# CEO Spotlight:  Garrett Langley, Flock Safety
# Georgia Tech Business Network — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOc8aP69nNw

the cloud
welcome to the georgia tech business
network ceo spotlight series i'm jay
shafer i'm the gtbn co-chair of events
along with roshni ramaswamy
gtbn's mission is to provide a link with
georgia tech community
and the atlanta and beyond business
people and who doesn't want to make more
uh georgia tech business connections
we're delighted today to have two of
georgia tech's recent 40 under 40
honorees garrett langley ceo of flock
safety and seth radman cto of infinite
giving who will share their insights
during the next hour
so before we start i want to let people
know for questions
please use the q and a
not the chat or raise your hand we want
to make sure we get all the questions at
the end
we're going to reserve
at least
10 minutes or so for questions but we
want to make sure that we get that
conversation from
garrett and seth going
and
before we do that let me just say about
seth when seth was a student at georgia
tech he started not one but two startups
and one of them crescendo was acquired
by ultimate guitar during covid seth and
a fellow musician founded a company
called upbeat app which allows musicians
choirs other people who are virtually to
perform live together in sync on zoom
which is pretty cool
and now seth is the cto of infinite
giving which is a platform that allows
non-profits and their donors to
invest money more productively which
will launch let me check my notes here
tomorrow
so seth thank you for taking time out of
your busy schedule to uh join us and
please take it away
yeah thanks jay appreciate you having us
um so hey everyone i'm seth i appreciate
that intro jay that was great
um really i'm excited to chat a little
bit with garrett it's not every day that
you get to chat with someone who is
in less than four years built a company
from nothing to over a billion dollar
company not only that but one that is
doing a lot of good if you haven't heard
of flock safety
um they recently had it was 150 million
series z i believe right led by jason
horowitz they've blown past unicorn
status um and it's surprisingly simple
but effective product that records
license plates and vehicles in a
database to help reduce crime
um and
just to give you an idea of the
magnitude of the impact i think i if i
recall correctly one out of every 100
arrests in the us this year will be from
a flock camera is that right
two and a half percent now wow you've
already gone up that's yeah
um but anyways
garrett thanks so much for joining me
i'm excited to chat about stuff
um but just to start out tell us a
little bit about you know why you
decided to start flock
yeah i mean it's a it's a great question
because
people assume
i have some long history in public
safety criminology
you know where your parents police
officers and
it's a pretty classic i think georgia
tech story of like i'm an engineer who
likes to solve problems
and about four years ago in my
neighborhood uh here in atlanta uh there
was a really big rash of car break-ins
like one weekend 100 cars get broken
into it's like clearly organized crime
and
the engineer said like
engineer me was like why is this
happening
and the
the major you know from the police
department was like well you know
file your insurance claim that's really
all we can do
uh and it was surprising to me because i
you know you watch nci or you know shows
you're like oh where's the fingerprints
and like where's all the heart where's
all this like hard work and he said look
like
you gotta have something to do like you
gotta have an action like a first step
like if you're in sales you're gonna
have a phone number an email right i
can't just say hey seth you need to go
close this account like well do you have
any contact for them do anything for me
to get started and so
he told us like you need license plates
it's the number one most effective piece
of
the puzzle
so we went to go procure that product
from my neighborhood and it was about a
quarter of a million dollar proposal
from the company
and uh we are in buckhead you know
sure maybe we could afford it like it
had been a pretty big capital
campaign and i just said like hold on
you're telling me that i can buy this
brand new iphone or the iphone 13 pro or
whatever it is for a thousand dollars
but some magical device that can read
license plate is forty thousand dollars
like that the engineer in me
could not reconcile it and so that was
kind of the beginning of like well let's
just go
let's go see if we can build a better
widget so i called another two other
georgia tech three other georgia tech
friends of mine and said like hey let's
just build this for my neighborhood like
i don't use the business this is just
like stuart and i never forget the
morning uh i got a call from detective
yimmer
uh in dekalb county
and he was we had put a couple of these
up in like our friends neighborhoods too
because they heard that we were like
building these things
and uh he called to thank me
for building the camera
and i don't know seth like in your prior
business is how often you get thank you
calls from customers yeah maybe yeah
very very very rarely
you're spending money with them uh and
he was like we made an arrest yesterday
afternoon due to your cameras i just
want to call you to thank you and to see
if you had any brochures because i'd
love to tell their neighborhoods and i
was like huh
it worked
like this little thing we built it was
actually quite large at the time this
large thing we built on my dining room
tables now all of a sudden solving
crimes and that was really
the point to where
the group and myself said all right this
is like this is real like we should
really we should really go after this
that's awesome so you started with this
realizing that hey i'm not going to pay
all this money for this expensive thing
i have my you know cameras we should be
able to use regular computer vision and
do that so what does the product look
like today
yeah a much better version of that
widget so you know for
for the engineers
uh joining us
the the the two big maybe three big
innovations in the technical side one
was realizing that you know smartphones
from a supply chain perspective had
dramatically reduced the cost of
high-end cameras like the iphone camera
is better than most dslrs it's better
than most other image sensors you can
get
so if you can get a one or two-year-old
iphone or android it's actually a quite
nice camera and it's going to be 5200 on
bom
that was really interesting the second
