What motivates a founder to shift from building a billion-dollar edtech unicorn to manufacturing missiles? And what happens when your career becomes a response to something deeply personal — the kind of world your kids might grow up in?
Vu Tran is a doctor, a co-founder of Go1, and now the co-founder of Black Sky Industries — Australia’s first scalable missile and solid rocket motor manufacturer. In this episode, Vu opens up about the moral tipping point that drove him into defence, the vulnerability he sees in Australia’s current military setup, and why he believes our future depends on becoming, in his words, “an echidna — small, underestimated, and far too prickly to bite.”
This is a conversation about personal mission, national security, and the power of bringing startup speed to one of the slowest-moving industries on the planet.
In this conversation, we cover:
🏥 The emotional toll and grounding power of Vu’s continued work as a doctor in Logan
🚀 How Black Sky Industries is tackling lethality and building solid rocket motors at scale
🛡️ What Vu means by “making Australia an echidna” — a defence philosophy grounded in self-reliance and deterrence
💣 Why no one wants to touch “the pointy stuff” — and why Vu’s choosing to anyway
🌍 How Australia’s current reliance on foreign defence suppliers makes us vulnerable — and what needs to change
💡 Lessons Vu took from scaling Go1 into a unicorn — and what he’s left behind at Black Sky
📈 Why defence tech is the next trillion-dollar market opportunity — and why Vu wants more founders to enter the space.
This episode is a raw and revealing look at how one founder is turning personal responsibility into national-scale impact — and why Australia needs more entrepreneurs willing to tackle the hardest problems.
