# Garrett Langley of Flock Safety on building technology to solve crime
#  — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYm2nXFDaB0

Garrett Langley started
Flock Safety in 2017
after a crime in his
neighborhood went unsolved.
Flock is now one of the
most successful companies
selling to law enforcement,
known for their camera network
across the roads
and even drones to support police officers.
Cheers.
Yes, cheers.
Likewise, thanks for having me.
Maybe start by describing, how does
the Flock product work?
Maybe we rewind all the way back
because it's evolved.
Eight years ago, living in Atlanta,
and there's a…
Fun fact: if you're in a place like
Atlanta or Memphis or pick a town
in the southeast,
if you just pull 10 F-150 door handles,
some—let's call it three out of 10—will be
unlocked and one out of 10 will
have a firearm in the glove box.
Which is like, regardless of the firearm,
your point of view on it,
it's like— It shouldn't be unlocked.
You should keep it in a safe,
not in a glove box.
That's just really bad.
That's what people do.
If you're a gang member,
and you're trying to obtain a firearm,
the easiest way is just to drive
into a neighborhood,
six kids—because they're kids—jump
out and start pulling door handles.
Not even breaking into the car,
just pulling door handles.
This happened in my neighborhood.
Someone got a gun, someone
posts on Nextdoor, "Oh, my gosh.
I forgot my gun in my car,
and it's now gone."
The Atlanta Police Department comes,
and the Major was fairly apathetic.
"Hey, sorry.
Good luck.
We're not going to…" To your Bosch thing,
they're not going
to fingerprint the vehicle.
No one's been hurt.
For most major cities— There's
no stakeout happening for this.
There's no stakeout, there's no,
"We're going to go do all this research."
For most major cities,
if a human is not physically hurt,
the crime goes to the bottom of the list.
I found that really frustrating.
This should be really easy.
"These people drove into our neighborhood,
they stole a firearm,
we should go after these people."
He was like,
"We don't have any information."
"What do you need?" "We need a license
plate." "Okay, great."
I was an electrical engineer,
so I called a buddy of mine who studied
computer science with me at Georgia Tech,
and I was like, "Look,
we're going to go build this camera that's
going to track license plates." That's it.
That's what the Atlanta
Police Department said.
Okay, great.
We built this thing.
If you ever come to Atlanta office,
we still have the original camera
on a pedestal that looks like garbage.
I'm not a mechanical engineer.
We put it up, and all it did was track
every car that came into our neighborhood.
But as you can imagine, after 30 days,
you start to be able to know,
that person clearly lives here.
They're in the neighborhood
twice a day, four times a day.
About two months later,
another car gets broken into,
another firearm stolen.
The same Major comes back, and I was like,
"Oh, by the way,
here's the only car that doesn't live
in our neighborhood that was here last
night." That car gets put on what we
call a BOLO, "be on the lookout" for.
Couple hours later,
they find that vehicle.
The gun's in the car.
The person goes to jail.
What was really interesting is...
We were very proud of ourselves.
This was not a business at the time,
it was a project.
The five o'clock news
wanted to do the story.
I'm on the five o'clock news and the next
morning, I had five
emails from neighborhoods.
I think we might be the only company
that for the first,
let's call it 20 or 30, 40 million of ARR,
strictly driven off of five o'clock news.
That was our only growth channel.
Yeah,
that actual media appearance did— Every
time we solved a crime, we'd be like,
"Hey, do you want to cover the story
at five o'clock?" They'd
be like, "We'd love to.
We love talking about crime."
Because it's the local news.
It's local news.
We're not going to go
to The New<i> York Times.</i>
Nobody cares about a stolen sofa,
or a stolen dog.
Okay, but that's interesting.
Did you start with…
Because I associate Flock today with being
plugged into the stolen car databases.
But you started without that,
just looking up suspicious stuff.
Yeah, well, if you think about it,
in the classic, I don't know who gets
credit for it,
there's 400,000 neighborhoods in America,
and there's no consolidation
of providing safety for those communities.
When I say neighborhood,
that is a legally-binding
organization that can sign a contract.
Not like you and me just put 20 bucks
together and say, "Let's buy this thing on
the street." That felt really interesting.
Then the other interesting insight that we
developed which took time is,
I imagine at your house,
you have a security system,
you might have a gate to your house,
you probably have a dog,
you have all these things, right?
They do two things that
actually are not helpful.
They tell you a crime has happened,
they don't actually help you solve it.
Then what about your neighbor?
What we'd realize is that every single
security system was
focused on the individual.
But I think about my life in Atlanta,
there was just a crazy random act
of violence a couple of years ago.
My wife wouldn't run outside for a year.
It had nothing to do with us.
It was a mile away.
The whole premise became that you had
to build a safety system for a community,
because that's actually what you feel.
You live in San Francisco, you get it.
Even if you've never been the victim,
if crime is up, it's really bad.
It was all neighborhoods for the first
three or four years of the business.
Give me the stats on Flock today.
Just how many cameras out there,
has crime stopped, or whatever.
And maybe just describe
the product as it exists today.
Now it's a much more sophisticated
product in that sense.
Last year we helped clear just north
of a million crimes in America.
What does "help clear" mean?
We want to be clear that similar
to probably how you feel in that
you help businesses grow,
but you didn't do the hard stuff.
You made it easy.
You made it really easy for me to grow
Flock by making payments simple.
I don't actually have to do any
of the hard work of chasing bad people,
putting my life at risk.
We write code in design circuits.
It's not hard work.
We like to be very careful
of not overstating our value.
We were involved in the arrest,
in clearance, or successful
arrest of over a million crimes.
In a lot of those cases, we are the end,
the beginning, and everything
outside of the human putting handcuffs on.
In some cases, we might
be the tip of the spear.
For more sophisticated investigations like
the Brown shooter and the MIT shooter,
there was a tip on Reddit, but then Flock
was the way they found them.
But we weren't the tip,
so we can't take full credit.
Maybe I'll walk you
through a recent example.
I won't name the city because the case
is still going through prosecution.
There was a 911 call.
It was a major city in America.
Our system hears 911 calls,
we can tap into 911 calls.
This is wild if you think about 911.
Today when you call 911 in San Francisco,
let's say you get about three
million 911 calls a year.
A human picks up every single time.
A human manually listens,
manually types in information.
Imagine if you were running Stripe
and every single lead you
received was human-routed.
You'd say, "This is crazy." That's
how we work in cities today.
We hear the 911 call in real time.
What that allows us to do is then
figure out what are they talking about?
Is there any interesting information
that the system could find beneficial?
In this case, we had heard that
it was an attempted homicide.
Someone was bleeding on the street.
All they could remember was
that the suspect was wearing
white converse sneakers.
Now we have a product called FlockOS
that allows us to integrate all
the cameras in a city, whether
they're Flock-developed or not.
That 911 call pops up,
the operator is like, "Oh, my gosh.
There's a 911 call right there."
They can listen to the call.
They're like, "This is
a really violent situation.
There's a privately-owned camera.
I can tap in that."
Double click that camera.
They can use one of our
products called FreeForm.
They can say,
"I'm looking for any individuals
in the last 30 minutes that are wearing
white converse sneakers."
They then find the individual.
They can then push that video
to the nearest officer.
We run on the dash of the police vehicles.
Then that person gets arrested.
If you think about the way it used
to work, that case never
would have been solved.
It had been weeks, maybe months,
and become a cold case.
In this case, this person was from a 911
call to an arrest in about 17 minutes.
We do that on people.
We do that on vehicles.
In that same version of the story...
I'll give you one other story,
and then I'll give you a sense of it.
In a town in Colorado, there was
an armed robbery of a Levi's outlet.
Got to get your jeans one way or another.
This is a funny one, actually.
They call 911.
We're plugged into 911.
The real-time crime center operator
hears it's an armed robbery.
They also hear two things.
The person has already fled the store,
and they drove away in a white van
that looks like a black and blue cow.
Mistake number one is criminal,
"Don't drive a weird car." Now,
this police department also has our
drone that we build here in America.
They immediately click a button,
the drone automatically flies
at 400 feet to the Levi's outlet.
That drone knows what to look for.
It has the visual nomenclature of a white
van with black and blue spray paint.
Using that same FreeForm,
we can start to look for it.
We get another 911 call from another
outlet that's having the same time.
The drone is already in the air,
zooms over, drone has eyes on it.
That video feed can now be sent
straight to the nearest officer.
In a traditional response,
you're going to come in hot, blue lights
flashing, someone's going to get hurt.
This case, the drone's
400 feet up in the air.
You have no idea the drone's there.
The guy drives home.
As soon as he pulls in his driveway,
two cops pin him in.
Safe, tactical apprehension.
It's drones, it's some computer vision,
it's cameras that track cars.
It's quite a robust portfolio.
What is Flock by the numbers today?
How many cameras, how many drones,
how many law enforcement agencies,
how many individual entities?
Yeah, so it's just over 6,000 cities.
It's well north of 50% of America
that's covered by Flock.
By population?
Yeah, by population.
There's about 17,000 cities in the US,
and we have all the big ones
outside of Manhattan at this point.
That's like the last one to go get.
I'm not sure if that's going to happen
anytime soon, the current situation there.
Yes, it's pretty well-deployed.
Then the business has gone from zero to
about 500 million in ARR
in the last seven years.
Building cameras, drones,
and selling them to the government,
which is like three strikes, you're out.
That's incredible.
I feel like something non-American
listeners mightn't realize is...
I grew up in Ireland,
a country of five million people,
and there is just, a police force,
the Garda Síochána,
the national— For the whole country?
Exactly, police force
for the whole country.
That is a relatively common
model in lots of places.
In the United States, it's very localized.
Just maybe you want to talk
about the average size of it.
I don't feel like what you're providing
is,
in some ways, scale economies and helping
police forces
coordinate with other agencies.
There's a dynamic that people
don't understand which...
You're right.
Ireland, most of the EU,
Australia has six police departments.
I mean, let's call it
effectively the same.
It's a really big country.
It's a lot of land.
Most of South America...
America is really the only country
that operates under a model where local
municipalities provide
law enforcement service.
It's very rare.
The benefit,
the pro is very straightforward,
which is like you actually have a good
chance of knowing
the police officer that has your
territory and has your patch of dirt.
The downside is criminals don't really
care where cities start and stop.
They don't care where
states start and stop.
Yet historically, law enforcement agencies
were incapable of sharing information.
To give you a sense of timeline,
the cloud was only recently made
legal in Florida, as recently as 2022.
If you were a law enforcement agency,
you could not host your data
in the cloud until 2022.
Maryland was 2023.
Any coordination between
agencies was very manual.
All phone calls, faxing files.
One of the big unlocks of Flock was this
realization that you could drive better
collaboration because if
you're a low-level criminal
who isn't maybe changing cities...
But you look at some of the most
successful cases we've helped work,
it's like multiple states.
We did a huge human trafficking bust.
It was 76 people arrested across
four states, all organized on Flock.
It's really hard for one agency to wrap
their hands around that whole thing.
No, at that point you've got six different
local cities,
three different state agencies,
and the US Marshals all
collaborating inside of Flock.
That's how it should work.
Because in Ireland,
that is actually the only option,
because you're the same police department.
It's a very unique problem
that America has created.
Law enforcement coordination.
Yeah.
