Greg Tomchick learned early that you cannot be great at everything at the same time.
That lesson didn’t come from business. It came from sports, and from the moment someone finally forced him to confront a truth most people avoid for too long. He played everything growing up, football, basketball, baseball. Quarterback. Pitcher. He was good enough at all of it to believe he didn’t have to choose. Internally, he thought football was his best path. Externally, reality kept interfering. A bad offensive line. A constant question running in the background: is it me, or is it everybody else?
His high school baseball coach didn’t let him keep hiding behind potential. “You have to choose,” he told him. “If you don’t choose, you’re gonna get hurt. You’re gonna blow both opportunities.” The message was blunt. You could be great at one thing, or good at several. Not both. “If you want to be great,” the coach said, “choose.”
Tomchick did. He chose baseball. And without realizing it, he chose a pattern he’d repeat for the rest of his career: specialization over breadth, focus over optionality.
That mindset followed him into college. When scholarship offers came in, Virginia looked like the obvious answer. Top-five program. National recognition. Prestige. But the advice he got from people around him reframed the decision. At Virginia, he might be talented, but he’d be surrounded by people just as good or better. “Everybody there throws 95,” he was told. At Old Dominion, the pitch was different. More responsibility. Leadership from day one. A chance to hit and pitch. A chance to matter immediately.
“I didn’t want to stop playing and sit the bench,” Tomchick said. “I wanted to make impact immediately.”
At ODU, the specialization theme showed up again. The program emphasized development and leadership, not just winning. If he focused, if he leaned into what he did best, he’d be put in uncomfortable situations early. That discomfort, he was told, would matter long after baseball ended.
On the field, things clicked. As a freshman, he started Friday nights, the pitcher’s equivalent of being a quarterback. Talent wasn’t the issue. Everything else was. Academics slipped fast. “I didn’t want to be there for school,” he said. “I wasn’t interested in what they were teaching me.”
Eventually, he left. Junior college in Florida followed, along with a coach who stripped away any remaining ego. “You’re a nobody,” the coach told him. “If you don’t do school well, you’re gonna be on the streets.” It wasn’t motivational. It was corrective. The kind of pressure that either breaks you or forces you to slow down enough to survive.
Years later, Tomchick would connect that experience to another lesson he learned as a pitcher: how to manage pressure in the moment. One of his coaches taught him that success wasn’t about ramping up, it was about slowing down. “You’re only going to make it if you have a slow heartbeat,” the coach said. To do that, you had to breathe out, not just breathe in. Breathing out told your body you weren’t in danger. It applied on the mound. It applied everywhere else, too.
Tomchick eventually returned to ODU, something most athletes never do. Coaches vouched for him. His academics had improved. For the first time, he had access to the business program. That’s where Mark Strome entered the picture.
Strome was a former Old Dominion alumnus whose donation helped establish the entrepreneurship center Tomchick passed through. The value wasn’t day-to-day mentorship or classroom instruction. It was proximity. Being inside a system built to push students toward building something real, not just learning about it. For Tomchick, it meant early exposure to entrepreneurship, access to networks, and being put in rooms that felt uncomfortable before he felt ready for them.
“You’re gonna have to take the lead and be put in uncomfortable situations from the start,” he said. “and if you do, you’ll have applicable experience from day one.”
Business stopped being abstract. He launched his first company, Incubation Technologies, building websites and software. It was practical, not flashy. And then it failed in a way that mattered. A client suffered a cyberattack, due to his lack of knowledge on the topic. Databases went down. Systems broke. Tomchick watched something he helped build get compromised, and he realized he’d stumbled into a problem most people didn’t think about until it was too late.
“I now know something that I feel like most people don’t know,” he said later. “This thing called cybersecurity, that everybody needs now more than ever.”
He didn’t rush to start Valor. Instead, he went inside other companies. Built service lines. Sat in boardrooms he didn’t think he belonged in. “I had no business being there,” he admitted. But he paid attention, especially to how interconnected modern businesses really were.
One consulting engagement changed how he saw everything. Early in his career, he was pulled into a high-stakes corporate assignment that exposed just how vulnerable large organizations can be beneath the surface. What he uncovered wasn’t a traditional software flaw. It was something deeper, embedded in how products were being designed, sourced, and monitored.
“They had foreign researchers bugging every product that they were producing,” he said.
It wasn’t a software issue. It was a supply chain issue. A connection issue.
That reframed cybersecurity for him. It wasn’t just about protecting networks. It was about protecting the invisible links that make a business function. Vendors. Partners. Dependencies. “How do you protect the supply chain of the business?” he asked.
After helping grow a Texas-based company at massive scale, Tomchick reached another decision point. He saw the opportunity clearly enough to walk away. “I was like, I can do this myself and start playing monoply with my own money.”
Valor Cybersecurity was built on restraint, not ambition for its own sake. Instead of trying to serve everyone, Valor focused narrowly: operational cybersecurity for defense contractors. Not everything. Not everyone. Just that.
Tomchick had seen too many companies selling generic solutions to specific problems. “Most people are selling me, ‘I want to do this thing for everybody,’” he said. Valor did the opposite. Talk to customers. Understand how they actually operate. Protect what truly matters to their mission.
“We don’t shy away from it,” he said. “We’re like, how are you using this and how does it need to be protected?”
As the work grew, so did the responsibility. Defense contractors. Critical supply chains. Stakes that didn’t allow for guessing. At the same time, Tomchick became increasingly interested in something adjacent to cybersecurity: human connection.
“At the core of everything that makes life life,” he said, “it’s all about connection and experience.”
Executives wanted safety. Locked systems. Air gaps. Total control. But total control came with friction. “If I lock down everything,” he said, “there’s inconvenience.” His point wasn’t that safety didn’t matter. It was that safety and connection weren’t opposites. “You don’t have to choose,” he said. “There’s an ideal balance for everybody.”
It’s the same balance that’s shaped his own path. Athlete and operator. Technician and storyteller. Specialist over generalist.
When asked what he’d tell companies operating in defense and innovation today, his answer was simple and unromantic. “Jump on board. Or get left behind.”
Not hype. Not threat. Just experience speaking.
Because Greg Tomchick has spent his life choosing where to focus, when to slow down, and how to breathe out long enough to stay in the game.
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