The Huge Impact of Simple Changes: My Conversation on Impactors Out Loud

https://youtu.be/VK8zmKpBF7U?si=Lf3ynM3E3falMDrE

On the Ability Curve, Why "Disabled" Isn't a Community, and How Aging Into Disability Is the Conversation Nobody Wants to Have

I sat down with Tracy V Allen on Impactors Out Loud for a conversation that ran just under an hour and dug into corners I don't always get to explore — the sub-communities inside "disability," why marketing to disabled people is like marketing to Asia, the family office as the ideal impact investor, aging into disability, and why a friend's line about "the huge impact of simple changes" now defines what I'm building. 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.

⏱ [4:20] — Independence Is the Cause

"My cause became about independence. I realized when I was injured, I don't cook. And that has a very, very large impact — a small thing with a large impact."

The mission statement for NULU didn't come from a strategy session. It came from noticing what happens to me when I can't cook. When my shoulder is bad, or my elbow flares, or the arthritis wins for a stretch — I don't cook. I eat processed food. My nutrition slides. My energy slides. My mood slides. All of that from one small thing I stopped being able to do.

The current cultural push around owning your nutrition — cooking from scratch, avoiding processed food — is great advice for most people. But it quietly excludes anyone whose body has stopped cooperating with the tools in a standard kitchen. Independence in the kitchen isn't a lifestyle choice for that population. It's the difference between agency and dependence. That's the cause NULU is built around.

⏱ [5:32] — Disability Is a Spectrum, Not a Classification

"Disability is a classification, not something to design around. People say you're disabled or you're not disabled. That got me thinking we can design better across an array of people categorized as disabilities — including temporary disabilities."

Coming into this space as an active participant instead of a spectator, what struck me first was how much the world treats disability as a binary category. You're in the group or you're not. But everyone is somewhere on a spectrum of ability — for every task, in every moment, at every age. I just had my primary shoulder rebuilt. Eighteen months in and I'm still not fully healed. For the first several months I was, by any honest definition, disabled for a wide range of everyday tasks. That reality doesn't fit the classification model.

The ability curve is the reframe. You are somewhere on a curve, for this task, at this moment. So am I. So is everyone. Design against that reality and the market — and the honesty — gets much bigger.

⏱ [6:22] — Why Most Adaptive Design Is Bad

"It's this mishmash of what disabled people come up with using PVC and pool noodles and duct tape — or something that looks like it lacks nice design. It doesn't look like something you want to pick up."

The current adaptive design landscape is bimodal. On one end, brilliant improvised solutions built by disabled people in their homes out of PVC, pool noodles, and duct tape — enormous ingenuity, zero commercialization. On the other end, mass-produced adaptive products that look like they were designed by an accountant who lost a bet. Nothing you'd actually want to display in your kitchen. Nothing that carries dignity into the product.

Adaptive design should look and feel as good as the mainstream products it's competing with. Better, ideally. If it doesn't, we're quietly telling the user that dignity is a luxury they've aged out of. That's not acceptable.

⏱ [7:31] — Why the Handle Doesn't Matter (and Why That Matters)

"On a normal knife you're holding the blade like this, chopping — the handle is out there providing weight because you're holding the blade. You now have a handle that actually serves no purpose."

Here's a fact most home cooks don't know: a trained chef grips the blade, not the handle. The handle exists mostly for balance. If you watch professionals, they pinch the blade near the bolster and use the handle as a counterweight. That's the whole reason the handle is there.

Which means the handle on a traditional chef's knife serves a structural purpose that most users never actually access — and the "correct" grip that professionals use is itself an admission that the standard design is asking you to fight your own tool. NULU flips that. The handle is a connection point, not a load-bearing element. You don't have to death-grip anything. The geometry does the work.

⏱ [9:17] — Adaptive, Assistive, Adjacent

"Adaptive are the people who pick this up and say 'I get it.' Assistive is the person who says 'this makes my life better and could prevent carpal tunnel.' That's how we enter the big market."

Our three-part product philosophy. Adaptive users need it — they can't accomplish the task without it. Assistive users benefit from it — they can accomplish the task but this makes it materially better, safer, more sustainable over decades. Adjacent users are the ones we didn't design for but who discover the product solves a problem they didn't know they had.

That last category matters for two reasons. First, it's how you build a market big enough to fund the R&D that improves the adaptive product. Second, it's the honest recognition that good design for the excluded usually turns out to be good design for everyone. Curb cuts weren't for wheelchairs alone. Voice recognition wasn't for the vision-impaired alone. NULU won't be for adaptive users alone. That's the strategy, and it's also the truth.

⏱ [9:37] — Tracy's Story: When the Locks Had to Change

"I couldn't turn a knob anymore. I had to change all the locks on my door — I had to get the pull-down ones so I just needed to do this and the door would open."