It shouldn't be controversial, but it's
actually a very controversial topic.
What's controversial about it?
I'm not aware of this controversy.
This is an interesting question of
your trust in government
probably follows some type of
logarithmic expectation or linear
expectation of the farther you are removed
from those people,
the least trust you have.
Most people's trust of the federal
government is very low.
State, a little bit lower.
Local, full trust.
There's this interesting dynamic where,
let's talk about a most recent case.
My guess is that most people don't have a
lot of trust for certain federal agencies.
But when stuff goes really bad,
like the Guthrie kidnapping,
it's the federal government
that runs the investigation.
They are the only ones with the actual
resources to work these cases.
It's the FBI that's
running that investigation.
The Brown shooter, the FBI.
The Mar-a-Lago assassination
attempt, the Secret Service.
It goes down, but people have this big
distrust, and so we actually see it
in places like California,
there is state legislation
that law enforcement is not allowed to
collaborate with the federal authorities.
Because of all the— On certain topics,
because it's just different politics.
We have to sit in the middle.
When it's clearly legislated,
like in California, it's actually fine.
That's the law.
That's actually very simple.
It's in other states where it's opinion.
That's like, "Oh, that's really messy,"
because we should just write laws.
You operate in a regulated space.
Regulation, when done properly,
just defines the rules of engagement.
Sometimes it's better or worse, but at
least everyone knows these are the rules.
Yes.
As I think about where Flock grew up and
the helping with flagging stolen vehicles,
and a very vehicle-oriented product,
how does that work at a technical level?
Like you guys...
There
was a database for stolen cars already,
But that's an example
of prior cross-law...
Like, who maintains that database?
How does it work?
Yeah, it's a good question.
You think about, there's
a couple of fun engineering
problems that Flock had to solve.
The first is how do you do what we just
described, read a license plate, track
a car on solar power with a 5G backhaul?
Which is the camera that you have
installed on the traffic lights.
The camera that we've designed.
Yeah, exactly.
But you very rarely have fiber or
power where you want to put a camera.
You want a self-sufficient box that you
can totally put up in an intersection.
Totally infrastructure free.
And be able to track a car going 100 miles
an hour and do some level
of computer vision on top of it.
That was a pretty fun problem because
if you put, let's say you wanted to put
a GPU in it,
you can't run on solar power then.
So then it's like, "Well then
what do you do on the edge?
What do you do on the—"
You can't buy any GPUs these days.
Yeah, that would have been
a huge disaster for us.
But the FBI maintains
a list called the NCIC,
which is about a quarter to half a million
known vehicles with other warrants.
It could be Amber, the Amber Alert system,
the Silver Alert system.
We saw, sadly, like a ton
of Silver Alerts too.
I think we did just over a thousand Amber
and Silver Alerts last
year that we helped clear.
It's like missing
seniors and missing kids.
Pretty sad stuff.
We have a direct integration
with the FBI for that.
Then at a local level,
let's say like the Bay Area.
There is a Bay Area hot list that we
maintain with those agencies.
Oh, wait, so I assumed
that there was a single integrated…
When a car is called in as stolen,
I assumed that went somewhere integrated.
This is scary.
Let's say your car is stolen
and you're in South San Francisco.
They will immediately put it in the
Bay Area Flock hot list immediately.
It will take 24 hours to make
it to the FBI hot list.
That's a CSV file that gets sent
around on FTP servers across the US.
As much as the economy runs.
We're very used to that model.
Used to that stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
The real-time happens on Flock and then
there's about a day lag
to make it nationwide.
Okay.
Local entities have some local lists
and those propagate to a national
database, which is an FBI database.
What you guys are doing is making
that real time, which obviously,
if a crime is unfolding
in real time, is a big deal.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It's not good to wait a day.
Yes.
You can drive really far in 24 hours.
It turns out, yes.
Then you had some great stuff
before about just a fraction of…
Stolen cars are bad news, the fraction
of crimes that involve stolen cars.
There's an interesting phenomenon where
you don't...
No one really steals a car for fun.
There's not much you can actually do.
Is that true, like all
the sideshows and stuff?
Isn't there a little bit
of stealing cars for fun?
Well, the sideshows are definitely...
They look fun, never participated in it.
Neither have I,
just want to make clear here.
It's my official statement on the matter.
I haven't ridden a dirt bike
in a sideshow, but I have
watched plenty of videos online.
That's fun.
You're typically not stealing a car.
You're typically driving
your own car in those.
Oh, okay.
You typically...
While there are some people, I guess,
who would steal a car and just drive it
for fun, the main use case
is when my car was stolen...
My car was stolen,
and then they used it to go rob three
CVSs, did a bunch of drugs in the car,
and then ditched it.
That's like a normal...
You steal a car to go do something bad.
Or you steal a car to go shoot someone,
because you don't want to shoot
someone in your own car.
If you're thinking ahead,
you want to do it in a stolen car.
We've all watched Pulp<i> Fiction.</i>
Yeah, this is how you do this, right?
We do a bunch of other interesting things.
We have this
feature called "cold-plating",
where if we detect that the vehicle,
from an AI perspective,
the make and model doesn't match the DMV
record, that clearly the person's
driving with a stolen license plate.
That's another thing you can do.
It's easier than stealing a car,
you steal someone's tag.
Then you got to go down to,
"We've got to steal the same license plate
from the same type of car." But then if we
detect an anomaly that the same car is
in two places at once, we'll flag that.
That's kind of weird.
That's like a glitch in the Matrix.
It's like we have all these,
and we would call them more like anomaly
detections where it's like,
"This isn't illegal yet,
but it sure is kind of weird."Yes.
It provides enough reason
to pull someone over.
Yes.
Depending on the size of the city,
it's enough to dispatch an officer.
I think if you're a major city, like
a San Francisco, you have enough going on.
But if you're a foster city,
you're a smaller town where thankfully you
don't have violent criminals running
around every day, you're
like, "Oh, that's weird.
We have two cars with the same license
plate in different parts of the city.
We should go see what's going on."
It strikes me that
a way you can think about what Flock is
doing is
not changing any of the
norms around privacy
but really expanding law enforcement's
bandwidth to go deal with stuff.
And so I don't think anyone really has
an expectation of a right to privacy of
the car they are driving
just being observed from a distance or
their license plate being readable
when out on a public road.
But if a car is called in and stolen,
rather than officers manually
looking for that
car and that license plate, instead
you can just much more quickly get it.
And yet this kind of stuff ends up super
controversial from,
I don't say super controversial,
but it ends up controversial
from a privacy point of view.
And so, I don't know,
is that take too generous?
Is there a steelman on the other side?
Why is it— There is.
I think you're right on the controversy.
I would articulate it as like,
if you're building a business that impacts
millions of people's lives,
it's going to be
controversy of some degree.
Like, I'm sure people…
I'm sure there's someone who hates Stripe.
I don't know why they would,
but I'm sure that person exists.
It's just like they're
someone who hates Walmart.
It's like they're trying
to sell cheap groceries.
Why do you…
It's like people hate every company.
Maybe they hate us more, I don't know.
I think there's a few
things that make it...
For the steelman argument.
One is you can see it.
I bet you if we pulled up your iPhone,
and we looked at the number of apps
that you've given full-time local location
services, it would shock both of us.
And then if we looked at the number
of data brokers who then leverage
that data to sell you ads,
we'd be really shocked.
And I think if we rewound 30 years ago
and said, imagine these private companies
tracked your location in real time
and sold that to advertisers,
we'd be like, "That is unacceptable." But
because we can't see it, we let it go.
We have this perception of
anonymity or being anonymous.
Anonymity.
Thank you.
Yet, you're an engineer.
How many data points do you need
to triangulate where someone is?
How about where they
sleep and where they work?
And I know exactly who you are.
Yes.
And so,
there is that one piece,
which is because we operate
in the physical world,
we are held to a higher standard,
which I think is a shame because
personal opinion, what I do online,
it's way more interesting and telling
about my personality and my life
than what I do in the real world.
I go from work to home and to
kids' birthday parties on the weekends.
That's my life.
So there's that piece.
The second piece is
there is an appropriate debate of
what level of privacy erosion are we
willing to take for an increase in safety.
You and I both choose to live in cities
that have governments, so we've already
chosen to remove some of our privacy.
We drive on public roads where,
constitutionally, we have no expectation
of privacy because we're using
the government's roads
with the government's license plate.
We have a driver's license in our pocket.
Driver's licenses are a modern thing.
That's not a…
That hasn't been around for 200 years.
It's a newer concept
of a driver's license.
So we've accepted all of those.
The articulation that I would have
is like, I want my kids to be safe.
And as long as there's accountability
of how the information is used,
which we do, every single action in our
system, the audit is stored in perpetuity
and it's publicly available.
For us, we really believe in this concept
of a certain data retention,
which limits the level of abuse.
It doesn't eliminate abuse.
There's still going to be abuse,
but it limits that, hey,
if it's seven days, 14 days, 30 days
of data, it's just not that interesting.
Relative to what you see with data brokers
online, where they have your entire
internet history stored forever.
You're interested in fresh data.
That's what's— Yeah, but criminals,
that's what's— Yeah, there's a really fast
drop off of where have you been
in the last couple of days,
versus like where were you a year ago.
It's very irrelevant
in a criminal investigation.
Yes.
Or it's protected behind
a warrant, which is fine.
All right.
You talked about cell phone locations
and your cell phone
having your GPS location.
I'm reminded of the phenomenon where it
feels like the
balance of power and the offense-defense
mix within crime fighting
tends to change over the years as new
technologies are invented and criminals
get wise to fingerprinting
exists and things like that.
It feels like cell phone locations
have had a huge impact on crime fighting.
Not even GPS location,
but just the coarse cell tower data.
And in particular, in murder cases,
it's had a huge impact.
I'm curious just what are the other major
trends going on, from a technology
point of view, in how crime gets fought.
Yeah, that's CDRs would be the
nomenclature in the law enforcement.
What's CDR?
Cell phone data dump or
CDR— Cell data records?
Something like that, yeah.
But to your point, it's the broader,
like you hit these three towers,
therefore you're in this general vicinity.
That is one of the best-kept secrets
for law enforcement of how to solve crime,
which people
dumbly commit crime with their cell
phone in their pocket every time.
It's very rare.
I think I've heard of one case in the last
12 months where someone was smart enough
to commit a homicide and left
their cell phone at home by design.
It was a very intentional,
they were very organized.
A couple other ones.
How did they get caught?
It's actually Flock, obviously.
So they were smart enough to
leave their cell phone.
They were dumb enough...
So they drove from LA up to San Francisco
general area.
They hit a bunch of Flock
cameras along the way.
They didn't pick up their cell phone
until they went back to LAX,
and we have cameras all around LAX,
and they finally made that one mistake.
It was a completely cold case until they
got a hit on the car pulling into LAX,
then got the cell phone,
could do the whole thing.
This is a good case.
And I guess the thing you can do is you
can know that a cell phone's in a car
because you can— We don't touch that,
but the law enforcement— Sorry,
law enforcement can cross-reference
cell phone location with Flock.
So they knew that the vehicle
was in a certain parking lot.
They can then use…
They have to have a warrant at this point.
Warrant to pull what cell phones were
in that area
and then start to build the case.
