October 14, 2024 • 28 mins
Rick Smith is the CEO of Axon Enterprise. He founded the company in a Tucson garage in 1993 after two of his classmates were shot and killed. Originally known as TASER International, Axon’s mission is to protect life — which includes making bullets obsolete. Rick’s family bet everything they had to get the company off the ground, nearly driving his parents to financial insolvency, and were saved only through TASER’s initial public offering in 2001. Rick has dedicated his life to helping public safety serve the communities they are sworn to protect. Under his leadership, Axon pioneered TASER energy weapons, made the body camera industry what it is today, and built the world’s leading digital evidence management platform, Evidence.com. In 2019, Rick published, “The End of Killing,” which challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that killing is a technology problem and offering a roadmap to solve it. He is a dynamic, inspirational and visionary leader who challenges Axon and society to rethink deeply entrenched problems and to drive toward life-saving outcomes. Rick holds a B.S. Cum Laude in Neuroscience from Harvard University, a Master's in International Finance from the University of Leuven in Belgium, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to another edition of CEOs you should know. I'm
your host, joe Yaylor, joined this time by the founder
and CEO of Axon Enterprise. Rick Smith joins us today. Rick,
great to see it, Thanks for being here, awesome, Thanks
for having me. So let's just start with it's still
pretty unique to be a founder and still the CEO
thirty plus years later for a company that's thriving, growing,
(00:23):
getting bigger. Take us through how that happened and thirty
years ago whether you expected to be sitting here at
this point, at this stage of the company.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So I've gone through numerous, i'd say cycles over that time.
When you first start, I thought, you know, we're going
to be bigger than Microsoft in no time. You have
delusions of Grangeur and then reality hits and seven years
of just banging our head against the wall. Our first
two products failed. Actually, in ninety nine, I was recommending
we shut the company down. I had just lost hope.
(00:53):
But my friends and family were the ones who funded it,
and my dad pointed out if we shut the company down,
he was going to get wiped out because he also
had signed and the guarantees for the bank loans. And
so we stuck with it. In our third product, we
pivoted in law enforcement and it took off. So yeah,
I would say initially I had delusions of grandeur. Then
I saw nothing but darkness for a while, and now
(01:13):
I'm just nothing but gratitude to be here. It's been
a wild and amazing journey.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And we should let our audience know the products that
you're talking about. Taser was was that the original name
of the company before Acts on Enterprise?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Correct? Correct?
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yep, So the Taser and now it was a pivot
to police and law enforcement where there's body cams, now
there is you. I mean, now you're a technology company.
The way I read it is it's not a safety company,
which it is, but it's a technology company.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah. In fact, the video part of our business, we
believe it's bigger than YouTube in terms of because we
have hundreds of thousands of police uploading two hours of
video every day. Now we don't have as many viewers,
but we've got a ton of users from the NYPD, LA, London,
you know, across Australia, really worldwide. So maybe i'll give
(02:04):
you the quick storyline thread. I had some guys I
knew through my high school Footall program were shot and
killed here in Arizona. In the nineties, I became very
interested in gun violence as a technology problem. It struck
me as just bizarre that the best we could do
for the way people defend themselves today is to shoot
bullets at each other. I mean, we've been doing that
(02:24):
for centuries, and so we set out with a mission.
We want to make the bullet obsolete. And would be
careful what I'm saying. I'm not saying we want to
take away anybody's anything. It's like, look, we just want
to give people more options. And if look, if you
could go out and buy Captain Captain Kirk's Phaser from
Star Trek, most people would choose that over a lethal weapon.
(02:45):
But the tech didn't exist. So we started out with Taser.
We started in the consumer space. At frankly, we had
two failed product launches. We pivoted into policing, basically because
we figured we had to earn the rights to prove
the tech worked with police. Taser took off and policing.
In fact, it took off so much that by the
mid two thousands, I was on the front page of
every newspaper in America. Very controversial people saying that cops
(03:09):
were doing awful things with tasers or that they were
killing people. And that's why we created body cameras, like, Okay,
rather than debate what people think police are doing, let's
record it and we'll protect the good cops and we'll
protect the public from the bad cops. So the truth,
you know, we'll set us all free. So we created
body cameras. With body cameras, we actually came to believe
(03:30):
we had to do software as well, because there's twenty
thousand police departments. If we sold them cameras, we'd have
to give them a way to manage all the data.
So we basically created like you know iTunes in the
cloud where we'd manage all these videos for them. And
now that has exploded where we're now by far the
largest body camera provider. We run the largest data set
in really in government anywhere with all the audio video data.
(03:54):
Now we do eing car cameras and drones. And the
next big pivot we're onto now is artificial intelligence because,
as you can imagine, there's a ton of information in
all these audio video files and now with AI we
can extract it. We just launched a product four months
ago that will write the first draft of a police
report for you. Wow Ed, cops are coming out of
their shoes. They're so excited about this because nobody likes
(04:15):
writing reports. In fact, the biggest thing we had to
do with practive Element was insert speed bumps to slow
them down, and like, no, no, no, you can't just submit
what the AI wrote. You have to review this. I
have to sign off that it's your report. The AI
is just an assistant tool anyway. So that gets us
to where we are today, where we've got a bunch
of software. We do VR training for cops. We do
know obviously taser weapons and a whole slew of different
(04:38):
cameras and drones and robotics is next on the frontier
for us as well. So a lot of interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
So did you invent the taser? The actual I did not, Okay,
when I was doing my research. Taser actually goes back
to before.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I was born. It was invented in the late nineteen
sixties by one of the guys who was one of
the chief scientists on the Apollo moon landing project in
the sixties, guy named Jack Cover. He had retired in
Arizona in Tucson and I found him. This is before
the Internet. I found him at the ASU Law Library
through a patent search. I noticed his patents were listed
with a Tucson address, so I four to one woned him.
(05:16):
I was twenty three, he was seventy three, and we
started out in his garage to give this thing a try.
He had failed twice, so his first two products failed.
Then together our next two products failed, so it was
really the fifth generation. We finally got it right and
that took off.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
It's such a remarkable thing, though, because I feel like
you've accomplished with your company what so many companies really
want and do a lot of energy and resources, which
is brand name recognition, right, and the Taser brand and
what people immediately think of has been accomplished in like
the public consciousness. But you're also that's like the tip
(05:53):
of the iceberg for the company, which you mentioned Google
a little bit kind of feels like alphabet Google, and
then they've got a you. You're on that scale of
here's the tip of the iceberg with the public might
recognize as our brand, here's actually everything we do.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, thanks, well, you know, part of it's the controversy.
