Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley - Law Enforcement's Data Problem: Why 50% of Murders Go Unsolved

Garrett Langley is the co-founder and CEO of Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based public safety technology company recently valued at $7.5 billion. Flock manufactures hardware like license plate recognition cameras, drones, and gunshot detection systems, as well as software used by thousands of communities and law enforcement agencies across the U. S. In this episode of World of DaaS, Garrett and Auren discuss: The broken state of law enforcement data infrastructureWhy 60% of murders go unsolved in ...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Garrett Langley. Garrett is the CEO and founder of Flock Safety. Flock manufactures hardware like license plate recognition cameras, drones, and video surveillance equipment, as well as software used by law enforcement agencies. Earlier this year, Flock raised $275 million and around that value, the company had $7.5

• 0:43Auren Hoffman?

  billion. Garrett previously co-founded Experience, a live events platform acquired by Cox for $200 million, and he's co-founded the car startup Clutch. Garrett, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

• 0:56Auren Hoffman?

  I'm super excited to dive in. Now, what is like data in the data landscape for like law enforcement? Like, what's the state of it?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  It's messy and old. I'll give you a good perspective, and I won't name the city because I won't give them too hard of a time. This is, let's call it a top 100 city in terms of population in America. And as of two years ago, they were running entirely on-prem and majority on paper.

• 1:22Auren Hoffman?

  Like in the folders, like putting it in the file folders?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  File cabinets.

• 1:27Auren Hoffman?

  Old school.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, because like you would have thought the cloud, maybe that's debatable, and it's deeply debatable. Like, in a case like Maryland, it was illegal to operate our business in the cloud as of three years ago. Illegal, not poorly adopted, illegal.

• 1:44Auren Hoffman?

  And was it illegal because they were just kind of technology laggards? Was it illegal because somebody was trying to do some sort of capture, some sort of other vendor was doing capture? Like, what was the reason why it's illegal? Someone just hadn't got around to it?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Regulatory capture is the most articulate answer. I think the gray area definition was

• 2:05Speaker 01

  There was a lack of clarity on whether or not the cloud or on-prem was safer. Now, I think that's laughable because I think it's hard to argue that Amazon, Google, Microsoft's, pick your cloud provider, they're going to have the best safety in the world compared to an IT department at a local city. That's just really hard to imagine, not at a hard work, just scale.

• 2:27Auren Hoffman?

  And you see all these IT departments that get ransomware and other types of things that happen to them at the local level.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so to the sense in the local government side, much of our customers exhibit, most of their data practices is on-prem. I think the last city to go kind of digital happened a few years ago, like I mentioned, and that was a major city that was still running on paper. And so, yeah, I mean, to give you a sense of scale, imagine you call 911 and you want to build a criminal investigation and a detective has to go through filing cabinets. Don't even think about AI. We usually get stuff digital first. So it's pretty wild.

• 3:00Auren Hoffman?

  Even when they do go digital, it's not like these data sets are connected. Like, they may have to go to tons of different data sets. They may not know where the data is. They may not have access to all the data, et cetera.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  That is spot on and conflated with the issue that criminals don't really respect or think about where cities and counties start and stop. And so there's no interconnected tissue from city to city, county to county, state to state. There's a little bit of work that the FBI tries to do, but that's pretty light and sparse. It's an opt-in system. It's not a required system. And so you wind up, you know, you could have quite a record in San Francisco, but drive three hours south and you're a nobody. You've got a clean record.

• 3:44Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. And I assume criminals are, it's not like they're making it easy. They're not like they're keeping the name the exact same everywhere they go. They've got some sort of opsec that they're trying to do to make it a little bit harder to connect these databases, I assume, right?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  The best way to think about it is we appropriately have this thing called the constitution that limits what we want our government to do. Criminals don't have to care. There's no rules for them. And so one of the kind of the challenges that our customers face on the local government side is they have a lot of good rules they have to follow. Actually makes their job a lot harder because to your point, criminals will change IDs, they'll change aliases, they'll change vehicles, they'll change everything about themselves city to city. But we have to care about things like privacy and surveillance as we think about kind of the impact we have on local government.

• 4:35Auren Hoffman?

  I have a lot of friends in law enforcement married into law enforcement. And I've seen like where people like get the tapes from prison or something that they're going through. And it was literally a tape recorder like, and they're actually pressing on the tape recorder. Like today, you would think you should put all that on the cloud. You should be able to search it with text. If they're talking about things that you're not supposed to hear, it should automatically bleep those out. How far are we from just the basic text stuff?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Pretty far. We're trying to get there and I think we've got compelling products that get our customers there. And there's that old saying, right? Like, you know, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. I think that's the case, but I mean, if you look at the average city, it is closer to MS-DOS than it is Windows XP. And I'm going to say like Windows XP is what you're describing, which would be a more simplistic user interface of, I should go in as a detective and say, tell me everything we know about Joe. That doesn't exist. Now we have a product that does that and it's fairly well adopted, but by no means are we at a hundred percent penetration.

• 5:40Auren Hoffman?