But to your question,
I'd say the current phenomena that is
causing a ton of problem
domestically is drones.
This is an example where
it's asymmetric warfare that law
enforcement is being put up against where
criminals have no rules.
So here's a good example.
In one of the counties we work with,
it's an affluent-ish county
in the Virginia area,
South American cartels fly illegal
drones through these neighborhoods.
They'll flip on night vision,
look through houses to see if
anyone's home, then go break in.
They don't want a confrontation.
They just want to see what's going on.
They're using drones
to case out— To scope out.
Yes.
Wow.
And this is where the downside is.
Law enforcement has just recently
in the last year been allowed
to fly beyond visual line of sight.
These guys have been operating for years.
Sure.
They jury-rig an LTE
modem to a cheap drone.
They can fly it anywhere,
however they want.
And then legally, even to today,
law enforcement is not
allowed to engage that drone.
They can't take it down.
It's FAA airspace.
It's not law enforcement airspace.
Sure, yeah.
And so they just sit there.
That's a problem in neighborhoods,
that's a problem in prisons.
It's probably the number one problem
we have in our prison system today...
Well, we have a lot
of problems in prisons.
One of the leading problems for
enforcement officers is
you've got these pretty incredible,
actually, from an engineering perspective,
drones that are carrying 10, 20,
30 pound payloads flying them over
the prison walls,
and they'll literally dangle it down
to the prison cell and the person
will reach out and grab it.
Cell phones, drugs, guns.
We had Keller from Zipline here.
It's Zipline for criminals.
And these guys have built
a comparable product.
I was with a sheriff that I know really
well, and he was like,
"If I shoot that down with a shotgun,
I am technically breaking the law.
I'm breaking federal law if I shoot this
down with a shotgun."
And so you're seeing states now pass,
like Louisiana has a state bill,
Georgia's working on a state bill
that says, sorry FAA,
we're going to do what we want.
And that creates a problem,
because most law enforcement
officers just want to follow the law.
Yes, and presumably that won't stand up
from a federal preemption point of view.
No, and the other challenge is,
I think you and I were
discussing, who's going to enforce this?
FAA is not an enforcement body,
but these people want to follow the law.
And the law says clearly,
you can't shoot a drone down.
You can detect it, you can't mitigate.
I had no idea.
It's a totally crazy law.
Yeah.
What else has gotten worse
from an offense perspective?
This is one that's like a…
I don't know if I have strong feelings
on this topic, but this concept that
we appropriately hold local law
enforcement to a very high standard
of accountability and audibility.
I think that's very good.
The downside is we don't with criminals.
And so as a citizen,
you could be the victim of a crime.
You get really frustrated
that they're not working hard enough.
It's very rarely that.
It's that they don't have the tools,
they don't have the data, or they're
not legally allowed to get to the data.
The warrant system is a very,
very good thing.
It's a very effective tool.
But there's a debate of should law
enforcement have more ability
to solve crime faster.
The example of the framework that we use
is, I don't know how you land this,
is that the severity of a crime should be
commiserated with the
sophistication of technology.
And I'll give you an example.
Facial recognition, hot topic.
There are thousands of cities in America
that have banned law enforcement
from using facial recognition.
John, facial recognition
is not bad as a technology.
It's not good either.
It's just technology.
I think a way more effective measure would
be to say, "Hey, look,
facial rec has its pros and cons.
You can't use it for shoplifting,
but for homicides,
crimes against children..."
Go to your list of things that we
as a society care deeply about.
Law enforcement should do everything
in their power to solve those cases.
And then the petty stuff, we should say,
"Look, we're going to make progress there.
You stole a pack of Skittles, we probably
shouldn't deploy a drone to find you.
If you kill someone,
I think we should work really,
really hard as a society to hold you
accountable." But there's no nuance.
That nuance does not come through.
No, they're just like facial rec is bad.
And we don't do facial recognition
for that reason,
because it's too controversial, but that's
counterintuitive to me when
the technology gets better every day.
Yes.
Another interesting thing that's happening
amongst these trends is
the prevalence of body cameras,
which I think maybe was, in some corners,
promoted by law enforcement skeptics
but I think now has— It's backfired.
I wouldn't say backfired but just like
it's, in a lot of cases,
been somewhat exonerative, right?
No, I think in many cases police were
really hesitant to get body cameras.
Just like, I mean,
imagine if you wore a body camera all day
at work, you'd be like,
I'm not sure if I love that idea.
It's a little bit invasive, but they did.
And I would say in the majority of cases
that I see where foul play is called,
it is almost always the inverse,
where the law enforcement officer
was just trying to do their job.
And on the other side,
there was either a mental health issue,
there was something gone wrong,
and it exonerates the officer,
which is interesting.
I think the same thing is true.
What at least we're seeing on the camera
side on the streets is historical
policing, sadly, is quite prejudiced.
We all have our biases,
whether it's conscious or unconscious.
So if you have bad data in,
you get bad data out.
And so the traditional way of policing is
you go to dangerous neighborhoods, look
for suspicious people, and arrest them.
It's just like you're perpetuating
a trend against a certain community.
And when you look at Oakland as a good
example,
who's quite a big supporter of Flock,
they're like, we need a more
objective way to police.
Let's just focus on stolen cars.
We don't care who's inside.
We will find out eventually
that car was stolen.
And then you don't wind up policing where
crime has happened historically,
you wind up policing where crime is
happening right now in real time.
And that is a fairly fundamental
shift in how policing works.
And for many cities we work with,
changes the perception of this
community with law enforcement.
Because they're no longer felt
like they're being targeted.
It feels like it's wherever crime happens,
we're going to go chase it.
And if there's not been crime in the last
couple of days, then we're good.
Yes.
Is crime up or down in the US?
It is down.
I think it'll continue to go down.
COVID was like really bad.
So it surged during COVID?
Crazy surge.
People lost their minds.
I think we tested society of what happens
if you keep people inside for too long,
and people got really violent.
Yeah, so do you have an explanation?
Is it that it was a mental health issue or
was it a crime of opportunity that
things were less well-guarded,
and there are more opportunities
for crime, but you think it was just
people went a bit batty being locked up?
I think so.
And results in crime.
But I'm obviously not a clinical
psychologist by any means, but
you look at the data and there's no other
way to articulate why
homicides went up three to 3–4x
and then plummeted back down to let's
call it somewhat reasonable levels.
There's a very few number of cities
that are left at COVID levels.
Most cities had this massive spike.
Yes.
And the way to…
If you look at the people who were
committing that violence, they tended
to be 16 to 22, male, and very online.
Very online?
Yeah, and so this is really sad.
How do you measure very online?
Let me give you an example.
I was in a major city, not too long ago,
and I was asking the chief to tell
me kind of what's going on.
This is a couple of years ago
during COVID.
And she was like, "Garrett,
these kids are just killing each other." I
was like, "What?" She's like, "Yeah,
they're literally getting in their car
and just shooting each other." I'm like,
"Why?" I'm like, "Because
this guy posted a picture of him
with that guy's girl on Instagram." And I
think in a normal situation you might have
called that person and been like, "Hey,
bro, that's my girl." And in other cases,
they're getting in a car
and shooting someone.
And that's not normal,
that's not normal behavior.
And it wasn't normal before COVID,
and it happened a lot during COVID,
and then it's largely gone away.
But it was a very specific social
phenomena where the race to violence
was so dramatic, it was so scary.
And I don't think society's necessarily
gone fully back to normal, but if you
look at the data, it's hard to articulate.
That's the most obvious explanation to me.
And I guess there are other empirical
measures like air rage incidents,
road rage incidents, all that kind
of stuff went up during COVID?
Everything went up.
Yeah.
Like everything.
People just literally lost their minds.
I think we need to be outside.
Yeah.
But how are we doing now on crime?
You say it's down.
Is that across all categories?
Because you read Twitter,
and it's like everything's locked up
at CVS and San Francisco is full of...
Like, there's all these memes which are…
Maybe do some debunking
and confirming of all the memes.
Every city is a little bit different.
Major cities still have
a major crime problems.
I would argue...
I live in Atlanta and the mayor,
he's made it very clear,
anything greater than zero homicides is
a tragedy, and therefore we're
on the race to zero still.
It's an unacceptable level.
We're down historic lows over the last
decade, but it's still pretty hard to wake
up and go, only 52 people
died in Atlanta last year.
You can't pat yourself
on the back for that.
I think where we're focused on is more so
clearance rates, and that's getting
better, but only better in certain cities.
We track it across Flock,
not to overly promote,
tends to be that if you have a Flock
product, your city has
a much higher clearance rate.
You look at San Francisco
as a great example.
The new chief,
the prior chief, Mayor Lurie,
they are making crime a focus
and the focus is on solving crime.
And when they solve it, as I'm sure you
follow on the news, they talk about it.
And they should, because it's really cool,
they're working very hard,
and what you'll see is back to the online
point I made, all these people are online.
And so when San Francisco PD is
dominating X— It has a deterrent effect.
Gosh, yeah, you don't want to get caught.
And that's the unintuitive or
the counterintuitive point on crime is
that most people would intuitively say,
"If the punishment is really, really bad,
people will do less of it." But
you were 16, 18 at one point.
You operate on a Boolean mindset.
I will get away with this,
therefore I will do it.
I'm going to sneak out of my house
because I'm not going to get caught.
You don't care if the punishment is being
grounded for a week or a month,
you're going to get away with it.
It's just will I get caught or not, yeah.
Yeah, and so when you flip— I didn't
realize criminals are so online.
So if you flip that...
It's a subculture, you got to get there,
but I mean, you'll see— Sorry,
is this like Reddit, Twitter?
They're everywhere.
Pinterest?
Probably less Pinterest.
But TikTok's really big.
Instagram's really big.
Snapchat's really big.
And it's how they recruit though
because the whole recruitment effort is,
I'm going to show a lifestyle online
that seems dream-worthy
to recruit these people.
And then they're in,
and they're going to perpetuate that.
And the data shows it's
actually not a very good job.
You actually don't make very
much money being a criminal.
It's like the medium income
for your average criminal...
It's very, very low.
But they promote a lifestyle of wealth.
So if you look at those cities,
so you're taking San Francisco.
Crime's coming down,
clearance rates are going up.
I would say as soon as we can get
somewhere like San Francisco to 100%
clearance rate, which we have
in other cities, crime goes down.
100% clearance rate is like 100% solved?
Yes.
And it's doable.
We have it in major cities.
Cobb County would be one,
which is like the second-safest county.
Cobb County has 100% clearance rate.
Yes.
If you commit violence in Cobb County,
you will get arrested.
And that's across what sample size?
That's the second-largest county
in Georgia, so let's call it a couple
million people, almost a million people.
So a decent number of violent crimes?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
But it's going down every year.
Sure.
So look at places like that
Because you will get caught.
Yeah, and so we have this new concept
that we've developed called Safe City,
and we'll go into a town and say, "Look,
this is the platform you need
to solve all the crime in your city.
It's your choice.
It tends to be, like about 20
bucks a citizen a year." Yeah.
It's like, it's your choice.
And what's fun to watch is we find these
mayors with really strong backbones,
and they're like,
"I want to be a safe city." There's this
awesome town, Greenville, Mississippi.
You've probably never heard of it.
26,000 people.
They have our drones,
they have our cameras, they have our AI,
they have everything we do,
and they are lighting it up.
