The first outside dollar I ever raised was in an IPO.
Until then, every professional investor told us we were crazy.
That building electrical weapons whose portfolio does that fit if you're a VC?
Between crazy and successful, I think it's just some element of survivorship.
I had a mole that was hired into the company who was actively sending material non-public information to short sellers.
I love my investors, but if we're doing things to please the investors, that's just focusing in the wrong area.
Are you creating value?
Are you creating a sustainable business?
Focus on just doing it and then telling people what you've done.
Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show.
On this episode.
What you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Rick Smith, the founder and CEO of Axon.
Axon is a name you might not know, but it is a nearly 50 billion public company.
That's products include the Taser that people are probably familiar with, in addition to body cameras and in-car cameras for police officers, as well as providing a platform called evidencecom.
And finally, a new AI product called DraftOne that helps police officers with their drafting of police reports.
Rick and I have a fascinating discussion about taking the company public in the very early days of Axon's journey, as well as what it's been like going from something of a penny stock to a business now worth 50 billion.
A really fun conversation with one of the more unique founders that I have had the fortunate opportunity to have a conversation with.
That you'll hear now.
Rick, thank you for doing this.
Yeah, I'm excited to be here.
I don't know how many people are familiar with the Axon story.
For people that aren't, can you just give a little bit of a primer of what your business does?
Yeah, so we are in the business of trying to reduce violence through technology.
Broadly, we like to say we're out to make the bullet obsolete.
We envision a world that you can see in science fiction, right?
If we had Captain Kirk's phaser, we wouldn't be shooting bullets at each other anymore.
And I started this business after two people I knew from high school were shot and killed.
And I became very interested in how we think about gun violence, but not as a political problem, as a technology problem.
And so the products today are what?
What are the main products that you derive revenue from?
Yeah, so our most famous product is the Taser, which is an electrical weapon that's designed to incapacitate temporarily.
From there we expanded into body cameras because frankly, once Tasers became successful, they became quite controversial.
And there were a lot of concerns about how police were using them, et cetera.
And so we basically said hey, rather than argue about whether cops are good or bad in the abstract, let's record what they're doing, and then we'll know.
So we created the body camera industry.
With that, we got into cloud software because we realized the real challenge wasn't going to be making cameras.
It was going to be What do you do with all the data?
And so we created a cloud-hosted system called Evidencecom that now, we believe, today hosts more video than YouTube in terms of content.
We don't have nearly as many viewers, but we have around a million police officers worldwide wearing body cameras, uploading about two hours of video every day.
We then got into in-car cameras, drones, counter drone systems.
We acquired the world leader called D-Drone in tracking small drones.
We protect all the NFL stadiums and many of the cities in Ukraine have those same sensors.
And then we've got a whole host of software and AI products.
Because you can imagine, with the AI revolution that's happening, we're in this incredible position where we can take the audio video feed of what an officer is seeing and hearing and use AI to process that.
Starting with our first major product, there we do the first draft of their police report, which cuts the amount of time police spend on bureaucracy by about 50.
That's a product called DraftOne.
And then we have a whole host of new AI products we're launching as well.
So it's a pretty broad ecosystem all focused around this theme of how do we help police do their job better, you know, while protecting and preserving privacy and sort of doing it in ways that build the kind of society we want to raise our kids in.
I'll circle back to some of the questions about the evolution of the journey.
But just just so people have it.
So company founded in 93 called Taser through 2017.
Yep.
And did you have other products? through that period of time?
Like when did the evolution of body cameras actually come and roll out?
So we started the body camera journey around 2008.
That took about seven years to really take off.
As did the first round.
It seems to me like major tech changes in this industry seem to take about seven years to sink in.
And then that's, we changed over.
So it was 2015 that the body cameras and the software stack was really taken off.
So we changed the name to Axon.
Just because Taser is such a powerful brand, that connotes the idea of an electric weapon.
It wasn't broad enough for the company anymore.
So we made that a product brand and took the name Axon for the company.
And then along the way, you went public in what year?
May 8th of 2001.
2001.
Wow.
Interesting time to be going public.
I'm sure their first couple quarters.
There was an interesting period of time with the market fallout and all that stuff.
Oh, yeah.
I think actually the only reason we were able to go public is because the Internet bubble had burst.
And so Wall Street was desperate for deals that were not Internet.
And we were a company that made a physical product.
We had growing sales.
We had actual revenue.
We have line of sight to profitability, which before then.
To be honest, the first outside dollar I ever raised was in an IPO.
Until then, every professional investor told us we were crazy that building electrical weapons just
Whose portfolio does that fit if you're a VC?
First outside dollar was an IPO.
The distinction between crazy and successful, I think, is just some element of survivorship which side of the line you end up falling on.
Yeah, for sure.
And so IPO at that point.
And the journey initially, I mean there's different ups and downs, penny stock all the way up.
So when you launched the body camera, do you remember roughly market cap at that point?
Let's see.
When we launched the body camera, we were doing about $100 million in revenues.
It was probably maybe $300 to $500 million of market cap, but then it came down.
Our investors did not like it.
Uh, this little weapon company that was making electronic weapons trying to do software and video.
Um, and to be honest, I can see why looking back, that was a very difficult transition.
We had to just fundamentally change the DNA of the company.
And so we were in the penalty box for a few years with investors.
Uh Obviously, now that's turned around and we're hovering around a 50 billion market cap, which is only possible because we made the transition from a pure hardware to a hardware and software, and now AI play, is it fair to say?
AI has obviously been a big part of your journey.
And I know investors are really excited about draft one, the potential that I think AI can bring.
It's a very cool use case that I want to talk about.
But yeah, AI seems to have been a big accelerator, at least in terms of valuation and intrigue as well.
And then there was the whole defund the police element of body cameras becoming in prominence.
Did that raise your profile and lead to increased demand from a revenue standpoint on the body cam side?
Yeah, really following Ferguson, Missouri.
That was the seminal moment for us.
That's where, you know, an officer shot, a white officer shot a black man.
Let's just... point out it was very racially charged.
The man he shot was unarmed.
However, they were apparently fighting over the officer's gun.
And there was a very controversial case.
And what made it controversial is the officer claimed he was fighting for his life with a much larger man that was trying to take his gun away.
And yet, Some of Michael Brown's family claimed, if you remember hands up, don't shoot.
He was surrendering and he was executed.
Depending on who you believe, that was either a justified self-defense of that officer or a horrific execution.
Um, And that was a case where everybody was saying God, we wish we had a body camera that we could know.
And that really propelled us.
Until then, police did not want to wear body cameras.
Look, you know, the first time when you think about wearing a camera that records what you're doing all day, it's that's a big change.
And so most officers were like I don't know if I want to be second guess constantly.
You feels a little Big Brother.
The public sort of felt the same.
And then after Ferguson, we saw a shift.
Michael Brown's family asked for body cameras.
The National Patrol or police asked for body cameras.
And there was sort of widespread agreement that everybody would be better off if we at least were working from the facts of what happened in these situations rather than a ton of, you know, unsupportable descriptions of the sort of he said, she said situation.