thing was your point on computer vision
computer vision has dramatically become
more accessible in the last few years to
where your average engineer can build a
pretty good model so that was really
unique
and then the third thing was uh you know
i only charge my iphone once a day
and there was this realization that we
could actually remove the infrastructure
requirements we could run on solar
because we could use
you know a low power
model you know pretty much a snapdragon
chipset on our carrier board our own lte
we could rebuild a cell phone in a box
and so if you go today
you know we've got about 1400 cities we
work with
and i've got a camera in my front yard
if seth you unfortunately stole a car
you drove by my house
within about seven seconds
apd atlanta police department would be
notified in real time that this stolen
car that's a blue
uh tesla
[Music]
just buy this camera go pick them up and
that notification's gonna go actually on
software we've built to the nearest
officer so our software also runs in the
patrol vehicle
so it's a pretty cool like that's how
you get to two and a half percent of all
arrests in america
is when you can you can provide that
much actionable and objective evidence
to law enforcement
so let's i'm sure a lot of people are
thinking about this obviously privacy is
a big concern right that you're equipped
with a very powerful database that i'm
sure is encrypted at rest but even so
there's a lot that you have to take into
account i guess just to start there you
mentioned that you integrate with patrol
officers and i think i read that you you
know you integrate with the fbi
tell us a little bit about your
relationship with them and how that all
works
yeah so
there's an interesting argument people
often ask the privacy question and i
think about it a little bit differently
because i spend all day thinking about
it i think there's a privacy question
and there's an ethical question
i think the privacy question of data
capture
is quite um like
unnecessary because the data that's
captured by equifax
all the credit unions facebook google is
actually about you as a person and what
you do
that and in those cases you can't even
opt out right like you can't it's pretty
you google you can you can use
duckduckgo there's some options but like
you're in you're going to use the
internet everything about you is being
tracked
we look at flock we actually don't know
who's in the car nor do we care all we
care about is that this car was stolen
it should be pulled over
i was actually meeting with an
interesting
customer yesterday in colorado and they
were explaining how actually like
there's this person who has an
outstanding warrant
but he only drives the car at night and
they they pulled over his wife by
accident yesterday because she was
driving another day oh we're not
interested in you uh and they get back
to like there's they don't actually know
when he is going to be there so the
privacy question is less interesting on
that same point
we only retain data for 30 days uh it's
encrypted both at rest
and transmission and it's completely
wiped after 30 days so it's like the
question is often like oh but someone
could use it to track their
you know ex-partner and i'm like there
are a thousand better ways to do that if
that's what your goal is like our
system's quite
you know
ineffective at that and then i think the
second question that people often ask is
like what's the ethical ramification of
a more productive police department
we often will see that a city will have
anywhere from a 50 to 60 reduction in
crime they'll double what's called their
clearance rate which is the likelihood
of getting arrested
if you commit a crime so today the
national average is about 17
so like
for those of us who took statistics at
tech it means that if you're in the
upper quartile of criminals like you're
never going to get caught because the
average has got a you know nine out of
10 chance of getting away with it hey
that's a chance so we then asked the
question about what are the ethical
ramifications of having a product that
is driving the more active police force
and the way that i think about it is
humans are inherently biased uh some of
that unconscious some of that conscious
hopefully mostly unconscious bias but
still conscious we unconsciously we grew
up in a house that had biases we grew up
in a culture that biases
the goal of this company is to push as
much objectivity in law enforcement and
so what i love about what we do is today
a patrol officer is going to drive
around without flock and just look for
something suspicious and go act on it
that's like incredibly subjective but
that's all they have available today
with flock if you go to a place like
sandy springs who's a customer we have
hundreds of cameras and neighborhoods
hundreds of cameras from the police
department they don't just go around
suspicious activity
the flop camera says hey
this car is stolen hey there's an amber
alert hey there's a silver alert go do
something and so we're pushing that
subjectivity to the last minute which i
think just creates a better relationship
between the police department and the
citizens they're tasked to protect
and it's really interesting that you you
know um i'm thinking of intersections
that have cap you know that have cameras
that have captured license plates and
cars and faces right like we always see
in the movie
um for years you're
you're intentionally actually
obfuscating that you're removing that so
that it is not based on the people it is
purely based on the vehicle
yeah that's because that's our
perspective is like it
there is a way
uh founders fund is an investor in our
company and peter thiel one time said to
me like
people make false decisions when they
assume you can't have your cake and eat
it too and i believe for a company like
flock our goal is actually to reduce
crime and increase our civil liberties
at the exact same time like that there's
a path like
or at least you should assume that it is
possible and therefore you should make
decisions of trying to drive that versus
saying oh there has to be some trade-off
like i don't think there has to be
and so it sounds like that probably
leads directly into uh one of the one of
the core questions that i'm sure is a
lot a lot on people's minds but i i know
you mentioned that some organizations
like aclu aclu think this is an invasion
of privacy and that can lead to
increased injustices against
underrepresented minorities you know how
do you respond to that what's your
opinion there
yeah uh
the the main thing is just around
communities if you look at our