And kudos to the mayor and chief,
like every crime they solve,
they're on the five o'clock news.
So these highly-effective cities.
What effect does it…
What happens to the criminals?
Does it shift it to other localities?
And you need to…
It's like disease eradication,
you ultimately need to do kind of enough
to blanket it, to snuff it out.
Because if just one municipality does it,
it'll shift to a local municipality.
Does it within that municipality,
people just go to, something non-criminal.
I'm curious, what are the effects of
one municipality getting really good?
There's two phases.
The first phase, you're spot on.
People, they just change cities.
It's like when San Francisco started
adopting Flock, Oakland crime went up.
So then Oakland needed to adopt Flock,
and now a couple of false starts,
now that it's fully going.
They will have the same,
but first is the shift.
And then you're right.
People don't…
The majority of criminals, let's call it
99% of criminals, are not evil people.
They're not.
Evil is a random act of violence,
and that is exceptionally rare.
It's all opportunism.
You and I were fortunate enough to be born
in a family, in a social construct that we
could go build great companies,
but not everyone had that chance.
Some people get pushed in the wrong
direction, and that's
what we have to stop.
It's like, as a business, we don't…
While we're proud of the impact,
making a million arrests,
it's actually quite disheartening because
that means a million people will now have
to go through the criminal justice system,
which doesn't work that well.
There's a million victims.
It's bad in every single way.
It's also crazy expensive as
a society to jail that many people.
It's a double negative bottom line where
it's costly and prohibitive that they'll
probably never reenter society,
so we're much more focused
on the preventative mechanisms of how do
you convince someone this is not a good
lifestyle, this is not a long-term plan.
Eventually, what you will
see is they will go get jobs.
These are functional members of society.
They can be functional members.
We should push them in that direction.
What kind of crime is on the increase?
I'll tell you one that's
pretty fascinating.
If you look in the enterprise community,
organized retail crime in stores was
really hot during COVID
and right after COVID.
That's why you saw CVS
lock their stuff up.
You saw places like
In-N-Out leave Oakland.
This was a huge problem, and it's still…
For someone like Walmart,
I think they reported just shy
of a billion dollars of theft last year.
It was a lot of money, and their peers
aren't doing dramatically better.
Now, Flock customers
are doing really well.
And Walmart aren't
neophytes at this stuff.
Yeah, we'll get there with Walmart.
But you look at some of our partners like
Lowe's, their shrink has
gone down order of magnitude.
It's not really a problem anymore.
But where the criminals have moved
is to the distribution facilities.
It's safer and bigger loads.
Probably the most sophisticated one
that I've heard of
is an Eastern European group.
They went and bought a legal,
well-running freight broker.
They now own this asset,
and they bid on all these…
Low bid on all these projects,
show up with real paperwork,
fill up a 20-foot with product,
drive away, dissolve the company.
$7 million in a single day.
That's pretty good business.
That's very sophisticated though.
That's harder to solve.
That's much harder to solve.
Because every car, phone, everything
will be disposable used in that.
Everything's going to leave the country as
fast as possible and just show up
on a street somewhere,
and then the other interesting
challenge is you have to unpack...
This is a little bit complicated.
Who's liable?
As soon as the product goes into a store,
that retailer is liable for the theft.
It hits their bottom line.
For a lot of these companies,
they negotiated such that
there's insurance coverage
from a different broker that owns
that asset until final delivery,
and so it's not super clear
who actually cares,
and it's going to take— The insurer cares.
The insurer cares eventually.
But when you talk about the scale
of what's called tens of billions
of dollars,
hundreds of billions of dollars of product
being moved, you're like, "Oh, we lost
a couple of hundred million." I see.
"We'll be fine.
We have insurance."
It will catch up eventually,
but that's probably the most
interesting type of crime we're tracking
is the tacking on the distribution.
We have
a lot of partners on the distribution side
where we're now deploying our product
to try to prevent this
from becoming an epidemic.
But it's much harder to solve.
It's a real company.
Yes.
I want to ask you more about this,
but I'm going to get another Guinness.
This is a good segue into your corporate
business, because again, people associate
you with selling to municipalities.
But obviously,
you sell a lot to corporates as well.
Yeah.
It's a big part of our business.
Can you say how big?
North of 100 million of ARR.
Okay.
It's real.
You told me to go all in.
Oh, sorry, you had some dregs left.
I'll get to that.
That's my fault.
You want to just go full up,
and you'll get more of a head that way.
It's perfectly, it's the correct…
It is.
You can trust it.
Yeah.
Okay, so the corporate business.
Yeah, north of 100 million of ARR.
Probably the fastest growing segment.
There's some wild stories.
We help businesses solve two problems:
how do you keep your employees safe,
and how do you keep your
assets or your stuff safe?
So it's kind of funny, because we have a
Fortune 5 company that's a customer.
You probably don't want to talk about
specifics, but we should just imagine big
box stores that kind of— Well,
this wasn't— These Walmart stores— We have
a Fortune 5 company as a customer,
and they spend like $100,000 a year.
Because they have like three
locations in the country.
That's it.
They have like three really big campuses,
so they're actually like,
we don't proxy towards necessarily
like market cap or revenue.
We proxy to physical locations,
like how many locations?
Someone like
a Dollar General is a way better prospect
for us because Dollar General
has 7,000 stores.
Yeah.
You want Subway.
Subway is a good example.
We tend to focus on retail,
healthcare, and logistics.
They tend to have big physical footprints,
a lot of employees,
and a lot of challenges.
Is their main challenge theft?
That's what they're worried about,
that they want to prevent stolen
cars coming to steal stuff?
I'd say employees is…
I'd say three years ago when we started
the business unit, it was assets.
It was like, "Oh, my gosh.
Coming out of COVID,
everyone's stealing everything."
It is much more shifted now
to keeping employees safe.
You think about some of these businesses,
they might terminate half a million people
a year, a quarter million people a year.
It takes one angry employee to come back,
and so in our system,
you can have it automated with HRS that
when the employee is terminated,
they're added to a localized hot list.
If that employee ever comes back
on campus—it's not illegal,
but it notifies security.
This is why people have security teams.
Don't let them in the building.
It's about kind of moving
that layer of safety farther out.
The other example is we do quite
a bit of work in executive protection.
I'll give you a good example.
If you think like a Fortune 2,000 CEO,
our stuff's deployed at her house.
We also deploy at corporate.
It's not illegal, but it's quite weird if
the same vehicle on the same
day goes to both locations.
That is not that person.
Yeah, it's not that person
or their EP team.
I think keeping people safe is
the number one thing.
The assets are like, it's good,
but worse case, you'll just
raise prices, which is not good.
But we had this crazy case
with one of our healthcare partners where
this group, pretty smart actually,
would show up to the hospital
dressed in a certain company's uniform,
and be like, "Oh, the robotic surgical arm
needs to be repaired.
Can you help me grab it?" and some
clinical surgeons were like, "Oh,
yeah, let me show you where it is.
No worries, no worries,
John." They walk in there.
This is a multi-million dollar piece
of equipment, and they
literally walk out with it.
This happened in— It's some<i></i>
<i>Thomas Crown Affair</i> kind of stuff.
But it's like, I mean, you're a physician.
You're not thinking like, "Oh,
is John actually working at this company?
Is the product…
I think I used it yesterday." You're like,
"Oh, yeah, that sounds right.
It's a super expensive product."
This is an example to your conversation
of where the business gets interesting is
we then connected that healthcare
provider with federal authorities.
This isn't going to be a local
authority to solve this kind of crime.
It's a federal crime at this point.
They were taking the product,
exporting it,
and selling it in a different country
for kind of clinical work.
We think that one is pretty interesting.
That's an asset one,
where actually the healthcare system is
like, "This is $20-something-million
of product stolen." That's a problem.
Is your business going international?
Which countries is this best suited to?
Is this a universally applicable product?
Do those differences in law
enforcement agency structure make it...
I'm just curious.
We're dabbling,
but we think payments is probably a very
global, everyone wants
to process payments, I think.
Yes, but there's a lot of local nuance.
Yeah.
I think for us,
maybe our ambitions aren't big enough,
but when I look at the domestic
opportunity,
we should be able to get to five, 10,
15 billion of revenue in America,
and we're not there.
The difference of,
to your point on the nuance in payments,
it's probably comparable to the nuance
of working with local government.
But then you overlay hardware,
and that just gets maybe two steps
too difficult for my stomach today.
Got it.
But there's, I mean, we get an inbound...
I saw an email this morning
from an Australian police department.
It's like, "We'd love to do
a demo," and it's like…
Why not just do…
I mean, I agree there's a lot of nuance.
Is there some aspect of your tech…
You've put a lot of work into the cameras,
vehicle recognition, and stuff like that.
I know, again, from painful experience
that localization is never easy
and never as easy as you think.
Yeah, here's…
But maybe it's easy.
Well, so here's the argument:
We pursued one really big deal last year
in Mexico,
and we had support from one of our
investors, like, "We should go after..."
And they had connections
to the Mexican government.
We got all the way to the finish line,
and it was us versus Hikvision.
Hikvision is a Chinese camera
manufacturer,
arguably a subsidiary of the CCP.
We were almost 10 times the price,
and it came down to like, well,
is the Department of Homeland Security
going to subsidize this
for the Mexican government?
Because we know their listed
price is way more than this.
It's very clear this is being subsidized
for the Mexican government
to make this purchase decision,
of which case they will most likely be
giving away real-time feeds to another
government, and we didn't win that deal.
I think that if you look at...
There's a great book on this topic.
If you look at what China was able to do
in Africa with their infrastructure
deployments on connectivity,
they own those countries.
What's the book?
I'll find it for you.
Okay, we'll pop it in.
I'll find the book.
But the book pretty much shows that one
of the maybe smartest moves that China did
was going to these developing countries
and saying, "We will give you 5G,
really low cost.
We'll bond it for 100 years, so we're not
giving away for free," but guess what now?
Chinese government has
access to your pipes.
Maybe that's not scary for some countries.
For me, I'd be a little afraid.
That was our pitch to the Mexican
government: "You don't look at just cost;
look at the sovereignty of the data,
who has access, and we'll domicile
this data in your country.
We won't domicile it in America."
They were like, "Sorry, it's too
expensive," and we've seen that.
We've done a couple other projects like
that, not just picking on Mexico,
but other countries where we're not
competitive with China,
not because our products aren't better.
I think they're much better,
but we're not being subsidized
by the federal government.
Presumably NATO countries, Australia?
Should be better, but I mean, no.
I mean,
we should go walk around
a strip mall and I could probably point
out 80% of the cameras are
Chinese-manufactured,
and your average would-be business owner
is like, "Yeah, I got it for 15 bucks
on Amazon." I don't know if you know
that story on the vacuum cleaners,
but someone hacked into it, it's like…
You should care about where your data is
stored and who's storing it, and that kind
of stuff matters to me, but not everyone.
That makes sense.
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As I think about your competitive
landscape in the US
and companies that sell to law
enforcement, I think about Axon—which
people would associate with making
the body cameras, but they make lots of it
and Tasers, I think,
but they make lots of other stuff—and then
Motorola Solutions,
which has kind of the radios and the
get-up in the cars and things like that.
Are you three the main three players?
Are there others I should be
thinking about, and how will it...
