In Hampton Roads, entrepreneurship and service have long been intertwined.

Few founders embody that connection more clearly than Leland Remias, founder of REaKTOR portfolio company VroomBrick; and recent conversations with the region’s veteran business community show just how much that mindset continues to shape both his company and his leadership.

Over the past several months, VroomBrick has become an active contributor to veteran-focused entrepreneurship programming across Hampton Roads, including engagements with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families’ Military Entrepreneurship Forum, and the Hampton Roads Small Business Development Center’s Military Business Network.

These sessions were working conversations about skills, failure, technology, and what it really takes for veterans to build a company from the ground up.

Many of the questions raised by veterans in attendance were practical and forward-looking:

  • How do you use AI effectively in a startup?

  • Where do you find incubators, accelerators, and non-dilutive capital?

  • How do you translate military experience into a civilian business context?

The answers often came back to a shared foundation.

Military service develops capabilities that are deeply relevant to entrepreneurship: operating under pressure, adapting quickly, leading teams, executing plans while remaining flexible.

At the same time, entrepreneurship introduces a mindset shift that can feel unfamiliar to veterans: learning to accept, and learn from, failure.

Startup growth often requires pivots, missteps, and recalibration. That willingness to iterate, rather than aim for perfection on the first attempt, is something many veteran founders have to learn in real time.

Encouragement from advisors led the company not only to refine its own strategy, but to step back into the ecosystem as a resource for others.

That dynamic is also central to REaKTOR’s mission: because founders who succeed don’t just build companies; they help shorten the learning curve for those founders coming behind them.

At its core, VroomBrick is a real estate technology platform designed to replace opaque, commission-heavy processes with transparency, automation, and user control. By giving buyers and sellers access to modern tools, the platform enables households to save thousands of dollars and move through one of life’s biggest decisions with clarity and confidence.

It’s a familiar arc in other industries. Tax preparation, travel booking, and investing have all undergone similar transformations, where technology shifted power back to the consumer. VroomBrick is applying that same logic to real estate, which has remained largely unchanged for decades.

For veterans and first-time buyers in particular, the implications are meaningful. Lower transaction costs, clearer information, and better decision-making can translate into long-term household stability and wealth-building.

For REaKTOR, stories like VroomBrick’s reflect the deeper value of the work happening across the region.

When REaKTOR founders show up to share lessons with veterans starting businesses, it reinforces a culture where progress can be shared cross the community.

And in Hampton Roads, that culture is one of the region’s strongest assets.