demographic data of who buys the product
you'd be shocked i think that there's a
natural assumption that this is for
affluent gated communities uh and like
the data just doesn't back that up uh i
think the average household income of
our customer uh is like
65 000 a year
uh that's that's a lot less than your
average georgia tech grad
um that's for sure and i think if you
get back to it
most of our customers
buy this because they want a safer
community uh we've got a great example
in nashville where the community
actually did a yard sale to raise money
to buy the product to show their police
department like we want you here and we
want you to be we want to be safer like
we want you to actually
i own a home in this community i'm not
the one that's out there breaking into
cars like i want them out of my
neighborhood i want them out of my
community so from our experience there's
a natural there's a national rhetoric uh
which the aclu that kind of group tries
to push and then there's a much more
local level of you could talk to people
actually live in those homes live in
these neighborhoods my my neighborhood
included where it's like yeah there's
more people that might have issues with
it but everyone agrees
they don't want crime in their
neighborhood so it's all right let's
talk about the solutions then
that makes sense so
i'm assuming that you have some data
that shows that flock has positively
impacted overall crime stats do you have
any data on the overall crime deduction
and the impact you've been able to make
yeah so and some of our best examples
are there's a town in southern
california called san marino if anyone's
from l.a or lives in la maybe they've
heard of it it's a 20 or 30 000 person
town
and
they put the flock cameras in
and a year later i was checking in on
the account and he was like garrett uh
i thought this was going to be
productive but
entering autos
so stolen cars residential burglaries is
down 72 percent
and i was like okay but chief like you
can't really accredit that to us right
causation and causes look garrett i'm
not a research scientist i'm a chief of
police
but i went in front of my city council
is that it so that's at least my opinion
and i live and breathe this stuff and so
what we find is that
we drive a ton of efficacy very quickly
where
every crime gets solved
just like you and i criminals use
instagram they help a sudden see that
that person they followed who was you
know the top of the food chain is now in
jail and
you stop committing crimes that's one
example but you go to other places like
i was mentioned i was in colorado
yesterday and i was talking to the mayor
of beaumar
colorado it's a great customer of ours
you've probably never heard of it either
had i until you know i met the mayor
uh and he said that the prior year
before installing flock they averaged
about uh one to two package thefts a a
week so it's a pretty small town
they haven't had one in the last 18
months since putting flock cameras
throughout the city
and i'm like look whether i caused it or
not all i know is like the data's there
and
those citizens have a fundamentally
better quality of life
so that's our goal for every city we
work with some are bigger and have more
challenges
and it takes a little bit longer but for
our average town that we work with you
know 50 to 200 000 people they see
dramatic results every night
that's incredible and i want to clarify
one thing because i think some people
might have this misconception that the
purpose of what your tool is to help
arrest more people right but in reality
it's it's really not your goal is to
deter people
from
committing crime in the first place can
you tell us a little bit more about kind
of your perspective there
yeah
at flock we all view think of the
population of you know of criminals at
least publishing criminals is there's
two types there's a very very very small
subset of criminals who are truly
monsters right these are people that are
committing violent crime against
strangers
that's been happening for thousands of
years we're not focused on them
we want to put we want to hold them
accountable but we can't prevent that
if you look at the majority of criminals
though it's crimes of opportunity i'm
going to break into your house because
i'm pretty sure i'm going to get away
with it i'm making a boolean decision of
a zero or one i'm not gonna get caught
i'm going to go do it and so if you look
at the primary research you know our
mission at flock is to eliminate crime i
don't think opportunistic crime should
exist it doesn't have to because if you
look at the research done by academics
there is a direct correlation between
clearance rates the likelihood you'll
get arrested and the amount of crime
that happens
and so we look at it as like okay step
one is capture as much objective
evidence as possible step two like make
it in a in a consumable fashion for your
average patrol officer who's you know 22
to 27 years old
and step three is like make those
arrests
and then what happens is you look at the
data and you're like oh wow we have no
the crime has gone down these people
have moved on to something else uh and
so
we we talk about arrests because it's
very easy to uh to show that like look
it's two and a half percent it's a
pretty significant number
the end result though always leads to a
reduction long term
and that's the goal right to reduce
crime right so that's that's awesome
yeah
cool i wanna um as jay mentioned i i am
a cto at a startup and so there's always
the inner geek inside of me i wanna
shift a little bit to technology and
learn a little bit more stuff there
um i'm sure you've thought of this and
i'm sure you have a solution um
but what happens if i want to be smart
and i go ahead and take the license
plate off my car is your system is your
system still able to track me
i wouldn't use the word track um are we
able to still solve the crime the choice
yes um
you know our system is a generic camera
that happens to read a license plate but
we're picking up what we would call a
vehicle fingerprint so that's 24
different unique characteristics of a
car
that can be tied back together so
we're looking for damage roof racks
spoilers bumper stickers
uh any aftermarket changes the color the
make the model the year
everything so the license plate is quite
important
um and i've got thousands of cases where
someone uh not like you a criminal who
thought they were smart uh took off the
license plate
went and did something put it back on
and drove off but most criminals aren't
that
spontaneitis they typically are going to
case an area so they'll typically case
