The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 320: Rick Smith - How To Take Initiative & Solve Problems (CEO Of Axon)

Episode Date: July 21, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #320: Rick Smith Full Show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com Rick Smith is the founder and CEO of Axon.  Axon currently employs over 1,300 people.  A pioneer of technology with the vision of making the bullet obsolete, Rick founded the original company, TASER, in 1993. As the TASER device became ubiquitous in law enforcement, Rick pushed the company beyond weapons technology and towards a broader purpose of matching technology to public safety needs in order to make the world a safer place. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a garage in Tucson to a NASDAQ-listed global market leader. Notes: Leaders who sustain excellence = Initiative -- "They see what needs to be done and they do it." Rick started the company out of his garage in Arizona in 1993 More on taking initiative: "Don't wait for people to tell you what to do.  Highlight it and fix it." Luke Larson was an individual contributor when the company had 250 employees.  He challenged Rick on an issue and offered a solution.  He is now the President of a 1,300 person company Mindset -- Build a culture that rewards challenging the status quo "Tell the ugly truth" "Anyone can challenge any idea" Qualities Rick looks for in hiring: Need to want to be with them Initiative - they need to step up and do work Intellectual curiosity - someone who seeks better answers No time for hierarchical people -- they cannot be threatened by 'up and comers' "You want to hire people that are literally better than you.  You have to learn to embrace that." "It's so liberating to know that I don't have to be right." Why try to eliminate the bullet? "In 1993, two friends were shot and killed.  I thought, 'why are bullets still a thing?'" "Don't wait until you have the perfect business plan.  Have a simple concept you believe in and get to work." "Focus on solving a big problem" The first seven years did not go well.  Rick was fortunate to have his dad fund it... However, it led to a difficult relationship when the business wasn't going well.  He had immense pressure for it to succeed. They fixed their core product and it began catching on with law enforcement agencies They own 100% of the taser market "I'm a libertarian guy. I don't want to take anything away from anyone." "But people romanticize guns.  The real world is messy.  We make mistakes." "Why use lethal force instead of a taser?" What about the phrase: "Don't take a knife (or taser) to a gun fight?" "How about, 'Don't get into a gun fight.'" The book (End Of Killing): "Our goal is to replace the gun long term.  The book is me sharing what I believe that nobody else believes." Have to respect ideas "It's a good sign if people initially think you're crazy" Keys to building a team at work that sees a higher mission? "You must have an authentic mission." "Don't say you're changing the world unless you actually are." "My goal is to inspire the right team and then get out of their way." "I'm now the chief storyteller of the business." Career advice: "Find a job where you get to feel the impact of what you want to create.  What are the big picture things you want to accomplish." "The people who are most effective see what needs to be done and they go and do it." Use the "Get To Know You Document" Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea

It is so liberating when you take the mindset, I don't have to be right. I never actually have to be right. I just have to make sure the team gets to the right answer. And when one of my junior employees challenges me on something and ultimately they're right and I'm wrong, I am elated when that happens. Because the way I look at it is, you know what, you just saved me from making an ass of myself. And the fact that you're right and I was wrong doesn't matter because the team got it right and that's going to elevate all of us. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show.

I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Receive Mindful Monday updates when I'm watching, reading, thinking about, and writing. Also, give the opportunity to be a part of my book launch team, text learners to 4-4-2-2-2. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. It's Rick Smith. CEO and founder of Axon.

Under his leadership, the company has grown from a garage in Tucson to a 1,300-person NASDAQ-listed global market leader in conducted electrical weapons, body-worn cameras, and software. Rick was a winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Also an author of a recent book titled The End of Killing, How Our Newest Technologies Can Solve Humanity's oldest problem. the topics we discussed, the importance of challenging the status quo and how to effectively do this where you work. Then the qualities he looks for when hiring a leader, followed up by how to build a team that buys in to the overall mission. This was a fascinating talk with Rick

Smith. All right, Rick Smith. It's so good to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. It's awesome to be here. Thanks. I, Rick, you have an incredible story and I'm excited to get into it. But to get us going, initially I have a quick question that I am curious about when it comes to the leaders. I'm fortunate enough to talk with. And that is, when I look over everything that you've accomplished as well as the people that have surrounded you in your sphere on your team and those who have impacted you, when you take a step back and think about those leaders who sustain. who sustain excellence and have sustained excellence over an extended period of time. What have you found to be some of the commonalities among them?

I think the biggest one is just initiative that people who just see what needs to be done and go do it and they don't wait for permission or for somebody to ask them to do it. And I think those are the people that rise to the top. Now, it might be a little different. in some very large organizations, you know, that sort of initiative may not work if you're in a super political environment, in which case I would say either enjoy being a politician and love where you're at or get the hell out. Get to an organization where, you know, initiative is rewarded.

That's a really great point. And I feel like I'm fortunate. My wife gets asked for her opinion a lot from younger people that she mentors college grads. And that's one of the things she shares with them a lot is that be proactive, which I think is another word for initiative, meaning don't wait around for somebody to tell you what to do. Go accomplish things. Do it. And after the fact, people will most likely thank you for it. And I think taking that initiative, that's fantastic advice.

Yeah, I can give me an anecdote. A couple of them. So, you know, I started this company in 1993 in around 2009, right? So we're like a 16-year-old company. You know, we've been reasonably successful, we're public, et cetera. And we were attempting to pivot from doing taser weapons to also doing software and cameras. And as we were doing this, our first software and camera product was frankly kind of a train wreck. And we hired this young program manager.

And so his job was to basically just talk to all the engineers and put together the project plan. Right. Like this guy didn't really have much authority. it was, hey, it's your job to just document everything, put together the timelines, let us know how long it's going to take and make sure everybody's talking to each other. And this kid walks into my desk. We have cubes at Axon. We've never had offices.