Do you think it was inevitable that, if not Ferguson, there was some events that was going to lead to body cameras being mainstream for police officers?
I believe so.
Now in 2012, we had a company meeting where the number one question I got was when are we going to shut down the video business?
So there was a few years there where...
You know, it was dicey.
And you really just had to believe.
But what gave me the belief in that situation was we could see the explosion of cell phone cameras.
And so cops were already being recorded by members of the public.
And that actually poses a risk to an officer because look, a lot of times people aren't going to come forward with videos that show you doing the right thing.
And there's a risk.
In fact I remember talking to a police chief in Fort Worth where somebody from the public had edited a video to cut out the parts to make an officer look worse.
And so, seeing those dynamics, you know, we just believed.
Frankly, in my core it's like Cameras are exploding everywhere.
Police are going to need to be able to have an irrefutable record of what happened, one where we can ensure there's no tampering, no editing.
And it was just a matter of time.
And then ultimately, Ferguson was the moment that that happened.
But I do believe it was a building experience. and it was going to happen eventually, regardless.
It would have just been a different case.
A lot of people I've had on the podcast before have gone through hyper growth demand.
Maybe there was a moment, maybe not.
But not a ton of people I think, have had the shift in probably institutional investor interest in the public markets that you guys have had.
I'm curious, like When you go through something where you maybe were owned by some hedge funds that focused on small cap stocks or whoever it was maybe a handful of mutual funds owned you, I don't know to now being nearly a 50 billion market cap company, what changes the most from a business standpoint?
Just not the demand side of customers and fulfilling and servicing all that, but like the public markets, institutional side of things besides podcast invites and things like this.
One of the biggest shifts was the internal culture.
So look, when we were primarily weapons manufacturer, making these hardware devices.
And then we pivoted to software.
There were a bunch of cultural changes.
One was we had to hire very different profiles of people.
And just one example to share to hire software salespeople, which is something we've never done before.
The market price for a software salesperson is significantly higher than what we were used to in our core business.
And so what would end up happening is we would hire these guys at two to three times the pay of what our existing salespeople were getting paid.
And yet the new guys were struggling to sell this new software product that wasn't resonating with customers.
And so our stock price was down.
Customers were actively telling us they weren't yet interested in the products we were selling with body cameras and software.
And it was really crushing our PL because we had to hire frankly, people at much higher price points for both software developers and software salespeople.
And so then you have this internal...
It got to nearly the point of almost a civil war, where it was like, wait a minute, this is unfair.
Why are you hiring these people and paying them more than you're paying me?
I'm a salesperson who's bringing in a $10 million revenue quota, and this new crew is not.
Navigating through those cultural changes was... really, really difficult.
And probably the biggest challenge.
If I could go back and talk to myself back in 2007 or eight, knowing what I know now, I'm not sure I would have embarked on that journey.
I mean, because now I know how it ends, I guess I would have.
But it turned out to be way harder.
Navigating through all those challenges, changing and getting the company to accept it was worth, you know, learning all these new skills and shifting.
We had to shift our investor base as well.
As you sort of point out, we went out.
Part of the name change was almost a re-IPO to reintroduce the company to a whole new class of investors.
So it was 10 years of really insane challenge, both internal and external to get to the point.
Although where we're at now doing hardware is hard doing software is hard doing.
Both really requires just building two very different skill sets.
But now I'm really excited about where we're at, because being able to do both means that we can really impact the physical world in ways that I think software-only companies can't.
Probably not many people listening or shifting from being a hardware company to a software one.
If you are, maybe I'd encourage.
There's probably other avenues.
You've talked about how to execute on that.
But a lot of people are thinking through different monetization models.
One of the things, at least in the software world now, is more...
Hey, this especially with the advent of AI.
What are this usage based pricing and how are we going to deal with that and maybe shift from more subscription potentially per seat the more consumption based pricing and uh.
I guess, as you went through that journey, that was a pretty big chasm in terms of the employee base and compensation.
Forgive the cheeky pun, but I'm sure there wasn't like a silver bullet, if you will.
That just made it work.
I'm sure there's a bunch of like... lead bullets, individual things that you sort of did.
But was there one thing that you think was most helpful in sort of making these different incentive alignments and cultural factions adhere in a better way?
Yeah, I would say there are no silver bullets.
The main thing I would say is you've just got to stay curious. and stay humble.
One of the challenges we had was, you know, we'd built a very successful business doing certain things and there became a lot of cultural defense.
For example one was we had been selling through distributors in the United States for our Taser devices.
And I remember early on We actually had a young guy who was just above an intern, a new hire, who was rotating around.
We have what we call a leadership development program.
And so we rotate these young kids right out of college into different areas.
So this guy's brand new.
We put him into sales and he comes in to his first sales meeting.
He says hey guys, I think we need to go direct to our customers because we're selling effectively through weapon distributors.
These guys cannot sell tumors and software.
We're going to have to do that direct.
Now, in retrospect, this looks like the most obvious thing in the world.
Like you can't have a.
You know a company that sells guns like going out and trying to teach them how to sell software.
But at the time that was, uh, that was like a sacred cow.
Right.
And I remember like just the revulsion of the whole world.
No, no, no.
What are you talking about?
Like, this is what's got us here.
These are our partners.
And we do want to be fair to them.
But ultimately I remember standing up and saying well, hold on before we throw Josh off the stage here.
I want to hear more because he's challenging our thinking.
And what he's saying seems to make sense.
And ultimately he was right.
I gave him the freedom to take his territory and go direct to the end customer.
And, by the way, Josh Isner is now the president of the company because that sort of challenging authority respectfully being curious intellectually and embracing that we may have to change things that got us here may have to change tomorrow.
I'd say that is the single most important thing in any company that's growing.
And whether you're making the transition from hardware to software or anything else, like With the AI revolution, that's happening.
I don't mean to overstate that, but look, every aspect of society and our jobs I think is going to change dramatically in the next 10 years.
And the organizations that will survive will be the most adaptable.
And that means you've got to be willing to challenge the sacred cows and just maintain a sense of curiosity and humility and do not assume that you know what you're doing in this new world, because what worked yesterday, it could work tomorrow, for sure.
Getting investors to buy in in the public markets.
On this journey it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg problem of like.
You want software investors to believe in where you're headed, or at least people that understand the software business model, but you don't have a software business model to start.
I guess in terms of what came first, did you get the public investors to buy in to the software journey or do you have to put points on the board before they came in?
Points on the board.
To be honest, I didn't spend a lot of time worrying about investors.
To this day, I don't.
I mean, I love my investors, but if we're doing things to please the investors, that's like just focusing in the wrong area.
What they care about is are you creating value?
Are you creating a sustainable business?
If you focus on that, the investors will sort of take care of themselves.
Now look, you do have to put effort into messaging with investors, But you can't let that be the tail that wags the dog here that drives the business.
Because I think then you end up over-focusing on the sizzle, as they would say, rather than the steak.
And it's like, if you're going to build a long-term, investable business, go do that and the investors will reward you for it.
But if you focus too much on like hey, we need to spin a story to investors, I think that can lead you to doing things that aren't really moving the fundamentals down the field the way you need to.
