Welcome to Creator Capitalist Conversations, a series spotlighting Category Designers who have rejected traditional career paths and built lives around what makes them different. Our new book, Creator Capitalist, is available now. Get your copy here.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Dr. Eric Hanson knows how to get the Pentagon to write a check. He has done it, to the tune of more than $300 million, for other people’s companies.
Seventeen years as an Air Force physician and senior flight surgeon. 750 hours in 36 aircraft. Dual board certified in aerospace and preventative medicine. Call sign “Genes”. (Which tracks, because he also has an MPH in epidemiology with a genetics concentration from Johns Hopkins on top of his MD.)
He ran a 15 million dollar DARPA-funded bioterrorism surveillance project in Washington, D.C., right after the anthrax attacks. He became the Air Force chair of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program, a 1.27 billion dollar program in fiscal year 26. He’s founded five companies. Published five books, 25 articles, and holds nine patents.
And somewhere in there he decided he wasn’t done serving.
So he started MilMed Connect, a Techstars portfolio company, to do one thing most founders don’t even know is possible:
Help life science CEOs raise money from the U.S. government without giving up a single point of equity.
Over 300 million dollars of it, to date.
The Pentagon deploys more than $40 billion a year in research funding. The Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program alone is $1.27 billion. That’s a bigger annual deployment than most VC funds have under management. And it doesn’t cost you equity.
The Department of Defense doesn’t want your cap table. It wants dual-use technology, products that work in both civilian and military settings. Smaller. Lighter. Cheaper. Lower-power. AI-assisted.
The military calls it C-SWaP: Cost, Size, Weight, and Power.
One of Eric’s clients, a biotech CEO working on host-targeted antivirals, raised $50M in private capital and $60M in non-dilutive DoD funding. One started at $11M and bumped to $24M, then $36M, then $50M without having to recompete. The Navy awarded one of Eric’s dental AI contracts in exactly 90 days from pencil-to-paper.
Try getting a VC to move that fast.
The military is the greatest Superconsumer on Earth.
If you’ve read our work, you know what a superconsumer is: the highest-intensity user in a category, the one whose demands pull the entire product forward.
Superconsumers force innovation. They don’t settle for average. They pay a premium for the extreme version.
The U.S. military might be the ultimate one.
It needs devices that function in the Arctic and the Sahara. It needs batteries that last in theater. It needs medical countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. It needs prolonged casualty care solutions for war fighters who, as Eric explains in harrowing detail, sometimes have to wait 72 hours or more near the point of injury before they can be evacuated.
And when the military finds a solution that works, it writes a check.
What Eric has done is category design a business around the translation layer. He’s built a firm, a Techstars accelerator arm, and a software product called Navigator, effectively an operating system for dual-use CEOs. He’s trained 50 military medical veterans to work with industry. 25 have started their own companies. He’s got a Curly Bot, a Dr. Eric Bot, and a dual-use triage bot in development.
He named the problem. He framed the problem. He’s claiming the problem.
That’s what a Creator Capitalist looks like in uniform.
The four capitals, fully loaded.
One of the things we love about Eric’s story is that he is running the full Creator Capitalist playbook, whether he planned it that way or not.
Financial capital. Non-dilutive government funding, deployed to founders who would otherwise be stuck on the VC treadmill.
Reputation capital. 17 years in the Air Force, an affiliate professorship at OHSU, a seat as a Uniformed Services University military medical ambassador. The kind of credibility that opens doors inside the Pentagon that nobody else can even knock on.
Relationship capital. A network of 50 trained military medical vets, each with their own networks. DoD program officers he’s worked with for over a decade. CEOs he’s placed inside the most exclusive buying room in the world.
Intellectual capital. The Navigator product. The dual-use triage framework. The C-SWaP lens applied to civilian tech. The books, the patents, the IP.
The reason we wanted Eric on the show isn’t because every listener is going to start raising non-dilutive DoD funding tomorrow.
It’s because Eric is a walking proof point that the Creator Capitalist playbook works in the most bureaucratic, credentialed, gate-kept industry on Earth.
If it works inside the Pentagon, it works in legal tech. It works in real estate. It works in consumer health. It works in whatever industry you’ve been told is “too traditional” or “too regulated” or “too old school” to do something new in.
The playbook doesn’t care about your industry. It cares whether you’re willing to name, frame, and claim a category before anyone else does.
Here’s how to navigate this conversation:
02:14 – Jack Ryan meets Michael Crichton: Why Eric’s resume reads like a thriller and how the Uniformed Services University path got him through med school without a dime of debt.
04:59 – Medical countermeasures, explained: What “dual-use” actually means when the threats are chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear and why COVID blew the doors off Eric’s 5-client model overnight.
09:45 – The cap table that isn’t: How a founder raised $50M private and $60M non-dilutive and what the government wants in return that isn’t equity.
13:59 – C-SWaP and the super consumer: Eddie’s hearing-aid story and why the military is the most demanding product development partner a founder could ever ask for.
18:30 – The 1-in-10 CEO: 1,500 companies evaluated, 300 worked with directly and the one trait that predicts who actually gets funded.
23:00 – $40 billion a year: The DoD funding landscape, the Small Business Innovation Research program, and how it stacks up against NIH, Andreessen Horowitz, and every VC fund you’ve heard of.
26:27 – DoD vs. VC, side by side: A 90-day Navy contract, million-dollar awards, and what happens when a government program officer is more founder-friendly than your Series A board member.
35:45 – Navigator: The operating system Eric is building for dual-use CEOs and the Curly Bot naming moment you’ll have to hear to believe.
40:04 – Ukraine as the accidental R&D lab: Why prolonged casualty care changed everything about military medicine and why nothing has been the same since.
46:30 – For the 18-year-old considering med school: The advice Eric would give his own kid, including a year in Korea, six months in Hungary, and a week on a paddle wheeler in Brazil studying parasites.
49:34 – What the Academy actually did for him: Eric on his Category Design journey from Substack subscriber to Cohort 3.0 graduate to reading the Creator Capitalist book with both of his sons.
To connect with Dr. Eric:
Follow Dr. Eric on LinkedIn
Email: eric@milmedconnect.com
Arrrrrr,
Category Pirates 🏴☠️
Eddie Yoon
Christopher Lochhead
P.S. — Eric didn’t become a category of one by accident.
He took 17 years of military medical expertise, named the translation gap nobody else was solving for dual-use CEOs, and built an entire category around it. Bots, software, a Techstars accelerator, a trained army of veteran entrepreneurs.
He’s also a Category Design Academy Cohort 3.0 graduate. Which means the frameworks he’s using to scale Navigator and train the next generation of military medical Creator Capitalists are the same ones we teach inside the Academy.
Academy 4.0 applications close in 10 days. The next cohort starts in May.
If Eric’s story resonates, if you’re sitting on a superpower the rest of the world hasn’t named yet, that’s exactly the work the Academy is designed to do.