  When I've seen like certain investigators, and that could be on the federal side or sometimes on the state or local side. And they're looking up databases, it's like the tab world. They have like hundreds of tabs they have to go between. And usually some, it's not like the investigator knows how to do it, but there's like some specialist in the office. Who's just really good at navigating all these weird tabs and databases. And somehow they have the right to get into certain things, but they don't have the right to get into others. And, and they have to like copy it into like some text file and then go back to the other tab. And of course they have this tiny little machine with a tiny monitor. So they don't even have like two windows next to each other. Like, am I describing what's normal?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Spot on. I mean, I'll give you a really good example of one of the breaks in the system. So there's a database that we subscribe to called NCIC. It's kind of the FBI's database of outstanding warrants, stolen cars, missing persons, like all the things that you would find interesting. That database, if you want to call it that, more of a CSV file. Gets updated like once a day. So you have a huge issue to begin with, right? We're saying this is not real time.

• 6:44Auren Hoffman?

  That's actually way better than I thought.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  It gets worse. There's no guarantee of data integrity. And so one of the bigger issues that, you know, I don't have a great answer for is let's say you report your car stolen. That was a rental car. So Hertz calls it in and then a week later, oh, actually Hertz found the car. That car is going to sit as a stolen vehicle probably forever because Hertz doesn't have necessarily that incentive to call it in. And it's no longer stolen. The local agency then would have to call it into the FBI and say, actually, we can mark it as it's not stolen.

• 7:17Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, so I could be driving a rental car and I get pulled over as a stolen car or something like that. And it's like legit.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's because none of these systems talk to each other. And so one of the things that we push more is like a policy or it's kind of like a implementation is like, hey, you gotta check like three different systems before you pull someone over. That's what leads to human error because like all it takes is one person that kind of skip a step and you're pulling over the wrong person. And that's where I think there's a gap in kind of how data flows today amongst local to federal to state agencies. It was like someone knew that car wasn't stolen. It just didn't get propagated through the system.

• 7:53Auren Hoffman?

  How do these law enforcement agencies share data? Because there's a data integrity problem. There's also just a problem with joining the data. Of course, there's different levels of sharing. So like certain people may not have access to certain types of data. So like you're in one database or you commit fraud against one thing and how does it all like join or does it?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  There's probably four layers of data sharing that you can talk about. The first is the default is nothing. The default is like, actually, nothing gets shared. And it's one of the reasons why it's so easy to be a criminal in America. It's very little data driven or technology driven collaboration. Let's call it level one, which has been in existence now for probably a decade is email, which I know sounds very silly, but like it is very popular where I'm working a case and I'll send out a bulletin to all nearby agencies via email. Here's a PDF about the case. The person who's wanted, here's all the information I have. And that's like pretty good, but obviously slow.

• 8:49Auren Hoffman?

  Or it's like this type of car. It's a silver Toyota. We got a partial plate. We have these other types of things. There's a guy with red hair or something, you know, in the car.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  It's literally a PDF. The third level, which is gaining up some momentum is things like Slack or GroupMe or WhatsApp, where it's now introducing some level of real time to it. And so there's some very successful Slack groups.

• 9:17Auren Hoffman?

  Which is like a private chat group of cops in different cities that are like helping each other out.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I think it's in, it might have been Hartford, Connecticut. I think they still use Slack and they've got a bunch of nearby agencies, officers, detectives are all in this big Slack group. And there's, you know, a narcotics group, there's a vehicular crime group and like it's actually doing a good job. And I think the issue you run into there is like Slack wasn't built for law enforcement. So there are certain data.

• 9:44Auren Hoffman?

  There's like weird data retention issues, like you might be sharing things that are sensitive.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And you might be sharing things with someone who like, and I've been being stored in a way that's actually not appropriate, but like, so there's Slack. And then there's a product that we've built called Nova, which I'd say is a more sophisticated version of that where it's truly collaboration at a case level, where I can build an investigation, I can integrate my jail record data, my criminal record data, open source intelligence, all the data you have access to. And then one click of the button, it's like, oh, I actually want to share this from San Francisco PD to Oakland. And it just gets shared and I can see the entire work stream, Flock manages kind of the C.

• 10:23Auren Hoffman?

  And you can even see who opens it. Every once in a while you have like a investigator, maybe does something bad with the data. So you could see, okay, like, oh, Joe looked at the data and he wasn't supposed to or something.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's an audit trail. And then I think where we get excited about it is it also opens up an ability for private businesses to collaborate as well. Because if you look at one of the issues that kind of plagued Northern California and parts of the country is this organized retail crime kind of phenomena. And it's one of the safest crimes to commit. And like, well, if you're a major retailer, you can't arrest anyone. So like, how do you actually work with local law enforcement?

• 10:56Auren Hoffman?

  But you have cameras.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  You have cameras, you have data, you have investigators, you have all this information. And today you PDF it, put it in a zip file, whatever it may be. And now with like Nova, you can actually collaborate with private entities and local government.

• 11:12Auren Hoffman?

