Guest: Rick Smith, CEO & Founder of Axon (formerly TASER)

Being a founder-CEO is a “unique superpower,” says Axon’s Rick Smith: People like him get a longer leash from the board to try things that outside CEOs might not.

“My job is to push risk into the organization,” Rick says. “If there's a project with a 50 percent chance of success, a 50 percent chance of failure, but it's going to pay 100 to 1, any finance person will tell you, you should take that bet all day long.”

One of those bets was the transition from running a weapons company called TASER into a broader public safety firm called Axon, which makes cloud-supported body cameras fro police, tactical drones, AI records management software and more. “If we never have a product failure, then we're not taking risks anymore and we're going to end up getting disrupted,” Rick says.

Chapters:

(01:09) - Tasers vs. guns
(03:35) - Axon’s growth
(07:09) - Biggest surprises
(09:33) - How TASER got started
(13:11) - Reinventing the taser
(17:24) - A humiliating launch
(23:33) - Rick’s family
(26:14) - The Auto Taser failure
(30:21) - The darkest days
(34:26) - Hans Marrero
(37:25) - Family and burnout
(42:49) - Rick’s family
(45:49) - Pivoting the business
(51:37) - Axon body cameras
(53:46) - Axon’s current products
(58:08) - Re-educating the cops
(01:02:09) - Pushing risk
(01:05:44) - Competing with the gun
(01:10:16) - Exponential stock plans
(01:14:17) - Who Axon is hiring
(01:14:46) - What “grit” means to Rick

Mentioned in this episode: UnitedHealthcare and Brian Thompson, Harvard University, human-machine interfaces, Star Wars, Timecop, Star Trek, Jack Cover, Project Apollo, Ed Owen; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; Tom Smith, Rodney King, the Sharper Image, Steve Filmer, Phil Smith, Silicon Valley Bank, Emil Michael, Bob Kagle, Benchmark, Norwest Ventures, Molly Wuthrich, Josh Isner, The Terminator, Ferrari, Richard Branson, Burning Man, Steve Jobs, Brenda Smith, Hadi Partovi, Amazon AWS, Microsoft, DraftOne, Ambience Health, OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Brown, Computer Aided Dispatch, Elon Musk and SpaceX, and Luke Larson.

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#227: CEO & Founder Axon, Rick Smith: Push Risk

Grit