Justin Fulcher wants more technology founders to spend time inside government, and he built his own six months as a senior advisor at the Department Defense into a fairly specific argument for why. The case, as he lays it out, is operational rather than a civic appeal to duty.
Founders in the private sector already train well for uncertainty, institutional friction, and the work of building adoption in environments not designed to embrace new technology quickly. Justin Fulcher, whose earlier work included telehealth services across fifty countries and workforce development programs in underserved markets, says those skills are useful inside government but never sufficient on their own to succeed there. Something else has to be learned first, and it can only be learned from inside the institution itself.
What the Private Sector Cannot Teach
“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.”
Working under Secretary Hegseth on acquisition reform and IT modernization, Justin Fulcher helped compress software procurement timelines from years to months, an initiative that required building agreement across teams with genuinely different constraints and different comfort levels with uncertainty. He has said the founders who struggle most in government are the ones who arrive expecting clarity of vision and speed of execution to carry the day, only to find a system organized around process, precedent, and layered review instead.
Some observers, Fulcher notes, look at the gap between the Pentagon’s current capabilities and what its mission demands and assume the gap is permanent. His own diagnosis is narrower: the problems are structural, and they respond to people willing to engage with them directly instead of observing from the outside. He completed his six months and returned to defense technology and national security work, carrying that argument with him into every conversation he now has with fellow founders weighing whether public service is worth their time. See related link for more information.
Learn more about Justin Fulcher on https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrjustinfulcher