After the Worst Three Months of His Life, Greg Tomchick Built a Different Kind of Company

Tomchick had launched the company in 2021, but finding the right customer and business model would take years.

“I’ll serve anybody at any price,” Tomchick recalled of his early approach.

Today, Valor has narrowed its focus around defense contractors, helping companies navigate cybersecurity requirements tied to government work. Tomchick says it took roughly four and a half years to determine who Valor could best serve and, perhaps more importantly, who actually wanted its help.

But the bigger transformation happened outside the company.

Since his previous appearance on Fervent Four, Tomchick went through what he describes as a three-month stretch involving an investor falling out, a divorce and a dispute with a former business partner over company information.

Instead of viewing the three events independently, Tomchick eventually began asking a different question: What was his role in how he responded to them?

“Pain is your greatest superpower,” Tomchick said. “The things that have challenged us the most qualify us for what we’re most capable of doing now.”

It took time to reach that conclusion.

Tomchick said he initially spent months avoiding some of what had happened. He looked for answers about how someone gets through a divorce, a failed investor relationship or a business dispute.

Eventually, his question changed from how to escape those experiences to what he needed to confront because of them.

“The quickest path to that peace is figuring out what you’re avoiding and just confronting it,” he said.

That philosophy now extends into how Tomchick runs Valor.

His first career was professional baseball. After playing at Old Dominion University, he was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals and spent time in the minor leagues. Baseball taught him to operate in an environment where virtually everything was measured and analyzed.

It also taught him about repetition.

Tomchick describes confidence today not as something someone either possesses or lacks, but as something earned through reps. When Valor was young, he lacked the experience to know whether his approach would work. Years of serving customers changed that.

“I can’t ease into Greg for somebody,” he said. “I just gotta give you Greg or give you Valor.”

That confidence coincided with a clearer business strategy.

Valor is now focused heavily on defense contractors, and Tomchick said the company is preparing another expansion around artificial intelligence. Valor has been piloting private AI environments designed to give companies access to language models while maintaining greater control over proprietary information.

The technology is different from what Tomchick was building when he started Valor.

So is Tomchick.

During his first Fervent Four appearance, the central challenge was figuring out what the company was supposed to become. More than three years later, Valor has a clearer market, and its founder talks as much about peace, vulnerability and knowing what matters as he does cybersecurity.

The difficult years did not disappear once the business improved.

Tomchick’s argument is that they became part of what made the improvement possible.

“Valor wouldn’t be where they are, Greg wouldn’t be where he is if I didn’t go through those situations,” he said.