an area with their license plate on and
so a good detective goes great
we can click they can effectively click
a single button and it says find this
same car
but when it had a license plate and
we'll search across the entire network
of cameras and say this is the exact
same car but this time it has a plate on
it
that's awesome now a cool computer
vision model yeah 24 items that's i mean
that's crazy to be able to looking at
bumper stickers and damage
i guess modern technology has made
things so much easier in the past five
years that we can now run machine
learning locally and all kinds of things
that make this a lot easier
so um i wanna i wanna dive in a little
bit more about the privacy of stuff
obviously you're using best practices
you're encrypting data at rest and in
transit
what about things like customer support
um if someone calls in
you know asking for help or they want to
have footage do you have access to those
videos do you like you you know you
mentioned two sides i guess i'm curious
from a legal perspective it sounds like
you they have it sounds like you're
simply their custodian of their data but
what about from a technology standpoint
could you actually view that data if you
wanted to
no so you talk about data breaches and
we're in the camp that we think humans
are the dangerous most dangerous part of
our operation uh they're most definitely
the most easily persuaded or hacked and
so none of our employees have access to
customer footage
now we have access to the last picture
taken by the camera so it's your point
from a customer support
if a customer calls and said hey
i don't think my camera is working
then a customer support rep can say well
i'm looking at the last footage in
oh yeah it appears that it is you know
covered in snow or it is you know a tree
has grown
into the the view of the camera so we
have that ability just to very quickly
say like yes something does look broken
um and we're gonna go roll a truck to go
fix that camera uh but yeah i mean our
philosophy is like no one should look at
our customers footage we are simply the
custodian we house the data we manage
the data uh we purge it at that 30-day
period but it's not our not our
responsibility uh to really to do
anything
and this is this is something that's
really important because that makes you
very different from one of your largest
competitors can you tell us can you tell
us a little bit about vigilant and kind
of their approach
yeah so i think that for us you know i'm
just a regular civilian and so when we
thought about building the company we
wanted to focus on
like
what is the best way to build a product
like this and i get the question all the
time oh could you monetize your data set
could you sell this
to
marketing companies because we probably
could tell you one of the most popular
cars on the street right now right like
that's we have enough cameras we have
enough data we could probably tell you
like how long someone owns a certain
type of car all these things we can talk
about traffic flow congestion
and our philosophy is like look we have
and you're you're a startup guy like
focus is everything and our focus is on
crime so remove the ethical part and
it's like i don't have time to deal with
another product i got to focus on crime
and then you layer in the ethical piece
of like
man why are we having to monetize this
data set why can't we just build a
high enough quality product that serves
its job
and build a business off of that so the
majority of the incumbents in the space
have really tainted the pool
and have built a big business off of the
sale of the data
um
and i think that's just a
bit of a shame because it's ruining
peter thiel's point of like we can do
both they have taken a different
approach of like let's remove all the
civil liberties let's become a massive
data play
and i think that's a shame
and i'm so thrilled to hear that you're
doing that i'm a big security geek and
i'm always paranoid about stuff i don't
even have alexis in my home because i'm
just terrified that they're always
listening to me and so i think that
maybe that's a shortcut that some other
companies have tried to take that people
are just aware of how data is being used
now and i was just reading the other day
that this is kind of scary but gmail has
stopped scanning your emails if you
didn't know that they were scanning your
emails they've been scanning gmail and
the reason that they've stopped scanning
all your emails is because they've said
that they now have enough data in their
database to understand every archetype
of humans that exist and they don't need
any more data and so
that was terrifying to know that they
have that and terrifying to a lot of
people who didn't know that yes they're
they previously were scanning all that
so i'm glad that you've taken that
approach and i i like the mindset of you
know there's legal side of things but
there's also the ethics of what you're
doing and what's right and that's not in
line with the mission that you're trying
to solve yeah i mean we at
flock i think the largest employee
resource group is young parents you know
i've got two small kids and we talk a
lot about like hey let's assume this
company's gonna be wildly successful
are we gonna be proud of what we've
built
and i think you've been fortunate to
work on products that are like very
cleanly like awesome and fun uh which
guy kudos to you we've entered into a
business that's quite
questionable of will will the end
outcome be something we're proud of and
so we spend we view that as actually a
core responsibility the products the
policies the people we hire impact
hundreds of millions of people's lives
and
we got to do it right like we can't make
a mistake and i take that as a pretty
heavy responsibility
and some days i wish like why did i
start this business i wish i was running
a marketing company that sold technology
to marketers that seems so uh so easy in
principle uh maybe more competitive but
uh not a lot of the uh the heavy stuff
we deal with no absolutely i do think
you know most companies have those kinds
of challenges that they face obviously
yours are are much different on a
different level like for us with
crescendo the whole ethical side was are
we accidentally replacing music
instructors people whose livelihood
depend on teaching music
right
um and and now with with infinite giving
it's it's a similar thing in terms of
investments but obviously having someone
incarcerated is is much different than
someone moving between jobs
but i think you bring up a good point
though on the on the ml side of the
machine learning which is
one of the best things we had in terms
