CEO Spotlight: Garrett Langley, Flock Safety

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