Justin Fulcher’s career has followed technology into places where mistakes are costly. Over two decades, Justin Fulcher  built telehealth services across fifty countries, worked on workforce development in underserved markets, and advised in sectors where a wrong call compounds across thousands of people. His most recent chapter took him to the Defense Department.

Fulcher spent six months there as a senior advisor working under Secretary Hegseth. His assignments centered on acquisition reform and IT modernization across defense agencies. He has since completed that planned term and returned to work in defense technology and national security.

A Thread Running Through the Work

The common element is constraint. His startup RingMD operated in markets where infrastructure limited what technology could achieve, and it taught him that adoption follows tools that reduce friction. The Pentagon presented a different kind of constraint: institutions shaped by decades of procedure, precedent, and oversight.

Justin Fulcher found the compliance demands familiar. The weight of the decisions was new. Defense choices influence how the country protects national security and serves the people in its armed forces.

“In government, there are decisions where you cannot iterate your way out of a bad call,” he has said. “That changes how you think.”

Turning Experience Into an Argument

Since leaving the department, Justin Fulcher has urged founders to consider a limited, dedicated stint in public service. He compares the experience to an MBA, matching it subject by subject: stakeholder management, operations, leadership, and governance. In his telling, government teaches each with more realism than a classroom can.

He grounds the case in results rather than civic obligation. Founders gain working knowledge of the systems that regulated industries and large institutions rely on, plus a sharper sense of what credibility means when formal authority is absent.

“Government gives you something the private sector cannot manufacture,” Fulcher has said. “An understanding of how the systems that everything else depends on actually work.”

For Justin Fulcher, that understanding now informs his work advising on defense infrastructure and national security modernization. He describes it as operational knowledge available in only one place. Read this article for related information.

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