Presumably you guys compete over time?
Yeah.
I remember in 2020,
trying to raise our Series B,
and every investor came
to the same conclusion.
There were three strikes, you're out.
Strike one, you're based in Atlanta.
Now, post-COVID, that's
become less of a problem.
But strike one, you're in Atlanta.
Strike two, you're doing hardware.
That's really bad.
Hardware is really expensive.
But now it's the only
business with terminal value.
I would argue that AI is not going
to replace cameras or dig holes.
It's like, we mean, a third of our
employees dig holes for a living.
That's just AI is a long ways away from,
I think, replacing that.
Sorry, what are they
digging the holes for?
Most of the time, you want a camera
where you don't have any infrastructure.
We actually show up.
We dig the hole, we trench it,
we pour concrete, put our pole up.
I mean, I might be— Okay,
so it's on your own pole.
I assumed it's just mounted
on an existing pole.
I should pull this data.
I would not be surprised if I'm
the largest general contractor in America.
We pulled 77 permits a day last year,
and if you've ever built a house, you know
how difficult it is to permit something.
Seventy-seven permits a day,
like crazy scale.
Yes.
AI is not going to replace that.
It's like a very safe asset.
But when we were trying to raise
that Series B, the third strike was...
Second strike was hardware.
Third strike was, and you're
trying to sell to the government?
The last company to go public was Axon.
They went public in 2005,
which would have been 15 years prior.
In the VC speak, it's like, "Well,
if you can't get big enough to go public,
you're not worth investing
in." It's like, well, crap.
Luckily, Garry Tan shared my beliefs.
Safety should be a public right,
it shouldn't be a privilege.
It should be a right
if you live in America.
He did our Series B which is, I think,
the only Series B he's ever done.
That's awesome.
He was right, and I was right,
so it's the three of us now.
It's Motorola, who's the biggest.
They're about a $90 billion
market cap, 120 years old.
Invented the radio, still are the…
I think they have 80% market
share globally of landmass radio.
It's a crazy scale.
It's funny how durable some of these
businesses, Garmin and other,
like you just start doing GPS,
you start doing radio,
and you just stay doing radio.
Yeah.
Own it.
And to Motorola's credit,
they've driven a ton of innovation
on the radio itself, similar to Garmin,
which you'd thought Garmin would have
been crushed, and it's like they just…
They've been so creative
in creating verticals, you know.
Aviation, all this stuff.
Awesome products.
Sports.
And no one would debate whether
Motorola's radios work really well.
When you need them,
which would be like a natural disaster,
they work especially well.
That's like pretty compelling when your
job is to respond to natural disasters.
Totally.
So you have Motorola.
Every single thing we do,
we compete with Motorola.
That's fun.
They're big.
Second one would be Axon.
You know, I said public in 2005,
about a $40 billion market cap.
Where did they come out of?
I understand where Motorola came out of.
Yeah, so Rick Smith is the founder.
Graduated Harvard.
He plays it off, he's a very smart guy.
Graduated Harvard,
found this Taser company.
It wasn't called Taser at the time.
Okay, so they started with Tasers.
Yeah, found the IP, the product,
and then tried to commercialize it.
If you love a good founding story,
it's a good one where they
almost went out of business.
His dad mortgaged the house.
He mortgaged the house, went public
because they couldn't finance it.
I think they went out at like
a $50 million market cap.
This is like when people went public
much earlier,
and just has done a really good job
of growing the business
in the public markets.
And Taser is a brand.
It's like Kleenex.
They own it…
They started as Taser.
They started as Taser and rebranded
to Axon in 2012 or 2015?
Yeah.
And got into body cams via acquisition.
They bought a company that had just won
the contract for the New York
Police Department to do body cams.
So bought that.
They have a dash camera,
and they'd recently launched
a competitive product with me.
Now we compete.
Everything we do we compete with Axon too,
which is fun.
So it's just a Mexican standoff?
Every single city.
And then what's interesting…
But your question was also in the future.
There's this really interesting phenomena
happening now where because Flock's been
somewhat successful, VCs have poured in.
When I used to call a police department 7
years ago— Ah, now you have a bunch
of competitors from all over the world.
No one would…
You could literally just walk
into a police department and be like,
"I'm going to meet the chief." They're
like, "Oh, that's great." Now chiefs are
like,
"I have 17 different people calling me
for the exact same price." Now they don't
compete with us, thankfully,
but you think about trying to deploy
AI to monitor body cam footage.
There's seven different companies
with VC backing doing that.
It's not a big enough market.
I think your annual report
was great, by the way.
You all are at what,
1% of GDP or something, probably?
Okay, I'm in 60 to 70%
of the cities that matter.
Yes.
There's just not enough
space for seven competitors.
The market's not big enough,
and we're not creating new cities.
There are new businesses
created every single day.
I think you tend to see structurally
in these smaller…
I mean, it's a large market in total,
but where there's a finite universe
of buyers, the distributional
advantages are very powerful.
I think so.
I think what we'll see is…
I see a new VC-backed company every day.
I'm like, there's just all these things
are going out of business,
so they're just going to be consolidation.
You see, I think Motorola has done 40
acquisitions in the last two years.
Axon did five last year.
We did one last year.
I just think you're going to see…
Everyone in this space
is going to consolidate.
A ton of consolidation.
Because once someone builds a good
product, you go, "Great,
I already have a sales force.
I have the customer base.
We'll just pick you up."Yeah.
I had no idea about the…
You're talking about where the tech goes.
I had no idea about two things
actually, that I learned here.
One is that you're doing
real-time analysis of 911 calls.
Is that being fed to an LLM basically,
or like 911 calls now scored by an LLM?
The way I think about it is
we are trying to build an orchestration
layer for a city's safety.
The majority of police
departments are understaffed.
I think the worst I've heard recently,
I was at a higher ed college campus,
a large college campus, a football school,
they're at 40% of staffing.
Could you imagine if tomorrow you
woke up and Stripe had 40% staff?
It was 40% staff.
Yeah, it'd be tough.
You would figure it out,
but a lot of things that you would
deem core today would just stop.
Yes.
That's how most of our customers operate,
which is not sustainable.
Yes.
We view our job as being that force
multiplier, or I like to think of this
orchestration layer where
every manual thing that's done
by a human should be automated.
The difference in public safety versus
maybe payments is like, I think you want
humans at the start and finish still.
If I call 911,
still want a person to pick up.
Those dispatchers are
incredibly well-trained.
They're very well-trained,
they're very calm.
Where I think it gets valuable is like,
but let's say there's a mass event.
AI is way better because if you have
a surge of demand,
and you go from only one call a minute
to ten calls a minute,
AI is better than a busy tone.
That makes sense.
Then I think about for us,
we call it amplified intelligence.
When that 911 call comes in,
LLM is able to pick up the call, is able
to determine what are the characteristics.
Can I go start to build an investigation?
Can I go pull this up so
that if you're the detective...
Whereas historically you walk in and go,
"All right, I'm going to go get the call
transcript, I'm going to go look up
my record system,
I'm going to go do a bunch of analysis."
It's the equivalent of having...
Whether you use something like a Glean or
another product that's like,
if you're going to do a lot of the hard
work, so that as a sales rep, you show up,
and you're like, "Got it."
We do that for investigators.
They show up to...
They get delivered a case and a lot
of the busy work has been done for them so
they can use the human part of their job.
Aggregating all the data they need that
All the different data,
like let's go do this.
Like we solved,
one of the cooler cases we've solved was
armored trucks, the Brink's,
they move money around.
It's one of the best,
it's called a jugging case.
It's very popular in Texas, where
you follow these armored trucks,
and you typically have
a shooter on a nearby building.
When the person walks out,
the shooter shoots him, the other guy runs
in, grabs all the money and runs away.
It's a very, it's obviously sad,
but it's a very, very profitable thing.
We built an agent
that tracks armored cars.
At all times, it is literally saying,
"Okay, here's an armored truck.
If we ever see other vehicles tracking
this car, flag them automatically." Now,
it's not illegal.
Yeah, sure.
Right?
But it is enough that if you're a city
like Houston who has a jugging problem,
you want to get a subscription to…
You let me know whenever you see someone
doing that because I want to know.
Yeah.
I want to get a step ahead.
Yes.
There's always types of crimes that you
can start to say, "Okay, this is
helping officers not do something new.
It is just doing things that when you're
at 50%, 40% staffing..." Sure, at 100%
you would have been doing this yourself.
You'd be checking the cars,
you'd be in Flock, you'd be running
searches, but you can't do that anymore.
What you're describing is again,
having this
data to be able to do anomaly detection
just allows for new police work
that otherwise wouldn't have gotten done.
No, it's people's lives, you know.
Then the other thing I hadn't realized you
guys were doing is the
drone assistance where, again,
this sounds to me,
obviously already it's the case that many
police departments have a helicopter
and then for very serious
crimes, they will task it.
But that's expensive,
very limited resource.
I think what you're doing is
allowing for some manner of air support
to just be much more cost-effective
and available to more officers.
That's right, yeah.
I think
it's another example where there's just
a lot of tasks we ask
law enforcement officers to conduct
that a drone could do faster,
more effectively, and cheaper.
If it's calling out a hit-and-run,
great, send the drone.
I was working with a town in Tennessee,
it's a good city, their average response
time to 911 calls seven
and a half minutes.
Their drone from us gets
there in 68 seconds.
It's like a better quality of service.
The incremental cost is less than
the cost of one single officer.
It's really nice when you see technology
deliver both a 10x better product
at a dramatically lower cost.
That's how it's supposed to work,
and it's working for them.
What kind of task or intervention
are the drones best suited for?
There's three primary use cases.
The first would be vehicular pursuits.
It's like one of the most dangerous things
cities conduct is high-speed pursuits.
Typically, it's not the suspect that dies,
it's some random person.
For most of our towns that have adopted
our drone program, they end pursuits,
they don't pursue anymore.
Send the drone.
Oh, wow.
Send the drone.
Way better.
It's way safer.
That's a— S you don't have like a police
car running at 80 miles an hour
down a residential street.
No, you just have a drone
400 feet up in the air.
Quietly, safely,
waiting for the car to pull into a gas
station, pull into their home, pull
in somewhere safe, get to a red light.
Then meanwhile that video feed's being
broadcasted to the entire
police department.
It's like, great, John's over here,
block him in.
Every pursuit goes to GTA
level five immediately.
Yeah, if you're smart.
That's a big one.
Second is 911 calls.
What's been interesting is that,
we'll send the drone first.
It takes something like Elk Grove,
up in Northern California.
They've got a bunch of our drones...
Where is Elk Grove?
Elk Grove?
It's a suburb of Sacramento.
Oh, okay.
But maybe 75,000 people.
I say suburb, it's a pretty big town.
But so they'll dispatch for 911.
Majority of the calls actually
never need a human to show up.
The example I'd give you is like,
you see a fist fight, you call 911,
and then what happens is historically like
seven minutes later someone
shows up, guess what?
They're no longer fighting.
But now we've dispatched this officer,
he's like, "Well, I'm in the area,
maybe I'll grab a Gatorade,
walk around, check it out." 30 minutes
later, like we've wasted a bunch of time.
You send the drone.
In the best case,
you see the guy's fighting,
and you're like, great,
I'm gonna keep an eye on them
and allow the officer to do his job.