Controversy gets eyeballs and police use of taser is nothing
if not controversial. Don't tase me, bro right. That was
like the most famous phrase of two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Is that long ago? That makes me feel a little old?
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, it does, it does. Uh, And then you have
to pivot to change the name of the company to Axon.
We had a whole bunch of soul searching on that internally,
because we're very proud of what we do with Taser.
But the name Taser is like Coca cola means a
certain you know, right soda, Taser means you know, so
closely associated with these electrical energy weapons. As we started
(06:44):
doing cameras and software, we needed a brand name that
could be bigger so that it would make sense. It's like, oh,
we're not just the Taser guys. We also do body
cameras and software and AI and virtual reality and all
this other stuff, and so Axon Actually the name Axon
comes from it's the aim of the nerve fibers that
connect your brain to the rest of your body. And
so when we built our body cameras, we chose Axon
(07:06):
to signify the camera's real power is its connection into
a central repository and now that we can put AI
on top of it, the whole thing's coming together nicely.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
It's a remarkable success story. And it's not even I mean,
it's we're, you know, at the beginning stages of what
you hope to do and transform and I want to
talk about some of those big, sort of audacious goals
for the company. But you know, let's quickly go back
to you, and as the leader of this company, you
have a personal background with a lot of education and
a lot of technical and scientific background. Then you're an
(07:42):
entrepreneur launching a company. You mentioned there was a couple failures.
There feels like there's a lot of lessons that could
be valuable to people who are listening that are wanting
to be entrepreneurial or in the middle point of their
entrepreneurial or maybe you've given up on being an entrepreneur.
What do you attribute to allow yourself to overcome that
and ultimately becoming very successful.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
So my primary advice somebody once to become an entrepreneurs,
do not do it for the money. You will likely fail,
and so you need to pick something you're so passionate
about that if it's failing you'll still stick with it
and be like, no, this is I'm like, I am
going to solve this problem. Pick a something that's wrong
with the universe you want to fix. Like I had
(08:26):
friends who made a ton of money in the Internet.
And these were guys that were computer geeks that went out,
you know, when they couldn't afford a car and their
start up. They'd be riding a bicycle in the mid nineties.
They did very well. Then after the Internet took off,
I had a bunch of other friends who went out there,
left investment banking or you know, these other industries to
go make money, and they all got slaughtered in the
(08:48):
Internet bubble. So top advice is really focus on the
problem you're solving, make sure it's something you're passionate about,
and then the other thing is just go and do
it as quickly as you can. Most people, you know,
keep thinking about it, talking about it, and there's this
sense of like, oh, I can't do it until I
have like the perfect business plan. Like my first business
(09:10):
plan lasted about two weeks and it was out the
window and we were pivoting in a different direction. And
that has happened over and over again. So you can't
wait for the perfect plan. If you if you've identified
a problem you're excited about, and then the other thing
is just start working on it. Just do it. Like
for me, the most important decision I made probably in
my life. I don't tell my wife that it was
(09:32):
the the decision not to interview for a job coming
out of grad school. I had the taser concept had
come up in a entrepreneurship class I took as one
of my last my last quarter of Chicago, and I
just said, you know, I think there's something here. I'm
just going to go move home with my parents and
just work on it for a year and see what happens.
(09:53):
And then because I graduated at the end of the summer,
I could still hit the spring recruiting if this wasn't
working out, And just that simple decision that I'm just
going to go work on this, and every day I'd
get out of bed and okay, what you know. First
thing I did is I went to see Shooters World
the local gun store. Okay, what other options are out there?
And then I started calling the different companies, and then
I went to the su law labra I'm doing patent searches.
(10:15):
I discovered that the gun venditastes were losing Tucson, and
so by just committing to start working on it, things
started falling into place. And you know, here I am
thirty one years later.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
It's not a shortcut. It's not a I know a
guy who knows a guy. It's conceptualizing the idea and
throwing yourself into it and committing yourself.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Yes. And I would also say, when you tell people
about it, if they say, oh, yeah, that's a great idea,
it's probably not a great idea. If it's if it's
so interesting, maybe that's obvious somebody would have done it.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So people would people tell you that sounds like a
crazy idea. Yeah, you'd get told that's a bad idea
all the time.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah. Yeah, And even the new stuff we're doing, when
people start with no, then I'm like, okay, this might
be a thing because it's not obvious. Interesting yeses are
obvious if it's oh yeah, you know, okay, somebody's probably
already done that. But when it starts with a no,
then you know, you get don't give up at the
first no for sure. To me, that's a signal that okay,
this is not obvious. Let me dig deeper. Like when
(11:14):
we did Taser. You know, everybody thought we were crazy.
My college roommates came out and filmed the video making
fun of me. It's a riot that we all still
laugh about today. So then after Taser's body cameras, there's
no cop in America wanted to wear a body camera,
and we started cloud software. Police told us, what are
you talking about? What is this cloud thing? We can't
put digital police evidence in some cloud thing, but we
(11:35):
dug in, Oh, what you're worried about is security? Okay? Well,
and I wasn't a software expert back that. I was
just asking questions, learning what turns out like your local
city doesn't have, or at least back then, didn't really
have any experts in information security. The idea of the cloud.
By partnering with Microsoft, who's got a big information security team,
we could actually be more secure than your local police
(11:57):
department could. But it's understanding where the nose are coming
from and pushing through them. But don't stop it. No,
you're gonna get a lot of nos.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Rick Smith is the CEO and founder of Axon Enterprise,
joining us here on CEOs. You should know. So my
thought and all this and I'm sure some people listening
think about this too. It's like, Okay, you've been you
overcame all those struggles, and you had a product that
you can be successful with, and you've even branched and
evolved in police enforcement. Is now a market that you
(12:28):
have have done have been very successful in creating a
safer community for all of us. Why not just stop there?
Why not just say Okay, these are our products, this
is what we do. We can do this really well,
and we can do this really well for a long time.