So he walks up to me and he says, hey, I want to talk to you. I said, okay, great. What's up? Well, I don't know how to put this, but this product is a train wreck. And like having me put a lot of effort into documenting all the plans around it is like sort fiddling on the Titanic. And I remember being a little taking aback in his direct nature. And I said, okay. And then he says, well, look, I don't want to just bring you a problem. I want to bring you a solution. We should put a bullet in this thing. And then he laid out a plan

where he had found a company that was making consumer-grade Bluetooth cameras that we could go buy the cameras from them, repackage them, and then create a partnership with Oakley, the I wear a company to see if we could make, you know, our product at that time was also pretty functional, but very ugly. And his point was, we should just throw out, start over, get a small consumer camera and really try to collaborate with a brand like Oakley. And I said, okay, if you think you can do it, like go chase that down. And a couple weeks later, he's back to my office. He's putting the deal together. Long story short, he's now the president of the company. He runs the company day to day. And, you know, he was maybe 26 at the time. And he just had the hoods, but to step way

outside of his job description. And he kept doing that. Then once he was, he brought this new product to market. He then was, came to me and said, hey, our marketing is not very good. And he gave me specific examples. And then, of course, he gave me a solution, not just a complaint. And next thing, you know, I'm like, all right, great. Guess what? You're not head of marketing. And so forth. And And he grew up. And I hold that up as an example for the behaviors I want to see our young people model, which is don't wait for people to tell you to do stuff. Like if you see something that's wrong, don't complain about it, highlight it, and fix it.

And that's how you climb. And if you're not, as I've given this feedback, some people have said, well, that wouldn't work where I'm working. And my feedback then is, well, great. Then either be happy, just slowly moving along in a hierarchical tenure structure. that's okay if that's what you want out of life. But if you want to the ability to grow faster and those sorts of behaviors are not rewarded, then you should probably change the environment and get somewhere else. Is that Luke Larson? That is Luke Larson. That's a really cool story.

And now how big is your company Axon? We're about 1,300 people now. Wow. And how big were you at the time when Luke came to you and said, we should put a bullet in this thing and start? I'd say we're about 250. Wow. And that product was really struggling. Yeah, it was Luke actually, I consider him a founder of Axon. So I sort of divide history. Taser was the company we started with to do electrical weapons. And by the way, we still do those. We're very proud of them. But Taser is now the brand of that product and the company has gone on to do additional things. And Luke was a guy who really helped me reinvent the company by challenging the status quo. And he and there were a couple other people that had similar stories that, you know, guys were very young in their, early in their career

who just stepped up and challenged things that won't working. And now they're, you know, now those are the people that are running the company day to day. For those people who are running companies or an organization as, as you are, Rick, how, how did you create an environment where somebody like Luke felt not only safe, but the potential to be rewarded for sharing, sharing the brutal truth with you and having a solution, certainly. But I think for the people who said that wouldn't work here, I'm thinking of leaders who are fearful now that, wait, am I leading an organization where the people that work for me think it wouldn't work? I want to make sure I'm setting the proper culture where it could.

So what's your mindset towards setting up a place like that? Yeah. So, you know, my honest answer is I don't think I get the credit for that. I think Luke does. What he showed to me is I had actually built a culture where it was very founder driven, where in the first half of my career, I kind of felt like, oh, I'm the founder. It's my job to solve all the hard problems and tell people what to do. And so that's what the organization had sort of adapted to.

That's how we operated. And luckily, for me, I'm very fortunate that we hired Luke. And he really took it on himself to challenge the status quo. and I found it very refreshing. And now, if we had been a very, if we were, you know, moving along, succeeding in the camera business, I don't know if he could have been as successful. But the fact that we were, he told me an ugly truth that was a true crisis. And that created the leverage for both him and ultimately me and the rest of us to change the company.

So I got a little bit lucky there and that I found somebody who challenged me. So now if I put myself, if you're. the leader of another company, you don't want to be the guy I was leading up to that. You don't want to be the one who's like, hey, you know, orders come down from on the top and we tell you what you really, you want to create a culture where you're empowering people to challenge you. And so today, I think we've gotten to a place where it's absolutely non-hierarchical. Any employee can challenge any idea as long as they do it respectfully. You know, we don't have any place for belittling people, etc. But the power of ideas come from, it doesn't matter where they come from. And many times,

it's some of our new young employees, because they don't know how things have always been. And they'll be the ones who challenge it. And you really, that's hard to do. And as a company gets bigger, it gets harder just because the nature of larger organizations, they become a little less personal. Thirteen hundred people can't know each other as well as, you know, 50 people can. And so I think it's really incumbent on the leaders to very explicitly model those behaviors and to make it clear that, no, challenging the status quo with good intentions is exactly what we want you to do. I mean, you've got to reward people who do it.

I frequently hold Luke up in front of the company and I tell this story. Personally, I do it a little bit of humor because Luke, he's blessed and that he looks much younger than he is, right? Now that I'm 49, I wish I had that attribute. So, occasionally I'll hold him up and I'll have a little fun with him. Say, hey, many of you are probably wondering why we have a teenager running the company. And now I'll go back and I'll tell the story. And I'm really, look, hey, I want you guys to model this. Luke got where he is because he challenged the status quo and he fixed it with zero authority to do it. And that's what I want everybody here to model. And that's how you will succeed in this organization, how you will

climb, not by waiting, you know, and just sort of doing the things you've been assigned to do. There are people right now, Rick, who are working to build out their teams. Perhaps there's open positions and they are in charge of hiring for those to fill out a team for a variety of roles. And so let's for a second take out the specificity around what the role does and just think about the qualities and the people that you want to bring to your team. And perhaps it's changed over time. If so, that's fine. Feel free to take as much time as you need.

