If you Google “Godfather of street skating,” Rodney pops up because he invented most of the tricks defining its modern era. He’s also the most dominant world champion in the history of the sport, defending his title 35 out of 36 times—even while studying chemical engineering at the University of Florida. He co-founded the era’s biggest, most influential skate company, and is widely credited for modern board and wheel designs, earning two patents along the way. Under that umbrella, he launched multiple brands alongside fellow pro skaters. After selling the company, he fell in love with Linux, finding parallels between skate and hacker cultures that foster innovation. His first talk on the subject went to TED; since then, he has extended these ideas for Apple, Wired BizCon, Jet Propulsion Lab, the Smithsonian, BrainMind, UV Med School, SXSW, and Anna Wintour’s Task Force meeting—even headlining NYC’s Beacon Theatre. In 2024, his talk to a packed audience at London’s Royal Institution earned a standing ovation. In 2025, a Kenyan wasp was officially named Dipara rodneymulleni to honor his contributions to skating, followed in 2026 by the Mayor of Ocala awarding Rodney with the Key to the City.

Rodney was appointed as a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab in 2019 and a Distinguished Research Scholar at the Smithsonian in 2020. He is also a Collaborator at the Department of Complex Pain & Addiction Services at Vancouver General Hospital, contributing to multiple published papers, and serves as a Scientific Advisor to the C4 Foundation for active-duty Navy SEALs. On the tech front, Rodney co-founded an Augmented Reality company in 2018 that now partners with Niantic and has already been nominated for multiple awards across the US and EU. His unique trajectory has been featured in a National Academy of Sciences study, Educating to Innovate, as well as papers for IBM and collaborations with Media Lab PhD students. Having spent his life in the public eye since his teenage years, Rodney has appeared in numerous documentaries, movies, books, and over a dozen video games; he was even nominated for a BAFTA for his role as a tech genius in Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon franchise. Regan Books published his autobiography, and Rolling Stone, Esquire, the New Yorker, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Wired have all published features on him—with Men’s Health up next.