  And I assume like people have cameras too. Some of them can contribute or how does that work? Like, how do the cameras get contributed to law enforcement? If you want to contribute them to law enforcement?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  In a place like San Francisco, we'll keep picking on San Francisco because they're a great partner of ours. And I think they're having a bit of a, not a bit of a, they're having a really, Mayor Larry is doing a great job pushing no crime allowed, which I think is the right approach. Obviously, I'm biased.

• 11:36Auren Hoffman?

  He's been a guest on this podcast as well.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Oh, no way. He's great. I think he's doing wonderful things for the city. So in the case of local businesses, homeowners, you can register your camera inside a flock. And you can do one of two things. You can say, hey, I just want the city to know I have a camera and I'm like open to helping. But I want that to be an ad hoc relationship. You have to ask me for help. I'm not just going to give it to you.

• 11:58Auren Hoffman?

  If there's a crime, then I could then decide if I want them help.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yep. And then there's another layer of sharing where you're like, you know what? I just want the city to have access 24/7 to the camera. I don't want to have to be asked. And so you think about if you're a major retailer and you're covering a private parking lot.

• 12:14Auren Hoffman?

  Those are the cameras I don't walk naked in front of, by the way.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  It's not your home. It's literally a parking lot. And so we see that the business community tends to just provide carte blanche access to the cameras. And private individuals say, hey, you know what? Why don't you just let me know if you need help? And I'm happy to participate, but I kind of want to be asked. I don't want to just have you access to my front yard at any time to local law authorities.

• 12:36Auren Hoffman?

  The drone stuff you're doing is super cool to be able to like follow someone who does something right quickly. I imagine that will help allow us to find a lot of criminals and apprehend them. Where are we going in the drone world? Like, how do we start seeing that long term?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  So I think the first thing I'd say is on the drone side, the hero story and the one that everyone jumps to is definitely, let's go chase bad guys, which has multiple societal benefits. Like, high speed pursuits are one of the most dangerous things that happen in a city. It's dangerous for law enforcement, dangerous for innocent civilians, dangerous for the criminals. Like, it's not good for anyone. That's a no brainer use case, which we see day in and day out. I think what I get more excited about longer term is the impact it has to fire an EMS as well. So you think about this today, like one of our most successful case studies in a place like Vacaville is related to fire, not crime. As you know, in Northern California, like forest fires and fires in general are a huge problem. Imagine if you could have within

• 13:35Speaker 01

  30 seconds, eyes on a fire, that this is actually roaring and it's about to get out of control versus this is actually a false alarm.

• 13:42Auren Hoffman?

  That'd be really helpful.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  So to me, it's more of thinking about drones as just a camera that can fly.

• 13:48Auren Hoffman?

  And you could get there quickly, too. If you don't have traffic, if there's a tree in a road, or there might be a lot of scenarios where it could be hard to get to there.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so for us, we look at that and go, people are expensive, people are very valuable. We should always try to use technology where we can and use humans where we think there is a need for a kind of subjective component to it. And so when I think about that use case, every 911 call, whether it's fire, EMS, or safety, should deploy the drone first. And that's what we're seeing. Places like San Francisco, places like Elk Grove, Vacaville, that's what we're seeing already.

• 14:24Auren Hoffman?

  There's this public perception of crime that's not always related to actual crime. Like, how do those things move in tandem? And how do those things change behavior for both the crime fighters and also the people committing crime?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  There's some interesting research on the topic, because I think as an outsider, my previous assumption was we should just dramatically increase the penalties. And like, these are logical people, and therefore they'll make a logical decision, and they don't want to go to jail for 100 years. The data shows there's just no correlation between the severity of penalty and the likelihood of a crime happening. The only-

• 14:56Auren Hoffman?

  Just to double click on that, I used to live in San Francisco, and I know in San Francisco, there are many streets where one side of the street is federal, and the other side is San Francisco County. And then on the southern side, one side is San Francisco, and the other side is San Mateo County. I've seen stats where the cars get broken into on the San Francisco side, but not on the federal side. So they seem like smart criminals, like they know it's better to do that, right?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  They know the likelihood of being held accountable. And that's been the issue in San Francisco.

• 15:25Auren Hoffman?

  Ah, okay. So not necessarily the penalty, just the likelihood of getting caught is the key thing, not the penalty. So any punishment would have been-

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Enough.

• 15:33Auren Hoffman?

  It's really the fact that they weren't getting punished at all, not that the punishment itself needs to be more severe.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Because whether it's a year or five years or 10 years, you're making a Boolean decision, I'm not going to get caught, therefore I'm going to do it. Versus I am getting caught. And so you look at some of the counties and cities we work with, where we've had multiple years of 100% clearance rate, which means like, right, there's 100% chance you're getting caught if you hurt someone. And violence in those communities is down dramatically. You're not going to do it there. We highlighted a podcast recently where fairly famous criminal in the Bay Area was like, he's out of the game. He's like, it's too hard between the license plate readers, the cameras, the drones. It's not working anymore. The economics aren't profitable. He's going to go get a job, I hope. That seems like he's a capitalist. He just chose to be a criminal instead of like you and me and build companies.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  But so I look at that and I'm like, Mayor Larry's doing the right thing in San Francisco, highlighting, he had a post last night on some of the ATV kind of takeover stuff. And it's going to work.