But I'm curious from your perspective, when you're looking to add people to your team, what are those inherent qualities that you really want people to have to be part of your culture? Yep. I would say first order business is it's got to be somebody I want to work with. Like just we spend the majority of our waking hours around each other. So pardon my friends, but the no asshole rule applies. Like no matter how brilliant somebody is, if they're going to be painful to work with, it's just not worth it.

And it's not just because it's for me. But if they can't play well with the team, then they're not going to be successful. They're going to be divisive and disruptive. So that's number one. Number two is then, of course, initiative that we want people that are going to step up and challenge things. We want people that are intellectually curious. I'm proud of the company we've built, but it has so many warts in our internal processes.

Like we are so far from perfect that the last thing I want is people that are going to come in and just do their job without challenging how we're doing things. There's so much room. And I think this is true of any organization to improve. You want people that are going to be curious or are going to ask questions and aren't going to say, well, that's just the way we've always done things.

That is a death knell when I hear that. That's how organizations die because the world is moving very fast. Organizations who aren't at adapting constantly are going to be on the decline pretty quickly. Need to want to be with them. Makes sense. Initiative, which we touched on before and intellectually curious, I mean, you're speaking my language, Rick.

I love this. Let's go back now. You know, the one thing I like to tell you is I have no time for hierarchy and hierarchical people. So I've had a few, and I've had some high performers who I've managed out of the company because they were too hierarchical, meaning when they had strong players on their team, they would try to quash them rather than grow them. They were threatened by up-and-comers on their team, and they had people that, you know, like to hire the comfortable B players that aren't going to challenge their authority. That's a great way to build mediocrity. I think you, and this

actually something as well, Luke, really challenged me on and it's helped me grow, this idea that you want to hire people that are literally better than you. And everybody says that, but it's really hard. We all want to feel like, you know, valuable and safe in our jobs and all that. And it can be a little hard when you've got, hey, wait a minute, I've got somebody who's on my team who's challenging me, who's disagreeing with me. And you know what? Huh, this person's right. I learned to embrace that where I love when a junior employee proves me wrong. Now, being the founder of a company, I'm in a pretty comfortable position where maybe I can take a little more risk than folks.

But I would tell you, it is so liberating when you take the mindset, I don't have to be right. I never actually have to be right. I just have to make sure the team gets the right answer. And when one of my junior employees challenges me on something and ultimately they're right and I'm wrong, I'm elated when that happens. Because the way I look at it is, you know what? You just saved me from making an ass of myself. And the fact that you're right and I was wrong doesn't matter because the team got it right. And that's going to elevate all of us.

So, you know, you get the strongest horses you can get. And that's another thing where I think Luke was particularly, he challenged the environment. No, no, we need to hire more people who are going to challenge all of us. And it really led to a significant culture shift in the business when you, legitimately, you know, it's one thing to say you can, you know, that there's no hierarchy and anybody can have ideas, but the rubber hits the road when you have those emotional moments when people are arguing it's a heated debate and you've got a vice president and a new employee. That's the moment where, all right, are we walking to walk or are we just talking to talk?

Like, does that VP pull rank and quash the discussion because it's inappropriate for this junior person to challenge them in front of their peers? Or do they accept it and treat that junior employee like a peer and continue to have a productive debate to get to the right answer? That's when you know if your culture is really there or if it's, you know, BS. Let's go back to 1993 in the beginning of, at the time, it was called Taser and you started this business. What was the impetus or your reason and at that time to start this business? I was living in Europe in grad school, and two of my friends were shot and killed back in America in a road rage incident. And, you know, it was pretty shocking.

And I found myself sort of getting very interested in the gun violence problem. And it just struck me, wow, this is really bizarre. Why are bullets still a thing? This is 1993. You know, we fought the Revolutionary War shooting bullets of people. why has this medieval technology, why is it still in primary use? And I'm not saying that in the like gun control-ish kind of fashion. I'm comfortable with guns.

I bought my dad one. But what I'm saying is you would think we can do better. And that's what made me realize, wait a minute, this is a big problem. The best businesses are the ones that solve big problems. If we could create technology that would make bullets obsolete, that would probably be a pretty valuable business. And with only that insight, I set forth to create the business. And that's another actually key piece of advice I give to people that are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur. Do not wait until you feel you have the perfect business plan because you will never have it and you will never get started.

And you will be that person for the rest of your life who's telling people about you would have could have should have done. You need to just get to the point where you have a simple concept that you believe can work. have to know how and then you just have to go after it hard. Do you remember what your business plan looked like in 92, 93 time frame as you're getting ready to launch? Did you even have one or what did it look like? Have you saved anything from then? Oh yeah. I did have a business plan. Now, part of it's because I was finishing a business school and one of my last courses was a course on entrepreneurship. So that actually provided a nice, I did it as a class project. That business plan was very different from where we ended up.

I wanted to develop a 12-gauge shotgun round with a battery in it that could be kind of a wireless projectile taser. Now, we ultimately, here's a really funny story. Let me think about the right way to tell you this. All right. So my original idea was we're going to build a 12-gauge shotgun round with a battery in it and a taser type of circuit. Then as I was doing the research to try to figure out if the theories would work, I came across

the guy who invented the original taser, and he convinced me to pivot and go in a different direction and to build a handheld wire taser using a compressed air launching system. So we did that. That product failed. Our second product failed. We eventually hit success. What was really funny is 15 years after we started, I finally went back and we built that product, that 12-gauge shotgun round that had been my original business plan.