Hard to know the counterfactual of having done this in the private markets versus the public markets.
But do you think Axon is a different or better business, having done all of this in the public markets, than you would have been otherwise if you had stayed in private this whole journey?
That's a good question.
I've enjoyed being in the public markets.
Now look until the day we went public.
We over the first seven years.
You know I was draining my parents' retirement fund and one of their best friends.
We'd gotten to the point where my parents were fundamentally insolvent.
We owed more money than their net worth.
And so there was a tremendous sense of relief just to get external funding in.
It has caused a certain amount of discipline, right?
You've got to do the right things to run the business.
And I think that discipline is generally a good thing.
Now in the 2005 timeframe, we had a big short seller attack on the company that nearly put us out of business.
We could spend a whole multi-hour show talking about that.
That, I would say has been the biggest downside to being a public company is investors don't always have clear, transparent intentions.
And especially if you get some of these big hedge funds that short stocks.
They don't wait around for bad things to happen.
They're very activist.
In fact, I had a mole that was, hired into the company.
It was actively sending material on public information to short sellers.
And that was a very disheartening life experience.
So there's definitely some downsides.
And I think the private companies don't.
You know There's no market to go out and short a private company.
That's probably the biggest difference.
So you've got to be ready for the attacks if you're public. fives are very in these days i don't know if you've seen rippling and deal and uh you know this is a whole corporate espionage is uh is back in vogue i didn't realize you went through a journey in 2005 of this stuff you probably could have given some some lessons learned for parker conrad at rippling on on having all that well i've not been following that one but i tell you it was uh All of the taser safety debate that came up, a lot of that was really being driven pretty hardcore by a combination of short sellers, plaintiff's attorneys that were suing the company.
You sort of get this cabal of negativity that comes after you that...
I mean, it nearly destroyed us.
But the good news is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Part of that controversy is what led us to go create body cameras.
Like when we created body cameras, it was largely a defense mechanism.
It was, my God, we've got to defend our customers against all these crazy allegations against them.
And we've got to defend our technology in.
The best way we can do that is to record the incidents where we were being used.
And I would say that for us has been something I've learned along the way is I actually don't spend any time really thinking about how we can go make money.
What I focus on is what are interesting, valuable problems we can go solve.
Because that question leads me to better focus.
Because if you solve a really valuable problem, then the next question is okay, how do you wrap a financial model around it for how you're going to get paid for that?
But it gets me in the right headspace.
And every time we've done that, like body cameras, this was a big problem for our customers and for us.
And when we solved it, it created a huge business.
Managing the data off those cameras created a huge business.
What we're doing with AI is fundamentally shifting how police spend their day like just helping them write their police reports can have the practical impact of effectively around a 50 increase in manpower.
Because an officer who spends four hours on a shift doing patrol work and spends the other four hours doing paperwork.
If we cut the paperwork in half, That goes from four hours of shift time to six hours.
So again, that's like a 50% boost.
Um, so not, not to get too much on my soapbox, but focus on getting the fundamentals right.
Do not get distracted with like storytelling and trying to pitch uh, Pitch too much on all the things you're going to do.
Focus on just doing it and then telling people what you've done.
I'm sure a very emotional experience and harrowing.
I've lived through the short seller journey that you went under.
Do you think today... short sellers' necessary function of the market.
And it's unfortunate the role that they can play when they're incorrect, but it's a necessary component of a good market ecosystem.
Or are you more on the Elon Musk, alex carp, uh from palantir camp of like f these guys uh they, you know they're they they, they're a dredge on society.
Uh, i'm probably in the second camp, like i don't think you need to be able to go short on things for an efficient market to exist, like having buyers and sellers.
Uh, make a market is fine.
Having artificial sellers.
If we're going to keep it, the one thing I would say is that's an area we should have far more regulation.
And what I mean by that is like look, as the CEO of the company, I am under a microscope at all times because there is an assumption that I could manipulate results for my own gain, right?
And that's fair.
We should be looked at.
But when you have a short hedge fund that can come in and take a multi-billion dollar short position, they should have to disclose any expenditures they're making relative to the company, because they'll then go out.
They'll hire private investigators, they'll hire PR firms, they'll play set pieces.
They'll do stuff.
If you were along, that would be considered manipulating the stock.
Um, but I think there's a presumption that well, since short sellers are external to the company uh, They they're not in a position to manipulate the company the way the insider is.
But the thing is, you know, I liken it to imagine I could take out an insurance policy on my neighbor's house and then I could go teach his kids to play with matches and fireworks and gasoline.
Right.
You can imagine I could do a lot of dangerous things.
You'd want to keep an eye on that.
And I think that's where these short sellers can do very negative things.
And there's literally almost zero oversight or repercussion for them to do that.
This might be a simple question, but what is a taser?
So the taser, it's a neuromuscular stimulator.
And so the most similar thing I can tell you is if you can go on Amazon today and you can buy these.
These home workout machines are little electronic devices and you put the pads on your stomach and you can watch TV and it will electronically contract your abdominal muscles for a workout.
Um, We're very similar to that technology, except it's not intended for voluntary use.
So, instead of giving you a workout, what we're going to do is we basically fire these two electrodes at you.
They penetrate through your clothing.
We then run an electric current through your nervous system that causes your muscles to seize up.
It looks like an induced seizure.
And the thing I would tell you is this technology is really effective when we get a good connection.
Our biggest challenge is getting reliably getting a good connection, because we've got to get through clothing and all that.
But it is unbelievably safe.
And I use that very specifically because our safety profile is so profound the critics simply do not believe it and will accuse us of overhyping it.
For example, based on studies by the Department of Justice, we have an injury rate of about three injuries per thousand.
Collegiate volleyball has an injury rate of four injuries per thousand.
So you're more likely to get injured playing volleyball than you are being tased by a police officer in the field.
Now, when I say that the critics, who tend to have a skeptical view of policing, immediately have this reaction that that is hyperbolic.
It cannot be true.
And so we've actually had to dial back how we talk about the safety of our devices just because we've learned it is actually such a remarkable safety profile we've got that it strains credulity.
It may be obvious to some people, but what then, is the purpose of a taser when used by law enforcement officers versus other things that could potentially be used namely, I guess, guns with bullets versus rubber bullets?
Yeah.
So if I take a step back, let me first start talking about what is the purpose of lethal force when the officer fires a gun.
This shocks most people.
When they use it, they actually don't use lethal force because it's lethal.
That is this horrific side effect that it kills somebody.
The reason they use it is it is reliable.
If you shoot somebody with a gun with high reliability, it's going to work.
It's going to have an impact on the person.
Reliable insofar as a mechanism of stopping someone from doing what they're doing, disarming or whatever it is.
Exactly.
So when a police officer uses lethal force, it's never... you know, an intended execution.
It is, hey, I had to stop this person and I had no other choice left.
You'll always hear some version of I had no choice.
I've had to do this because it's the only thing that would work.
So the purpose of a device like the Taser is to stop a threat, but to not have the lethal outcomes.
And the biggest critique against us which I think is true is we are not as reliable as a gun, And that's where we're spending a lot of our RD dollars and effort is increasing the reliability of getting that connection on target.
