Rick Smith

Rick Smith × David Friedberg

After seven years of consumer-market failure, Axon proved its Taser could immobilize attackers and pivoted to police sales in 1999, reaching break-even within a year.Body cameras and cloud software turned that foothold into a platform used by more than a million officers uploading two hours of footage daily, though the software build nearly failed operationally.Axon’s Skydio stake and exclusive channel rights extend the strategy into response drones, while surveillance concerns and human-control safeguards remain central limits on deployment.