Episode 21: Josh Isner on Axon's Journey and Future

**Drowsy Investor** (0:00)
Hey guys, and welcome to episode 21 of Shooting the Bull Pod with Drowsy and Bear.
As always, you can reach us at shootingthebullpod2025.gmail.com.
You can hit Bear up on Twitter at investing underscore bear. You can hit myself up at Drowsy Investor on Twitter as well. So we've been big fans of a company. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. It's called Axon Enterprise. I am the self-proclaimed roaring kitty of the Internet for Axon. Bear, the astute investor he is, is long at Axon as well. We've received probably five to ten questions a week on Axon for the last six months. And we've been planning out this episode just on Axon to go as deep as possible. And rather than us kind of talk about the company, we thought we'd have someone on who knows it a little bit better. Okay, a lot of it better than us.

**Bear** (0:51)
So better than you.

**Drowsy Investor** (0:53)
It is possible.

**Bear** (0:54)
Does such a person exist?

**Drowsy Investor** (0:55)
I'm as surprised as you are.

**Bear** (0:57)
They have to work for the company or something.

**Drowsy Investor** (0:59)
And it's weird, we have just that special guest today. So our special guest is Josh Isner. He is the president of Axon Enterprises. So welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here, Josh.

**Josh Isner** (1:10)
Thanks a lot. We really appreciate it. And man, five to ten questions a week. I excited to get into it. Let's see what we got.

**Bear** (1:17)
Well, you know, it's all drowsy tweets about, so it's all people ask you about. I love that. I appreciate it. The roaring kitty of Axon.

**Drowsy Investor** (1:25)
When I saw the company in 2017, I was done. This is what I was focused on ever since, and it's been an amazing opportunity. And I wanted to kind of start the conversation today with something that CEO Rick Smith mentioned in the opening of the quarter. And to quote Rick, it said, today, I think we've passed an inflection point for Axon. And in some of your prepared remarks and some of the answers to the questions, you mentioned how this was that pivotal moment for the company. So to start our conversation, I wanted you to kind of dive in deeper on what you guys meant by that.

**Josh Isner** (1:57)
Sure thing. I think, you know, there's been some pretty defined phases of Axon's growth over the last 30, 35 years, 33 years.
The first, obviously, maybe not obviously, was the Taser device, which was kind of the single product of the company up until about 2009, and then kind of contributed to putting a body camera on the police officer. Now, the body cam had always been on the Taser, it was called the Taser cam, and it recorded Taser exposures, and that was going well. So we said, hey, maybe we take this and put it on the police officer, since they use other tools in the field other than Taser as well. And that led to kind of an explosion of demand for body cameras, which led to this explosion of data on the back end, which kind of birthed evidence.com. And now we are Microsoft Azure's biggest customer. We manage about 40 times as much video as the Netflix library. And we've kind of, the SaaS wave has taken us to some extent over the last 15 years and to new heights, but it's very clear that things are changing and have been over the last couple of years, where it's not only about what workflows and efficiencies you can deliver in software, but really about how you can deploy AI to drive even higher ROIs, to drive more customization. For so long, software was about not customizing things, and now we're back into an era where much more can be tailored to a user. And that is the big, or has been the big moment over the last couple of years. And we've been on the front end of AI, not only adopting it as a company for internal use, but also deploying AI solutions to our customers. We're in our third year of selling DraftOne, which was our fastest selling product of all time. And it's driving this adoption of something called the AI Aero plan, which is our big kind of AI suite of products, booked over $750 million of it last year.
We had a great 2-1 in that regard, and off we go. But that's really the moment, is can we go from a hardware manufacturer to really a cloud company, and now into this new era of AI? And we're very confident we can. We're seeing that in our results and amongst our customers, and off we go.