And it turned out all of the technology. assumptions worked. It was a brilliant design, if I may say so myself. And the reason I'll say that is because I also will tell you it was a commercial disaster. We couldn't sell the thing. It worked great in the lab. So the point was the original business plan went in a totally different direction. We later came back to it. And even then it turned out the original business plan, the product technically worked was a commercial failure. So it almost doesn't matter what the original business plan is, as long as you're focusing on solving a big problem and you can build a business model

where people will pay you for solving the problem and then you just gather smart people and you work really hard at that problem and you'll eventually get there. The quality of the original business plan is not super relevant in my opinion. So don't, I'm not telling you to quit your job tomorrow because you've got some ID you've spent five minutes on,

but, you know, if you spend a few weeks nights and weekends researching and thinking about this and your gut tells you and you think you've got some good data that there's there's something there, then there's a time you've got to stop researching and planning because you won't find all the answers in your business plan. You have to just start executing. When was one of like the first inflection points where you turned a corner and you started having some success? How much time?

What happened? Take us back to that moment. Yeah. So for us, it was seven years in. The first seven years were pretty miserable from the business perspective. Were you poor at the time? Were you just trying to figure it out or what was going on? What was your living condition?

Yeah, I'd love to tell you I was poor because I'd be so much more uplifting. But it's worse. Okay. So I was born to a fairly successful family. My dad was a serial entrepreneur. So now, growing up, I watched him. He would fail at a business. Then he'd go get a job, save some money, try to.

again, fail, you know, repeat. And then finally, he moved out to Silicon Valley, joined a startup there and had a good size hit, made, you know, $7 or $8 million. And when they sold the, when they sold the startup. And so I went from seeing my dad struggling, you know, driving at Dotson to, oh, this is pretty cool. Dad bought a Ferrari. And I always saw he was so much happier when he was doing the entrepreneur thing than when he was working at a job, even though he usually made a lot more money working at bigger companies, but he was always kind of miserable. He loved trying to do his own thing. And then when it finally hit, it was like, wow, okay, I would have to do that. That's pretty cool. So I had the idea for the taser. And of course,

first thing I went, I pitched it to my dad, not thinking we'd raise money from him, but just to get advice. And he fell in love with the idea. He's like, great, I'll fund it. And so we're off to the races. Seven years later, I had bankrupted him. So I felt like, a complete loser because I'm like, man, I was kind of a silver spoon kid who had this great opportunity most people don't because my dad had made enough money to fund this thing. And I completely food barred it. And not only had I screwed this thing up to where, you know, we were in 1998 or 99, I thought the chance of survival was around one or two percent. Literally, it was that bad. And my dad had put everything into this business because he's a high risk serial

entrepreneur. And my mom was pissed. She wouldn't talk to me for about a year. She didn't go to my wedding. Really? This was ugly. That's like that's serious stuff. That was not just like oh, Ricky, you're not doing what like that's serious. Well, the problem was like my my dad kept pouring money into this and my mom was like what the, you know, what the hell are you doing? They just turned 60. And then eventually I took my mom's side. I was like, hey, dad, you got to stop. But by then it was too late. I remember we sat around the table when I was telling him to stop putting money in. And he said, look, nobody else was putting any money in. And guess what? I signed. the guarantee at the bank. So if this thing goes under, I'm toast. They're going to take everything.

So I'm putting everything I've got left into the company. And you're going to figure out how to turn this thing around. No pressure. No pressure. Whoa. So now I get to sit here and talk to you like, I'm Mr. Successful Businessman. Man, I was within a hair's breath of being the Schmo who had wiped his parents out. And, you know, I don't know what the hell I'd have done. I'd probably still be, you know, working a job somewhere trying to support them. So. but for a little luck and a lot of hard work this could have been a very different story so what happened seven years in so uh seven years in we we basically had we had to do the hard work of fixing the core product and making it work so the early generation tasers uh they they're pretty similar if i showed you one in a room today

compared to the tasers we're selling they don't look that different they shoot darts they send electricity down the wire. The biggest difference was the early tasers had never done any biomedical testing on how effective they were to actually incapacitate your muscle tissue. They'd done some safety testing, but not effectiveness testing. And this is one of those things where part of the reason the product was failing was like Rodney King had been shot with an LAPD taser and it didn't work. And that was actually before I met the original taser inventor. that that had happened, but it really given the technology a bad name. And when I met the inventor, he told me it's because the batteries were dead.

That's not true. The original tasers were underpowered. They were not sufficiently well designed to actually causing capacitation against people who are violent or on drugs. And so this is great one. I actually just read this article by Mark Andrewson about lead bullets, where everybody looks for silver bullets, right? The simple answer.

What's the one tricky move we can make? make that's going to save the business. And we did a couple of those, and all of those failed. And this idea where Andreessen talks about lead bullets is like doing the hard work to fix the hard problems and not pivoting away from them. And ultimately, that's what we had to do. We had to figure this out. Nobody, like, how do you test an electrical weapon for effectiveness? I don't know. Well, let's see. Let's call around and see who does nerve, like nerve stimulation testing, and we found this guy in Nebraska, who happened also, by the grace of God, be a pig farmer.

So we had access to the animals. We would need to be able to do some, because you have to test on animals. There's no computer models that will tell you what to do, because nobody's done the underlying test to develop the computer models. So we basically went to this PhD in Nebraska, and he helped us design some tests using anesthetized pigs. So, by the way, they didn't feel any pain. But we could actually measure the effect of the,

electricity on their muscles. And once we figured out how to test it, within a matter of hours, we had we knew what the product had to do. We had solved the underlying issue. Now we just had to go back and design the physical hardware to deliver the type of electricity that we were able to develop in this test regime. And once we made the product work, boom. Boom. Who was buying it then? Who was buying it? Cops. All cops. We were launching in the law enforcement market. And we would go across the country in a Winnebago doing demos. And it was really simple. We'd show up and we'd say, hey, who's your toughest guy?

All right. Tell you what, I got a $100 bill. You want to come and get it? We'd say, well, you know, we're going to hitch you with a taser. If you get to me, you can take the $100 bill. People did this? Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness.