of a recruitment ability is for people
who are into ai and computer vision is
like
come work on something that like really
makes an impact
yeah go work on google image search
which is a quite cool product i love it
i use it a lot of days uh work on
something that like
is changing the world for the positive
uh but don't get it wrong because that
wrong
result can lead to you know a traffic
stop for the wrong person
yeah now when i first introduced you i
kind of blew past something that is just
an incredible achievement that in in
what it's been four years since you
started the company maybe a little bit
more and you guys have already raised
over 230 million dollars you've grown
you're expecting to be at 350 400
employees by the end of this year
um tell us about some of the challenges
that you experienced early on and i'm
also curious to hear about some of the
challenges you've faced with some
growing pains that you scale the company
yeah plenty of challenges that's for
sure um you know for the first
two and a half probably almost three
years of the business
no one believed this was a good idea or
it was a worthwhile
yeah so here's the challenge right
most venture capitalists are
self-classified as pattern matchers
the last company
to go public that was focused on public
safety
was a company called axon
they started in 1999.
and sorry that's when they went public
uh
so it's a 30 year old company
uh that's not good right like that's
that causes all types of red flags for
an investor to go wait a second this
market must be tiny wait a second this
market must not matter
uh
and
my counterintuitive point was like no
it's just entirely underinvested like no
one has chosen to tackle this problem
and
we can be a monopoly that means we only
have two competitors like that's it
motorola and axon are the only two
publicly traded companies that are truly
playing in our space and i think that's
a great thing
um
now what we had to prove very early on
and it took us i said a couple years was
that if we could build
a you know multi-billion dollar company
and no one believed us
uh we struggled quite a lot
from a fundraising perspective early on
because it just it was weird right we
were a hardware company that's an x
we were based in atlanta now kovids made
that easier but at the time being based
in atlanta was another x
we sold to public safety and
neighborhoods
that's an x it's like before we even got
to the first pitch
they you know 80 of investors are like
oh i don't do government i don't do
hardware i don't you're not based in the
bay i'm not interested in talking to you
uh now the benefits of scale the
benefits of covid
are you know we did our series c and our
series d entirely over zoom
and i think that's awesome uh someone
who likes living in atlanta and doesn't
want to have to fly to san francisco to
raise money
it's been it's been pretty incredible so
that that's like from my side
most entrepreneurs have a really bad
patch in terms of fundraising and
company performance and we definitely
had like a good 12-month chunk where it
felt like
nothing was working
and then you just find that magic that
figurative lightning in a bottle and you
just try to keep it locked up as long as
you can
so i want to dive into that a little bit
more um i've always struggled with the
whole grid or quit question right where
you know we both went to georgia tech
and um you know we learned that good
engineers know how to solve great
problems and persist but they also know
when to abandon bad ideas yeah so for
you know 12 months is a long time to
keep pushing with something and not see
results i i'd say the average person
would probably have given up much sooner
because they think oh clearly this isn't
working
um when you had all that doubt and
uncertainty just not seen results what
what kept pushing you to keep trying
things
it's being stubborn
like
it's so interesting because
i remember distinctly i was at a board
meeting we had it was like
we had one investor on our board so i'd
say board meeting like this was a small
conversation uh
and
i said you know hey i think we should
you know take a slight pivot in the
business to focus on you know selling to
both neighborhoods and municipalities
it was a big debate right because like
wait a second you know we invested in
this business doing this
uh that's going pretty well it's not
going bad it's going well though you
know you're tripling the business you're
growing the business by 5x annually
and i said yeah i know but i think
we can build a much bigger business if
we do both
and the
investor time was like fine like let's
just cap the investment like you know i
think we had raised 17 million dollars
today and i was like yeah let's just cap
it at a couple million dollars maybe 90
days give me 90 days to go test it
like the results were total crap
like we couldn't build
real pipeline we couldn't close deals we
couldn't crack to go to market
but i just kept coming back to
for me like
nothing that i had learned in the market
changed my core hypothesis which was
the business that owns the police
department the business that owns the
neighborhoods
owns the entire city and that is an
incredibly defensible position my whole
argument was i can build a much bigger
moat
not a product mode because i don't think
product modes are very defensible this
is a business model mode it's going to
be so hard to replicate that if we get
it right i think it's really worthwhile
and so yeah i mean it was
12 months of like
no pipeline just very few deals being
booked
and then
we
started to see traction
and i was like huh like we we we tried
you know six different go to market
motions sales tactics pricing all the
different variables
but for me the reason why i stayed stuck
to it is like
i didn't learn anything that decreased
my conviction in that core hypothesis i
was having a hard time figuring out how
to sell the government because i'd never
sold to government before uh and then we
brought on like we got enough traction
to bring on a new sales leader
uh because i'm not a great sales leader
um
and man it is now you know a very very
different story um
so was there was there one key moment uh
throughout that process where things
finally clicked and you realize man this
this is gonna work yeah uh
i'll never forget i went to it'd have
been the q4 board meeting of 2019 so i
guess two years ago from you know a
couple months from now
and i told the board that
i now know that every time i get on the
plane
i'm gonna come back with at least forty
thousand dollars of ar
it's like it's it's that predictable now