What is it about your leadership and your vision that
at this point you're like, well, now we want to
do more.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
I guess for me, I'm kind of like the kid
who came home from elementary school I want a mom
to put the picture on the fridge.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Type a that's called yeah right, or just kind of
a creator. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I like feeling like the work I'm doing matters, and
for me, I like creating new things. I actually went
through a burnout phase in the middle of my career,
went to the board and said, look, I want to retire,
Like I feel like I'm gonna die at my desk
from stress. And I wasn't enjoying the job anymore as
the company got bigger. I was when you're a small startup,
you're in the middle of everything and it's fun and
(13:24):
you're trying to problem solve, to figure out like product
market fit and all that. And as painful as his
first seven years were, it was fun because you make
a decision now and you're changing tomorrow. As it gets bigger,
you spend all your time managing budgets and people. Just
I wasn't enjoying it, and so I actually told the board, Hey,
I want to retire, and they said, well, well, well,
(13:44):
you know, hold on to the founder what's going on,
And so we came up with a plane instead. So, okay,
I'm going to go to Europe for a year. I
wanted a bit of a break, one of my kids
to see the world. They're at the right age. And
there was an interesting thing that happened. It was going
to take a year for me to get ready to
take this year on a semi sabbatical, and so I
(14:04):
had asked myself questions like, Okay, I'm writing a web
page at two in the morning, who can I give
this to? So it's not me, and I basically delegated
everything I was doing and I thought I was getting ready,
and I remember I walked out the door on May
like twenty fifth, and I stood out in the sun.
I put my head back, I felt the sun on
my face, and I thought, I'm done. My work here
(14:26):
is done. I'm gonna go to Europe for you, and
then I'm gonna retire. So then this thing happened. I
go to Europe, and over the next year people said, dude,
you are a way better CEO, and I didn't know
how to take that. So I'm like, well, I actually
not doing much now. It's this good or bad that
I'm better when I'm not around. And what I figured
out was I was in the middle of everything. I
had slowed the whole organization down. I was a chronic micromanager,
(14:50):
and I had to let go of everything. And that
is I think the transition from founder to CEO why
most people don't make it. They're totally opposite. When you're
a founder, you delegate nothing, You're in the middle of everything.
It's your baby's right baby, and then you got to
give it all up. So the only way I could
give it up was when I was like, Okay, I'm
I'm ready to actually leave, and then I fell in
love with the job again because I actually learned how
(15:12):
to be a quote unquote CEO, and you delegate it,
you know, you delegate and let other people do their jobs.
And so today I've got the greatest job on Earth.
I've even learned to delegate further, where what will happen
to a lot of companies is they'll be like, Okay,
the founder CEO, we want you doing the vision thing
and all that, but we're going to bring in a
new CEO over you. And a lot of times that
(15:33):
doesn't work because like you're not really empowered then to
really be making the decisions. So the way we're organized,
I'm still the CEO. I have one direct report. His
name's Josh Isner, and he is an execution machine. He
is like the head coach. He loves managing people, he
loves hiring, he loves budgets, he loves all the management
and execution that I actually don't enjoy it. I like
(15:56):
talking with customers. I like being in the lab working
on new products with online engineers. And so we've got
it really dialed in and the magic is working really well,
and Josh has built a phenomenal team, So he and
I still work together closely, and it's really clear he
makes all the decisions on budgets and people and operations
of the business, and I make the decisions on product
(16:16):
strategy and direction and marketing creative. So I'm the storyteller.
My job is to figure out is to tell our
story like we're doing here today, and then to write
the story for tomorrow. Okay, where does it go next?
And it's a pretty awesome job. So for any entrepreneurs
who are in that middle stage where you're in that like,
do I want to stay into CEO or not, I
highly recommend looking at this organizational structure where you bring
(16:39):
in a number two who's a strong executor that allows
you to keep doing what you like doing as a
founder and is frankly unique. All and on one last thought,
there's a book called the Founder's Mentality and it talks
about it looks at it's a Harvard Business School review.
Founder led companies outperform the rest and the reason is founders,
(17:01):
by their very nature, want to get out and talk
to customers and get that feedback direct into the organization.
And I've discovered that's what I love doing. Professional CEOs
when the founder leaves a professional CEO who came up
through the organization, just naturally, they are going to be
much more focused on running the business. So that means
you sit frankly in the ivory tower and people come
(17:23):
and present to you. So by time the customer's voice
gets to you, it's been through ten layers of the
organization and everybody's manipulated the data a little bit for
their you know, not saying people are bad, but they
all have their own agendas. And so the CEOs, some
of our competitors that are bigger than us, I don't
think they really know what's going on in the market.
They can't. They're too busy running the big organization. Because
(17:45):
Josh does that for me. I'm out meeting with customers,
so I'm getting these early demand signals. You know, we
made a bet on AI seven or eight years ago.
There was a high risk bet because we're you know,
I was able to connect the dot to what the
customers were saying and their problems. And then I go
to these tech conferences, so I'm learning on what's happening
(18:06):
and how fast tech is moving. And because I was
free to connect those dots and make the bets we're
able to out into it, and it's not unique to me.
I think that's just true founders in general. That's the
niche you can stay in even as your company grows.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
The other thing I really appreciate about that story and
that background is you reached a point where you succeeded,
which you would think is the peak of your professional career,
and you found yourself unhappy, which is not something people
are either willing to admit or even willing to consider
when they're on that journey up. I look at it
from my personal perspective, it always feels like there's a
certain level you get to where you've got to make
(18:40):
a conscious decision like am I going to continue to
pour everything into my job at the expense of everything
else in my life? Or am I going to choose
everything else in my life and see what I can
do professionally. It sounds like you found a way to
do both by stepping back and having perspective.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yeah, And I would say when I went to Europe
as well, I also learned I got to have something
to keep me mentally engaged. Right, I thought my wife
and I'd be holding hands trapesing through the flowery fields
of Europe. And it was actually one of the more
stressful years of our marriage, and I think part of
that was it was just too much to gatherness. I
(19:16):
think our relationship is healthier, like when you know, I
travel a bit. Now I've got things to work on,
and you look forward to getting back together and there's
interesting things to talk about because you're not staring at
each other.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Not relying on her to satisfy all of these other
needs that you can be getting elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah. Well, and it's just, yeah, I need to feel
like I've got kind of a purpose, and certainly being
a good dad and all that is important. But I
like creating things and doing things, So for me, I
like this balance of I'd say for most people, the
real key is if you can if you can calibrate
(19:52):
your job so you're doing things you like doing, it
doesn't feel like a job. I'm guessing for you, this
probably doesn't feel much like a job.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
No, I love this.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, yeah, Now for me, I didn't like being a manager,
like everybody wants to be a manager because you feel
like you have to climb the hierarchy. But man like
some people like Josh is great at it, and he's like,
he's a head coach, that's what he does for me.