I'm a little bit jaded. I have personally tased thousands of people. How many times have you been tased? I've done it seven. I'm done, by the way. It's not fun. I've never had this done. Okay.

I think of like the hangover. By the way, was that, was that yours in the movie? That was us. Was it really? Yep. Were you on set or did you? I would have tried. Oh, no, no, no.

No, no. They just got one. The first I saw it was when the movie came out. I left my butt off too. Like, so what happened is there's this phenomenon. So if we go back to 1999, there's pepper spray, there's bean bags and rubber bullets. There's all these non-lethal weapons. But the way cops looked at this stuff, they're like, look, none of the stuff works very well.

When we use it in the field against some guy who's high on PCP, you spray him with pepper spray, he just smiles at you. You hit him with a bean bag around. He doesn't care because these things just cause a little bit of pain, but they don't stop the aggressive, dangerous guys, the ones we really need them to. So not only the weapons had a bit of a snake oil reputation. And frankly, so did the taser, because the early taser weapons were also like pain. They would cause pain, but they wouldn't infestate you. Once we figured out how to take out your, they'd lock up your muscle tissue,

it was a whole new game. So now we could roll in to a police agency and say, yep, we know all the previous weapons haven't worked very well. Give it this one a try. And then we would just crush these guys. And then what happened, they'd get up because the tasers like a light switch. When I hit you with it, your muscles contract.

It's kind of like the temporary seizure. And there's nothing you can do to stop it until I turn the electricity off. And then as soon as it's off, you're right back to normal. It's like right now, you know, your brain could tell you could flex your bicep. And then when you stop doing it, the muscle relaxes again. Same sort of thing. So we could, once we could demonstrate that this was effective. And then, of course, the first guy would fall down, he'd get up.

And then you get this a little bit of a, you know, kind of an adrenaline junkie. Cops are kind of like, you know, they're adrenaline junkies. They're kind of like extreme sports guys. So the first guy takes a hit. Then he goes down and he gets up. Everybody sees he's fine. He's typically laughing at off. And then somebody else says, okay, I want to give it a shot.

And then next thing you know, you know, everybody's lining up. And it actually created a really interesting dynamic where it made for fantastic demos. And by time he gets done, everybody's tried it. And, you know, you've got 50 believers. And then the product has sold itself. Well, I was going to say, when you think about product demonstrations, that's got to be one for the one for the book. I mean, as good as it gets.

As good as it gets. It's actually pretty funny in my office. We can be sitting in a meeting and you'll hear a pop and a scream. And if we have visitors in the building, they literally, the blood flushes out of their face. They look like they're going to dial 911. And I'm like, no, not at all. And somebody just got tase downstairs. Don't worry about it.

It happens all the time. And I forget that like this is not normal. I've gotten accustomed to something that is a little different. So what percentage? What just happens? What percentage of the taser market do you guys own? 100%. So the taser is a registered brand name.

So if there's a taser from a cop or who else would use them besides law enforcement, anybody? Well, private citizens can buy them as well. Okay. So we have about call it 600,000 in use by police and maybe 300,000 in use by the public. But taser is a brand name. It's like Kleeneups or Microsoft. Now, there are other stun guns, like particularly a handheld, old ones that don't shoot darts and we have to touch somebody.

That's a stun gun. Now, frequently people call them tasers and then we have to correct them to protect our brand. But if it says taser, it's us. If the police are using it, it's us. There are some dark firing knockoffs in China and Brazil, but we have really strong patents. So we've kept them out of the U.S. and Europe because they basically violated our patents and we got a pretty good legal team.

I gotcha. Okay. So how, so what do you think when it comes to the second amendment, perhaps for the people who want to have a gun at their house for protection or even those who have firearms to go hunting? What's your thought process on that? You know, I am a pretty libertarian guy. I don't want to take anything away from anybody. That's not my, my stick. I think people have their own opinions and they're not going to change their opinions.

my point is for the purpose of defending yourself. Let's go back to when my two friends got shot and killed. The guy who killed them was a businessman who had a gun in the glove box of his car. He wasn't a killer. He wasn't a criminal. Well, he's spending his life in prison now. He didn't go out to hurt anybody. He bought a gun to defend himself and he got in a situation.

My buddies were, you know, they were big, you know, former high school football players. And they used to get me occasional dust up on a Saturday night. So, you know, things were getting heated. And this guy probably had a legitimate concern that he was going to get his butt kicked. And he grabs a gun out of the glove box. And now things are really out of control. And they're dead and he's spending his life in prison. So whether you like guns or not, you don't want to kill somebody.

It is just bad news. Like, going through that after the fact. And the fact is, like, I think people romanticize it. Like, you know, yeah, it's going to be like in the movies where Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer is chasing me and I'm going to kill. That's not the real world. The real world is you wake up, it's three in the morning, you know, you're groggy. All of a sudden, you get that creepy feeling, and now your adrenaline's rushing and something moves in your house, and you've got a gun in your hand. And more often than not, it turns out you just killed a family member. Like, it's,

the real world is messy. We make mistakes. And with a gun, you can't take it back. So I'm not saying people don't have the right. If they want to hunt, great. If they want to own a gun, great. But if you, if you could go on by Captain Kirk's Star Trek Fasor, you know, this elegant energy weapon that was faster, more reliable, more infected than a gun, like, there's a reason Captain Kirk never pulls a gun out. It would look ridiculous in Star Trek, right? That's a future where, obviously, technology has progressed. I think we'll get to a point where, like today, if I was walking around with a sword on my hip, you'd look at me like I lost my mind. Like, what are you doing? I think we're going to get there where the idea of shooting lead balls at people,

you know, we're going to look back and go, hey, you remember when cops used to, like, you know, shoot bullets in people? Wasn't that kind of bizarre?