In laboratory conditions, we actually have a faster time to incapacitation than a bullet.
Unless and this is going to get a little bit grotesque but if we think about the effects, if you put a bullet in somebody's head or the upper spinal cord, it's immediate.
They stop. anywhere else, you're basically, you're causing major tissue damage, but it takes anywhere from 15 seconds to 15 minutes for somebody to bleed out.
And so there's many cases where somebody shot many times with bullets and they can still fire back.
If we get a good connection with a 12 inch spread where we get this electricity in a large part of the body, we're like 999 effectiveness in less than a 10th of a second.
But our big nemesis today is still getting through heavy clothing.
But that's actually the thing I'm most excited about.
We have a new technology that's going into field trials in the next year that has been extremely effective at solving the clothing barrier for us.
And we think once that's out and proven, then we're going to see a dramatic decrease in the number of police shootings because they will be able to use our system once we get the reliability up in cases where they previously would have felt they had to use a gun.
The 12-inch point you made about the amount of distance between the different points.
What is that at a technical level?
Yeah, so think of it this way.
Imagine my two fingers are two taser darts.
If I put them very close together, you can imagine the electricity flowing between these two points.
So this will stimulate the nerves in this very small part of my shoulder.
And so you're gonna see the muscle twitching there and it's going to hurt a bit, but that's not going to incapacitate me.
If I put one probe here and one way over here now, you think about every nerve fiber in that area is going to get stimulated and those nerves connect to other nerves, and so what we find is
If we spread it out, we catch enough nerve tissue that it overwhelms the whole nervous system.
We start, no, it's shades of gray.
It's not like it's 12 inches.
It works perfectly in 11 inches.
Not at all.
It's more when it's very close, it's localized as you spread that.
And we've found that with a 12 inch spread anywhere on the body, we get such a massive increase stimulation that it's overwhelming and the person can no longer perform voluntary complex activities like firing a gun or even walking.
What's the range of efficacy?
Like how far away is recommended or what's the distance that you guys talk about?
Yeah.
So we, our newest weapon goes from zero to 45 feet.
And actually this is another area where, um Our previous generations, we would always shoot two darts at once.
Think of it as almost like jumper cables.
We're firing a positive and a negative electrode, And you need both.
You need both to complete that electric circuit.
Now the challenge we've sensed large.
When you fire two darts, it's almost like trying to shoot two free throws at the same time, right.
You're trying to aim two projectiles at once.
It's at this fixed angle.
If you're too close, if I'm standing right next to you, those two darts don't have any room to spread.
So they're too close together.
So what we found historically is from zero to five feet.
You didn't have enough spread to be effective.
From five to 15 feet, it would work really well.
Beyond 15 feet.
That bottom dart was so far away from the top one it was really hard to get both darts to hit the target.
So we used to have this very sort of fuzzy effective range between five and 15 feet.
On our newer system, we simplified it.
And by the way, this was a fascinating learning.
When we realized and I pushed our engineering team I said look, how many shots can we fit in the system.
Because the main thing we can do is give police officers or end users more shots, right?
There's a reason you don't carry a Derringer with two bullets.
They carry a Glock with 17 because it's hard to hit things in the real world.
And we got to hit them with two.
So we realized we could fit 10 projectiles.
Then the question was, okay, how should it work?
Like do we shoot two every time like we've always done?
But then wait a minute, if you miss, you probably only miss with one dart.
Should we shoot two on the first trigger pull and then one on subsequent trigger pulls?
One of my engineers said, hey, let's just fire all 10 like a shotgun and just blast the subject.
And then the final approach was, well, what if we just fired one dart with each trigger pull?
Every police expert we asked said that's a terrible idea because you need two darts.
And we were so accustomed to shooting two darts with every trigger pull.
But we didn't listen to them.
We went and we built a prototype and said, okay, let's just experiment.
And what was amazing is the moment we had people fire the system.
There was this aha moment from the experience where they said, oh my gosh, this is so much easier.
I don't have to do like angle trigonometry.
How far is the guy?
Where's my second dart?
You just pick your two dart locations.
You aim there and you fire it twice manually.
Now, what that also means is if I'm standing next to you, I can pick fire here and there.
So I've got full control over where I place those electrodes at zero feet and at 45 feet.
So this simplification, it was extremely non-obvious.
In fact, when we asked our customers intellectually, they said, do not do it.
This makes no sense.
Only when they experienced firing it did we all have this realization.
My gosh, we should have simplified this thing years ago.
You made a point at the top about making the bullet obsolete.
I'm curious, what does success look like for you with that.
So let me tell you, I am so excited about this next year.
Two weeks ago, I was in Norway and I met this amazing police trader named Espen.
And he had been tasked by the Norwegian police.
They were looking at arming their officers.
Most Norwegian police do not carry a gun today.
And he was starting from the position that, hey, we should arm our officers.
It's getting very dangerous.
You know, crime rates are rising in Europe.
You've got shifting demographics with lots of migration, many people from war-torn countries.
And so people have seen a lot of violence.
The police are dealing with more gun violence in particular.
And what was really interesting is he has been going through his analysis and he basically reached out to us and said hey, if you guys can solve the cloning problem, I actually think the taser is a better weapon than a gun.
And so I flew to Norway to watch him train.
And when he said that he stood in front of a group of people of like nine I think it was 70 or 80 instructors.
And he said, I'm going to show you the taser can be a better weapon than a gun.
I've had this pucker factor.
I'm like, dude, you can't say that.
Like, that's like, you're going to get us thrown out of the room.
We've always been very careful to always respect.
Like the gun is at the peak of the hierarchy.
And after two days of training, 100% of the people in the room, agreed with him.
They said, you know what?
You're right.
And what he did for his training was remarkable.
It was just very simple.
He put them in pads.
He had them wear a taser and a gun.
He's like, okay, fight.
And then what you found is, if you pull a gun out when you're in a physical fight, Now you're fighting over a lethal weapon, which is extremely dangerous.
And if you grab the slide on a weapon, it actually jams it so it won't fire.
The taser ends up being a much safer alternative if you're actually in close quarters and in a struggle with someone.
With the caveat, we have to solve the clothing issue.
And so here in a couple of weeks, I've invited Espen, the Nordic trainer, to come out and he's going to speak to about 1500 US police.
And we're going to describe what he's going to do over the next year.
We're giving him this new heavy clothing penetrating dart that we've been working on and they're gonna test it in Norway as their primary defensive weapon and in cities north of the Arctic Circle where it will be the coldest, harshest environment with the heaviest clothing.
And if we can prove and tune this system to work there, then we'll bring it back.
And I think that'll be a sea change because police officers don't want to kill someone.
We technologists have just never given them the tool to have confidence that they can stop the most dangerous people with anything besides a gun.
As you move from the law enforcement angle here to more consumer potential use cases.
Once upon a time, you guys were launched in the sharper image.
Is that right?
Like in the early days of Taser?
That's right.
Yep.
That was our part of it.
Where is the consumer side of the business today?
Or like, what is the roadmap on maybe moving outside of law enforcement?
