TurbineOne’s Court Vanzant on Education, Discomfort, & Veteran Paths To Defense Entrepreneurship

Defense Disrupted · Feb 17, 2026 · 36m

Court Vanzant, Chief Growth Officer at TurbineOne, offers a veteran entrepreneur framework that rejects the comfort trap: get a formal education to build hard skills, then deliberately seek discomfort as the growth indicator. His metric for knowing you're in the right space is sustained imposter syndrome: if you feel comfortable and competent, you've stopped learning.

For hardware startups, he challenges the VC orthodoxy on domestic manufacturing, arguing 40 years of offshoring created strategic vulnerabilities that demand US-based production despite higher costs. His counter-UAS market…