• 16:32Auren Hoffman?

  What's the ATV takeover? What's that?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  It's not necessarily too new, but it's called a street takeover, where they kind of block all four intersections and just do donuts on other ATVs or tricked out vehicles and they bring a bunch of guns. And it's a show of bravado, in my opinion. It winds up being obviously a huge pain in the butt for citizens who want to just get from point A to point B. It also winds up being dangerous because gangs treat it as a bit of like a rivalry, like who can do the most impressive takedowns. But it's a huge annoyance. And so like Mayor Larry did a good job last night. He posted like-

• 17:03Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, the gang is doing it?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, a gang does it. It's not like you and me calling like, hey man, let's go do some donuts. It's like a recruitment tool.

• 17:10Auren Hoffman?

  And this happens in San Francisco, like in Hunter's Point or someplace like that in San Francisco or whatever.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Every single major city has this in the summers. And it's a huge nuisance. And so it was smart. The mayor did a press conference and said, you know, here are four ATVs we just recovered. Those people are now in jail. We also own their vehicles. So like, maybe the bigger issue is not even necessarily to go into jail. It's that we've taken possession of your ATV. And my guess is that he does that one or two more times and I think takeovers are going to go away.

• 17:38Auren Hoffman?

  That would be amazing.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  And it will happen.

• 17:40Auren Hoffman?

  It's kind of simple. Like you do a crime, like there's a consequence. Even if the consequence isn't like, you don't need to have three strikes, you're out. Like any consequence is key.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Do you have kids?

• 17:50Auren Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Okay, it's the same with kids. Whether they're in timeout for five minutes or five days, doesn't matter. It's the fact that like, there was a repercussion for a poor decision. Leads to a behavioral change over time. And that's to me, very consistent. And what you see in cities.

• 18:06Auren Hoffman?

  When I lived in San Francisco and my car got broken into, I never once reported to the police. It was just like too big of a hassle. So do we have a sense of like the percentage of crimes that are not reported or under reported?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  It's an alarming number is how I'd describe it.

• 18:23Auren Hoffman?

  Obviously, like if there was a murder, I would be definitely reporting it.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  That's not consistent, though. One of the more interesting things that we do is gunshot detection. And so, one of the reasons why gunshot detection is such an important product for major cities, is the sheer number of gun violence that goes unreported.

• 18:41Auren Hoffman?

  I guess if I heard a gun, I probably wouldn't call the cops unless it was threatening me specifically or something.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Exactly, and most people don't just shoot guns in the air for fun. Obviously, that is like a thing, but it's not that common. It's like, we had a crazy case in Wichita, Kansas, where it was, to your point, was a homicide, had gone completely unreported, and the only reason why Wichita knew it happened is they have our gunshot detection. So they not only knew that it happened, they knew the exact time it happened, they knew the exact location within 50 feet, and they were able to dispatch an officer within seconds. No one ever called 911. And so, look, that's obviously one example, but it's pretty consistent that in communities that feel like calling 911 is ineffective, like your experience in San Francisco, the reported crime is dramatically lower than the actual crime. But it is community to community that's different.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Like, I think that if you lived in maybe a different city, you might call every single time your car is stolen, but clearly, you know, San Francisco had some work to do for you.

• 19:38Auren Hoffman?

  And my car was stolen, I'd be calling, my car broken into. It's like, well, it's like, do you really want to like, deal with the hassle of spending like two hours filling out paperwork and everything? Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Waiting for a detective, for insurance, and you're like, yeah.

• 19:51Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. So, kind of depends on what's going on there.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's a pretty significant number, though.

• 19:59Auren Hoffman?

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• 20:40Auren Hoffman?

  In my anecdotal discussions, I don't have good data on this, but my anecdotal discussions with lots of people, it seems that home break-ins seem to be on the rise in America. Home invasions, people sometimes are in their home when people are coming to steal things. Sometimes they're not in their home. Is that true? And these are, let's say, very wealthy people. And these are very wealthy homes. So I guess people are trying to find, I don't know, jewelry or watches or some sort of very fensible items or something like that. Is this true? Is this actually happening?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Crime in general is going down, but there's two things, two other forces that are going against that trend that make us feel less safe. So the first is just information. The flow of information is dramatically faster, right? Orders are much faster today than it was 10 years ago. Between social media, the internet, that didn't exist. You didn't hear about things. The second thing is our expectations of safety continue to go up every single day. And so you go to maybe one of the safest cities in America, you go to a place like Atherton. One home break-in a year is enough to cause pitchforks to come out. Now, they don't have that same expectation in Memphis, but eventually Memphis will.

• 21:57Auren Hoffman?