Tracy shared her own experience with carpal tunnel and De Quervain's surgery — including a detail I'm going to keep telling, because it captures the entire product thesis in one image. She had to replace every doorknob in her house with lever handles because she could no longer grip and turn. She learned to drive with one hand. She learned to write left-handed and is ambidextrous today because of it. And she stopped cooking — because the tools in the kitchen weren't designed for the body she was living in during recovery.

She's not a spokesperson. She's a customer. And her story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who quietly retrofit their lives around temporary or permanent limitations that mainstream product design pretends don't exist.

⏱ [17:44] — "Disabled" Is Not a Community

"If you're a marketer and you say 'I'm going to market to the Asian community' — that's not a community. There's South Asian, there's East Asian, there are all these different communities with very different heritage and dietary needs. Disabled is the same thing."

This is one of the more important reframes to come out of this conversation. The word "disabled" is treated as if it names a community. It doesn't. It names a category that lumps together radically different lived experiences, needs, and value propositions.

Our marketing to the Parkinson's community leads with tremor management and safer force transfer. Our messaging to the Down syndrome community leads with gaining independence rather than retaining it — because kids with Down syndrome are now living independently into their 50s (up from their 30s a generation ago), and grip strength has been a lifelong constraint. Our messaging to the arthritis community leads with pain-free food prep. Our messaging to the aging-in-place market leads with dignity and continued participation.

Same product. Same value proposition at the core. But radically different framing depending on which community we're actually talking to. Treating "disabled" as one market is marketing malpractice. It's also why so many adaptive products fail commercially — they're written for a category that doesn't actually exist in the way marketers imagine it.

⏱ [18:38] — The Down Syndrome Market I Didn't Expect

"With increased visibility comes better treatment. People are living longer. Kids with Down syndrome are able to live pretty independently into their 50s. They suffer from decreased grip strength from the beginning."

I hadn't been thinking about the Down syndrome community until I met an advocate at an event who wanted to see the knife. Once we started talking, the fit was obvious: reduced grip strength from birth, high parental engagement, active community organizations, and a growing population living into ages where kitchen independence becomes central to quality of life. Down syndrome parents are among the most active advocacy communities I've encountered. If we can partner well with them, they will move product further than any paid ad campaign.

That's the pattern. Every community inside the "disabled" umbrella has its own gravitational center, its own trusted voices, its own advocacy infrastructure. You have to earn your way into each one on its own terms.

⏱ [20:00] — Kids Are the Adjacent Market Nobody Talks About

"If we can integrate something like this in the right place where it's safe, then all of a sudden you're maybe engaging them on food prep earlier — because this is safer than a normal knife."

Kids are on the ability curve too. A seven-year-old is functionally disabled for adult kitchen tasks — not because anything is wrong with them, but because their strength, dexterity, coordination, and frontal-cortex judgment about danger aren't there yet. A knife without a point (which NULU is, by design) becomes safer to introduce earlier. Which means kids get engaged with their own food prep earlier. Which means they build ownership of their nutrition earlier. Which means the adaptive/assistive/adjacent thesis quietly extends into childhood development.

That's not a market we set out to build for. It's a market that the design revealed once we stopped defining the product by the community and started defining it by the geometry.

⏱ [22:38] — The Family Office as the Ideal Impact Investor

"We're looking for the unicorn — a family office that's an investor but also has their foot in philanthropic endeavors in one of the communities we're looking at. Maybe there's a family member who had Parkinson's."

Standard venture money is chasing AI, quantum, and enterprise SaaS. A physical adaptive product in the kitchen is not what most VCs are indexed for. But there's a specific investor archetype that is exactly right for what we're building: the family office.

Family offices manage ultra-high-net-worth wealth across investing, financial management, and philanthropy. And in almost every family office, there's a personal story — a mother with Parkinson's, a grandparent aging, a sibling with a spinal injury — that has already channeled some portion of their philanthropic capital into a specific disease community. That family office is our unicorn. They have both the investment mandate and the personal proximity to the community our product serves. If they're already donating to a Parkinson's foundation, they may see NULU as a way to invest in the same mission — bringing a for-profit tool to the community they already care about.

That's a much easier conversation than pitching a generic impact fund. If you're in a family office reading this — or you know one that fits — reach out.

⏱ [24:32] — Stacking Ailments into a Market

"Our model allows us to stack ailments and characteristics of disability. Now you're taking a symptom this sells to and running across all these different conditions. That covers Parkinson's, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, Down syndrome, spinal injuries."

The market-sizing breakthrough that made NULU fundable was recognizing that we're not selling to a disease. We're selling to a symptom cluster — reduced grip strength, tremor, bilateral upper-body limitations, coordination challenges, fatigue. That symptom cluster shows up across dozens of medical conditions. Instead of selling one small market at a time, we're serving the intersection of every condition that manifests those symptoms.