Or there's not a fight anymore,
you dismiss the call.
You actually
decrease the response time for situations
you really do need to go
to by removing the junk in the system.
That's the second one.
The third one is search and rescues.
Not every city has a helicopter.
Cities that do is a very
expensive proposition.
Sadly, people go missing all the time,
and you can pop up the drone,
throw on thermals,
surely it's at night, and find the person.
Actually, I haven't thought of that.
Drone plus thermal camera is
very transformative for SAR.
No, yeah, we had an interesting case
in a cold state right now
who's flying our drone.
There was a, sorry,
a lot of my cases involve homicides.
I'm going to find a better topic
than homicides at some point.
I have a better topic for you in a second.
Okay, great.
There's this 911.
Car on the side of the street,
launch the drone, throw in thermals,
actually see where the person went.
Sensitive enough to see the heat pattern,
like there's like a dip in the snow.
Want to find the guy,
find him and everything.
But it's interesting, to your point,
I think we're still
very early on in the use case exploration.
I think it's just the type of technology
that until it's fully proliferated,
which give it two or three more years,
I think we'll continue to find more
ways to augment how we respond.
I think, I guess the last example I'll
give you is we typically launch
the drone for all first responders.
It's not just law enforcement,
it's fire, it's EMS.
The whole community gets advantage of it.
Okay, my final example, because I agree a
lot of the crimes are quite heavy topics.
I feel like one of the
most satisfying genres of YouTube video
to watch is people who laser aircraft,
but they are mistakenly
lasering a police helicopter.
This is an insane crime that happens.
Wait, why do they do that?
Okay, so there's this
insane crime that happens.
Isn't that bad?
It's, like, very dangerous.
It's very bad.
It's very dangerous.
But bored people, to your point of just
maybe people going mad during COVID
and being cooped up,
people just for fun, laser aircrafts.
It's very dangerous.
It's dangerous for anyone's eyes,
turning a laser into them.
But, like, a pilot who is flying a plane
full of people at that moment,
it's especially bad.
But it's a real problem that happened.
You listen to ATC recordings all the time,
like "Airliner going into LAX getting
lasered by someone on the ground."
People buy these lasers on Amazon.
Yeah, they're very powerful lasers.
Exactly.
They're very powerful, and they're
just lasering the cockpits of aircraft.
But occasionally what happens is they're
lasering an aircraft, but it turns out
that aircraft is the police helicopter.
They're just like, "Gotcha!" They
got the thermal, and they're just…
You get to watch the whole thing unfold.
There's a bunch of these on YouTube,
where you'd see the squad cars
coming up, and it's, yeah.
I'll have to check that out.
But it's such an odd crime, and
it's very satisfying to see
them caught in real time.
Yes.
That's a really weird...
The other interesting thing,
because I know you like aviation stuff.
We're seeing more and more police
helicopters have to turn
off ADS-B as well.
Because criminals have
the same data that you have.
Yeah, sure.
Most of the police helicopters actually
fly without ADS-B now,
which is like a whole challenge.
Sure.
From a separation point of view.
I have so many more things to go
into or jumping around, but I like this.
How's the business evolved?
You're now, you said around 500 million
in ARR selling to both law
enforcement agencies and corporates.
Have there been interesting
changes in how you monetize?
Is it just a question of scaling up?
I mean,
I'd say the biggest challenge is
two, three years ago we were
single product, single customer.
We had our neighborhood business.
It was growing 20-30% year over year,
but it was just operating.
Law enforcement was going
really, really fast.
We had one product
and then maybe made a mistake.
I know RJ from Rivian was here.
Similar story,
probably built too many products
for too many customers really quickly.
In hardware, that's really expensive.
Hardware tends to follow this J-curve
of huge CapEx investment upfront to get
the thing going, and then you monetize,
and it actually winds up being— And
there's very significant scale economies
at very high orders of magnitude.
Yes.
We went from one camera that tracks cars
to a camera that's focused for people,
a drone, trailer, multiple customer
segments, and that's really hard.
Looking back on it, you think
you went too broad too quickly?
Yeah.
I would have better
Did you discontinue products and stuff?
No, we muscled through it.
But you slowed down
the rate of adding products.
We were like, we cannot do any
new hardware products this year.
We need to take a year or two off
of hardware products.
We can debate software products because
there's no incremental
burn or cash outlay for it.
But we know what the J-curve looks like.
We saw it in the core business.
The core business now is
profitable, which is great.
We'll generate free cash flow,
hundreds of millions of dollars
of operating cash flow this year.
But those new businesses are
effectively Flock five years ago.
We know how painful that is,
but we were just like, "Oh,
it'll be great, it'll be fine."
I think that's been challenging for us.
Is how do you balance from a product
roadmap servicing two customers
with just very different use cases?
Like your average Amazon distribution
facility is 30 acres, 50 acres.
That's like a neighborhood block.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then you've got, like, San Francisco
that's got hundreds of square miles.
It's the problems are different.
That is probably like the hardest thing
that we're still
trying to muscle through that.
Like how do you organize your company
to service these two different
customers without having redundancies?
I haven't figured that out.
What have you learned other than
to don't make too many products?
What have you learned
by building hardware?
Or what have you learned
about building hardware?
Yeah, I
mean, a couple of things that I would jump
to, the first would be,
I don't know how you guys
think about forecasting demand.
It's a full-time profession at Flock.
Sure.
It typically needs to be
12 to 18 months out.
Yeah, yeah.
If you look at the hardware companies
that don't make it,
that's actually where they fail.
Yeah.
No, we ended up with, I mean,
our hardware business is a very small part
of our overall business but we
wildly overproduced at one point.
You're just sitting in a warehouse like,
there's all my money.
Exactly.
Sitting in a warehouse.
Sitting around.
Luckily, it's not...
It's not going to go bad.
It's not like bananas.
It's like, "Oh, gosh.
We have like a week
to move this product." Yes.
But it kind of goes bad.
It does go bad at some point.
I think I remember,
during YC many, many, years ago,
talking to Eric at Pebble of how it was
like the irony that in the best year ever
of the company in terms of revenue is
the year they went out of business.
I'm like, that's crazy.
Yes.
But they just, they overproduced in Q4,
even though it was still a record quarter,
it just still wasn't enough.
I think that has been amplified by also,
our distribution process,
which we're full first-party.
We not only design the stuff,
build the stuff, we install the stuff.
I have to have forecasting
Maintain it, presumably.
Maintain it as well.
I have to have forecasting not just
at the product level,
but at the geographic level by product,
with some level of discrepancy.
I don't need to know this city versus
that city, but at least the general area.
I think forecasting,
that's been pretty hard.
The second is,
every decision you make in hardware is
millions of dollars at a minimal
and often tens of millions of dollars.
When you grow up in this Silicon Valley
mindset of like,
everything's a two-way door.
Yeah.
Bullshit.
Hardware, everything's a one-way door.
Yeah.
You want to pick that part?
Yeah.
One-way door.
We're gonna live with it
for the next five to ten years.
Yeah, and like, I don't know,
you probably don't track this as much,
but probably the dumbest financial mistake
I've made in the last year is
our supply-chain team came to us like six
months ago, and they were like,
solid state memory is
getting really expensive.
We had this one part
that was in our cameras and the price had
gone up 4x in near time,
which indicates that typically one much,
much larger company
placed a massive order.
We've seen this time and time again where
an Apple or a Sony or some consumer,
Samsung, will pick a part for a new
product that's coming out in 12 months.
The supply globally disappears.
You're feeling the AI data center
buildout in your supply chain?
Yes, and so our supply chain leader was
like, "This is getting crazy." I was like,
"Well, who do we use?"
I go, you use SanDisk.
I'm looking at their stock, and I'm like,
should we be buying like SanDisk?
I started my CFO, I was like,
"Should we be buying SanDisk stock?" I
was like, their prices are going up 3x.
It means that like a lot of people
are buying a lot of products.
Of course, the stock's up like 1200%,
and I feel like an idiot for not
like following that conviction.
But no, yeah, I mean, our BOM,
now luckily it's a small part of our BOM.
Yeah.
But we have a full team of people who all
they do is mitigate
global supply chain risk.
Because parts just disappear.
Just getting the products into the hands
of customers as already
specced is nontrivial.
What we wind up doing,
which I think a lot of companies do,
I'm not sure if we're special,
but it's just like you don't think about
this is when we look at a BOM
of a product,
we'll risk purchase not necessarily
the whole thing, but the cheapest,
highest risk things.
We should have bought...
We did, we bought a ton of memory so
that we didn't run out because we can't
But I would have thought, often these
supply chain crunches come on the leading
edge where everyone's fighting over TSMC,
three nanometer
node production capability.
But the auto chips, at much
larger gate sizes are not,
or larger nodes, are not as contended.
I would have thought that you guys are not
using tippity-top end cameras and lenses
and memories and things like that.
But that's not a panacea.
It's like capacitors.
The point I give you is,
let's say we ship 100,000 units.
That's tiny.
All it takes is,
if we need this capacitor
from Texas Instruments,
all it takes is Apple saying, well,
the iPhone 27 doesn't have that capacitor,
and Apple's like, "Cool,
we'll buy everything for the next three
years." Then we go, "Oh, crap,
we've got to completely change our
strategy." But I'm surprised you're
competing with Apple for components.
I would have thought their capacitor
Well, capacitor is a capacitor.
But so it's actually
know the capacitor you want.
You have to have a supply chain to buy it.
You have to have enough
inventory with enough lead time.
What you wind up doing is early on,
your designs are very simple.
You buy everything from out
of fruit or whatever.
You buy everything from easy places
where you can buy 50 at a time.
Then, when you move to tens of thousands
at a time,
you start having to have designs that have
four different derivatives for every part
so that your supply chain doesn't have
to call engineering being like,
this part's out, they know
these parts are all sub-ins.
You're describing the scale diseconomies
of manufacturing where it's easier to buy
three of something than
it is to buy 30,000.
100%.
I never would have thought
we would need a team of people who all
they do is spend money for a living.
Just buy stuff.
What's hard about operating the hardware?
How do you keep the lenses
clean on the cameras?
Just how do you…
I don't know what the other— It's like
on the one hand, we're some
of the best weather forecasters.
It's like we keep track
of every major storm.
It's like a storm, we need to be back up.
We do, we have a pretty cool,
we call it our flight team,
and there are technicians that only fly.
It's like that big storm in New York and
Boston, they were flying into the storm.
We had surge demand to fix stuff.
To be on site, when they get a call
that something is down, go repair it.
Yeah, well so everything's,
we have really good telemetry
on the equipment, so if a customer calls,
something's gone, we've really screwed up.
Yeah, you know before the customer knows.
We know before the customer knows,
and most of the maintenance
at this point is fairly predictive.
We know this mechanical part malfunctions
after between 100 and 200,000 uses.
If you're in the area,
it's ironic that the largest cost
structure in replacing
equipment is the driving.
It's driving.
If we think a part needs a replacement
in six months, and we're nearby,
it's cheaper just to replace it,
refurb it, and get it back in the field.
That part's been like,
we had to build a software company,
a hardware company,
and a field services business.
Do you have parts that wear out?
I would have thought the whole
thing is fairly solid state.
Most of it's…
Well, drones obviously— Sure.