  When I lived in San Francisco, there were home break-ins that happened pretty regularly, like someone going to garage and stealing a bike or something like that. It was often homeless guy or some random thieves or something. When, now that I live in Northern Virginia, I probably have eight or nine friends that have had a home break-in, very, very professional, like, super, super, like, taking out the cameras before they go in there. It's almost like Mission Impossible style, coming in and trying to get their stuff. So it does seem like the professionalism has gone up.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That it has definitely changed. And so there is very accurate, although recently politicized narrative on the sophistication of criminals. And what you're describing is very accurate. I'm good friends with a sheriff in Virginia, maybe it's your county. And they have a huge problem on their hands because what these organized South American gangs are doing, they're using illegal drones that they've removed ADS-B, so no one has any idea the drones are in the air. They'll fly the drone, they'll check out your house, and then they will go hit. If you wanted to, we could go down a deep rabbit hole of like, these groups are very sophisticated, and it is a capitalistic activity for them. This isn't like because they're mad at you.

• 23:07Auren Hoffman?

  And why is it so hard to catch these guys? I got eight or nine friends, this is not like one anecdote, that have happened to, I've had three on the same block that I've got broken into. Why is this so hard to catch?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  The shortest answer would be they have better technology. They're more equipped, they're better funded than what your local police department probably has access to. I think the second one is regulatory issues. If you want to pick on the drone was an example, a policy that we are fighting very hard to adjust was that local government has zero ability to protect the airspace. And so in an ideal world, if you talk to the sheriff, because I've talked to him about this, his big push to the federal government is like, why is it that I can use a gun on the ground, but I can't use some other type of weapon to take down a drone in the air? Who is expected, when that drone is operating in his airspace, and I'd argue it's his airspace, who are we expecting is going to protect your house from that drone?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  The FAA is currently being asked to do that, and that is clearly not their mandate.

• 24:07Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Plus, I mean, digging down a drone is not an easy thing to do. Shooting a drone with a bullet would be very, very difficult.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  We're not going to use it with traditional bullets.

• 24:16Auren Hoffman?

  Can maybe take it down with like an electromagnetic thing or something.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, we look at that and we go like, that's clearly just where regulation is blocking technology from solving a problem. And this is a good example where the bad guys don't have to follow the rules, but the good guys do. And so I've got a sheriff who's like, Garrett, I'd have to take a shotgun out there and just shoot the thing, but I don't want to break the law because my job is to enforce the law, not break it. It's a bit of a chicken and egg there. We've got to get the regulation to open up so we can go build technology for them.

• 24:46Auren Hoffman?

  What are some other like crime statistics that aren't, that are either misunderstood or kind of run against conventional wisdom?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I'll give you two. One is a fascinating problem in kind of the supply chain world. So you've got these Eastern European gangs, quite sophisticated, right? And if you look at the way three PLs work in moving products across the country from kind of getting them in a port, whether it's Oakland or LA or Savannah, then moving them through, you have these groups that will go in and they will buy a legitimate freight forward. It's a company that's been around maybe for 20 years and they're going to provide a credible multiple for this small business owner. They will then turn the company illegal and start stealing 20-foot containers of products, millions and millions of dollars of products.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  They'll make a couple million dollars and then just literally walk away, turn the company off, disappear.

• 25:40Auren Hoffman?

  And they bought the company for?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Couple hundred thousand bucks, they'll clean house. And it creates this problem where there's an incentive misalignment where everyone wants the problem to go away, but no one is actually either sophisticated enough or incentivized enough to solve it because everyone has insurance. And I think it's one of the most fascinating problems we're faced with right now because it's continuing to grow. It's causing a problem for major retailers in America, but no one has a great solution yet. So that's like one that I find quite interesting that like we're trying to work on with.

• 26:13Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, this has been happening for years. Like if you ever see the movie Donnie Brasco, one of my favorite movies, they're out there like basically heisting trucks all the time and stuff like that. Maybe in those cases they have to like go with guns and take the truck or something.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is like a silent crime. No one ever knows that crime has been committed until it's months, weeks afterwards. And the traceability of the product, you actually can't figure out where things went wrong. The other one that I think is really interesting that we're working on quite aggressively is, if you look at Nationwide, generally speaking, you've got about a 50/50 chance getting away with murder.

• 26:47Auren Hoffman?

  Wait, what? It's that high?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yes, about 60% chance of getting away with murder.

• 26:51Auren Hoffman?

  Wait, what? I thought it was really low. I thought most murders are solved.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Most murders are not solved. A 40% clearance rate is the national average.

• 27:00Auren Hoffman?

  I didn't know that. I didn't know it was that low.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's pretty bad.

• 27:03Auren Hoffman?

  That's terrible.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  That's why Flock exists. It seems unacceptable.

• 27:08Auren Hoffman?

  Obviously, that's the worst crimes. That's the number one worst crime. That's the number one thing I want to solve was that.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Only crime we can't undo.

• 27:15Auren Hoffman?

  I want to have a 99% chance of solving the murder, right?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Should be 100% chance. Like, if you kill someone, you should be held accountable. What's just as alarming is if you don't hurt someone, you have about an 85% chance of getting away with it. So nonviolent crime is about an 85% get away with.

• 27:31Auren Hoffman?

  For that particular crime?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, like if I steal your car, I have an 85% chance of getting away with it.

• 27:37Auren Hoffman?

  But I assume like someone who steals a car steals a car all the time or something. And so if you have 85% chance, then it's like 15% chance of, you run those numbers enough, like there's a high likelihood you will eventually get caught.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  You eventually get caught.