and now like okay i haven't proven how
to get other people to have that
performance right like i haven't built a
massive sales organization like we have
now where they see some results but i
was like literally guys
i go to la every week and i come back
with forty thousand dollars in an r
it's working um what we had figured out
was we had originally had a strategy of
very much
uh the classic sas
sdrs aes all cold outbounds all phone
it's just blanketing a massive market
and we had very quickly realized like
that for this business it was much more
about word of mouth and relationship
sales so you had to be in market you had
to be doing door-to-door type sales and
building very strong relationships and
so we switched from that sdrie model to
like i'm just going to go fly to la
every single week
and it was tiring
uh but we had another one of my guys
bailey he focused on houston
and it was like man every single time
bailey and i do a trip we come back with
contracts like and they're getting
bigger and so that was that turning
moment was like man this is super
predictable yeah we do need to go build
a sales organization we got to train
people but
there are a lot of smart people like our
current cro uh alex like he once we
could give him that and we hired him and
said look there's a playbook here we
just need you to go like print it times
100 sales reps she's not an easy job but
like a job that he could do
uh he did that and then obviously the
rest is uh history
that's a great story so i'm i'm curious
did you pivot at all or
have you stuck with the kind of original
concept and idea that you've had since
the very beginning because most
companies they go through a discovery
phase they realize they're wrong you
know slack started off differently we've
heard of all these companies but it
sounds like you kind of nailed it on the
head to start and then you just fought
through
you know some challenges
yeah we
we got very lucky
that if i pulled up uh i think it was
like project flock
at the time so we had like our internal
like you know document between the
co-founders
it's the same
like that's crazy it that never happens
and i remember gary tan
uh by the way if you're a
entrepreneur he's got some great videos
on on building companies uh he wrote our
first seed check
and i'll i'll never forget but he was
like dude you've got like product fit
for the entire market
like out of the gate like i don't or you
didn't even have to change anything like
no we haven't even really changed the
product as we've gone from
you know whether it's dallas texas or
dallas georgia
or it's my neighborhood they kind of
have the exact same product and have had
the exact same product for the last four
years we've had lots of fancy bells and
whistles you know it's a much better
product but the core premise of like
we're going to capture objective
evidence we're going to give it to
people who can do something they're
going to arrest people
that will generate positive buzz about
the company to sell more cameras to
solve more crimes like
uh there's this really cool chart we
have that shows
the number of crimes we have solved
is a future indicator for the number of
cameras we will sell next quarter oh
that's one of your lead indicators
that's very cool yep yep exactly
that's awesome so
um i have to ask you know i don't know
if there's anything you can share but
what's what's next for flock you guys
have done such incredible work you've
nailed it right out of the gate any any
exciting stuff that we can expect to see
in the future
yeah i mean
our product roadmap is really
straightforward
we look at a chart of all the crimes
that happen in a city and we will have a
product for every single one so if you
steal a car
we gotcha really good today
if you
experience aggravated assault
we don't have a product yet for that uh
human human interaction is something we
saw we got to go build that
you've obviously seen a lot of news
around gun violence in america homicides
have have seen an unprecedented uptick
since covid uh we've got a product
coming out for that in the next couple
weeks um so we kind of just look at the
list and say
what are the crimes today about 70 of
all crimes happen with the vehicles
that's why we started there but to fill
out that product portfolio we'll
continue to build that out and then for
us you know we set a very simple north
star as a company that by 2025 we want
to see crime in america be reduced by 25
last year was not good uh homicides were
up a lot so the way we do that is more
cities we've got you know 1400 out of 17
000 cities
we've got a lot of land to grab um we
have a lot of work to do there so it's
more products
more cities and then driving more more
evidence capture for those cities
awesome
um well everyone who's here listening
we're going to go ahead and move into
some q a so i know there's already some
questions in there we'll go through in a
second but if you have questions for
garrett go ahead and start adding them
to the not the chat but the q a panel
uh that tab and we'll start going
through those
um so there's some good ones in here
uh one question is with you know 2g and
3g network sun setting how does that
impact flock safety what happens
you know in the next network sunset
yeah so
it's an interesting question luckily we
are all on all of our devices are on lte
uh right now so we're on 4g
the the cool part about the business uh
particularly for those of the
engineering and financial mindset we
actually retain title of all of our
equipment
our polls our cameras and everything and
so one of the
cool kind of
secrets of the business gary taylor
let's talk about one of the secrets you
figured out is
we can deprecate our hardware at the
line level on the bomb
so when i think about the next 10 years
of our product
i don't do a full swap lithium ion
batteries
unless you know seth you know something
i don't know haven't really changed in a
long time they're not gonna change
we can hold that battery for five to
seven years
uh uh carrier networks for the question
those change on a pretty slow cadence
you know 5g is definitely coming it's
been coming for a long time
6g will be after that
we can change our modem that's only a 20
part of the bomb
image sensors change much faster so we
can actually look at it at an individual
level of our of our bill of materials
and say okay we're going to upgrade this
part for all of our customers in the
next 12 months
and that allows us to drive a much
faster refresh cycle
than your traditional hardware company
that's just selling a device since we
maintain it we get to manage that so
minimal impact for us luckily all our