Different kettle of fish.
But on the camera side, there's one part,
which is the IR-cut filter.
When we operate at night,
we operate on infrared,
and you need a different filter so that
you don't have pink images during the day.
That literally changes twice a day.
Oh, like something mechanically
Put a lens over it.
I see.
After a couple of hundred thousand uses...
That's the one moving part.
It is the one, and it is
the only part that breaks.
Why not just have two lenses?
With two different image sensors too?
Yeah.
BOM.
Okay.
No good reason.
Okay.
Other than it would
just be more expensive.
Yeah.
But yeah, that part's,
I think a third of the company,
like I said, digs holes,
drives bucket trucks.
Yeah, sure.
Keeps track of all the inventory.
But if you look at it,
I didn't want to build that business.
But early on in the company,
there was this horrific case in Atlanta
where a woman was just running in our
version of Mission Dolores,
or pick your nice park in the city,
random act of violence.
There's cameras everywhere in the park.
Yep.
None of them were working, and the city
got blasted appropriately for it.
They're like, "Well, but also,
do we really want our police department
being in charge of camera uptime?"
That's a dumb idea.
We should just pay a company,
like Flock in this case,
so just make sure the stuff always works.
It's not my favorite part of the business
in that sense of like,
it's a lot of stress.
It's very operationally intense, but I
think it's valuable to our customers.
Yeah.
How do you think about the right...
When you talk about cameras in the park,
many movies center on this idea of
universal surveillance in the
Bourne<i> Identity</i> or something.
They have cameras on absolutely
everything,
or I guess the Bourne<i> Supremacy,</i> I think,
is more the Waterloo Station scene and
same with lots of other things.
How do you create the right guardrails
once you move off roads,
and into parks and public spaces and kind
of creating access controls around that?
Yeah.
The cop-out answer is like, I don't
want to be in charge of deciding that.
Thankfully, we have elected officials who
we vote to make that decision.
But what do you think a sensible
place for them to land is?
I think it's way higher than we have now.
I think that for me at least,
for every crime that occurs that doesn't
get solved, it means we
didn't have enough cameras.
That's, to me, the easiest rubric.
Now, I think to your question though,
it's a question of where they are,
who has access to them,
and I think it's one of the few cases
where the disparity between
maybe my knowledge and your knowledge
of how the technology works and how much
official work is pretty big,
and their dreams of how it might work
versus actually how it works,
it's much less sophisticated
than they think or dream up.
It's just a camera.
For me at least,
we should have an abundance of cameras
and have incredibly restrictive
controls of how and when they're used.
And the example I'd give you is like
today, everything in Flock just
you can generally do.
There's data retention where we
protect how long something is stored.
For live video, it's typically 7 days.
For LPR data, it's typically 30 days.
You can go longer or shorter if
a democratically elected body votes on it.
But I would challenge, why not do more
cameras and have a warrant restriction?
Like why not do 30 days of LPR data, but
if you have a warrant, you have a year.
You will need less cameras.
I do think there are some nuanced ways
to do it, and thankfully,
we have a really good government affairs
team that is lobbying for that kind
of legislation to say like,
"There's a way for us to both be safe
and maintain civil liberties, and it
needs to be legislated though." I can't…
Those ideas are
not in line with what my customers want.
They're law enforcement customers,
they just want to go catch bad guys.
They want to follow the constitution,
catch bad guys.
But that nuance in the middle of like,
but what is societally acceptable today
really belongs in your elected officials
to make that decision so that it can
change, and so we pushed them to be like,
let's legislate this now before
it becomes a problem.
Where do you think has
passed sensible rules?
Sensible.
I think Virginia's bill
last year was pretty good.
It defined...
It did a few things well,
and one thing I don't agree with.
What it did well is it defined
a modest data retention period of 21 days.
I think that's fine.
I like 30, but tomato, tomato, it's fine.
I think the ACLU was
lobbying for 3 minutes.
It's a little tough.
It's hard to swallow.
I think seven, 14,
20-something days is enough.
There's a trade-off there.
They mandated formal auditing,
which I think is great.
Not enough of our customers audit
themselves on a regular basis.
We can build software to make that easier,
but we need to be pushed to do that.
Customers don't want it.
They need to be told to do it,
so I think that was good.
It also validated that this could only be
used for criminal investigations,
which I think is really good.
While that's obvious,
it's helpful to write it in law.
I think the only thing that I disagree
with is they did say
effectively there's no participation
with the federal government.
I think that's just…
It's their choice.
I think it's their choice,
and that's the beauty of the country,
is like Virginia should do
what feels right for Virginia.
But I worry about
the types of cases that you don't want
to read about on the news that tend to get
solved by the US Marshals, the DEA,
the ATF, the FBI, and like
they can't use our technology in Virginia.
Which is like I said, I live in Georgia,
so thankfully it doesn't really impact me.
But as a business, I'm like,
I don't know if that's right,
but I'm more than anything just
happy they passed some legislation.
New Mexico passed
a similar bill this year.
California has a similar-ish bill.
I think a couple other states have...
I think the worst type of bill is actually
not whether it's 14 days or
30 days of data retention.
To me, the worst bill
is an unenforceable bill.
So you can imagine a bill that's like,
this product cannot be used for
possession of marijuana.
I'm like, "Who's going
to enforce it?" It's unknowable.
You might believe that, and that's great.
But someone has to enforce this,
and actually what's going to happen is no
one's going to enforce it now, and that's,
I think, really bad law in those cases.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
I'm curious what your view is
on police department procurement.
What do they do?
What do they buy not enough of?
What do they buy too much of?
They don't feel like they're
swimming in procurement dollars.
But yeah, I'm curious.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing they buy too much of is,
and not to pick on Motorola, things
that only matter in the 0.001% case.
It's like, guys, why don't
you just use cell phones?
Like, well, in a natural disaster,
and it's like, "Got it, okay." How often,
so you look at a landmass radio contract,
and it's going to cost something like
San Francisco County $200 million.
You're talking about that kind of money?
On a TCV basis, oh yeah.
Wow.
I think...
Motorola is a really big company.
Sure.
Yeah.
That's how?
Seriously, you don't get there...
And you go, "Well, I get it.
If there's an earthquake and every single
cell tower goes down,
law enforcement definitely needs a way
to communicate."
Man, is that really the only way?
Yeah.
Could you guys just have your own tower?
There's gotta be something.
But you look into it— Is this a "your
margin is my opportunity"
situation for you guys?
Maybe, because law enforcement's unique
in this case in which they really also
like that they own the infrastructure.
They own that bandwidth, and so they
can do whatever they want with it.
I don't think they do anything
interesting with it, but they can.
Versus if they're riding on Verizon or
AT&T, they have no control over that.
Why don't you guys just have the exact
same products like radio in the spectrum?
We probably should.
Yeah.
But we got to— That's my…
It's like a VC in the boardroom
You should go to an $80 billion company
that's been in business for 130 years.
Like, I mean, I guess you did it in
payments, and it worked out pretty well.
But yeah, so I think like that part,
I think, is really, really kind of crazy.
At least in the business world,
I feel like I buy for my majority case,
and I deal with the ramifications
of the edge case or build
around it, and they do that.
I think procurement is exceptionally
slow and exceptionally laborious.
Everything goes to RFP,
but the RFP is written for one vendor,
so all it does is wind up taking
an extra year, six months.
I get why RFPs exist,
but they're not actually RFPs.
I've never seen an RFP that's
not written for one vendor.
I'm sure it exists somewhere.
Yeah.
I haven't seen it.
But what I think they do well is one
of the things that I think the government
did figure out is maybe you need to have
an RFP for a $200 million contract.
What about a $10,000 contract?
Great.
So they do have spin levels where
if you're a police chief,
you can go spend $25,000 or $50,000, and
not have to go through the entire process.
You know, it's tough.
I would not wish upon anyone
selling to local government.
It's more negatives than
positives in a lot of ways.
Yeah, and again, that procurement process
has evolved for a reason, and to protect
against certain other failure modes.
But yeah— Well, I mean, you think
about it in business, and I know you.
We use Stripe.
I'm sure you have like six
competitors, I don't know.
But I know you, so I'm
just going to buy Stripe.
That in the business world
is considered very normal.
In the government world,
that is called illegal.
Which is really...
It's really interesting.
But again, it's evolved for a reason.
The rules are written in blood.
Well, no, and then like you have plenty
of cases where it's gone sideways,
but it is just interesting dynamic.
For so many things that we take
for granted as normal business practice
are definitively illegal when
procuring with government.
How do you guys use Stripe?
A lot of our private-sector customers
pay either via credit card or check.
We have a lot of checks.
Okay, so for the public sector stuff,
that'll generally be via a torturous RFP
process, NPO and something like that,
but for your private sector
But even, I mean, we don't want
to be in the check deposit business.
Sure.
So you use Stripe
for the check functionality?
No one knows about our check functionality
that Stripe can accept checks for you.
Am I allowed to talk about it?
No, no one knows because
we're bad at marketing.
I was just like, oh.
Not because it's a secret.
No, yeah, no.
It's like we don't want
to be in that business.
So it's a remote deposit box,
or whatever it's called.
But yeah, that's right.
We can give you an address that you can
give to your customers,
and they can mail checks to it,
and we will turn it into digital money,
and the fact that a bunch of atoms
and an envelope going through the postal
system were involved,
you can forget about those details.
Not a single customer
of ours pays via ACH.
It's either check or credit card,
and we do a lot of checks.
I'd probably say 80%,
90% are checks, maybe higher.
You're one of the few tech companies
to mostly use Stripe for checks.
Just trying to buck the trend
every day of the week.
That's really funny.
I love that.
You were talking about police departments
maybe being over fixated
on kind of the 0.1% cases.
Does that apply to...
A common critique that you hear of police
department procurement is the sort
of militarization of police departments,
and you know what we really need is
a BearCat for this town of 20,000 people,
which is like an armored
personnel carrier.
It's like a $3 million vehicle, and it's
like, why couldn't we just get an F-150?
So do you think that applies
also to kind of the shiny stuff?
Oh, yeah.
I mean you look at like...
Early on when we were building
the company, we'd get the question of,
can your license plate reader work
on a car going 175 miles an hour?
I was like, "Probably not.
I've never driven that fast.
I'd have to rent a runway
to go test this." They're like, "It's
really important." I'm like, "Really?
How often does that happen?" They're like,
"In a high-speed pursuit,
people drive very fast." I'm like, in a
high-speed pursuit, you know who they are.
We were criticized,
and had to build a product.
Until we got to like 120, 150,
it was a major blocker to sales.
Really?
I mean, it's like we built a camera that,
I mean, we tested it on roads that we
drove on, so we'd get up to like
80 or 90 and it worked fine.
But we had to eventually, we rented
an amateur racing track and just
drove around in circles at 120 miles.
We emailed the employee base and were
like, who owns a car
that goes really fast?
That was actually kind of funny because
a lot of people were like— What
car do you use to test this?
There's some fast cars.
Plenty of Teslas, Rivians,
some other nicer cars.
They drive really fast,
and that was like a fun day.
It was like, put the cameras up and do it.
But that's not the performance.
Did the cameras work out of the box or did
you have to tune the model performance?
It's fine.
Yeah,
the only place where we had to make one
modification, which is
kind of interesting.