I'm more of a creative. I want to work on
interesting problems to solve, not managing people issues. So it
(20:21):
acts on. For example, there's this term in business, they
call them individual contributors or ices. I kind of hate
that term because it feels a little demeaning, Like, so
we call them creators. Absently, you can be a manager
or a creator, and we try to elevate the idea
of the creators because those are the people do the
real work. The Yes, being a manager is doing work too,
but your job as a manager is to clear the
(20:42):
decks so the creators can actually go create and make
products or make great marketing campaigns or whatever they're working on.
And I've learned I like being a creator, and I've
had this multiple times, but I've seen this happen to
the other You really talented people, they're great creators, and
then they feel like for career progression, they got to
become a manager, and then they're just not good at
it and they're miserable. So we try to find ways
(21:05):
where hey, we have a parallel track. Hey you can
stay a creator, like don't measure your worth in the
universe by how many people you manage like that's b Yes,
it doesn't need to be that way. And so if
you focus on finding a job at you're the day,
the things you do day to day, or things you
love doing, then it's not really jobbing.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
One thing that Accellent Enterprise does really well is think big.
And I know this is kind of a core part
as we've talked about, is don't be limited, don't constrain yourself.
Think big. Your goal as a company is to cut
police civilian deaths by fifty percent by two thousand and
thirty three. That's obviously a huge goal that you are
(21:44):
actively working towards, but it also from my research filters
all the way down to the day to day of
how you empower your employees to you want everybody in
the company to think big and not just think should
I just get my basic job requirements done today? Some
(22:04):
managers and some companies might look down on that, say
it's too much wasted time, Like focus on what you're
supposed to focus on, and that's how we succeed. Can
you describe how you came to the kind of organizational
philosophy the thinking big is just what we do.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, So this whole moonshot of cutting gun related desk
this came about because I'd say maybe five six years ago,
I was getting very frustrated that as you get bigger,
it's easy for a company to become mediocre and it's
very easy for people to be like, well, this is
my job. I do this one thing over here, and
it's kind of just a job. And in particular with
(22:41):
the Taser, I was like, guys, we are not we're
not pushing hard enough. It was not to take swipes
at Apple because it's a phenomenal company, but look the Apple,
I have the what is the iPhone fifteen? It's not
that different from the fourteen. Not that the cameras better
now they're also doing transformative work in other areas. But
I was like, with Taser, not good enough yet. We
need to outperform the gun. That's our long term vision.
(23:05):
So that's where I started the moonshot. Internally, how do
we build a taser that outperforms a pistol? And then
that's kind of hard to measure, and so you know,
if you're going to declare a moonshot that it's just
like when Jack Kennedy stood on the you know, up
in Congress and said, we're gonna put a man on
the moon. That's a measurable goal. By the end of
the decade, we got a measurable goal in a date,
so we sort of didn't work on it. We I
(23:28):
personally read hundreds and hundreds of officer involved shooting incidents,
and we reading through it, believed if we gave them
a high power, long range, highly reliable taser weapon and
drones and robotics, that's the next phase. So you don't
have to send a cop through the door if you
think there's something dangerous inside. Between those we think we
could limit up to seventy two percent of police shootings
could be resolved another way. And so from that we said, okay,
(23:50):
fifty percent is in reach. Let's declare this as a goal.
And one of the stories, I don't know if this
is true or not, but there's this apocryphal story that
Jack Kennedy goes down to the Space Center and Houston
and he there's a janitor there and he says, hey,
you know, what's your job here? It just making small talk,
and the janner, for instance, says, well, I'm here to
put a man on the moon and gives me chills
(24:11):
saying that, now that's what we want our business like.
And and you know, we tell that story and a
lot of times you'll ask people what their job is
and they'll say, my job is to cut gun related
desk between police and public at fifty percent. It's a
little more cumbersome to say than putting a man on
the moon, But for us, it look at energizes. It
makes me more excited to keep working. You know, financially
I don't have to anymore. That's true for a lot
(24:34):
of folks, and there's lots of other jobs people could
go get. In fact, yesterday I met with one of
our engineers and he had left a couple of years ago.
He was frustrated. He was having some issues with his manager,
and he sort of shared the story and he came back.
And the reason that came back was the mission. The
other place he went, he didn't feels like it was
is engaging and he was making a difference, and he
(24:56):
came back and we fixed the managerial problem that he had.
But it was a great example of power of the mission.
When you have people that are really excited, they just
the whole organization outperforms.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
So you this started, the story began with some tragedy
that you experienced personally as a young man, and it
took this entire arc of trial and air, entrepreneurialship building,
a successful company, burning out, coming back in a different
way to continue to successfully lead it to now a
(25:26):
moonshot of making just everybody say, for police, the community,
what's what do you what's the progress that you've made
towards that, and and in your mind, what is going
to be the way you accomplish that and succeed in it.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
So for the moonshot, there's there's still a little more.
First thing we got to do is we've actually got
to get the Taser weapon to the level of performance
where it's comparable to the reliability of a nine millimeter
And we're still ironing out some of the some of
the bugs in this show is there there's one big
remaining technical hurdle, and that's how we get through heavy clothing.
(26:05):
So I spend a lot of my time in the
lab with the engineers. We're shooting all sorts of different
clothing and sounds kind of fun. It is really fun stuff.
So I think we're eighteen months out from getting that solved.
We've almost solved it in the lab, and then it
takes time to get into production. So really i'd say
we're about a year and a half in so by
(26:28):
year two and a half, the third year, we should
have all the tech in place that we need. There's
some stuff we're doing on drones and robotics as well
that will start to layer in. Once we got the
core tech in place, then it's about Okay. Now we've
watched what we call the Apollo cohort or the Apollo
Apollo Alliance, thank you, which is where we're going to
early police departments like say saying okay, we want you.
(26:50):
Once we get everything dialed in, it in place, you
sign up to deploy it, and we're going to measure
this is like our test cohort. Can we pick a
couple big agencies over a two to three year period
proved that we can cut their gun related desks in half?
And once this is like you know, medical device testing,
you got to prove it first in a small test group.
Once we prove it and we've got the data, then
(27:10):
years five through ten is all about rolling it out
across the country and getting enough momentum and enough deployment
that you know we can hit the.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Goal over a thousand employees here in Phoenix. It's a
international company with a lot of successes through a lot
of trial and air and a lot of overcoming adversity.
I really enjoyed the story inspired by it. I can't
thank you enough for sharing all parts of that journey
here on CEOs you should Know and continued success to
x On Enterprise.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Thanks. It's really an honor to be in this position.