devices have been on lte we push tens of
gigabytes of data per device per month
so we consume a lot of data so we've
been on lte for a while
awesome
another question this is kind of similar
when we asked but we want to get
specific what is the biggest challenge
you encounter since starting the company
yeah you know i think
it's probably going to come back to
where we started the conversation which
is
what are the unintended consequences of
us being successful
and how do i
build an employee culture
that is proud of what they're doing
when there is
reasonable doubt and question about
you know the role of policing in america
and what we what we do as employees and
as team members is say look
you're either going to be a part of a
solution
and recognize that it's going to be
messy or you can sit on the sidelines
and so for myself and the 300-ish other
people at flock we choose to be a part
of the solution
some of us are liberal some of us are
conservative some voted for trump some
voted for biden some didn't vote at all
we got everyone at flock uh because they
all believe that they as an individual
can contribute to a better society and
they want to be a part of it
but finding that narrative and
continuing to beat that drum uh it's a
lot you know particularly in a remote
first company you know our employees are
everywhere
i don't get to see them i don't get to
you know have this kind of talk face to
face it's all via zoom uh and that's
definitely been the hardest thing
along those same lines you know after
the george floyd protest police backlash
police reform have you noticed any
decline in interest in your technology
from the technology departments and
purchasing this
so we've actually seen a pretty big
uptick
um
and i'll explain why because it might be
counter-intuitive
i was meeting with a chief in
birmingham not birmingham pd but a
suburb of the town
and i was just asking him how's his
experience been you know getting general
feedback as a you know a good ceo should
do
and he told me the thing that he didn't
really process was that today
sorry before flock if a 911 call comes
in they say hey we're on the lookout for
a white camry
what are they going to do they're going
to pull over every single white camry so
now you and i seth we might get pulled
over i'm assuming you drive a white
camry and that's not great traffic stops
are one of the riskiest things for both
a citizen and an officer it's a very
tense environment
with flock now
we're going to pull over the one white
camry that is the suspect
and so for for our police departments
and our cities
they recognize that actually with
technology we can reduce the amount of
traffic stops that are unnecessary
by using technology and so
that is a uh there's a long way to say
you know we have found that cities are
now seeing a decrease in head count
no one wants to be a cop so the only gap
fill is technology and then we can be a
double bottom line of hey we're going to
actually save the city money we're going
to increase the objectivity of that of
that police department uh city councils
get pretty excited
i'm curious um this isn't a question
someone asked but just my own curiosity
just what you're talking about maybe
think about you know biases and ai and
machine learning i'm curious if you run
into any
uh similar issues where for example
maybe cheaper cars that people in lower
social economic areas purchase could be
perhaps easier to read or have more
dents that are more easily uh you know
defining a vehicle fingerprint have you
run into any issues like that with your
data and how you train it
yeah we
i would say we have seen less
issues on the core kind of like ml
building um and more on the
implicated policy uh so as an example
uh i got a question one time from a
customer like could you build a model
for suspicious activity
and i was like
okay like let's interesting
what do you mean right he's like oh well
uh
a car
that has damage
but that has a dealer tag
that's suspicious because you don't buy
a new car that has damage
and i was like okay that's like
kind of suspicious
i don't think we're going to build that
because it's not illegal technically to
buy a car that has damage
um and so where we come into is like we
have to make hard trade-offs of because
we have an incredible engineering team
predominantly georgia tech engineers
that can build anything
and the harder question is like what
should we build
um
and then that gets to a pretty like okay
you know that's a
non-boolean non-trivial question to
answer and so in the case of suspicious
like it's pretty easy it's like hey is
it illegal it's not illegal we're not
going to build it uh
and so that that'd probably be the
answer yeah it's a great problem to have
when you're such a good team that you
can build anything that you have to make
more difficult decisions about what you
should build that's a great place to be
agree i agree um i got a good question
from
alan is there permitting required by
some jurisdiction similar to small cell
and tower builds and telecom for you
guys
yes alan i have been shocked at how
complicated permitting could be
we we as i mentioned before we work with
about 1400 cities today across 37 states
the permits in every city in every
county and every state
are entirely different
uh some it's quite straightforward
and in places like southern california
places like illinois
it seems like the most complicated thing
i've ever experienced and all we're
trying to do is put some poles in the
ground
so it's probably similar to a small
small cell tower it's less of a
construction our polls about 15 feet
tall
devices about 20 pounds i think in total
so it's smaller construction project but
it's still
you know we gotta dig two feet deep two
feet wide put concrete in it's a it's a
project
i didn't realize it was that involved
that's crazy it's there's a whole team
that all they do is permits hey that's
why they say hardware is hard right it
doesn't yes yeah
yeah bring out some competition i think
that one more question and this one this
is probably a fun one um obviously
you've grown so quickly you have this
idea with a couple friends a few years
ago now you're you know reducing crime
by such a big amount how have you
maintained a great company culture at
flock as you've grown just so rapidly
over the past couple years
yeah so for us we often ask an interview
question
which is would this person work here for
free
we pay everyone market salary don't get
me wrong we happily pay people but
at this company it's a lot of hours it's
weird hours right because crime doesn't
just work nine to five uh crime's 24 7.