But we, we have to first fill the gap. Okay, what's the next thing they're going to get? We need to create a weapon that's capable of legitimately knocking guys down every time. And, you know, firearms have had a 500-year-head start on us.

Yeah. And I think the natural argument is if the other person, has a gun, you don't want to bring the so-called knife to a gun fight, I think is one of the arguments. It is, but that's an interesting one. My argument to you would be, forget about don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't get in a gun fight. I agree.

First of all. Like, chances are you're both going to get killed or seriously injured. FBI statistics show, even if you shoot somebody right in the heart, for the next 14 seconds, they can still shoot back at you. because it takes a while to bleed out. You know, you hear about guys in combat, right? They get limbs blown off, and they're still crawling through the mud, shooting back. Like, bullets don't magically stop you suddenly. It's a gruesome process unless you hit somebody in the head, which is really hard to do unless you're a sniper.

If you hit the brain, it lights out game over. But that's not the typical shooting. A typical shooting is like, like, there's bloods flirting. People, body parts are getting, you know, gruesome things are happening. but they're not done. If they're really focused, they're going to fight back. Now, you wouldn't take a taser to a gunfight today. But what I take, if I had to go into a situation where I know I'm going to go into a gun fight,

give me Captain Kirk's phaser. I'll take that because that's going to be, if I knew the non-lethal weapon was actually more effective and faster, that's the one that you'd want. And I've actually been talking to cops about this too. And they agree because police aren't in the business. They're not executors. They're not out there executioners. their job isn't to kill criminals because they've been sentenced to death.

They use lethal force because damn it's the only thing that still really works well today to stop a threat right now. Oh, no, by the way, the downside is in the process of stopping the threat, you just killed somebody. And the simple premise of this book is we need to pull those two concepts apart so that killing somebody is a separate concept from stopping the threat. And that means we just need better tech to pull it. And intellectually, the two have been so intertwined that it's hard at first to like wrap your head around it that, no, maybe a gun isn't the most effective weapon in a future state. And when it's not, then yeah, you would take a taser to a gun fight if the tasers, you know, higher performing. So are you, is it a focus of yours to sell tasers to someone like me for protection in my home instead of using. having a gun, I'd have a taser that if I hear the rustling sound at three in the morning,

that that's what I'm going after instead of a gun. Is that one of your focus areas? Absolutely. Absolutely. We go to taser.com and they're available for the public and it's a great choice. Now, I will tell you most of our consumers actually own guns, which is interesting. But I think most rational gun owners are like, man, I do not want to use this thing. if I can have a taser, like a lot of times they'll keep it in their car.

There might be in a state where they can't keep a gun. Or I think, you know, if people really stop and think about it, think about the types of situations that you actually end up in life. It's very rare that you're up against a terrorist or a serial killer. But you're walking down the street and you have some aggressive drunk or some homeless guy who's high on meth who's coming up and causing issues. Or my two buddies who get into this situation where it's been out of control. Like most situations where you are going to need to protect yourself, a gun is probably overkill and may actually get you in more trouble than you really want to get into.

And in that case, I think that's where a lot of folks, even though they've got guns are like, you know, I think a taser is probably a little more practical. And I think that math will really change. What I've said in the book is in the next 10 years, we'll get to where we actually outperform a gun. And at that point, I think the choice becomes much clearer. So the book you're referencing is The End of Killing, How Our Newest Technologies Can Solve Humanity's Oldest Problem. Talked me about the putting this book together, why you wanted to do it, the process of writing. I just finished my first manuscript. So I'm like, this is really top of mind for me.

So I'm fascinating to buy everything that went into the why and the how of putting this thing together. Yeah. So, man, it was, it was rough. A lot harder than I thought. There's this thing, as you well know, like, I can crank out a five-page paper, you know, in a night, no problem. So I figured, oh, you write a book, you know, to get 500 pages. So it's 100 nights of work. No, because what ends up happening is you're writing this thing. It gets, the book ends up getting bigger than fits in your brain. And so you're constantly going back to reread. Well, did I already write that? And then you're D-DUPE. things up and there's just like exponential it ended up getting way harder than I thought and because you're trying to do you know do it in your free time between other things but going back to the impetus for me I was at a dinner with a bunch of entrepreneurs and one of the guys did a conversation starter where I said hey I want everybody to share what do you believe that nobody else believes and when it came to me I said huh I believe we're getting near the end of war and I don't know if I said the end of killing exactly, but that was the basic concept.

And then everybody looked at me like I was nuts. And then I started to sort of share this idea. And for the next two hours of dinner, it dominated the conversation. It was really interesting to see how people's first reaction was your looney tunes. And then after you really talk it through, people like, you know what? That kind of makes sense. And so somebody said, hey, you should write a book. And just given that, you know, my life's work is in this space.

And this in the book is the first time I've come out and said that our goal is to actually replace the gun long term. You have to be really careful saying that with police because what they can't hear is that we want to take their guns away. And I was nervous about putting this out there because you don't want to oversell today's technology. So you've noticed I've been very careful to say, look, it's probably 10 years in the future. We're not there yet. But you've got to plant the flag if they're going to have a moonshot and say, look, here's where we're going. It's going to take time. and we got to start to prepare our customers.

When you tell a cop that, hey, you may not carry a gun someday or you're going to use this non-lethal thing instead of a gun, their initial reaction is, are you nuts? And so that's why writing the book now starts that conversation. And it's, you know, I'm learning a ton as well. I'm seeing, okay, what are the criteria, you know, where police would actually shift away from using lethal force to an advanced non-lethal weapon?