I get up with a just insane sense of gratitude
every day that I get to do this job. I
get to work with amazing people on a really cool
mission and get to come out and you know, meet
awesome and interesting people like you, and get to brag
about what And it's by no means me. We have
(28:00):
O don't know three, almost four thousand people working on
this mission. So it just it's fun to be part
of the high performing team.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Incredible, incredible story. It's CEOs you should know. He is
the CEO and founder of Axon Enterprise. Rick Smith, Thank
you very much for being here.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Thank you
Welcome to another edition of CEOs you should know. I'm
your host, joe Yaylor, joined this time by the founder
and CEO of Axon Enterprise. Rick Smith joins us today. Rick,
great to see it, Thanks for being here, awesome, Thanks
for having me. So let's just start with it's still
pretty unique to be a founder and still the CEO
thirty plus years later for a company that's thriving, growing,
(00:23):
getting bigger. Take us through how that happened and thirty
years ago whether you expected to be sitting here at
this point, at this stage of the company.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So I've gone through numerous, i'd say cycles over that time.
When you first start, I thought, you know, we're going
to be bigger than Microsoft in no time. You have
delusions of Grangeur and then reality hits and seven years
of just banging our head against the wall. Our first
two products failed. Actually, in ninety nine, I was recommending
we shut the company down. I had just lost hope.
(00:53):
But my friends and family were the ones who funded it,
and my dad pointed out if we shut the company down,
he was going to get wiped out because he also
had signed and the guarantees for the bank loans. And
so we stuck with it. In our third product, we
pivoted in law enforcement and it took off. So yeah,
I would say initially I had delusions of grandeur. Then
I saw nothing but darkness for a while, and now
(01:13):
I'm just nothing but gratitude to be here. It's been
a wild and amazing journey.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And we should let our audience know the products that
you're talking about. Taser was was that the original name
of the company before Acts on Enterprise?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Correct? Correct?
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yep, So the Taser and now it was a pivot
to police and law enforcement where there's body cams, now
there is you. I mean, now you're a technology company.
The way I read it is it's not a safety company,
which it is, but it's a technology company.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah. In fact, the video part of our business, we
believe it's bigger than YouTube in terms of because we
have hundreds of thousands of police uploading two hours of
video every day. Now we don't have as many viewers,
but we've got a ton of users from the NYPD, LA, London,
you know, across Australia, really worldwide. So maybe i'll give
(02:04):
you the quick storyline thread. I had some guys I
knew through my high school Footall program were shot and
killed here in Arizona. In the nineties, I became very
interested in gun violence as a technology problem. It struck
me as just bizarre that the best we could do
for the way people defend themselves today is to shoot
bullets at each other. I mean, we've been doing that
(02:24):
for centuries, and so we set out with a mission.
We want to make the bullet obsolete. And would be
careful what I'm saying. I'm not saying we want to
take away anybody's anything. It's like, look, we just want
to give people more options. And if look, if you
could go out and buy Captain Captain Kirk's Phaser from
Star Trek, most people would choose that over a lethal weapon.
(02:45):
But the tech didn't exist. So we started out with Taser.
We started in the consumer space. At frankly, we had
two failed product launches. We pivoted into policing, basically because
we figured we had to earn the rights to prove
the tech worked with police. Taser took off and policing.
In fact, it took off so much that by the
mid two thousands, I was on the front page of
every newspaper in America. Very controversial people saying that cops
(03:09):
were doing awful things with tasers or that they were
killing people. And that's why we created body cameras, like, Okay,
rather than debate what people think police are doing, let's
record it and we'll protect the good cops and we'll
protect the public from the bad cops. So the truth,
you know, we'll set us all free. So we created
body cameras. With body cameras, we actually came to believe
(03:30):
we had to do software as well, because there's twenty
thousand police departments. If we sold them cameras, we'd have
to give them a way to manage all the data.
So we basically created like you know iTunes in the
cloud where we'd manage all these videos for them. And
now that has exploded where we're now by far the
largest body camera provider. We run the largest data set
in really in government anywhere with all the audio video data.
(03:54):
Now we do eing car cameras and drones. And the
next big pivot we're onto now is artificial intelligence because,
as you can imagine, there's a ton of information in
all these audio video files and now with AI we
can extract it. We just launched a product four months
ago that will write the first draft of a police
report for you. Wow Ed, cops are coming out of
their shoes. They're so excited about this because nobody likes
(04:15):
writing reports. In fact, the biggest thing we had to
do with practive Element was insert speed bumps to slow
them down, and like, no, no, no, you can't just submit
what the AI wrote. You have to review this. I
have to sign off that it's your report. The AI
is just an assistant tool anyway. So that gets us
to where we are today, where we've got a bunch
of software. We do VR training for cops. We do
know obviously taser weapons and a whole slew of different
(04:38):
cameras and drones and robotics is next on the frontier
for us as well. So a lot of interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
So did you invent the taser? The actual I did not, Okay,
when I was doing my research. Taser actually goes back
to before.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I was born. It was invented in the late nineteen
sixties by one of the guys who was one of
the chief scientists on the Apollo moon landing project in
the sixties, guy named Jack Cover. He had retired in
Arizona in Tucson and I found him. This is before
the Internet. I found him at the ASU Law Library
through a patent search. I noticed his patents were listed
with a Tucson address, so I four to one woned him.
(05:16):
I was twenty three, he was seventy three, and we
started out in his garage to give this thing a try.
He had failed twice, so his first two products failed.
Then together our next two products failed, so it was
really the fifth generation. We finally got it right and
that took off.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
It's such a remarkable thing, though, because I feel like
you've accomplished with your company what so many companies really
want and do a lot of energy and resources, which
is brand name recognition, right, and the Taser brand and
what people immediately think of has been accomplished in like
the public consciousness. But you're also that's like the tip
(05:53):
of the iceberg for the company, which you mentioned Google
a little bit kind of feels like alphabet Google, and
then they've got a you. You're on that scale of
here's the tip of the iceberg with the public might
recognize as our brand, here's actually everything we do.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, thanks, well, you know, part of it's the controversy.
Controversy gets eyeballs and police use of taser is nothing
if not controversial. Don't tase me, bro right. That was
like the most famous phrase of two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Is that long ago? That makes me feel a little old?
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, it does, it does. Uh, And then you have
to pivot to change the name of the company to Axon.
We had a whole bunch of soul searching on that internally,
because we're very proud of what we do with Taser.