• 27:50Auren Hoffman?

  Whereas I imagine you don't commit a murder every day.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  I sure hope not. That seems like a very poor way to live your life. But the thing that I ask is, why is there even a difference to begin with? Because like, it must just be effort then. And then if it's effort, the question I then ask is like, to your first point, how do we get violent crime from a 40% to a 99%? And then how do we get nonviolent crime from a 15% to a 99%? Because there really shouldn't be a delta outside of effort.

• 28:17Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, it does make sense that there should be a delta, right? I mean, you should be putting most of your resources to solve murders, to stop murders, to stop if there's serious violent crime or, you know, other types of things that are, anything dealing with a gun or something like that, you're probably going to be more serious about.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  The thing that I think about is if one of the benefits of this AI revolution happening is we move to a world of abundance, abundance of resources, abundance of intellect, that to me seems like one of the better things that could happen for society. Is it actually like all crimes are treated equal? Because typically speaking, people don't just kill someone. It's actually a progression of you commit a nonviolent crime that typically escalates to violence.

• 29:02Auren Hoffman?

  It does depend. I know that if you. Commit a fraud. Let's say you commit some sort of fraud and you're stealing money or something like that. If you steal less than a million dollars, like the federal government is not going to be involved in looking at your fraud and they have a lot more resources, right? So, you know, you probably have to steal at least a few million before the federal government's going to get involved. And maybe you have to steal a million before the state and then, you know, otherwise you're at the local or something. And so it makes sense. Like, and obviously the federal government just has way more resources. The quality of the people is super high. If you have an AUSA, they're just going to be just like a baller. Some of the local prosecutors are amazing, but they just don't have the resources. They may not have the other kind of ability to deal with a sophisticated case.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  To your point, I just think people are genuinely always shocked at how low clearance rates are in America and how easy it is.

• 29:55Auren Hoffman?

  That 40% is shocking to me. I had no, and I'm a fairly knowledgeable person. I had no idea it was that low.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  It's scary, right? And you obviously are a data guy. You know that there's a standard deviation there too, which means in some places it's in the teens. It's really bad because it's so rare for a city or county to have 100% clearance rate on violent crime that I can think of only probably one place, maybe two.

• 30:24Auren Hoffman?

  A hundred does seem like almost an unreasonable number, but like, let's get in the nineties. Like, that seems like something that we should be able to aim for and get.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Most cities, when they get into the sixties and seventies, start to do a kind of applause tour. I think it should be really high.

• 30:40Auren Hoffman?

  Different places around the world have different levels of baseline surveillance. Like in London, you know, they're famous for the CCTV. In Dubai, they have this like camera system everywhere. They've got all these different sensors. Obviously, certain places in China have the kind of more extreme surveillance model. How do you think the Americans are going to be okay with having a little bit more surveillance? Or what's important? What's not? How do we think about those things?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Well, I always would first premise that no one elected me the police chief of America or president. So I will share Phlox's point of view. There's really two ends of the spectrum that you described. There is the Chinese in less Dubai, but let's put China and Dubai together, which is like a bordering totalitarian regime, which is controlling crime with fear and censorship and persecution. I don't think that's going to go very well in America. We have this thing called the Constitution. We're going to stick to that.

• 31:38Auren Hoffman?

  I would say there's China, then Dubai. There's a gradation, right?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  There's a gradation there.

• 31:43Auren Hoffman?

  Because Dubai, there is more freedoms. But my friends who live there say, look, I know the government is listening to my calls. Like, that's the quid pro quo. Like, I live in safety, but the government gets to listen to my calls. But it's completely safe when I walk around and I'm signing up for it. I moved here for that trade.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  And if you commit a crime, they can just deport you. They get out of our country. We don't want you.

• 32:02Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, they could deport you. They could do whatever they want with you. Right.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  And so like, let's put that on the very far right. And to your point, yeah, let's go China to the far, far right. You've got Dubai right before that. And then if you go like all the other spectrum, I won't pick on any certain countries. But there are certain countries where it's clear law and order has evaporated from their community.

• 32:19Auren Hoffman?

  They have no capabilities to do anything.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And their GDPs are in depression, their economies are dead, and no one wants to live there. I think there's like a massive gray area that I think if Flock is successful, we allow local communities to pick where they want to end up.

• 32:37Auren Hoffman?

  And then people could opt into those if they choose to.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  You look at it and I'll pick on certain places. Like, there are certain cities who've chosen to not prioritize safety. And that's their choice. Like, and I don't live there and you don't have to choose to live there. And they're going to have more crime. And then you go look at, you know, what San Francisco has been doing recently. And clearly Mayor Lurie and before him, the prior mayor, has pushed that city closer towards, we want to put significant law and order in place. And I think that's going to pay off for it. But I think what's important to me is to your earlier point, we have the benefit in this country of local governments having a choice.

• 33:16Auren Hoffman?

  Tons of experiments. Right.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  And that's great. And I think for me, I prioritize law and order. I think like we have rules in places. Society and we should respect those rules and we should debate them fiercely and we should elect people to write those laws and kind of ask our police departments to enforce them. But for me, it's somewhere in the middle. And I think the best case possible is at the state and local level. Those elected officials get to pick how aggressive or how unaggressive they want to be for their constituents. But every city is a little different.