We deploy a radar.
So on really busy roads,
where our angle of incident is
particularly tight,
we can't shoot super far down.
We have to shoot at a sharp angle.
We have a radar attachment that we tilt
backwards to notify the cars on the way,
like get ready, which helps.
But that's a very far edge case.
But the camera doesn't actually
You prime the camera essentially?
Yes, to get ready for a car coming.
I'm sorry.
Because the camera is offline
unless there's a vehicle.
I see so you booted it up,
and that's a power-saving measure?
Yeah.
The most expensive thing
we do is take a picture.
The second most expensive thing
we do is send stuff to the cloud.
Third is just like being a computer turned
on, and so it's similar to your
iPhone turning your screen off.
Okay.
So we added the button
to take a photo right away.
The continuously running
radar is very low power.
It's negligible.
I see.
That's cool.
Yeah, that was a fun one.
We were talking about hardware previously,
but what's building your
own drones been like?
A lot of fun.
Sounds fun.
No, it's fun because like…
I have kids and you have a kid.
It's really fun to build a product
that your kids understand.
It's like we drive around Atlanta
and my son will count the cameras
from home to school, or we'll go
to the airport, or we'll go to the park.
I love that he can actually
understand what dad does.
Yes.
I'm not sure if you've taught your
son like how to— I'm screwed on that.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah.
"We process the world's payments."
And so when you show him a drone,
he's like, "Oh,
this is so cool." Obviously,
he has like a little miniature drone.
Well, also, you don't only do drones,
but you do drones to catch bad guys.
That's the very early age.
Yeah, you get like, yeah, to be clear,
he'll watch PAW<i> Patrol,</i> and be like,
"That's what dad builds.
That's the helicopter." Well,
we don't put any people in it.
But I think what's been fun is we made a
hypothesis that if you've studied planes,
I think the most interesting plane,
military-wise, is the Warthog.
Because whereas traditionally, you built
a plane, what kind of missiles can we add?
They were like, "No, no,
let's design the best missile.
It's very precise, very big,
and then we'll figure out how to fly it."
Our thesis was,
"Well, we're really good at cameras.
Drone is really just a camera that flies.
Let's build the best payload and then
figure out how to fly it."
I could show you the payload the next time
you're in Atlanta,
or we could fly one out here.
It's like the coolest camera ever.
It's huge, it's like this big,
and it's got four different image sensors,
maybe six, different optical lenses.
We can read a license
plate almost a mile away.
Like crazy specs, great thermal,
then we're going to get to fly.
I don't know,
I was an electrical engineer, one of my
co-founders was a mechanical engineer.
It's fun to build things that fly.
So it's like, all right,
we have a payload,
we have these airframes,
we have aeronautical engineers now.
It's been fun to grow
the engineering team.
An imaging team, you think about the dock
that it lives in, it's effectively
a commercial grade HVAC system.
The drone lands, it needs to be cold,
it needs to be hot, it has to charge.
If you know anything about lithium-ion,
Lithium doesn't like to be too hot or too
cold, so you've got to keep
that well-conditioned.
It's like this huge compressor,
it's this massive thing that opens
and closes, and if it's snowing,
if it's frozen,
all of these engineering problems,
and that's the fun part of this stuff.
Yes.
Everything else is...
Selling is good, but building stuff's fun.
How many drones do you have
out there in the world?
We don't disclose that.
But decent number?
Yeah, no, it's hundreds
of cities that are flying.
They are flying drones.
It's funny when you talk about
the A-10 Warthog, you're reminding me of
the Boyd book by Robert Coram,
which I only read recently,
but it's like one of those kind
of Silicon Valley,
and everyone talks about it,
and everyone talks about him
in the context of his OODA Loop.
You know, orient, something, decide, act.
But I think that's
actually kind of overrated.
Actually,
the main reason Boyd is interesting is
helping the Pentagon
procure better planes.
I'm just reminded of that with the Warthog
and also, you know, your description
of needing to run at 170 miles an hour.
Because basically he came into a Pentagon
that had a bunch of bad planes because all
the generals were just
obsessed with specs.
Yes.
They wanted, a high top speed and, like,
they really judged planes on specs, and
actually,
you know, the fighter pilot joke is
that there are only two throttle settings
in a dogfight: maximum full
military power or throttles idle.
Those are the only two
energy states that you're in,
and what matters is maneuverability
and the ability to add energy
or lose energy quickly.
Anyway, he was involved in basically all
of the good planes that were produced,
including the A-10 Warthog,
because he got them out of the mindset
of just kind of speeds and feeds.
Well, that's for us.
The spec we track is time on scene.
And so, one of the reasons why we care so
much for the payload is like,
if you have a payload that can see really
far away, you don't have to fly there.
Actually, you get there faster virtually.
Which is what,
if this was a drone that was carrying
a payload, like a Zipline or something
else, like actually physically in there
matters, but for us, it's just
about time on virtual scene.
Yes.
That's what we measure ourselves to.
That's why we fly high,
because physics allows you to see farther.
That's why we have these huge payloads.
You don't have to actually fly there,
and then you don't have to fly as fast,
which means you can conserve battery life,
which means you're in the air longer.
All of these designs were around
that use case versus like,
I'm sure Zipline went through a whole
separate use case of like, you know,
what's the max payload
and all that kind of stuff.
How many drones does a city
the size of San Francisco need?
Twelve.
Okay, so that's a very small number.
No, because our average drone can cover
a 30 square mile radius and get there
within under a minute,
and thankfully, you know, knock on wood,
there actually aren't that many 911 calls
that merit a response,
so we look at it both ways.
We look at it in terms
of geography and then 911 density.
So in more rural parts,
you need less drones because there's less
call for service, and then in more dense
urban areas, you need more drones,
mostly from a volume of service.
But even in our most dense customers,
it's pretty rare that they fly
two drones at once.
It happens, but it's like...
I think our busiest drone is
being flown 90 hours a week.
That's a lot of flight time.
Sorry, do you dispatch the drone when it's
needed from its charging dock,
or is the idea that it's out there
flying already and you just task it?
Yeah, it lives in the dock.
There's debate of whether a drone
should be in the air at all times.
Does that actually save
you meaningful time?
Being in the air?
Yeah.
It would save a lot of time.
Oh, really?
Yeah, but you look at the Carpenter case
in Baltimore, and they had an airplane
with a very powerful camera,
24 hours a day, and that was deemed like
an unwarranted search, so it got killed.
And so we're very conscious, like we have
other part of our business that is
interesting now at scales,
like we have a full team of constitutional
attorneys, and I'm sure you have like
a regulatory team that when you want
to build something, they're like,
let's check it before we ship.
We have a constitutional team that's like,
cool idea, let's actually make sure
this doesn't violate the constitution.
Let's just look up
the Fourth Amendment here real quick.
Yeah, let's just like double-check this
thing,
and so when you look at the drone,
like we believe,
and this hasn't been tested in court,
but these are smart people.
They're like, look,
it's unclear how that would end in court.
But if you call 911,
there is a reason to fly the drone.
If there's a gunshot,
if there is a gunshot detection,
if there is a stolen car,
that is a reason to dispatch versus
just flying around looking for stuff.
It's not unconstitutional,
but we would not push that as a use case.
I'm sorry, like a lot of this precedent,
as new technologies come along,
people reason by analogy of like, a
car is somewhat like your house,
but somewhat different, whatever.
Isn't a drone flying around just
like a police cruiser on its patrol?
So the...
And I'm not an attorney.
Hasn't been the case yet.
Neither am I.
But, it's never stopped me yet.
The other analogy that would be
the butterfly effect,
which is like when things are much,
much cheaper and much, much easier,
historical precedent gets thrown away,
and so you take the helicopter example.
You could say, "Oh, well,
helicopters fly sometimes." Yeah,
but helicopters are so expensive, it's not
practical to have 24/7 aerial coverage.
With a drone, it's not impractical.
It's the same reason why when we launch
our drone, we want to go from the launch
location to the in location, the camera's
pointed at the horizon the whole time.
We don't want to look in your backyard.
That's like...
We feel really strongly,
and that's not a law,
that's just our point of view of where
the law should be, so we'll
build a product for that.
Then, if the operator wants to tilt down,
that's their control.
But as a default,
we're flying straight on.
That's very interesting.
Last question.
You guys have grown with cameras out there
in cities, now getting into drones,
building the software OS to help law
enforcement agencies, and others kind of
synthesize all the information they have.
Just what comes next?
What future product ideas
are you playing with?
Where do you want to go?
So, if I think about it,
we talked about this earlier,
failure for Flock
is prison population goes up.
It's actually like really bad.
We look at, the products today are very
much focused in the middle of a crime.
A crime has already happened,
and therefore we should solve it,
and that's really good,
and I think we're definitely not done, but
we've done a lot of work in that category.
I get pretty interested in expanding that
and going, "Well, what about what can we
be doing from a product perspective
to prevent crime from happening?"
That actually doesn't
necessarily look like software.
It's like one of the interesting things
that we started last year,
so we call our Thriving Cities Fund.
It's probably in an analogy
similar to your Stripe Press.
Which is like it's never going to be
the core of your business,
but you feel really good that it's a part
of your business,
and so when we go in places like
Greenville, Mississippi,
we also commit to deploy capital
as growth partners to those businesses.
Because if we want to convince
that 16-year-old to not be a criminal,
there does need to be jobs.
Jobs that like a 16-year-old can get,
and so we deploy capital in restaurants,
nail salons, like pick your business
that you can be 16 and work at easily,
and we want more of those to exist.
Last year, I think we were at 21% IRR,
so it's not a bad business.
I think Flock's stocks done a lot better
than 21%, but I feel really strongly we
could deploy hundreds of millions,
if not billions of dollars of capital
in the cities that also choose to be safe.
I don't want to go deploy capital
in a place that doesn't want to be safe.
But for that, I want to do more there.
Then, I think to our conversation
on the other half,
the majority of the crime
we solve is not violent.
It's non-violent, and today,
the discrepancy for a juvenile
and non-juvenile,
you still wind up in some type
of penitentiary or prison system.
I think that's crazy.
All the data shows, as soon as you wind up
in prison, you're going to get violent,
and you're going to come back.
So,
I would articulate there is
an opportunity, don't know yet what it is,
to say, "Well, hold on.
If this was an opportunistic criminal,
is there a product—with a capital P,
because it might not be software,
it might be hardware or software,
I don't know—that allows that person
to have a second chance?"
And in a way that is not going to increase
their likelihood of doing it again.
Like, that's bad.
But like, prison can't be the answer.
It just doesn't work.
The whole concept of prison will never
work,
and there are some incredibly well-run
prisons with really well-intentioned
wardens doing the best of their ability,
but the concept of putting a bunch
of violent people together
is by default flawed, and so I question
what could Flock be doing to say,
"I'm going to prevent kids from becoming
criminals,
and if you do wind up on that path,
how do I get you back on track as fast as
possible?" We're a for-profit business,
so I'm not looking to be a non-profit.
But I think there is something there.
I mean, you're talking about millions
and millions of people who really need...
It's actually as a society
in our best interest to get them back
in and productive,
and I want to do both of those.
So, fewer crimes, fewer people in prisons?
Yeah.
That's the end goal.
Thank you.
It was fun.
It was awesome.
Yeah.