But the name Taser is like Coca cola means a
certain you know, right soda, Taser means you know, so
closely associated with these electrical energy weapons. As we started
(06:44):
doing cameras and software, we needed a brand name that
could be bigger so that it would make sense. It's like, oh,
we're not just the Taser guys. We also do body
cameras and software and AI and virtual reality and all
this other stuff, and so Axon Actually the name Axon
comes from it's the aim of the nerve fibers that
connect your brain to the rest of your body. And
so when we built our body cameras, we chose Axon
(07:06):
to signify the camera's real power is its connection into
a central repository and now that we can put AI
on top of it, the whole thing's coming together nicely.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
It's a remarkable success story. And it's not even I mean,
it's we're, you know, at the beginning stages of what
you hope to do and transform and I want to
talk about some of those big, sort of audacious goals
for the company. But you know, let's quickly go back
to you, and as the leader of this company, you
have a personal background with a lot of education and
a lot of technical and scientific background. Then you're an
(07:42):
entrepreneur launching a company. You mentioned there was a couple failures.
There feels like there's a lot of lessons that could
be valuable to people who are listening that are wanting
to be entrepreneurial or in the middle point of their
entrepreneurial or maybe you've given up on being an entrepreneur.
What do you attribute to allow yourself to overcome that
and ultimately becoming very successful.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
So my primary advice somebody once to become an entrepreneurs,
do not do it for the money. You will likely fail,
and so you need to pick something you're so passionate
about that if it's failing you'll still stick with it
and be like, no, this is I'm like, I am
going to solve this problem. Pick a something that's wrong
with the universe you want to fix. Like I had
(08:26):
friends who made a ton of money in the Internet.
And these were guys that were computer geeks that went out,
you know, when they couldn't afford a car and their
start up. They'd be riding a bicycle in the mid nineties.
They did very well. Then after the Internet took off,
I had a bunch of other friends who went out there,
left investment banking or you know, these other industries to
go make money, and they all got slaughtered in the
(08:48):
Internet bubble. So top advice is really focus on the
problem you're solving, make sure it's something you're passionate about,
and then the other thing is just go and do
it as quickly as you can. Most people, you know,
keep thinking about it, talking about it, and there's this
sense of like, oh, I can't do it until I
have like the perfect business plan. Like my first business
(09:10):
plan lasted about two weeks and it was out the
window and we were pivoting in a different direction. And
that has happened over and over again. So you can't
wait for the perfect plan. If you if you've identified
a problem you're excited about, and then the other thing
is just start working on it. Just do it. Like
for me, the most important decision I made probably in
my life. I don't tell my wife that it was
(09:32):
the the decision not to interview for a job coming
out of grad school. I had the taser concept had
come up in a entrepreneurship class I took as one
of my last my last quarter of Chicago, and I
just said, you know, I think there's something here. I'm
just going to go move home with my parents and
just work on it for a year and see what happens.
(09:53):
And then because I graduated at the end of the summer,
I could still hit the spring recruiting if this wasn't
working out, And just that simple decision that I'm just
going to go work on this, and every day I'd
get out of bed and okay, what you know. First
thing I did is I went to see Shooters World
the local gun store. Okay, what other options are out there?
And then I started calling the different companies, and then
I went to the su law labra I'm doing patent searches.
(10:15):
I discovered that the gun venditastes were losing Tucson, and
so by just committing to start working on it, things
started falling into place. And you know, here I am
thirty one years later.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
It's not a shortcut. It's not a I know a
guy who knows a guy. It's conceptualizing the idea and
throwing yourself into it and committing yourself.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Yes. And I would also say, when you tell people
about it, if they say, oh, yeah, that's a great idea,
it's probably not a great idea. If it's if it's
so interesting, maybe that's obvious somebody would have done it.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So people would people tell you that sounds like a
crazy idea. Yeah, you'd get told that's a bad idea
all the time.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Yeah. Yeah, And even the new stuff we're doing, when
people start with no, then I'm like, okay, this might
be a thing because it's not obvious. Interesting yeses are
obvious if it's oh yeah, you know, okay, somebody's probably
already done that. But when it starts with a no,
then you know, you get don't give up at the
first no for sure. To me, that's a signal that okay,
this is not obvious. Let me dig deeper. Like when
(11:14):
we did Taser. You know, everybody thought we were crazy.
My college roommates came out and filmed the video making
fun of me. It's a riot that we all still
laugh about today. So then after Taser's body cameras, there's
no cop in America wanted to wear a body camera,
and we started cloud software. Police told us, what are
you talking about? What is this cloud thing? We can't
put digital police evidence in some cloud thing, but we
(11:35):
dug in, Oh, what you're worried about is security? Okay? Well,
and I wasn't a software expert back that. I was
just asking questions, learning what turns out like your local
city doesn't have, or at least back then, didn't really
have any experts in information security. The idea of the cloud.
By partnering with Microsoft, who's got a big information security team,
we could actually be more secure than your local police
(11:57):
department could. But it's understanding where the nose are coming
from and pushing through them. But don't stop it. No,
you're gonna get a lot of nos.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Rick Smith is the CEO and founder of Axon Enterprise,
joining us here on CEOs. You should know. So my
thought and all this and I'm sure some people listening
think about this too. It's like, Okay, you've been you
overcame all those struggles, and you had a product that
you can be successful with, and you've even branched and
evolved in police enforcement. Is now a market that you
(12:28):
have have done have been very successful in creating a
safer community for all of us. Why not just stop there?
Why not just say Okay, these are our products, this
is what we do. We can do this really well,
and we can do this really well for a long time.
What is it about your leadership and your vision that
at this point you're like, well, now we want to
do more.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
I guess for me, I'm kind of like the kid
who came home from elementary school I want a mom
to put the picture on the fridge.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Type a that's called yeah right, or just kind of
a creator. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I like feeling like the work I'm doing matters, and
for me, I like creating new things. I actually went
through a burnout phase in the middle of my career,
went to the board and said, look, I want to retire,
Like I feel like I'm gonna die at my desk
from stress. And I wasn't enjoying the job anymore as
the company got bigger. I was when you're a small startup,
you're in the middle of everything and it's fun and
(13:24):
you're trying to problem solve, to figure out like product
market fit and all that. And as painful as his
first seven years were, it was fun because you make
a decision now and you're changing tomorrow. As it gets bigger,
you spend all your time managing budgets and people. Just
I wasn't enjoying it, and so I actually told the board, Hey,
I want to retire, and they said, well, well, well,
(13:44):
you know, hold on to the founder what's going on,
And so we came up with a plane instead. So, okay,
I'm going to go to Europe for a year. I
wanted a bit of a break, one of my kids
to see the world. They're at the right age. And
there was an interesting thing that happened. It was going
to take a year for me to get ready to
take this year on a semi sabbatical, and so I
(14:04):
had asked myself questions like, Okay, I'm writing a web
page at two in the morning, who can I give
this to? So it's not me, and I basically delegated
everything I was doing and I thought I was getting ready,
and I remember I walked out the door on May
like twenty fifth, and I stood out in the sun.