So, if I go back in history, the reason we entered law enforcement was because consumers did not believe the taser worked very well.
And Candidly, they were right.
We had to go and re-engineer things to increase the power output and make it more capacitating.
That was the first change in 1999 that actually made our product take off in law enforcement.
We will be returning to the consumer market in 2026 in a very interesting way.
I think the first step was we have to prove that we're actually a viable alternative to a firearm for self-defense, and that's what we're gonna go prove in Norway over the next year.
And then we'll bring it to American policing, but then we're going to bring the same technology back to the American public.
And if I, let me first start from what I told you before is let's not worry about making money.
Let's worry about what problem we want to solve.
American police shoot and kill about a thousand people a year.
Private citizens shoot and kill 40,000 of each other each year.
Now, most of those are suicides, about half, 40% are homicides.
Um, But the point is we can save more lives and it's a bigger market.
And so I've actually had to face internal resistance over the past 20 years.
We found so much success in policing that on a regular cadence somebody in management will say you know what?
We should shut down this consumer business.
It's small.
It's a distraction.
It's different from our core.
And I finally had to slam my fist on the table and say we are not ever shutting down the consumer business.
We have a moral obligation.
We are going to give people like my mom, who went and bought a gun in 1998...
Or I'm sorry, 1993.
That was one of the other reasons I started the company.
She went to a gun store and they told her tasers were illegal, which they were at the time.
She couldn't buy one.
So it was a bit of a rambling answer, but we are coming back to the consumer market.
But only once we have proven that the technology is so sufficiently reliable and effective.
No, we do have consumer weapons today and they're pretty good, but they're not near as good as where we'll be in a year.
I'm sure there'll be a whole nother set of considerations around distribution and figuring out incentives for people and pushing the consumer products.
But is the thought then for your mom or for myself or whatever, to have a non-lethal product at home, whole main case of the intruder, like the standard protection use case?
And I guess I'm curious, how big of a market do you think about that potentially being for people?
So here's the interesting thing.
We are running hard at the gun owner.
That is our target market.
It is not the person who's uncomfortable uh, with guns.
It is the person who's very tough with guns.
We want to give them a gun from the future that has many advantages.
I've actually tasked my team.
And if you're not a gun owner, some people, uh, react differently when I say this.
It has to be fun.
Like gun ownership is enjoyable.
People who own guns and love them enjoy taking them out.
Hunting, shooting.
They enjoy working and customizing them, much like people who, like you know classic cars, will customize them.
And as we look at this We say look, we have got to figure out what is the actual set of things and attributes that that customer enjoys about that product.
And can we give them a better gun that's more fun to own, that has a lot of those same attributes and gives them this extra benefit?
If you ever use it, you are not taking somebody else's life in the process, which has a whole host of benefits in terms of your own legal liability or the risk of something terrible happening in an accident in your home.
And so there we will return basically to the gun distribution.
We're very much going to be focused there on selling back into those gun stores because this is a product for them.
There's been media reports at different points over the years about deaths related to tasers.
I guess.
First I want to give you an opportunity to respond to how that affects Information maybe gets manipulated in a meaningful way.
And then I want to ask about like media and some of the things that you've seen.
But first can you speak to the point I've heard you make about the deaths and what gets attributed to you versus other causes?
Yeah, here's the really odd part of this.
Tasers have killed people, but they're not the ones you hear about in the news.
There have been I don't have the latest numbers, but it would be ballparks around 20 deaths from falls where the taser caused somebody to fall over.
Uh, and sometimes they fell from a height, like off a bridge.
Uh, sometimes there was a horrific, terrible situation.
I saw where a a young woman was in handcuffs and she ran in the officer taser and she just fell in a way she couldn't touch herself.
It sustained a lethal head wound.
Um, And I say that because we all understand that it's not controversial and it ends up not being in the discussion in the news.
Like there was just recently John Oliver did a piece sort of mockingly on taser safety.
But they kind of ignore the things that are the actual risk.
There's another risk, which is the taser can ignite flammable environments.
And there have been about eight deaths from people that were either in something like a methamphetamine lab, where you have explosive chemicals, or some people who had doused themselves in gasoline.
And then they were struck with a taser and that ignited.
That's one of the things we warn against.
And so the actual risks that are known end up not being in the news.
The ones that tend to be in the news are where a taser has been used and somebody dies a few hours later.
And it's not immediately obvious what the cause was.
And there's a real knee jerk reaction.
Of course, you know.
The story is much more intriguing and interesting if it has an element of good and evil in it, right?
So police used a taser.
Somebody died.
Clearly the police killed this person with the taser.
Tends to be the narrative.
But in almost all those cases, there's underlying factors.
And by the way, there's one really important thing to understand.
How electricity impacts you has been well studied.
If electricity is going to stop your heart and that's been one of the most controversial allegations that the taser causes cardiac arrest.
If that were to happen, it's an immediate effect.
If you get shocked and you go into ventricular fibrillation, you are unconscious in a few seconds.
It does not happen hours later.
And so most of these cases, there's actually a long time delay between when the taser is used.
And there's significant issues typically related to long-term drug use people with, like a methamphetamine or a cocaine habit.
Doing that, and I'm not saying that to judge anybody.
My family has been hit by the methamphetamine and the opioid epidemics.
This is not me passing judgment about saying anybody deserved an outcome.
But what I'm saying is over 100000 people die every year from drug-related causes in the United States.
And if those are related to stimulants, in particular cocaine methamphetamines PCP, those express themselves in what tends to be very violent outbursts where somebody calls the police.
And look, that is a situation where the only device police have that is likely to work is a taser.
Pepper spray does not work on somebody who's high on drugs.
They're not feeling pain.
They simply don't care.
So you've either got to go to your gun, which is way worse, of course, because it's got a 50 lethality rate, or you get into a physical fight where you're either hitting them with a baton or physically wrestling, which we can actually show you physiologically.
That puts more stress on the person than a well-coordinated taser use followed by fast restraint.
But those are the situations where we've been accused of underplaying the risks of taser on these people because they are in a medical crisis.
And in fact there's a term that's become somewhat controversial, called excited delirium, which has been coined for decades, which connotes this idea of people that are in these very violent mental health episodes or drug related episodes.
And they're quite dangerous.
And these people, there's a fair likelihood they die in custody, regardless of what force police use.
And so we for years have been helping train police to recognize the signs of excited delirium.
And this is in an effort to save lives, right?
And so one thing you wanna do if you see somebody, for example, who's naked sweaty, acting in erratic, irrational ways with expressions of violent behavior, One of the things we train police is call for an ambulance.
This person is in a medical crisis, and only use force if you have to, because this person is probably in a much more fragile medical state than you might believe looking at the violent behavior.
But because that term excited delirium, our critics have said that we invented it to cover up the taser, killing people through some mysterious, unknown mechanism hours after they've been hit with the taser earlier that it's actually been frankly canceled.
The state of California passed a law outlawing police from training on excited delirium because it didn't fit the critics' narrative.
They looked at it as well.
You're blaming this mysterious medical condition for clearly police killing people.
So we're either going to outlaw you using that very term or training police on when to recognize it.
