At 23 years old, Rick Smith had a simple—and seemingly impossible—idea.
Two of his high school football teammates had been shot and killed. And Rick kept asking the same question: why are we still using bullets?
He'd grown up watching Star Trek. Captain Kirk never pulled out a Glock. He had something more elegant. Rick thought that should exist in the real world, too. So he tracked down Jack Cover — the Apollo scientist who invented the Taser — and started a company to make it real.
That company is now Axon, worth roughly $50 billion.
And Rick Smith—Axon's Founder, CEO, and longtime Abundance360 Member-—took the stage at this year's Summit to share how he got there, what almost killed it, and what he's building next.
His story is a reminder of what becomes possible when you combine a mission that won't quit with the conviction that exponential technology will eventually catch up to your vision. We are living in the moment when it's catching up, fast. The supersonic tsunami of AI, robotics, and converging exponentials isn't coming. It's already here.
Abundance360 exists for leaders who see that and want to build what comes next. If that's you, this is where those conversations happen.
The early years nearly ended everything. Two products failed back to back. No outside investor would give Rick a dollar. His entire company was funded by his father, who had quietly put the family's financial future on the line. By the late 1990s, they owed Silicon Valley Bank $2 million, and his father had $500K left.
"I went home that night and I sat and I cried in my apartment. I felt like such a loser."
He wanted to quit. "To be honest, the only reason I stuck it out was I couldn't let my dad down."
His dad's bet paid off.
Rick's declared Moonshot: cut gun-related deaths between police and the public by 50% in 10 years.
The data is already moving. One major U.S. county sheriff's office reported a 42% reduction in deputy-involved shootings after deploying TASER 10. For the first time since tracking began, the national trendline has turned downward.
But getting there required Rick to fight his own company. Building TASER 10 (a 10-shot weapon that fires from up to 45 feet) meant Axon had to legally become a firearms company, which alarmed his board. "We're a tech company. We don't want to become a firearms company." Rick pushed through anyway. The mission required it.
At the Summit, Rick also unveiled something brand new, demonstrated live on stage for the first time anywhere. You had to be in the room for that one.
What struck the room most wasn't the technology. It was Rick's clarity on why.
After Uvalde, when his twins were the same age as the children killed, Rick went to his board: "We must announce the taser drone now." He got flamed online. Board members worried about being canceled. He kept building.
His advice to the audience: "Make sure you're passionate enough about your idea that if you worked on it for 10 years and ultimately failed, you'd still feel good about it. If it's just money, you'll give up at your first or second failure."
Rick has been part of the Abundance Community since 2013, and the connection goes deeper than membership.
In the middle of a company civil war—his profitable Taser business at war with his nascent body camera and cloud software division—Rick watched Transcendent Man on a Friday night with his kids. "Holy shit," he thought. "If this exponential stuff is anywhere near close, we're going to be sitting on a goldmine if we can actually wire up every police officer to the cloud." He doubled down. He came to Singularity University. And the rest, as he told the Summit, is history.
That cloud software business, which nobody wanted, which police departments said was illegal, is now bigger than Taser itself. Axon ingests more video every day than YouTube. Over a million officers across London, Sydney, New York, and LA wear Axon body cameras. The exponential thinking Rick encountered in this Community didn't just inspire him. It changed the trajectory of his company.
That's what Abundance360 does. It does more than expose you to big ideas — it changes what you're willing to bet on.
The Abundance Summit is next March, but the Community, the relationships, and the access don't start then. They start now. Abundance Membership includes access to all Summit Recordings and year-round programming: expert-led Workshops, peer connections, private Q&A with Summit Faculty, and the ongoing conversations that turn ideas into action.
Spots in the Abundance Community are limited, and we do mean limited. Membership is carefully curated and over 70% of Members have already claimed their seat for the next Summit.
If you want one of the few remaining seats and to be in the room where the future is shaped, join us.
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