So this was a way for me to kind of test the waters, push out some, you know, some kind of crazy ideas and then learn from people's reactions. And that's guiding, you know, how we're developing these products over the next decade. What's been the early response? It's been really good, much better than I expected in two respects. Number one, I was holding my breath at how police were going to respond because, you know, the police culture, these people have a very close relationship with their done. It's their lifeline, right? It's what they rely on to get through dangerous situations and get back to their families. And I was concerned that there would be a negative reaction. And I've been just shocked at how

overwhelmingly positive it's been where cops are basically saying, hey, like, I've seen what happens when police kill somebody. And it's not just bad for the family in the community. Those officers' lives are frequently destroyed. I mean, if it's it's a bad shoot because they made a mistake, they may end up in jail. But look at Ferguson, Missouri, right, the Michael Brown incident. That cop got completely vilified. Now, nobody knows how justified he was or not. I think most of the evidence shows he was pretty brutally assaulted, but I don't know, for sure, I wasn't there, right? That's based on what I can read in the media. That cop may have killed an innocent man. We don't know. Some people believe that. Or he may have

been under a brutal assault and was fighting for his life and defended himself. Even if that's true, his life is ruined. He lost his job. He moved out of town. The guy was vilified. You know, his tarnished reputation. He went through hell after that. And so as I talked to cops, they're like, look, none of us want to be that guy. Even if it turns out it was fully justified, it can still destroy your life. So the first reaction was a shot tell positive police event. And the second reaction that surprised me is I started. putting some more aggressive future concepts like, you know, there are circumstances where I think we should look at arming drones with non-lethal weapons. And you could, you know, I was expecting

some really negative backlash from the media, like, you know, the standard Terminator story stuff, like, oh, we shouldn't arm robots. But look, you look at like the Mandalay Bay shooting last year. It took police like 12 to 15 minutes to get up to the shooter. Meanwhile, he kills another 40 people. If police had a small drone where they could triangulate on the shots and send it up. Now, I don't think we want to have drones armed with firearms. That, to me, sort of crosses a line where we don't want little robots that can kill people. But if they can incapacitate dangerous people, that actually allows police to work faster and to keep police officers further from danger. Or, you know, the Pulse Nightclub shooting, you think of lots of times

when if you can send in a swarm of non-lethal capable robots, you could save a lot of lives and prevent police and put in their life at risk. I thought I'd get a lot of negative blowback on that, and I've gotten extremely positive feedback, even from the media that's like, you know what? That actually does make sense. It seems like a better approach than putting more snipers out there.

Wow. Yeah, reading through some of your ideas and then hearing you speak about them, it is interesting to hear because I think a lot of people before things become just normal or the way it is, they sound nuts. And it takes a few of those early leaders that are willing to go out and say things and potentially be wrong. Certainly, as you probably know, you've been wrong in the past, as you mentioned before. Potentially be wrong, but to say them because you believe in it, I think I find that inspiring. regardless of people listening agree or disagree, I think you have to respect that.

You know, I would tell you this. When I talk to entrepreneurs or people that are, hey, I've got, you know, telling me they've got an idea. And everybody's telling them that they're crazy or it's a bad idea. I tell them I think that's actually a good sign. Yep. Because if you, if the first time you tell people your idea, they're like, oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, well, chances are, you know, you're not really pushing the envelope. of somebody's probably already done it,

or if it seems like it's an obviously good idea and somebody hasn't done it yet, you might have some, there's probably a reason why. I think ultimately the transformative business opportunities are the ones that are not obvious and the ones that challenge the status quo. So I take it as a good sign

and I try to encourage young entrepreneurs that, you know, if everybody around you is telling you all the reasons it can't work, don't get discouraged by that. that means you're challenging the way things are and you might be onto a breakthrough. One of the other things I learned, Rick, prior to us talking is the fact that, quote, your executive team is very buttoned up and extremely impressive. And they've said Rick has done a great job of finding and developing impressive leaders

to surround himself with and has delegated extremely well. what's your thought process? And we've touched on it briefly about making sure that you don't, if somebody's worried about an A or A plus player being on their team, that you would probably fire them. You want people to desire to have other smart people around. So obviously you're modeling that by having an impressive buttoned up executive team. But I love just to learn about overall philosophy on how you think about that.

So for that person who is working to build something, perhaps like you've built, that could be good advice for them. Yeah. So for me, one of the hardest transformations of my life was from founder to CEO because they're very different characteristics. When you're a founder in the early stages, you have to be in the, you have to micromanage a lot. You've got to be in the middle of everything. There's no room for air. You know, you're washing the dishes and, you know, sweeping the floors and all these other. That's hard.

And for me, as the company got bigger, I found that I was turning into a chronic micromanager. And for me, one of the things that was transformative was I actually reached a point where I was getting ready to retire. And so mentally, I was going through this process of, okay, how do I start like just delegating everything that I'm doing? so that I could eventually just walk out because I was getting so burned out. And in the process, I had a conversation with one of my board members, and they basically said, wow, that'd be really bad because you are a founder, CEO. We'd like to have you stay around. And so we came up with a plan where I said, like, okay, here's what I'll do.

I'll go to Europe for a year and help hire our European sales team. We were really struggling. And to me, that was interesting to, it was a new problem to solve. I'd gone to school in Europe, and I wanted my kids to experience the world a little bit. And it was a chance to me to take a little bit of a sabbatical, so to speak, mentally. And the most amazing thing happened is I was preparing to go to Europe. I basically have moments where I'm like, wait a minute, it's 10 p.m. and I'm writing a web page. Huh. This doesn't feel right. Why isn't somebody else doing this?

