Rick Smith is the CEO and Founder of Axon Enterprise, Inc. A pioneer of technology with the vision of making the bullet obsolete, Mr. Smith founded the original company, TASER, in 1993. As the TASER device became ubiquitous in law enforcement, Mr. Smith pushed the company beyond weapons technology and toward 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 in conducted electrical weapons, body-worn cameras and software. Mr. Smith was winner of the Ernst & Young 2002 Entrepreneur of the Year. Mr. Smith graduated from Harvard with a B.S. in neuroscience — cum laude — and later earned a master’s degree in international finance from the University of Leuven in Belgium and an MBA from the University of Chicago. In this exclusive 4,592 word interview in the Wall Street Transcript, this entrepreneur reveals the secrets of his success.
“I started the company back in 1993 after I had two friends who were shot and killed while I was living in Europe. And our mission at Axon is to, frankly, end violence through technology. We started with the idea of basically making the bullet obsolete…It seems strange to me that, in this day and age, the way that we stop people who are threatening is by blowing holes in them with the same technology we used hundreds of years ago to fight wars. So the main idea of the business, originally, was that we would create new ways to resolve conflict without killing people. Now that’s been highly successful. You see most officers, certainly in North America and across Europe, now wearing these TASER devices.”
To get the full detail on how to start and succeed with a multi-billion dollar corporate start up, read the entire 4,592 word interview with Rick Smith in the Wall Street Transcript.
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