Godfather of Modern Skateboarding Rodney Mullen

Legendary skateboarding inventor and pioneer Rodney Mullen

Mullen inherited his meticulousness from his parents, who were both brainy overachievers. His mother was an accomplished pianist who graduated from high school at the age of 14 and later earned a physics degree; his father was a dentist and property developer who built self-propelled vacuums for fun. Though his family was prosperous, Mullen has bitter memories of his upbringing on a farm in Gainesville, Florida.

He lived in constant fear of upsetting his father, a surly and domineering man who brooked no dissent from his three children. When Mullen first became interested in skating, his dad refused to let him have a board—he didn’t want his son to waste his talents on such a dangerous, marginal sport. But he finally relented in late 1976, and Mullen responded by devoting upwards of six hours a day to skating alone in an un-air-conditioned barn, which became a sweltering refuge from his father’s temper and stern admonishments.

Since that barn had a flat concrete surface, Mullen gravitated toward a now-defunct skateboarding discipline known as freestyle, a close relative of ballroom dancing—twirls and fancy footwork were freestyle’s bread and butter. The skaters who soared off-ramps generally scoffed at freestylers as timid and dull. But when Mullen started to compete in professional contests in the early 1980s, even the most judgmental skaters were enraptured by his tricks, which reflected the mathematical bent of his mind.

The creativity evident in Rodney’s skating combined with his engineering background and love for Open Source (computing) inspires him to relate the seemingly disparate subcultures of tech and skateboarding. Innovation through adaptation and reinvention is a central theme that applies to business as well, which Rodney knows from running his own industry-leading businesses.

Skaters hack the world around them by using it in ways never intended, to create something new in the process, which they share in an open source way. This resonance with hacker culture is reciprocal: many of them relate to skate and edgy subcultures, making the analogies and the way they’re communicated not only readily understood, but surprisingly fresh and accurate. Speaker Rodney Mullen explores how tech companies often embrace a radical “fail fast” ethos to develop new teaching to disrupt markets.

Innovation requires experimental, which often results in failure. Whether you’re building a lightbulb or landing a rocket, failure takes different forms. The stigma and anxiety of failures are shown to harm mental fortitude, dampen innovation, and severely reduce productivity, especially in hyper-competitive organizations. Rodney speaks directly to this to help manage and assess the risk that inspires us to keep the focus, the passion, the grit, and the will to succeed with creativity and invention.

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