And this is one of those where.
So what they've effectively done is reduced the ability of police to train their officers to provide better care.
If you see somebody in this condition,
Frankly, a lot of it was driven by the plaintiff's bar that sues police, and they wanted this terminology out because they viewed it as an excuse that police weren't taking responsibility when these people die in their custody.
And I think that's just a great example of where you get a further tragic outcome because sort of the blame game overtakes sort of the rational discussion on the underlying science issue.
Do you think you're the worst company to need to deal with dogfooding because of some of the internal stuff?
Maybe speak to how you guys will actually, employees will be tested on?
How does this work internally with different taser products?
Yeah, so look, we're proud of what we do.
Our customers often go through taser discharges.
And look, a lot of our critics will say, I mean, this is the exact thing you're talking about.
Oh, these tasers are dangerous.
And look, I've been hit with it eight times.
There is no greater expression I can make about the safety of our products than to say I'm willing to put my own health and safety on the line.
And then we get criticized for being cavalier, Oh, you're testing it on your employees.
No, we're not testing it on them.
We do our testing in controlled medical settings.
Some of our employees volunteer for that.
But our police customers will volunteer to get hit with a taser largely for two reasons.
One, so that they understand what to expect when they use it on somebody in the field.
And then two, frankly, to build some empathy.
So you understand, look, this is what you're going to do to someone.
And if you're ever on the stand, we think it makes you a more informed user to be able to articulate exactly what happens, having experienced it yourself.
We also want them to experience the speed of recovery.
Like right after the taser is over, you're back to normal.
And what that means is, when you use it in the field, you've got to have a plan to move quickly while this person is incapacitated, because after that five second burst, the fight can be right back on.
So there's valid reasons why our customers will volunteer.
And then internally, we look at it as a bit of a badge of honor.
But we don't pressure anybody.
We make it very clear, you don't have to do this.
But if you are curious and want to understand how our products work, and understand what our customers go through when many of them get trained.
We do provide the opportunity for people to volunteer.
And then there's a little bit.
Look basically with anything like When you think about elite military forces right, they go through very hard physical training together and that does tend to build a sense of camaraderie.
There's a bit of that too, that there's a shared experience that comes from people who decide to do it.
Yeah, got it.
What do you think?
How many people are you guys today?
We're about 4,500.
What do you think ballpark number of people that have gone through it are?
Do you have any idea?
I would say it's probably a third.
It's lower.
When we were just the taser company, it was probably 80%.
And, you know, we're sensitive.
Or at least we're aware of the critique and we want to make sure that we're not putting people in an awkward position.
And so we've really erred on the side of hey, you can do this if you're curious and want to, but there's no expectation you do it.
What about body cameras?
How have body cameras changed policing and suspect behavior since they've been implemented?
So one thing that's been interesting is, you know, early on a lot of the groups that are pretty critical of policing changed very vocal about pushing for body cameras.
And I think look in their worldview.
They thought body cameras were going to find a bunch of bad police that were doing horrible things.
I think what we've generally seen is body cameras have shown on the whole.
Police are doing a really difficult job and there's a surprising amount of professionalism in how they do it.
And look, occasionally you see a bad officer doing abusive things.
But what's been interesting is now that these cameras are generally exonerating officers.
I would say we've seen police become more proponents of wearing body cameras.
Like police unions will say they don't want to go on patrol without it.
Now, in fact, officers will refuse to go to patrol if they don't have a functioning body camera.
In some agencies,
I would say we've seen some of the police credit groups shift and become more negative on them, because they're saying well, these are now being used to prosecute people, because they're recording what they're doing when they assault police on camera.
And there's almost a little bit of a sense of well, the cameras can't be working right because they're not finding all these dirty cops that we just believe are out there.
And I think we need to be open to this.
Well, there's a third option here, and that is that maybe these cameras are actually showing that police are generally doing a really good job.
In your mind what's the coolest innovations that are happening at the intersection of law enforcement and AI right now?
What gets you excited about the potential that can exist here?
So look, AI is going to be very disruptive in many places.
There's going to be jobs that probably won't exist in another year or two, one of which is human translators.
Like we're launching on our body camera using AI to translate between basically any two languages on earth.
Now with varying degrees of performance, right?
Like I actually used it with a guy speaking Icelandic and it worked pretty flawlessly.
We use the major LLM models.
So we can work with Mistral.
We typically work with OpenAI.
So that's going to be a game changer.
And what I think is really exciting for our customers, it doesn't put their core job at risk.
It puts the part of their job they hate doing and that, frankly, is not very value additive.
All the bureaucratic tasks we can automate.
And I think that's maybe more exciting to them than it first sounds.
People immediately want to jump to these dramatic use cases like oh, we could use AI to do facial recognition and solve crimes.
We look at that and say yes, but let's move carefully there because there's privacy issues and other things we'll be quite thoughtful about.
But automating the bureaucracy...
Like there's.
That's a much lower risk and it's a very high reward for our customers, just literally freeing them up to do actual police work.
They're super excited about.
So it's probably the fastest growing product we've ever launched are these AI productivity tools.
Did the customers request this?
Was this something that you guys thought of on your own?
Like how logical of an extension was this when you saw some of the potential of OpenAI?
Yeah, so that's a great question.
We started building this stuff out about 10 years ago.
So I am a huge Ray Kurzweil fan.
I saw the documentary about his life previously.
Oh, background of 2011 is we're in the midst of this transition.
And I was just really hooked at this idea of how technology is moving exponentially in terms of processing power and how that unlocks things that begin to feel magical.
And the main takeaway I took from that is things will move faster than most people think will believe.
And if you are thoughtful about that, you'll make bets while they're still high risk.
You'll make the riskier bets but the advantages you'll be there when the tech shift happens.
So in our case, like we started building a record management system because I had gone to many of these futures conferences and just looking and hearing from the experts in the field, we believe hey, somewhere in the next 10 years,
AI will be able to extract a police report from an audio video record.
Now, when we started working on that, it was complete smoke and mirrors in the eyes of our customers.
People thought it was pretty sci-fi and pretty crazy, but it turned out we were approximately right.
It was about 10 years later, in 2024, maybe seven or eight years, even.
You know, GPT-4 was really the moment where that became possible.
And so for me, it's a combination of, it's my job to think outside the box with our customers.
Okay, what are the non-obvious things coming?
And then I would say invention is a team sport.
Like, it's not just me.
It's me having conversations with our customers, having conversations with our engineers.
And then my job is to kind of connect the dots between those things.
And that's where this one in particular emerged from all those conversations that report writing would be massively valuable.
It seems like you guys have a lot of slow burn, skunk work, projects that are, you know, building towards some future.
It sounds like every product is in some type of incubation state for seven years.
Seems like the consistent number.
I'm curious how do you think about like, when to keep resourcing those versus when to shut them down, and this isn't working.
That's a great question.
And they're not all the big ones seem to be multi-year endeavors, but things like Draft1 and AI, once we pivoted, that was like three months or six months in its final implementation, even though we'd been building some of the underlying tech for years.
So let me give you an example.
One area we spent tens of millions of dollars that we ended up shutting down was an investment in computer-aided dispatch.