That's how you get from "adaptive is niche" to "adaptive is 150 million Americans." Not by inflating the number, but by defining the market by what the product actually addresses rather than by the diagnostic labels the healthcare system has assigned.

⏱ [26:59] — Circular Development

"We don't just want feedback saying 'I love this knife.' We want people to be brutal — tell us how to make it better. The question isn't how do we make this so you can grip it. The question is how do we make you not drop it."

There's a subtle but important difference between building for a user and building with a user. Traditional product development treats feedback as validation — did they like it, will they buy it. Circular development treats feedback as design input — what did we miss, what did we get wrong, what should the next version do differently.

The best example: instead of asking a user with weak grip "how do we make the handle easier to grip," we ask "how do we make it so you don't have to grip at all." That reframe led us to a handle that functions as a connection point rather than a load-bearing element. The user's answer to the first question would have gotten us a slightly better version of the wrong product. The reframe got us to a genuinely different product.

⏱ [28:35] — The NULU Venture Studio Vision

"Our bigger aspiration is to move into a venture studio — an organization that takes ideation through viability and to market. If NULU is successful, we take what we've learned, systematize it, and bring more adaptive things to market."

NULU isn't just a knife company. The bigger play is building a venture studio for adaptive products. Once we've solved the pipeline problems for our first product — retail category creation, adaptive office evaluation, community partnerships, PR channels, investor education — those systems become reusable infrastructure for every adaptive product that comes after.

The dream is that someone from the community comes to us with an idea. Or someone brings us a product that failed commercially the first time because it went to market as a mainstream gadget when it was really an adaptive product in disguise. My friend from West Point invented a stake rake — brilliant piece of engineering, went to market as an outdoor tool, sold decently. But it's also an adaptive product for arthritic users. Would it have done differently if it had been positioned to the arthritis community first? Probably yes. That's the kind of second look the NULU venture studio wants to give.

⏱ [30:38] — Aging Into Disability

"Nobody has a discussion about aging into disability. Understanding adaptation to continue to do what you love — you're not selling out. Adaptation is not surrender."

This is the conversation I want more people to have with themselves before they need to. Aging is a slow migration down the ability curve. You will lose grip strength. You will lose dexterity. You will lose reflex speed. This is not tragedy — it's biology. The tragedy is refusing to adapt until you're forced to, which almost always means adapting in crisis instead of adapting on your own terms.

Try to get an older adult to accept a walker for the first time. It's brutally difficult. Not because walkers are hard to use, but because the walker represents a version of the self they're not ready to accept. The result is often a fall, a hospitalization, and a forced adaptation under much worse circumstances. Why wait? Why not notice, at 55, that you're cooking less because the knife is hurting your hand — and buy the tool that fixes it now, before the habit of not cooking becomes permanent?

Adaptation isn't surrender. It's how you keep doing the things you love for the longest possible span of your life.

⏱ [33:00] — Testing with a West Point Chef

"One of my good friends is a chef — he was a West Point friend. He said 'It took me three days and I get it.' Right, you have to let go of 'I want to use a regular knife.'"

We're bootstrapped, so our current test units aren't manufacturing steel — which means the feedback we get sometimes is "it doesn't hold an edge." Fair. We know. That's a manufacturing question, not a design question. What we're solving for right now is the design question: does the geometry work, do users get it, what needs refinement.

A trained chef needed three days. That's the honest answer for most adopters. The muscle memory of using a traditional knife has to be actively unlearned before the NULU makes sense in your hand. Once you've made it through those three days, you don't want to go back. But we have to be honest with new users about the learning curve — and that transparency is itself part of the design.

⏱ [34:44] — "I Like Using a Chef's Knife Because It Makes Me Feel Like a Chef"

"I talked to a guy last night and he said 'I like using a chef's knife because it makes me feel like a chef.' What should be making you feel like a chef is people saying your food is good."

This exchange stuck with me. A guy at an event told me he preferred his chef's knife because it made him feel like a chef. That's the aesthetic-over-outcome culture we've been sliding into. Feeling like a chef should come from feedback that your food is good — not from holding an object that resembles the objects chefs hold in television shows.

There's a version of this pattern in almost every consumer category. We buy identity-signaling objects and call it quality. Adaptive design has to break that pattern — because the users we serve most urgently don't have the luxury of choosing aesthetics over outcomes. The tool has to work. And once it does, the aesthetic case has to follow.

⏱ [38:56] — Disrupting the Cycle of Degradation

"Let's disrupt the cycle of degradation to the point where you lose control. Because that's what it all leads to — and that impacts so many other things."