I put my head back, I felt the sun on
my face, and I thought, I'm done. My work here
(14:26):
is done. I'm gonna go to Europe for you, and
then I'm gonna retire. So then this thing happened. I
go to Europe, and over the next year people said, dude,
you are a way better CEO, and I didn't know
how to take that. So I'm like, well, I actually
not doing much now. It's this good or bad that
I'm better when I'm not around. And what I figured
out was I was in the middle of everything. I
had slowed the whole organization down. I was a chronic micromanager,
(14:50):
and I had to let go of everything. And that
is I think the transition from founder to CEO why
most people don't make it. They're totally opposite. When you're
a founder, you delegate nothing, You're in the middle of everything.
It's your baby's right baby, and then you got to
give it all up. So the only way I could
give it up was when I was like, Okay, I'm
I'm ready to actually leave, and then I fell in
love with the job again because I actually learned how
(15:12):
to be a quote unquote CEO, and you delegate it,
you know, you delegate and let other people do their jobs.
And so today I've got the greatest job on Earth.
I've even learned to delegate further, where what will happen
to a lot of companies is they'll be like, Okay,
the founder CEO, we want you doing the vision thing
and all that, but we're going to bring in a
new CEO over you. And a lot of times that
(15:33):
doesn't work because like you're not really empowered then to
really be making the decisions. So the way we're organized,
I'm still the CEO. I have one direct report. His
name's Josh Isner, and he is an execution machine. He
is like the head coach. He loves managing people, he
loves hiring, he loves budgets, he loves all the management
and execution that I actually don't enjoy it. I like
(15:56):
talking with customers. I like being in the lab working
on new products with online engineers. And so we've got
it really dialed in and the magic is working really well,
and Josh has built a phenomenal team, So he and
I still work together closely, and it's really clear he
makes all the decisions on budgets and people and operations
of the business, and I make the decisions on product
(16:16):
strategy and direction and marketing creative. So I'm the storyteller.
My job is to figure out is to tell our
story like we're doing here today, and then to write
the story for tomorrow. Okay, where does it go next?
And it's a pretty awesome job. So for any entrepreneurs
who are in that middle stage where you're in that like,
do I want to stay into CEO or not, I
highly recommend looking at this organizational structure where you bring
(16:39):
in a number two who's a strong executor that allows
you to keep doing what you like doing as a
founder and is frankly unique. All and on one last thought,
there's a book called the Founder's Mentality and it talks
about it looks at it's a Harvard Business School review.
Founder led companies outperform the rest and the reason is founders,
(17:01):
by their very nature, want to get out and talk
to customers and get that feedback direct into the organization.
And I've discovered that's what I love doing. Professional CEOs
when the founder leaves a professional CEO who came up
through the organization, just naturally, they are going to be
much more focused on running the business. So that means
you sit frankly in the ivory tower and people come
(17:23):
and present to you. So by time the customer's voice
gets to you, it's been through ten layers of the
organization and everybody's manipulated the data a little bit for
their you know, not saying people are bad, but they
all have their own agendas. And so the CEOs, some
of our competitors that are bigger than us, I don't
think they really know what's going on in the market.
They can't. They're too busy running the big organization. Because
(17:45):
Josh does that for me. I'm out meeting with customers,
so I'm getting these early demand signals. You know, we
made a bet on AI seven or eight years ago.
There was a high risk bet because we're you know,
I was able to connect the dot to what the
customers were saying and their problems. And then I go
to these tech conferences, so I'm learning on what's happening
(18:06):
and how fast tech is moving. And because I was
free to connect those dots and make the bets we're
able to out into it, and it's not unique to me.
I think that's just true founders in general. That's the
niche you can stay in even as your company grows.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
The other thing I really appreciate about that story and
that background is you reached a point where you succeeded,
which you would think is the peak of your professional career,
and you found yourself unhappy, which is not something people
are either willing to admit or even willing to consider
when they're on that journey up. I look at it
from my personal perspective, it always feels like there's a
certain level you get to where you've got to make
(18:40):
a conscious decision like am I going to continue to
pour everything into my job at the expense of everything
else in my life? Or am I going to choose
everything else in my life and see what I can
do professionally. It sounds like you found a way to
do both by stepping back and having perspective.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yeah, And I would say when I went to Europe
as well, I also learned I got to have something
to keep me mentally engaged. Right, I thought my wife
and I'd be holding hands trapesing through the flowery fields
of Europe. And it was actually one of the more
stressful years of our marriage, and I think part of
that was it was just too much to gatherness. I
(19:16):
think our relationship is healthier, like when you know, I
travel a bit. Now I've got things to work on,
and you look forward to getting back together and there's
interesting things to talk about because you're not staring at
each other.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Not relying on her to satisfy all of these other
needs that you can be getting elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah. Well, and it's just, yeah, I need to feel
like I've got kind of a purpose, and certainly being
a good dad and all that is important. But I
like creating things and doing things, So for me, I
like this balance of I'd say for most people, the
real key is if you can if you can calibrate
(19:52):
your job so you're doing things you like doing, it
doesn't feel like a job. I'm guessing for you, this
probably doesn't feel much like a job.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
No, I love this.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, yeah, Now for me, I didn't like being a manager,
like everybody wants to be a manager because you feel
like you have to climb the hierarchy. But man like
some people like Josh is great at it, and he's like,
he's a head coach, that's what he does for me.
I'm more of a creative. I want to work on
interesting problems to solve, not managing people issues. So it
(20:21):
acts on. For example, there's this term in business, they
call them individual contributors or ices. I kind of hate
that term because it feels a little demeaning, Like, so
we call them creators. Absently, you can be a manager
or a creator, and we try to elevate the idea
of the creators because those are the people do the
real work. The Yes, being a manager is doing work too,
but your job as a manager is to clear the
(20:42):
decks so the creators can actually go create and make
products or make great marketing campaigns or whatever they're working on.
