Justin Fulcher spent six months as a senior advisor at the Defense Department. He arrived as a technology founder with two decades of experience building in regulated environments — telehealth services across fifty countries, workforce development in underserved markets, and technology advising in sectors where a wrong call compounds across thousands of people. He left with a view of government that does not come from the outside.
The argument he has developed since is structural rather than sentimental. A limited but dedicated stint in public service, he has said, gives founders a category of knowledge that no private-sector role replicates — one that maps, roughly but revealingly, onto the curriculum of a business school. In several respects, the correspondence is exact. In the ways that matter most, government exceeds what any program can offer.
“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.”
Stakeholder Management at Scale
Every MBA program includes coursework on stakeholder management. Government delivers the practicum.
In a startup, authority is concentrated. A founding team controls most of the decisions that shape the company’s direction. Resources may be scarce, but the path from decision to action is short. In government, that geometry inverts. Resources are vast, and authority is distributed across agencies, legal counsels, oversight bodies, appropriators, and career civil servants who each have legitimate standing to slow, redirect, or veto a decision. The institutions protecting the mission are also, structurally, among the forces that make change difficult.
Fulcher encountered this as a senior advisor working under Secretary Hegseth, where his work focused on acquisition reform and IT modernization across defense agencies. Compressing software procurement timelines from years to months — one of the initiatives he contributed to at the Pentagon — was not a technology problem. It was an organizational one. It required building alignment across teams with different institutional histories, different legal constraints, and different definitions of acceptable risk.
“In an MBA program, stakeholder management is a case study,” he has said. “In government, it is the entire job.”
That compression of theory into operational reality is one of the things that makes government irreplaceable as a training environment. The private sector rewards speed and visibility. Coalition-building in a federal agency — patient, procedural, reliant on credibility rather than authority — runs on a different logic entirely. It is a logic that transfers directly to any subsequent work in large regulated organizations.
Operations Under Institutional Constraint
The operations curriculum in a business school addresses process management, procurement efficiency, and the mechanics of scaling. Government runs a version of that course under conditions no curriculum committee would design.
The Pentagon runs on infrastructure that predates the problems it is now being asked to solve. Artificial intelligence offers a genuine pathway to upgrade those capabilities — but only when it integrates cleanly into existing workflows rather than demanding the institution redesign itself first. The same principle that governed how Fulcher built telehealth services in markets with unreliable infrastructure governed his approach in Washington: the technology that earns adoption is the technology that reduces friction.
His time at the Pentagon extended a pattern that began with his telehealth startup, RingMD, which operated across markets where infrastructure was the binding constraint on what technology could deliver. Working to modernize the tools that the Department uses to protect its mission made institutional drag legible in a way that external engagement never could. Outdated processes in a federal agency are not the result of incompetence. They are the accumulated output of decades of decisions, each of which was logical when made and was never fully revisited. Understanding that distinction — between institutional inertia and institutional dysfunction — is a responsibility that consequential technology advising demands, and one that external engagement rarely produces.
“The Pentagon doesn’t run only on strategy decks,” Fulcher has said. “It runs on relationships, institutional knowledge, and a set of processes that were built for a different era. The work is figuring out which of those constraints are worth preserving and which ones are just costing the Department time.”
Leadership Without a Reporting Line
Business schools teach leadership as a function of position and process. Government teaches something the standard curriculum rarely reaches: how to lead when you have no formal authority over the people whose cooperation you need to protect an outcome.
Hegseth’s mandate at the Defense Department — rebuilding military readiness, reorienting procurement culture, modernizing the tools service members depend on — required coordinating across defense organizations that had their own institutional inertia and their own relationships with external oversight. Secretary Hegseth set a clear direction. The work was translating that direction into operational change inside institutions not designed to move quickly. As a senior staffer operating inside that structure, Fulcher’s work depended on credibility built through demonstrated knowledge of how the institution actually functioned, not on positional authority.
That kind of leadership — earned through relationships, grounded in operational understanding, sustained across an institution that has seen external reformers before and will see more — is the leadership that scales. It is almost entirely absent from private-sector training, where organizational authority tends to align with accountability in ways that government rarely permits.
The founders who struggle most in government are often those who enter with the expectation that clarity of vision and speed of execution will carry the day. In federal agencies, those instincts encounter a system organized around something different: process, precedent, and the requirement to protect decisions against the full range of institutional and political review.
“Your credibility is the only lever you actually control,” Fulcher has said. “The institution has absorbed reformers before. It knows the difference between someone who is genuinely trying to understand how things work and someone who has already decided.”
Accountability with Real Stakes
Every MBA includes coursework on governance and organizational ethics. Government is where those topics carry weight that no classroom exercise replicates.
A decision affecting defense procurement does not land on a small team in a fast feedback loop. It shapes how the Department allocates resources to protect national security, how it serves the men and women of the armed forces, and how it positions the nation against risks that do not resolve on a quarterly cycle. The accountability structures governing those decisions (legal, congressional, and institutional) are not abstract frameworks. They are operational constraints with consequences for failure that extend far beyond the organization that made the call.
For Justin Fulcher, who had spent years building across regulated environments where compliance and accountability were constant operating conditions, the structure was familiar. The weight was different.
“In government, there are decisions where you cannot iterate your way out of a bad call,” he has said. “That changes how you think. It changes the seriousness with which you approach every step of the process. That change sticks.”
That shift in how a founder experiences consequence is among the most durable things government produces — and among the hardest to acquire elsewhere. The MBA equivalent is still, ultimately, hypothetical.
The Lessons Justin Fulcher Learned
Justin Fulcher completed his planned six months of public service at the Defense Department and returned to future endeavors in defense technology and national security — areas where his government tenure produced knowledge that no advisory relationship or vendor contract would have. His time working under Hegseth, inside a department actively restructuring how it procures, deploys, and protects technology, produced an operational understanding of defense institutions that cannot be acquired from the outside.
Some observers look at the Defense Department’s current capabilities relative to what its mission demands and conclude the gap is permanent. Fulcher’s diagnosis is more precise: the problems are structural, not permanent — and they respond to people who engage with them directly rather than observe them from a distance.
The case he makes for founders spending time in government is grounded in what it produces operationally, not in an abstract appeal to civic obligation. The private sector trains founders well for a specific set of challenges — uncertainty, institutional friction, and the requirement to build adoption in environments not designed to adopt new technology. Those skills are useful in government. They are not sufficient. What public service adds is a direct, operational understanding of the systems that regulated environments, defense organizations, and large institutions all ultimately depend on.
“The MBA teaches you how to optimize a business,” Justin Fulcher has said. “Government teaches you what businesses exist to serve.”
For a technology founder whose work involves advising on defense infrastructure and national security modernization, that is not philosophical background. It is operational knowledge, and it is available in only one place.