Conventional wisdom about starting a company tends to favor stability: build when capital is available, markets are clear, and conditions are favorable. Justin Fulcher disagrees. The technology entrepreneur and national security advisor who co-founded the digital health platform RingMD spent years making the opposite case, drawing not from theory but from the difficult periods he navigated while building a healthcare company across 22 countries.

His position is pointed: hard times are productive for builders, precisely because they strip away the noise.

“Periods of uncertainty tend to expose real problems,” Fulcher said. “Markets shift, old assumptions break down, and institutions are forced to adapt. That creates opportunities for builders who are focused on solving real problems rather than chasing short-term trends.”

That observation carries weight when held against the historical record. Many of the most widely used companies today were founded during or immediately after periods of economic disruption. What boom markets obscure, downturns reveal: which problems are real, which demand is durable, and which teams have the discipline to build through pressure.

When the problem sets the direction

Fulcher traces this philosophy to the RingMD experience. The platform expanded to serve users across Asia, connecting millions to healthcare for the first time, through an environment where regulatory complexity, infrastructure limitations, and institutional inertia were constants rather than exceptions. That context sharpened how he thinks about what makes a company last.

The lesson he takes from RingMD is specific: mission clarity is the load-bearing element of any organization that plans to survive difficulty.

“Solve a real problem that people genuinely care about,” Fulcher said. “Technology alone isn’t enough. Lasting companies are built around problems that remain important even as markets and trends change.”

The distinction he draws is between companies organized around a trend and companies organized around a problem. Trends are conditioned by the moment. Problems don’t disappear when market sentiment changes. The healthcare access gap that motivated Fulcher when he founded RingMD persisted through investor pressures, legal disputes, and operational crises that came afterward.

When his company faced a stretch where survival required the entire team to accept drastically reduced salaries for roughly 15 months, mission clarity held the organization together. Every team member stayed. When the problem is real enough, it turns out to be a more reliable retention mechanism than favorable compensation in a favorable market.

Discipline and the cognitive environment of difficulty

The case Fulcher makes about timing is, at bottom, an argument about cognitive environment. Expansionary periods create options: multiple funding paths, multiple market hypotheses, multiple strategic directions. Abundance of possibility is also abundance of distraction. Teams can pursue poorly defined problems for years without facing the pressure that forces correction.

Difficult environments remove that margin.

“Difficult environments force discipline and clarity, which are often the ingredients for durable businesses,” Fulcher said. He pointed to the pattern directly: “many of the most important companies were started during challenging economic periods.”

Clarity extends to team building. The people who commit through genuine hardship are the people who believe in the problem being solved. The RingMD team that accepted bare-minimum salaries through a prolonged period of legal and financial uncertainty stayed because the problem was real.

Building institutions around enduring problems

For Justin Fulcher, the argument extends beyond tactical advice about startup timing. It informs how he thinks about institution building in broader contexts, including government environments where he has worked on modernizing procurement and integrating emerging technologies into public-sector operations.

The same principle applies: the problems that survive difficult periods are the ones worth organizing around. Problem clarity determines whether an organization holds together when conditions demand it.

“When you focus on a problem that truly matters,” Fulcher said, “it gives the team a clear mission and creates the strength needed to navigate the inevitable challenges of company-building.”

Fulcher is currently pursuing doctoral research at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where his work examines how technological change reshapes institutions over time. The thread from his entrepreneurial experience to that research is consistent. Institutions, like companies, prove durable when they organize around enduring problems rather than favorable moments. Adversity clarifies. It does not disqualify.

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