There's a cycle that plays out in millions of American homes and nobody talks about it directly. The tool gets harder to use. The task gets skipped. The habit erodes. Convenience food fills the gap. Nutrition declines. Health declines. Independence declines. The cycle accelerates. Eventually someone else is preparing your food, and something you enjoyed doing your whole life is gone.

Every step in that cycle has an intervention point, and the earliest one is the tool. Change the tool at step one and you might never enter the cycle. That's what NULU is designed to do. Not just for people who are already deep in the cycle, but for everyone who's noticing the first small signal — cooking less than they used to — and wants a real answer before "cooking less" becomes "not cooking at all."

⏱ [39:08] — The Gift Market

"My father lived with us for a couple years before he passed — he was in his late 80s and pretty independent. Gift-giving will be a big part of this. Grandma and Grandpa are slowing down — get them a NULU so they can keep doing what they love."

Adaptive products have a specific gifting problem: the person who most needs the product is often the person least willing to buy it for themselves, because buying it means admitting they need it. The gift market solves that. A caretaker child buys it for an aging parent. A grandchild buys it for a grandparent. The purchase becomes an act of love rather than an act of self-diagnosis.

Watch how this plays out around the holidays. The best adaptive product companies will win the caretaker gift market before they win the direct consumer market. Because caretakers are already spending. They just need permission to spend on the thing that actually helps.

⏱ [40:19] — Three Tips for Adaptive Innovators

Tracy asked me for three tips for anyone entering the innovation space, especially adaptive design.

1. Find help — and specifically, find an accelerator. An accelerator is structured, curated, and pushes you through the pivots your idea needs. Use your affinities — disabled-owned, veteran-owned, woman-owned, alumni networks — to find one you qualify for. Many are free. Skip them and you're paying for the same lessons in cash and time later.

2. Be fearless — reach out to people you have no business reaching out to. I cold-called CEOs of major knife manufacturers. The CEO of Buck Knives was extraordinarily generous. Jason Knight, one of the early Forged in Fire judges, gave me hours of his time. The corollary: don't sit on your idea because you're afraid someone will steal it. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what wins. The people you fear are almost certainly not the people you should be afraid of. Reach out.

3. Get smart on patents — but don't trust them as a shield. I belong to a nonprofit called US Inventor.org that fights to preserve the constitutional protection patents are supposed to provide. Patents can be written badly. They can be invalidated by well-funded challengers in the PTAB. Understand the system before you bet your business on the piece of paper.

Bonus tip Scott Galloway articulated better than I can: don't just follow your passion — find what you're good at, develop passion around that, and bring people along for the ride. Passion without competence is a hobby. Competence with cultivated passion is a business.

⏱ [44:35] — The Huge Impact of Simple Changes

"A friend of mine with MS from the academy said something that stuck with me — the huge impact of simple changes. You see somebody who's struggling, you make one small change, and it makes a massive difference."

The line I now use to describe what NULU is actually about came from a West Point classmate with MS. He said it almost in passing during a conversation about the project, and it landed. The huge impact of simple changes.

I was at a Founders event where people were architecting quantum computers and building AI infrastructure. Enormous ambition, enormous complexity, enormous capital. I'm making a knife. And in some ways this small, tangible change to a 10,000-year-old tool can make more day-to-day difference in more human lives than most of the projects in that room. Not because knives matter more than quantum computers, but because the huge impact of simple changes is a real phenomenon that gets systematically undervalued in a culture obsessed with complexity.

That's what I want to keep building. Not the next moonshot. The next simple change with a huge impact. And then the one after that.

---

About NULU — The Canonical Facts

Founder: Douglas Katz — West Point graduate, disabled Army veteran, artillery officer, second-degree black belt in Aikido

Company: NULU — adaptive product company evolving into a venture studio for adaptive innovation

Core Innovation: Force Transfer Geometry — routing cutting force from elbow through blade in a straight line along a circular arc

Design Origin: The Inuit ulu — historically "the everything knife" and the woman's knife across Inuit culture. NULU means "new ulu."

Product Philosophy: Adaptive, Assistive, Adjacent

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

Product Strategy: Point-free geometry for safety, handle as connection point rather than load-bearing element, customizable use across chop, slice, cleave, and precision cut

Team Model: Deliberately built around seasoned professionals over 50

---

Who I'm Looking For

If you're a family office with a personal connection to a disease community — Parkinson's, MS, arthritis, spinal injury, Down syndrome, or aging in place — NULU may be exactly the intersection of investment and philanthropy you're looking for.

If you're an orthopedic surgeon, physical therapist, or occupational therapist whose patients keep telling you the kitchen has become impossible, we have an evaluation program built for you.

If you're a caretaker in the sandwich generation navigating aging parents, this product was built for the family member you love who has quietly stopped cooking.

If you're a disabled chef — professionally or aspirationally — call me. This is the community I most want to be building with, not for.

---