Founders come in all shapes and sizes—and, in some cases, stars and stripes. In 2022, veterans were the majority owners of more than 1.6 million firms employing nearly 3.2 million workers, according to the US Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. Veterans also make up 4.3% of business owners in the US. For founders coming from the disciplined and highly regulated world of the military, the transition into entrepreneurship can feel both freeing and disorienting. Going from taking orders to building a company from scratch means trading established systems and clear hierarchies for ambiguity, fast decisions, and constant uncertainty. While that environment can create new opportunities, adapting to the unstructured chaos of startup life doesn’t always come naturally to people trained inside institutions built on structure and tradition. Across interviews and emails, Founder Brew discussed how the military experience translates into founder life, with four founders who are also US Military veterans: - John Doyle, founder and CEO of secure mobile carrier Cape, was a special forces sergeant in the US Army before spending a decade at Palantir.
- Kimberly Shenk, co-founder and CEO of Novi, a former captain in the Air Force, is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and served as a senior data analyst.
- Adam Harder, founder and CEO of InPress, was a staff sergeant in the Air Force and served from 2011 to 2017.
- Daniel Castillo, founder of Ghost AI Systems and CEO of production company Media Geeks, is a former Marine Corps corporal
Interviews were conducted separately and have been edited for length and clarity. Veteran founders share the hardest part of leaving military life behind for founder life John Doyle: In the military, there is a lot of structure, a very clear hierarchy, and often a book that literally tells you how to do your job. What is amazing about a startup is none of that exists. Monday morning, you check into a WeWork and now you’ve just got a company and a couple bucks in the bank. There’s nothing else. You don’t even have an email address for yourself. So you get to write the entire thing from scratch. That is fun and motivating, but can also be really disorienting. What veterans have to unlearn in startup culture Daniel Castillo: When Media Geekz first started growing, we were partnering up with an agency…And then we saw how the agency operated versus how we operate. In the Marines, you go as fast as possible, break it and fix it. The agency we were working with was more like NASA. On the military lessons that still shape how they build Kimberly Shenk: I would say the biggest, most important one is the concept of service. That’s why I joined to begin with, like serving something larger than myself. It is still very important, because now I think about it, building a company, you’re serving your customer, you’re serving your stakeholders, you’re serving your employees, and so that is extremely important in that concept of like what it means to serve a mission and bring that to your customers and your employees and everyone day in and day out. When military training influences business decisions Adam Harder: There was this guiding principle in the Air Force that they always repeated: “Integrity first.” I’ve always said I’d rather watch InPress go under than sacrifice our moral fortitude and the mission that inspired the creation of this company. Read more about how founders with military backgrounds have built their companies.—JH | 
