Justin Fulcher’s Career Shows How Startup Skills Transfer to Government

The skills that make a founder effective identifying systemic problems, building under constraint, iterating without losing sight of a larger goal are not always recognized as transferable to government service. Justin Fulcher‘s career suggests otherwise. His work founding RingMD and later advising the U.S. Department of Defense traces a coherent line between private-sector problem-solving and public-sector institutional reform.

Healthcare Technology in Underserved Asian Markets

Fulcher co-founded RingMD in 2013, building a telemedicine platform that operated across Asia and addressed a gap in healthcare access that few Western companies had prioritized. Many regions in Asia had developed mobile connectivity faster than healthcare infrastructure, leaving patients without reliable access to medical professionals. RingMD’s platform connected them remotely, working across multiple countries and building for resilience in environments with inconsistent bandwidth. Fulcher was direct about the stakes involved: “Healthcare is one of those things that affects everybody. Without the basic, fundamental healthcare access, it handicaps many parts of the world.” Forbes Asia recognized this work in 2017 by including him on its 30 Under 30 list in the Healthcare and Science category. He now serves as a board member and minority shareholder at RingMD without active operational involvement.

Government Reform and the Long Game

Justin Fulcher’s move to the Department of Defense in early 2025 marked a different application of the same instincts. As Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, he worked on the bureaucratic and structural problems that slow down technology adoption in large defense institutions. Contributions from his tenure included helping shorten software procurement timelines from years to months and supporting IT modernization across the department. He also participated in diplomatic engagements with senior officials in the Indo-Pacific. On the philosophy guiding this kind of unglamorous, high-stakes work, Fulcher has written: “Execution over narrative. Accountability over optics. Durability over speed.” He holds a master’s degree in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute and is completing a doctorate at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, with a focus on defense technology and critical material supply chains. Refer to this article for related information.

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