So that's an area where basically, if you call 911, a human operator picks up the phone and okay, 911.
How can I help you?
Then as they're talking to you, they're typing into a dispatch console Then there's a different person who's reading that who is a dispatcher.
And so they are then reading what you're typing in and they're talking to police officers over the radio.
So you have, like this, four human chain from the caller to the call taker, to the dispatcher, to the officer where things can fall apart.
And so we decided to go after dispatch software.
But what we learned in this case, we did two implementations with customers.
And what we learned was that customers were not looking to innovate there because customers It's a very heavily trained and regimented job, these dispatchers.
And the best example I got was one of my engineers told me the story of the QWERTY keyboard.
You know, the layout of our keyboards on our computers was designed in the 1870s for typewriters.
Because the mechanical layout.
You wanted to make sure the Q was not next to the U so that the keys wouldn't strike each other if you put the keys too close together.
And since then, there have been new layouts of keyboards.
In fact, the U.S.
Navy did one that was something like 50% faster for human typists.
But the problem is...
You've got to retrain everybody who's learned the old keyboard design.
And people don't have the patience to go learn a new keyboard.
And that's what we ran into in dispatch was we were introducing new features but that we thought were more efficient.
What we learned is the training bar for that group of officers was just too high.
The dispatchers, did not invite us to innovate.
And so that was a case where we looked at it and said, you know what, let's shut it down.
And the other thing is, when you replace a dispatch system, it's integrated with dozens of really old federal and other legacy IT systems.
So the relative lifts consumed a ton of resources to rip and replace a dispatch system.
And the reward was just not there because the customer actually didn't want us to change the user experience.
It was seen as just too high a bar to retrain people.
So that was an example where we had to surrender and say all right, but I'll tell you what we did instead.
We also learned in dispatch, there's sort of two elements.
There's the typing, you know, this console they're typing commands into, and then there's the map.
And the map data, that we learned we could innovate.
In fact, we were getting outpaced by a small startup called Fusos that had built this map where you could bring in all the different camera feeds, different sensor feeds, all the officer locations.
So we ended up acquiring Fusis because they rolled out several hundred agencies in the same time span.
We rolled out two dispatch customers.
So we acquired them, shut down our dispatch console, moved our entire team under Chris Lindenow, the CEO of Fusis, because we believed we were learning that we could innovate and we could potentially win to be the primary map that integrated all these other systems.
So it was a combination of just identifying customer dynamics, resource trade-offs.
And then part of this is you're like an amoeba.
You have beliefs about what's going to work, but then you start to go in that direction.
And then some things work, some don't.
And you just got to sort of do the work of understanding the things that weren't working.
Was this like body cameras where customers were just uncomfortable, but we thought they'd get there?
Or is it like dispatch, where it was just hey, the cost per implementation is going to be too high and they're not going to value the things that we could innovate on.
Is the point, and I'm trying to think through all the different products but is it kind of a greenfield versus incumbent in some ways thing of how CAD played out versus how some of these other things played out?
Or is that too simple?
That's probably too simple because we also have a record management system.
Now, records is different than the dispatch.
Records is basically where the police officers create their reports.
DUI investigation reports, traffic tickets, basically all their reports.
There, we are displacing also legacy systems.
But there, what we learned was we could add enough value.
They weren't so beholden to.
The dispatcher has got to be like every keystroke matters, because every second.
When you're in a crisis, there's a ton of time pressure.
For the records management, what we were hearing was, hey, our systems kind of suck already.
And, if you can, just they're the officers.
We're open to it, especially this idea if we could innovate with AI.
So there we are.
And I think we're currently the market leader.
I think we have more major cities on our record management. than any other incumbent.
So we have displaced in the red ocean there.
I think it's more just understanding the dynamics of how hard it's going to be.
And what is the relative benefit?
Because there's got to be a huge benefit for you to displace a big core system.
Is video an input into records management?
Was that able to be a beachhead for you, or is that actually orthogonal and a little different?
Our belief is it would be a beachhead.
It was not until draft one.
Now it is a beachhead because we're able to extract a lot of information from the video and put it right into the report.
You brought up privacy as well.
The AI use case right now, it sounds like it's principally focused on productivity and time saved on the drafting side or the filing of the police reports.
Do you think...
Do you think the near term?
We sort of stay within the bounds of productivity maybe, broadly speaking, for some of the use cases of AI within law enforcement.
Or do you think there's a logical extension that kind of goes beyond that?
That might help resolve more cases and things like that?
It's both.
I think there's still a lot of wood to chop in the productivity side, but we're now extending more into sort of the real time and the analytics.
We will be doing both over the next few years.
What industry do you think you guys are a part of, or how do you define like, the industry that you're in?
Yeah, that's a great question.
We're in the violence suppression industry, which is kind of our own unique thing.
So we're primarily in public safety, but we also sell to the military and we sell to enterprises domestically.
We're helping major enterprise customers now deal with shoplifting or the threat of an active shooter, which Unfortunately in America every enterprise has to be concerned about.
What happens if you fire somebody and they say I'm going to be back with a gun this afternoon.
You know, you need to interact with police.
You need to have your own security teams.
And so we're... we're now expanding down into any adjacencies.
And this will also include consumers, right?
How do we help consumers protect themselves better interact with police when they feel they're at risk?
So there's, we don't really define ourselves in aerospace.
That's why I wanted to ask the question.
But I guess some industry-related questions and feel free to answer this.
However you want to define the industry that you're a part of,
Is there a piece of regulation that you've come across in the industry at large that you actually think has been super impactful and beneficial?
We're actually ourselves running legislation in Congress.
We have two or three bills right now.
So one of them is to change the regulatory environment for the new taser.
So the new one is technically a firearm and it really is sort of due to a technicality and that's creating a bunch of problems.
Downstream effects.
Like many of our corrections officers are by policy forbidden from using firearms in the correctional environment.
Of course that's written, because they don't want a gun coming in that could be taken away from a correctional officer.
A taser weapon is just a different ballgame, or many of our health care professionals that want to use the new Taser 10?
You know the majority of workplace violence in America happens in health care settings now.
And for them, like pepper spray, you can't use pepper spray in an emergency room.
It would contaminate all the equipment.
You certainly don't want bullets flying around.
So a Taser is a great option.
So in this case, we're just going to the head of this whole thing.
We're going to Congress and say, look, we need you to change the law.
And we've got good reasons why.
We've got broad bipartisan support.
We're doing the same thing on counter drone.
Right now, your local police department is forbidden from doing anything to interfere with the flight of a drone.
But those are laws written for manned aircraft before drones existed.
And so I think, after what happened in New Jersey, now everybody of course expects what do you mean?
My police department can't even tell me what these things are flying in the sky.
Or you know, when the Louisiana State Police called us, they wanted to use some of our counter drone tech to protect the Super Bowl in New Orleans and we could not sell it to them.
We had to bring in the Coast Guard to be able to do counter drone tech.
So there's things that we're pushing.
But I tend to be focused on things we can do and move the ball down the field.
You actually answered my second question, which was going to be something regulation-wise.