• 33:46Auren Hoffman?

  When I meet people in law enforcement, cops, FBI agents, other types of folks like they are mired in paperwork. They're just constantly doing paperwork. They're constantly complaining. People I know who have been in these jobs for a while say the burden has increased over time. They want to be out there fighting crime. They want to be out there solving crimes. They want to be able to out there preventing crimes. How do we change it? Like, what can we do? Is AI? Can AI do the paperwork for them? And obviously, all these paperwork things that they have to do are not like terrible ideas. They're all put in place for like a good reason. For safety or for accountability or for other types of things. So how do we make it so they can actually do their jobs more?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  We are pushing a concept that's a little bit different than pure AI. We would call it more amplified intelligence. I think in certain parts of our economy, we just want humans completely out of it. That's makes sense. Totally fine. I think when it comes to public safety, I think we want humans pretty involved still. You think about the dystopian fears of something like Minority Report. Isn't that they actually had a higher, you know, success rate? It's that it was this artificial intelligence that was making decisions. There's this black box of like, why does this precog believe that I'm a criminal?

• 35:01Auren Hoffman?

  It's a great movie. Highly recommend. Like, I've met people recently who haven't seen Minority Report. It's an amazing movie. Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Are you serious? It's a wonderful movie and an interesting kind of debate on what's better for society. But we look at that and go, no, no, artificial intelligence isn't the right answer. It's amplified intelligence where I want a human at the start of the process. That might be someone calling 911 because they're a victim of a crime. They're seeing something bad happening. I want AI, artificial intelligence, to take over, build the investigation, write the report, do the busy work. But I want a human again at the end, making a subjective call on what's right and wrong. I don't think we want to replace that part of what makes us human. And I think to your point on the policy writing and all the legwork, that to me has got to go away. We want cops in the streets. We want cops being parts of a community, not sitting behind a desk.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  That to me is not the answer.

• 35:55Auren Hoffman?

  Your company is in some ways both bits and atoms. Everyone talks about how much easier it is to start a bits company in the US than an atoms company and you're doing manufacturing in the US. You're doing all these things, you're building things in the US and you kind of have to like, you have to manufacture in US for many things because what you're doing is sensitive. You can't just like take the random components from China and stuff like that. Walk us through what it's like being like set up manufacturing in the US.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  I think it's easier today than, so I started the company eight years ago or so. Eight years ago, it was very uphill battle, particularly with investors because every investor wants to put you in a bucket and they're like, okay, Garrett, are you a software company? Well, kind of, or are you a hardware company? Well, kind of, are you an AI company? Well, kind of, are you an operational company? Like, are you a field services? Well, kind of have to do it all. And for most investors, that's just too many weird strikes because each of those presents significant risk, like being good at software, hard, being good at hardware, hard, being good at manufacturing, also hard, field services, the kind of list goes down. So that was painful. I mean, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars at this point, close to a billion

• 37:09Speaker 01

  dollars now investing to make this business even a possibility.

• 37:14Auren Hoffman?

  When I see companies like you, I mean, there's like you guys, right? There's Flock, there's Andorol, which is very similar, right? Except for a different market. You've seen this like massive success of Flock, Andorol and some others. Like, so I imagine it's like way easier to raise money today just because people have seen that success.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, someone else has done it. But I think we're lucky, like I went through YC and wound up coming back to Atlanta. And part of the reasons why I went back to Atlanta and in Georgia in particular, it's a very pro-business state. It is easier to build this kind of a company in Georgia than other states. Like we have policies that promote manufacturing, poor engineering, there's a talent workforce that like wants to do this kind of work and that like so many of those things were right.

• 37:58Auren Hoffman?

  Also, there are a lot of factories, there's a lot of car manufacturers and other types of things in Georgia.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  You look at Rivian, you look at Iandee, like there's a reason why they're building in Georgia.

• 38:08Auren Hoffman?

  By the way, I love Atlanta. It's one of my favorite cities. I think it's an incredible place. It seems like a lot of super smart people are there. Give us a sense of like why you like Atlanta. I know you're from there, but why you like Atlanta so much?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  If you look at the higher ed system in Atlanta, metro Atlanta, I've got SCAD, so Savannah College of Art Design from a design perspective. I've got Kennesaw State and Georgia State as incredible places.

• 38:32Auren Hoffman?

  You've got Georgia Tech.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Incredible places to recruit sales talent. From Emory, I can recruit great attorneys and business people. From Georgia Tech, I can recruit good engineers. You've got Morehouse, you have Agnes Scott. The list goes down.

• 38:44Auren Hoffman?

  Of course, you've got Georgia, like not that far away, a couple hours away.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  We do recruit from UGA. I like to give it a hard time. Yeah, they're a little farther away. But yeah, if you look at it, just like incredible talent pool. And then you combine that, this is a benefit Flock, but a benefit to my prior businesses. You combine that with a surprising number of Fortune 500 companies that are headquartered in Atlanta. And you just forget that, like, we've got Home Depot, we have UPS, we have Delta, we have Fiserv. We used to have Truist.

