Rodney Mullen

The move

Rodney Mullen is, pretty much everyone agrees, the most inventive skateboarder who ever lived. Through the 1980s he takes a single move off the ramp and onto flat ground, then builds a whole language on top of it. The flatground ollie. The kickflip. The heelflip. The 360 flip. The impossible. The darkslide. A big chunk of the tricks street skaters everywhere do today are his.

He patented none of them. Licensed none of them. He filmed them, named them and let them go. Anyone could learn them for free. Everyone did.

Then skateboarding crashed in the mid-90s and most brands went under. Mullen didn't cash out. He co-founded the companies that kept skaters skating. World Industries. Later, Almost. Making what the culture actually wanted while the old industry died.

Why it was risky

The obvious play was to own what he'd made. Trademark the tricks. Brand the moves. Take a cut every time someone did a kickflip in an ad. Mullen did the opposite. He gave away the most valuable thing he had, on purpose, and bet that a sport built on his tricks would grow big enough to carry him with it.

Staying in through the crash was a bet of its own. Skateboarding looked finished. Vert was dead. Sales had fallen off a cliff. Sponsors were folding. Starting new companies into that was, on any spreadsheet, mad.

The numbers

The tricks he refused to own became the language of a global sport, and that's exactly why it went global. Tony Hawk made himself the asset and won the market. Mullen gave it away and won the culture. Same sport, opposite bets.

The lesson

Inventing the tricks wasn't the risk. Giving them away when he could have owned them was. Mullen knew some things grow faster when you don't charge for them, and the payback comes round as a whole industry you helped build. R.I.S.K. is for people ready to give the value away and let it grow.