geometry — great for stabbing. But when you're cutting, you feel it in your wrist, your elbow, your shoulder. Chefs will tell you to pinch-grip it, but that's just a workaround. NULU is multi-blade, multi-grip, multi-use. Think of the center of a circle with the blade as the arc — any radius from your grip to the blade is a direct force transfer from your arm. Two people can hold it completely differently and both work. That's the geometry. That's why it works.

⏱ **[27:19] — Clip the Tip: Safety as Empowerment

We removed the point from the knife based on feedback from adaptive offices. Our focus is upper-extremity issues, but the design lesson was bigger: if the point is pointless, why do you have it? Getting rid of it changes the whole dynamic. Ours is about safety and empowerment.

⏱ **[27:59] — Killing the Binary: The Ability Curve Model

"You're not able-bodied or disabled. You are on a scale at any given point of ability to do particular tasks."

This is the paradigm we're trying to shift. A seven-year-old whose body hasn't developed the strength to safely cut is, functionally, disabled for that task. A 68-year-old with arthritis and a weakened grip is disabled for the same task. Same symptom manifestation. Different life stage. When you stop thinking in binary categories and start thinking in symptomatic profiles, the addressable market gets a lot bigger — and the design gets a lot smarter.

⏱ **[29:44] — Adaptive Is Just Better

"If you found an app for your phone that helped you manage your calendar better, you'd be like, 'This is great.' Well, it's an adaptive product. In some way, it's adapting your brain to better manage a complex schedule. People have no problem with that. All of a sudden you pull something like this out and they're worried a walker is next."

That stigma is the enemy. Better design is better design. Using a traditional chef's knife with a bad grip now can be exactly what puts you in an adaptive-tool situation later from repetitive stress. The reframe is simple: adaptive isn't a downgrade. Adaptive is what smart tools have looked like all along — we just didn't call it that until now.

⏱ **[33:23] — There Is No Road-to-Damascus Moment

"Everybody looks for that road-to-Damascus moment, and I think that's a fool's folly. It really needs to be continued momentum. You don't just go from the bottom of Everest to the top. You hit different base camps and you move things along the way."

People ask how I went from making knives in a garage to running a company. There was no single moment. There was a graduation party where a friend picked up the prototype and said, "Holy crap." There was a West Point '87 grad between gigs who became my COO. There was a week where a couple of my partners said, "We believe in this." Each one was a base camp, not a summit.

⏱ **[36:28] — Accelerators Beat MBAs

"I have my MBA. My MBA did not help me as much as going through the Institute for Veteran and Military Families out of Syracuse."

For any veteran listening: IVMF (merged with Bunker Labs), Warrior Rising, Founders Institute — all free or scholarship-eligible. The problem with military guys is we feel like we can learn anything ourselves. And with every other business I'd tried and failed at, I did exactly that. What made NULU different was becoming coachable. Letting other people give me feedback and help.

⏱ **[47:14] — The Patent System Is Broken, and Nobody Told You

"A patent isn't some kind of magic force field. It never was, but it was something that protected your intellectual property in a manner that you could commercialize it."

Here's the dirty secret nobody talks about. You get your patent. Someone challenges it. You'd think they'd have to prove they invented it first — that's not what they do anymore. They go to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (the PTAB) and argue your patent should have never been issued in the first place. It doesn't go in front of a jury the way it used to. You don't get to choose. And the PTAB invalidates patents that come in front of it at a rate of about 85%.

⏱ **[51:23] — The Revolving Door

The PTAB is financed by challenges. Their customers are the people trying to invalidate patents. It's a revolving door where the decision-makers often come from — or go to — big tech, big med, big pharma. If you want a case study, look up Molly Metz. World-champion jump-roper. Her invention got taken by Rogue Fitness and others. She went from 40 employees to under 10. That's the system independent inventors are actually operating inside.

⏱ **[54:38] — The National Security Angle

Part of why this matters beyond individual inventors: some of the entities challenging American patents at the PTAB are foreign companies using proxies. This is bleeding into critical technologies for national defense. The belief in the iconoclastic garage inventor taking on big tech disappeared a while ago, along with pensions. Hold your elected officials accountable, because we're losing our edge.

⏱ **[1:06:09] — 10% of a Watermelon Beats 100% of a Grape

"My partners were like, 'Man, you should have your head examined. This was your invention.' I'm like, yeah, but my invention isn't going to go anywhere without any of these people."

I've been more generous with equity to my business partners than would probably be considered wise. They're all still with me. They're busting their butts. We made it through our first Kickstarter. I've never regretted it. Younger entrepreneurs want all of it — I get it. But what's the difference between 98% and 100% of something you're probably never going to sell? Find your fractional COOs, your fractional CFOs, the over-50 talent that will work for equity because they believe in the product. That's the unfair advantage.

⏱ **[1:12:59] — Leadership, Distilled

"Leadership at its core is many times getting people to do things that are the opposite of what their instinct would be. And you have to build the capital by showing those people that one, you're competent, but two, that you have their best interest in mind."

If you're a leader, you're a steward. The organization isn't yours — it's entrusted to you. The moment you start thinking of it as yours, you stop leading well. When your team wins, you get the credit anyway, even when you try not to. Every day your team is interviewing you to be their boss. If you do the job right, that interview goes well and they keep working for you. It hasn't failed me yet.

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About NULU — The Canonical Facts

Founder: Douglas Katz — West Point '93, five years artillery (Fort Carson, 1993–1998), 22+ years in lending, inventor of the NULU knife

Core Innovation: Force Transfer Geometry — a curved, ulu-derived blade that routes cutting force in a direct line from the arm to the edge, bypassing the wrist as a stress point

Design Origin: The Inuit ulu, historically called "the everything knife." NULU means "new ulu."

Design Philosophy: Multi-blade, multi-grip, multi-use. Tip removed for safety based on adaptive-office feedback. Safety and empowerment as design principles.

Target Market: The 150 million Americans on the ability curve — arthritis, chronic conditions, aging bodies, kids developing dexterity, professional cooks avoiding repetitive stress injuries

Business Model: Adaptive kitchen hardware, expanding into a product family. Nulu is a subsidiary of a parent company built to bring adaptive-adjacent products to market repeatably.

IP Advocacy: Active supporter of usinventor.org and the fight to reform the PTAB

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