And I've learned I like being a creator, and I've
had this multiple times, but I've seen this happen to
the other You really talented people, they're great creators, and
then they feel like for career progression, they got to
become a manager, and then they're just not good at
it and they're miserable. So we try to find ways
(21:05):
where hey, we have a parallel track. Hey you can
stay a creator, like don't measure your worth in the
universe by how many people you manage like that's b Yes,
it doesn't need to be that way. And so if
you focus on finding a job at you're the day,
the things you do day to day, or things you
love doing, then it's not really jobbing.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
One thing that Accellent Enterprise does really well is think big.
And I know this is kind of a core part
as we've talked about, is don't be limited, don't constrain yourself.
Think big. Your goal as a company is to cut
police civilian deaths by fifty percent by two thousand and
thirty three. That's obviously a huge goal that you are
(21:44):
actively working towards, but it also from my research filters
all the way down to the day to day of
how you empower your employees to you want everybody in
the company to think big and not just think should
I just get my basic job requirements done today? Some
(22:04):
managers and some companies might look down on that, say
it's too much wasted time, Like focus on what you're
supposed to focus on, and that's how we succeed. Can
you describe how you came to the kind of organizational
philosophy the thinking big is just what we do.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, So this whole moonshot of cutting gun related desk
this came about because I'd say maybe five six years ago,
I was getting very frustrated that as you get bigger,
it's easy for a company to become mediocre and it's
very easy for people to be like, well, this is
my job. I do this one thing over here, and
it's kind of just a job. And in particular with
(22:41):
the Taser, I was like, guys, we are not we're
not pushing hard enough. It was not to take swipes
at Apple because it's a phenomenal company, but look the Apple,
I have the what is the iPhone fifteen? It's not
that different from the fourteen. Not that the cameras better
now they're also doing transformative work in other areas. But
I was like, with Taser, not good enough yet. We
need to outperform the gun. That's our long term vision.
(23:05):
So that's where I started the moonshot. Internally, how do
we build a taser that outperforms a pistol? And then
that's kind of hard to measure, and so you know,
if you're going to declare a moonshot that it's just
like when Jack Kennedy stood on the you know, up
in Congress and said, we're gonna put a man on
the moon. That's a measurable goal. By the end of
the decade, we got a measurable goal in a date,
so we sort of didn't work on it. We I
(23:28):
personally read hundreds and hundreds of officer involved shooting incidents,
and we reading through it, believed if we gave them
a high power, long range, highly reliable taser weapon and
drones and robotics, that's the next phase. So you don't
have to send a cop through the door if you
think there's something dangerous inside. Between those we think we
could limit up to seventy two percent of police shootings
could be resolved another way. And so from that we said, okay,
(23:50):
fifty percent is in reach. Let's declare this as a goal.
And one of the stories, I don't know if this
is true or not, but there's this apocryphal story that
Jack Kennedy goes down to the Space Center and Houston
and he there's a janitor there and he says, hey,
you know, what's your job here? It just making small talk,
and the janner, for instance, says, well, I'm here to
put a man on the moon and gives me chills
(24:11):
saying that, now that's what we want our business like.
And and you know, we tell that story and a
lot of times you'll ask people what their job is
and they'll say, my job is to cut gun related
desk between police and public at fifty percent. It's a
little more cumbersome to say than putting a man on
the moon, But for us, it look at energizes. It
makes me more excited to keep working. You know, financially
I don't have to anymore. That's true for a lot
(24:34):
of folks, and there's lots of other jobs people could
go get. In fact, yesterday I met with one of
our engineers and he had left a couple of years ago.
He was frustrated. He was having some issues with his manager,
and he sort of shared the story and he came back.
And the reason that came back was the mission. The
other place he went, he didn't feels like it was
is engaging and he was making a difference, and he
(24:56):
came back and we fixed the managerial problem that he had.
But it was a great example of power of the mission.
When you have people that are really excited, they just
the whole organization outperforms.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
So you this started, the story began with some tragedy
that you experienced personally as a young man, and it
took this entire arc of trial and air, entrepreneurialship building,
a successful company, burning out, coming back in a different
way to continue to successfully lead it to now a
(25:26):
moonshot of making just everybody say, for police, the community,
what's what do you what's the progress that you've made
towards that, and and in your mind, what is going
to be the way you accomplish that and succeed in it.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
So for the moonshot, there's there's still a little more.
First thing we got to do is we've actually got
to get the Taser weapon to the level of performance
where it's comparable to the reliability of a nine millimeter
And we're still ironing out some of the some of
the bugs in this show is there there's one big
remaining technical hurdle, and that's how we get through heavy clothing.
(26:05):
So I spend a lot of my time in the
lab with the engineers. We're shooting all sorts of different
clothing and sounds kind of fun. It is really fun stuff.
So I think we're eighteen months out from getting that solved.
We've almost solved it in the lab, and then it
takes time to get into production. So really i'd say
we're about a year and a half in so by
(26:28):
year two and a half, the third year, we should
have all the tech in place that we need. There's
some stuff we're doing on drones and robotics as well
that will start to layer in. Once we got the
core tech in place, then it's about Okay. Now we've
watched what we call the Apollo cohort or the Apollo
Apollo Alliance, thank you, which is where we're going to
early police departments like say saying okay, we want you.
(26:50):
Once we get everything dialed in, it in place, you
sign up to deploy it, and we're going to measure
this is like our test cohort. Can we pick a
couple big agencies over a two to three year period
proved that we can cut their gun related desks in half?
And once this is like you know, medical device testing,
you got to prove it first in a small test group.
Once we prove it and we've got the data, then
(27:10):
years five through ten is all about rolling it out
across the country and getting enough momentum and enough deployment
that you know we can hit the.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Goal over a thousand employees here in Phoenix. It's a
international company with a lot of successes through a lot
of trial and air and a lot of overcoming adversity.
I really enjoyed the story inspired by it. I can't
thank you enough for sharing all parts of that journey
here on CEOs you should Know and continued success to
x On Enterprise.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Thanks. It's really an honor to be in this position.
I get up with a just insane sense of gratitude
every day that I get to do this job. I
get to work with amazing people on a really cool
mission and get to come out and you know, meet
awesome and interesting people like you, and get to brag
about what And it's by no means me. We have
(28:00):
O don't know three, almost four thousand people working on
this mission. So it just it's fun to be part
of the high performing team.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Incredible, incredible story. It's CEOs you should know. He is
the CEO and founder of Axon Enterprise. Rick Smith, Thank
you very much for being here.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Thank you
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