That's had super negative, unintended consequences.
So it's fascinating when you get into some of these industries that have a lot of nuance.
The people within them have such appreciation for the downstream impact of what an upstream regulation could do.
And so being classified as a firearm is actually a perfect one for what.
It limits the use of your product to its fullest extent or potential.
Here's another one.
I'd love to put a camera on the taser so that we can help the officer if they squeeze the trigger.
We could use the camera to determine when to fire the dart.
So we, for example, don't shoot somebody in the face if you're aiming there.
But if I did that, that would make our weapon a machine gun.
Because under the 1930s laws, like you have to have the trigger directly fire each bullet.
And I don't think that's the intention.
But yeah, there are these weird downstream things.
And this is all because we changed the propellant.
If I do fire the Taser 7, that's not a firearm, and the Taser 10, you would not be able to tell me which one is a firearm or not, based on how they operate.
You'd have to crack it open and it's this minor technicality and stuff, but it does carry these kind of major regulatory impacts.
Are there groups that will lobby against the change of classification, or who puts up the resistance against you when you want to make a change like this?
Yeah, in that case we have seen some resistance from some of the gun violence groups, but it's not to us specifically.
I think it's more...
They're just.
Hey, we don't want to see anything that expands the definition of what is not a firearm.
They're worried about loopholes.
So we've been working with them to help craft the legislation to make it very specific.
And I think we've done that.
But I think it's more just resistance to change that we see more than any specific resistance.
Do you get... You're in a weird position where in some ways there's the anti-guns in general people that might be against you.
In other ways, they might be for you.
In some ways, the pro-gun people might be against you.
In some ways, they might be for you.
I guess in broad strokes, when you get resistance from a constituency or a lobbying group or something.
Where does it tend to come from?
It's all over the map.
We're in this sort of weird position where I think we can be friends with anyone, but we can also end up adversarial for unknown reasons.
And so there's no...
Real consistency.
We're kind of our own thing.
And we just try to really stay out of the politics of gun violence, et cetera.
We're like, look, we're a different thing.
We're a new tech.
And that's why I've been very careful to say we're not against guns.
In my company we have lots of card-carrying Second Amendment policies.
You know loving folks and we've got.
You know strong gun control advocates and we're like Hey, That's fine.
Whatever your beliefs are, we're here to make something better.
And that's something both sides can generally agree on.
Is there something in the last like six months that you think was super important, either at an industry level or a news level, and just didn't get the amount of coverage that it should have?
The only one I could think of was the New Jersey drone situation, but that got a ton of coverage.
But I think, actually now translating that into action, like okay, what are we going to do so that local police departments are actually empowered to have some sort of drone mitigation capability?
I mean, that certainly captured the imaginations of America.
I guess when you reflect on that story in and of itself, do you feel like it was mostly compounding uh factors, that when it got more news coverage then more people paid attention to it and therefore more people were, you know, hobbyists were putting their drones up or they were more attuned to planes flying over like what do you think the the net takeaway of of that whole incident was?
Yeah, I think it was mostly people just paying more attention because it was happening.
I mean, there's some chance that some of this might have been a psychological operation from nation-state actors to sort of toy with us a bit um, but again, i'm just speculating there.
Yeah yeah, that was that was my original uh.
My original thing was either nation state actors within our own country or or or abroad uh, that were our own country may be trying to figure out or normalize the how that would be received from people when they see something like this for whatever reason bomb detection or something in the future.
But it seems like the Occam's razor in all of this was yes, there were a handful of drones, for whatever reason, and they all sort of compounded on themselves.
Yeah.
Is there something you've held a strong opinion on from an operating standpoint, maybe five years ago, that 10 years ago, maybe in the early days that you've changed your mind on?
I would say, if I go back further, the one thing if I go back and slap my 23-year-old self, it would be really focus on most of your energy, on who you hire.
Everybody says people are the most important part of the business, but it's easy to get distracted and hiring can begin to feel administrative right.
But, like when you make a great hire, you never have to worry about that person's area of operational oversight again, because they're going to do a better job than you could have.
And I would say in the early days, I would be like, oh God, I've got to hire somebody.
Let's just get somebody in the seat.
And I sort of felt like it was my job to solve all the hard, interesting problems.
And then as the company scaled, I was a chronic micromanager.
I'd actually gone to the board and told them I'd wanted to retire because I was so burned out.
And it was only when I was in that mind frame the board said hey, instead of you retiring, retire.
You know what do you really want to do?
And I said, look, I'd like to spend a year.
My kids are, at a certain age, over in Europe.
Show them the rest of the world and getting ready for that year abroad.
I learned to delegate everything.
Now I thought I was going to be retiring and moving on, but then I fell in love with the job again because like Oh, wow.
Now that I'm not up at 2 AM writing webpages, like life is manageable.
Um, And a big part of that was really getting the right people in the right roles.
And by the way, I've also learned, like, that's actually not my superpower.
So my one direct report, Josh, he is like...
He is a head coach.
That's his self-image.
Everything about building teams, hiring teams, moving people around, firing people, replacing them.
He loves doing that.
And that's...
Something I don't have to worry about now, but making sure somebody is really focused on your human capital.
I did not appreciate that early in my career, how super critical that was.
What does being a head coach mean in this case?
And, I guess, going from micromanager to delegating and empowering the individual.
How did you get to that point?
So my role, I'm the cheerleader.
He's the head coach.
I'm sort of a combination of like the team owner and cheerleader.
Um, and what I mean by that, like I struggle with having difficult conversations with people.
I really don't like it.
It's like almost gives me ulcers.
Um, Firing people, to me, I hate doing that.
I feel like just the most awful person in the world.
I feel like I'm destroying somebody's life, which is not true.
Whereas, you know, I love working on technical problems.
I love meeting with customers.
And I love connecting the dots across our teams of what we're going to invent and then how we're going to tell the story.
That stuff keeps me super pumped.
Josh Isner.
He loves everything about managing and growing teams, but he is self-admittedly, not really a technologist or a product visionary.
So we made really a great fit between the two of us because he is so focused on everything it takes to run the business.
He's a much better leader and manager than I am.
And that kind of frees me up to really be sort of the chief storyteller, in sort of focusing on building the vision of the company is really the story we're telling about tomorrow.
But of course I have to make sure it can be a true story that the underlying technical fabric you know is going to make sense.
Well, right before we hop, I guess, as you look forward, you've been on this journey now for 32 some odd years.
It seems like you're still enthused and enjoying what's going on.
As you look forward, what has you most excited about the next 10 years of Axon?
Yeah well, number one.
This will be the only job I ever have, as long as the board and management wants to keep me around because I'm in the zone.
I have a job I love doing.
I'm working as hard as I ever have.
But I'm doing things I love.
You know, I walk in the halls of Congress promoting our message or our bills.
I'm meeting with customers and I'm in the lab with our engineers working on next gen products.
And I'm a happy camper doing all this stuff.
And I'll do it as long as they'll keep me around.
Well, I have a feeling they will keep you around for the foreseeable future.
So, Rick, thanks for doing this.
I appreciate you coming on.
Thanks, Logan.
This has been great.
