Most people who move between the startup world and government eventually choose one. Justin Fulcher has spent years refusing to. A technology entrepreneur who co-founded the digital health platform RingMD and later served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, Fulcher has developed a perspective on technology and institutional policy that is grounded in both domains rather than either one. His argument is direct: the divide between technologists and policymakers is not a values conflict, and it is not structural. It is, at its core, a translation problem.
That framing may sound simple. But in a period when artificial intelligence is forcing rapid decisions inside institutions that move slowly, the ability to move fluently between technical implementation and institutional reality has become increasingly consequential. Justin Fulcher’s career offers a lens into why that fluency is harder to develop than most people assume, and what it actually requires.
Two Educations, One Problem
Fulcher traces the gap between technology and policy to a fundamental difference in how each discipline teaches people to think. Building a company, he explains, is an exercise in systems at scale. Engineering decisions shape what is possible. Incentive structures determine whether those possibilities get used. Infrastructure sets the ceiling on growth. The feedback loops are fast and the failures are visible.
Studying national security and policy, by contrast, trains a different kind of reasoning. “Building companies teaches you how systems scale—how infrastructure, incentives, and engineering decisions influence real outcomes,” Fulcher said. “Studying national security and policy forces you to think about long-term strategy, governance, and the unintended consequences of those systems.”
That combination proved meaningful when Fulcher was operating RingMD across more than 22 countries and nearly half of its users were accessing formal healthcare for the first time. Technology alone was not enough. The platform had to navigate local regulatory environments, build trust with public institutions, and adapt to vastly different expectations about how care is delivered. Success required understanding not just what the software could do, but what the surrounding systems would allow.
The lesson, in his telling, was an early version of the same insight he would encounter in government work years later. “At scale, you realize healthcare technology isn’t just a software problem,” he noted, “but rather it’s a systems problem involving regulation, institutions, and trust.”
The Gap Is a Translation Problem
When asked directly how he bridges the two worlds, Justin Fulcher resists framing it as a matter of choosing sides or developing a specialty. The value, he says, comes from accumulation. “The most valuable thing has simply been working in both worlds long enough to see how they actually intersect,” he explained. “Technology shapes what’s possible, but institutions determine how those capabilities are used.”
That intersection, he argues, is where most well-intentioned efforts break down. Technologists entering institutional environments often underestimate how deeply governance structures shape what gets adopted and how. Policymakers engaging with technical teams frequently lack the working vocabulary to evaluate claims, anticipate failure modes, or negotiate tradeoffs in ways that preserve operational integrity. Neither side is wrong exactly, but both are often speaking past each other.
“Over time you realize the gap between the two worlds is mostly a translation problem,” Fulcher said. “Technologists often underestimate institutions, and policymakers often underestimate technology. The most useful perspective comes from understanding both well enough to connect them.”
The pattern holds across sectors. In healthcare, software that works technically can still fail to achieve adoption if it conflicts with how clinicians are trained, how insurers pay, or how patients understand care. In defense procurement, the ability to move faster depends not just on engineering timelines but on how acquisition rules are written and who has authority to approve exceptions. The bottleneck is rarely technical capacity. More often it is the absence of people who can operate in both registers simultaneously.
What Mutual Fluency Requires
For Justin Fulcher, the implications extend beyond individual career paths. He is currently pursuing a Doctorate in International Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where his research focuses on how technological change reshapes institutions and geopolitical competition. That work reflects the same conviction: the questions that matter most tend to sit precisely at the intersection of technical systems and institutional capacity.
For technologists considering public-sector roles, he is direct about what the adjustment requires. Institutions move differently than startups. Progress demands patience and an understanding of how policy, law, and operations interact with technology. The technologists who succeed tend to focus on improving specific systems while working constructively within existing structures, rather than arriving with the assumption that speed and disruption are straightforwardly positive.
At the same time, he is equally pointed about the other direction. Policymakers who engage with technical systems need more than a surface-level briefing. They need enough working knowledge to ask productive questions, identify where expert claims are genuinely contested, and understand why certain engineering choices close off future options. Neither domain is self-sufficient.
The technology-policy divide gets described, often, as a cultural problem or an incentive problem or a hiring problem. Fulcher’s view is more specific. It is a language problem, and language problems are solvable. The prerequisite is genuine engagement with both domains, sustained long enough to see where they actually touch. That kind of fluency, he suggests, is less a credential than a practice, built incrementally from experience in both worlds rather than from mastery of either one alone.
