Reflex Protect is the story of two men with similar origins, both born into the 4th generation of Montana ranching families, who followed strikingly different paths before coming together to form a revolutionary non lethal self defense company.

After graduating high school, Steve Mangold joined the U.S. Army as a member of the military police stationed in Germany. After honorably serving his country, Steve returned to Montana where he worked in various manufacturing management positions, as a fiber optics installation consultant specialist, and as a real estate agent, all while tinkering in his workshop, establishing numerous patents for new inventions in the non-lethal self-defense field, notwithstanding his lifelong interest in firearms and membership in the NRA.

Meanwhile, Joe Anderson graduated from Stanford University, followed by Georgetown University Law Center, before joining Pettit and Martin, a large corporate law firm headquartered in San Francisco. On July 1, 1993, Pettit and Martin was the site of the infamous 101 California Street Shooting, the largest mass murder in San Francisco history, in which nine people were killed and many others injured. Traumatized by the loss suffered by friends and colleagues, Joe temporarily left the practice of law to pursue his love of music, but soon found his talents better suited to representing others more creatively gifted than he. He opened his own practice and became the Entertainment Law professor at U.C. Hastings College of the Law just as the Napster fueled dot com boom took off, laying the foundation for a long and varied entrepreneurial career in both business and the law.