And multiply that 10,000 times over 18 months as I had to figure out how to give away my Legos, you know, give to other people the things that I was doing. and then when I moved to Europe, I stayed engaged with the organization, but because of the distance, I could only stay engaged on the most important factors. And what happened? I became a way better CEO

because I was engineering myself out of the job. And ultimately, now that I'm back in the business, I really, after that year, I fell in love with my job again. I was like, wait a minute, it's not my job to write web pages. It's not my job to be working 24 hours a day. It's my job to build the team.

team and let them run. And, you know, once I've adopted this mindset, like, my mental health is way better. My stress levels are way down. I've basically gotten to the point where, you know, I've accepted that my role is just to help inspire the right team and clarify their roles and get the hell out of the way. So what's your day to day like now? It depends. I, um, I like to say, uh, my role now. is I'm the chief storyteller of the business. And that sort of bookends it. So I'm at the beginning phase where, okay, where are we going to be in 10 years?

What's the story we want to tell over the next 10 years? What's the vision we're painting? And then I get to come back and connect the dots with our R&D guys and our product roadmap, which is the stuff I love doing. So it's, okay, you know, what is Taser 8 going to be like? What research do we need to do? the problems we need to solve. I love all that stuff. And then I also get to tell the story of the company publicly about, okay, here's where we're going, the book, obviously. And then everything

in between, I've delegated. So Luke Larson is the president company. He runs the place day to day, overseas hiring all the people, managing all the issues, his job. I've done it. It's way more stressful than the job I have now. But I actually think it's really important for the business, because what happens, if I was the chief, operating person. You get so overwhelmed with all the day-to-day stuff. There's no room left in your brain for creative thinking. You're up at three in the morning waking up with that nod in your stomach because Billy and Susie are having some issue at work. You've got to disentangle the next day. That stuff, there's an endless stream of all those managerial issues you have to deal with.

And so for me, when I went to Europe, I basically handed off all of that. And I've tried my darndest, to get back into it since I came back after that year. And I think it's been really good for the company as well because my brain cycles are going into really solving the interesting strategic problems. And again, it almost sounds like BS when I say it. Like, well, you know, I can't work hard because then I can't think. But it's actually true, right? You only have so much emotional and mental energy. And if you allow it to get sucked up in all the minutia, then ultimately you're going to miss the big picture stuff that you've got to get done. So that allows me now to focus on the creative problem solving stuff, knowing that I've got a

team that's way better than me at hiring, frankly firing, you know, and doing all the day-to-day operational things that you need to do. One more question, Rick. Let's say you're sitting in your office and a person earlier in their career has come into your office and asked for career advice. And their loose question is, Rick, I want to build a career and a life where I make a positive contribution to the world. I want to have some significance. I want to do great work. What are some of the pieces of advice you would give to that person earlier in their career to say, you should do these things or you should think in this manner

or just in general, an operating framework for somebody who desires to do that. Yeah. I would say, you know, if that's the case, find a job where you get to feel the impact of what you want to create, right? Meaning not just a job where you go in and you get assigned tasks and you do those tasks. And for some people, that's great. Some people just want a job that's going to pay the bills and they don't want a lot of stress. And that is a choice.

Not everybody needs to be pushing the envelope of what they're going to accomplish at work. But if that's what you want to do, and it can be very rewarding. Well, then you need to focus a lot more on what are the big picture of things you are accomplishing and do not overfocus on your daily to-do list. Actually, I'm not the best.

If you want to make sure something gets done, I am not the guy to give it to. Because probably half the shit I commit to, pardon my French, slides off my to-do list. And I've come to accept that it's actually, it's good and it's intentional. There's just a lot of stuff that I think I should do that ultimately, you know what, There's not enough time to do all the things on your to-do list. And you've just got to let go because otherwise the stress will kill you. Like trying to get your email inbox to zero, not worth it. You'll spend your whole day.

And when you've seen people, like they sit in meetings and they're on their phone the whole time, they're just constantly, they're never really present. You know, you've got to identify what are the big things I need to do and make sure I get those done. And then now, you know, being the CEO, I have a little more latitude. to let things slide off my plate. If you're more junior in an organization to where there's going to be negative repercussions for that, you may have to find ways to engineer those to do's to go somewhere else. But I think it really just comes down to, again, that factor of

initiative and working on things that are going to have a material impact. The people that are the most effective are the ones who can really see what needs to be done and go do it without being told. And it's a fairly small percentage of the population. If you can be one of those people, you are going to rise up in any organization that you'd want to be a part. But again, you might be in a dying organization where politics and infighting or happen, and there you just get the hell out. But if it's an organization that's growing and succeeding, those behaviors are what are going to serve you much better than, well, I did everything they told me to do. okay so did 95% of the world that's not going to differentiate you yep it's great stuff rick thank you so much your books called the end of killing how our newest technologies can solve humanity's

oldest problem uh where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online yeah best place is uh i've got my website simply end of killing dot com uh you're on twitter hashtag end of killing or the company website at axon.com. Perfect. Well, Rick, thanks again for being here. It's great getting to learn from you directly, and I would absolutely love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man.

Fantastic. Well, I really enjoyed it, Ryan, and congrats on all the success of building a fantastic show. Awesome. Thanks, man. All right. Have a good one.

Okay. Bye. Bye. I found that conversation with Rick to be fascinating. particularly the part about his dad's money being tied up in his business and that causing fractures within the family and was happy to obviously hear that it had a good ending and it currently still does. In addition to that, I found one part to be really useful for all of us and that was his value in taking initiative. and when you see a problem, work really hard to solve that big problem, regardless of if you work

within a company or if you're an entrepreneur, I think that can apply to all of us. And it's really a great reminder at any point in your career, at any position in your career, take initiative, look for opportunities to make a difference and then attack it aggressively as Rick has done. We all can do this. if you enjoyed this one as much as I did. I would love it if you would write a view, subscribe and rate the show in iTunes Apple Podcasts. Write a review, subscribe, and rate the show in iTunes Apple Podcasts,

hopefully five stars, as well as spread the message, tell a friend the best form of marketing is word of mouth, one person at a time. And that continues to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you next week. wait.