and so we really ask like are they
deeply committed to the mission
um
and for us it's been a super super
consistent filter of
if they believe in the mission if they
are excited by it they're going to want
to work here for free they're going to
be excited every day
and it makes my job a lot easier because
it's just like all right let's just go
hire the right people
and everything all of a sudden gets a
whole lot easier if you have the right
people in the seats
i love that question i
i um i usually ask a similar question
but i usually do it after their first
day
which is if i pay you ten thousand
dollars
it's not a question it's it's a deal
where i ask people hey um you've gone
through that you know after the first
week they've seen what things are like
hopefully get an idea of what the
culture will be like if it's the right
fit and then give them an offer that'll
give them ten thousand dollars if they
want to leave right now if they think
that it's not actually the right job for
them or they can stay
and it's just to kind of balance out the
sunk cost and emotional energy that's
gone into it um and at least that
crescendo we had 35 employees and there
was one person who took that once
he was very polite he said all right
this is he said the job isn't for me but
i don't want the money and i was like no
no it's part of the
deal
you can take it
um but i i always love to hear kind of
those unique
uh policies or traditions or questions
that you ask that
really help filter out people who are
your people and on board with what
you're doing because it's at the end of
the day it's about the mission and the
vision and if everyone's aligned with
the why behind your company then well
that's you know obviously you know how
to do that because you're you've built
an incredible company behind you
so i appreciate it this has been fun
seth yeah this has been great i don't
think we have any more questions whoops
i actually raised my own hand
um
jay i'm going to go ahead and turn it
back over to you yeah what i was going
to say is there was i thought there was
really interesting in one of the
podcasts that garrett about how you do
the vehicle fingerprint but
do people ask you about the contents of
the car you could take pictures of
people
in the car so why are why not does plot
safety do that
it's a bit of a physics problems um it
is hard to build a camera that can both
read a license plate at 120 miles per
hour you know 150 feet away and then
also see through a
window without a polarized lens
so
typically it's just physics
you know we just can't our angle of
incident is pretty sharp pointing down
to pick up a plate in the vehicle kind
of frame so that's the main reason
okay that was one of the questions and
then the other one we don't own our
license plates they're the property of
the states yeah
i just thought that was interesting and
read them about fox safety yeah
people you're just renting it from the
state it's a lease to go drive that's it
it's not yours
so what about those bars that have the
license plates on the walls things like
that yeah
all those places that i've heard about
never been on those anyway we're
delighted that you all could join us
this afternoon for for the discussion
and you know this has just been great
i've got five or six pages of notes here
let me just
let everybody know
that
we want to
thank the gtb and leadership norm
richardson's the president of georgia
tech business network and conor wynn
also i also want to give a shout out to
alan goliveski he had a question in
there as well he's the thought leader
he's the one that came up with the idea
of uh for this event and also thank all
the gtbn board members who were able to
help this event so this was definitely a
team lift
and we're glad that everybody could join
us this afternoon
the other thing that we ask is thank you
for joining us on the thank you seth
thank you thank you garrett thanks
roshni for being here and also all the
people that took time out of their day
to join us for this webinar please stay
tuned for upcoming gtbn events and we're
going to send a survey we'd love to hear
from you things that we can do to better
and uh get your feedback for our
upcoming events so we have a few extra
minutes for everybody and i have any
closing thoughts closing words from
seth or garrett roshni
i guess just thank you to everyone for
coming out i know for me personally i've
done a couple startups i've coached you
know probably over 100 startups through
createx and georgia tech
and every time i interact with another
founder i always learn something new and
hopefully you guys learned something new
from garrett because it's not every day
you get to meet with someone especially
at such a young age who has built a
billion dollar company that's definitely
not an easy feat um so i appreciate you
guys coming out and hope you were able
to get at least one helpful thing from
this conversation that will help you in
your own life
all right and thank you seth thank you
garrett and everybody enjoy the rest of
your day really appreciate thank you
thank you thank you thanks guys
that's it all right cool
i think we're still recording um