Rick Smith is the CEO of Axon Enterprise. He founded the company in a Tucson garage in 1993 after two of his classmates were shot and killed. Originally known as TASER International, Axon’s mission is to protect life — which includes making bullets obsolete. Rick’s family bet everything they had to get the company off the ground, nearly driving his parents to financial insolvency, and were saved only through TASER’s initial public offering in 2001. Rick has dedicated his life to helping public safety serve the communities they are sworn to protect. Under his leadership, Axon pioneered TASER energy weapons, made the body camera industry what it is today, and built the world’s leading digital evidence management platform, Evidence.com. In 2019, Rick published, “The End of Killing,” which challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that killing is a technology problem and offering a roadmap to solve it. He is a dynamic, inspirational and visionary leader who challenges Axon and society to rethink deeply entrenched problems and to drive toward life-saving outcomes. Rick holds a B.S. Cum Laude in Neuroscience from Harvard University, a Master's in International Finance from the University of Leuven in Belgium, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.