• 39:10Auren Hoffman?

  Also, by the way, it's the biggest city in Southeast, right? So you're not just recruiting from Georgia. You could recruit from Tennessee, you can recruit from Mississippi, you can recruit from Alabama. You can recruit from places in Florida and recruit from South Carolina, right?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And then you combine that with incredibly low cost of living, where you can pay someone a low six-figure salary. And they're going to put two kids through school and have a nice house that's safe. And it's like, that's a really unique combination where the benefit that it makes for a place like Flock is our retention numbers are through the roof for our employees. And I obviously think we're a great place to work, don't get me wrong. But like, it's just people don't job hop as much. They want to get a great career, they want to work really hard. And they want to focus on building a family, too.

• 39:56Auren Hoffman?

  Other things I like about Atlanta is, you mentioned universities there. Those are a few things I really like about Atlanta is, one, it's just like the airport's super connected, right? It's obviously the biggest airport in America. You can get anywhere from there. So if like you live in Austin, like you often have, it's like harder to get places from Austin, right? You don't have like a major airport.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Or DC.

• 40:16Auren Hoffman?

  DC, you can get places, but like, but Austin, it's just like the airport's just not as connected, right? Like, you have to go to Dallas to get the connected one if you live in Austin or something, right? And then the second thing about Atlanta is, well, it's good weather. It's maybe the One of the best weather places in America. It's this great. You can, it's easy to go outside. It's a nice place. And then the third is, is actually like a fun city. It's a really, really, really fun city. So if you're a 28 year old or 25 year old, it's fun. It's fun to be single there. It's fun to be married there. There's great restaurants. Like you can have a good time there. Like any major city, it would be like at that kind of stage.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Totally agree.

• 40:54Auren Hoffman?

  Why aren't there more companies being started there?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  If I had the answer to that question, you know, I think the biggest issue is just the lack of successful exits creates a kind of downward spiral.

• 41:08Auren Hoffman?

  You have like MailChamp, Cowenly, like you've got some good ones in Atlanta, right?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, think about, what's the last company that went public in Atlanta and had a good IPO?

• 41:19Auren Hoffman?

  CNN or something.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  No, it goes all the way back to ISS, Internet Security Systems. And that was in the late 90s, early 2000s. That's the issue, right? And so you look at, we've had a couple at bats and I think MailChamp's a great company, but like it didn't mint 500 millionaires that were, that had the appetite to go start a company. And even if you look at us and you look at One Trust and Stord, you know, none of us are public. That I think creates a problem.

• 41:48Auren Hoffman?

  Now, there's been all this like GovTech talk. People want to put money into public safety related things. Where do you see the market looking? Like if you had to advise other companies that want to go, like not to compete against you, but just broadly get into this space, like how would you be advising them?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  You mentioned Androl. Trey is a good friend and an investor in Flock through Founder's Fund.

• 42:12Auren Hoffman?

  Also been a guest of World of Dance, also an amazing guy.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yes, I saw that. He's a great guy. And the history on Flock, right? Our original market was not public safety. It was neighborhoods and still a nice part of our business. And I was contemplating going into law enforcement and Trey was like, don't do it. You know, we tried it at Pounds here. It's a horrible market. And I was like, Trey, I got customers calling me. Want to give me money. Tell me why. And I don't know if it's like a two by two or probably, you know, like an axi, it's probably an axi of sales cycle and ACV. And so you either have to have like really big ACVs if you want a big sales cycle. But if you get stuck in a quadrant of like low ACV and long sales cycle, you die. And that is generally speaking, local government. Local government takes a very long time to buy.

• 42:57Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, selling a local government. Obviously, there's like successful companies like OpenGov that have relatively low ACVs and super long sales cycles and they've figured it out somehow.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  But it still took 14 years to get to, you know, 100 million of ARR. So not necessarily the latest kind of push for fast growth with AI.

• 43:15Auren Hoffman?

  Not the triple, triple, double, double stuff.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  No, or even the like, you know, one to 10 to 100, whatever people expect these days. And so you look at that and you have to really ask yourself, do I just believe I'm going to have outsized ACVs or am I going to have undersized sales cycles? And at Flock, we were fortunate that, you know, our sales cycles were really, really fast, under 90 days. And that's the only reason why we've been successful.

• 43:40Auren Hoffman?

  That's insane.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  It's very fast.

• 43:43Auren Hoffman?

  Most of the SaaS companies I'm in have like sales cycles longer than that. Like, why? Is it just because it's compelling? Like, or it's just like they have a problem where like, the politician's going to get fired if they don't do something? Or?

• 43:56Speaker 01

  The best analogy I've come up with is, so as a CEO, I think about two things. Either generating more revenue or saving money. When I get a pitch to save money, I send it to my CFO. I'm like, hey, we should look into this. When I get a pitch that's like, I can help drive your growth, I'm like, I'm taking that demo myself. And if I like it, I'm going to buy it on the spot because I'm measured as a CEO on the growth of my business. For a police chief, revenue growth equates to solving crime. And so if you sell some widget that's going to save his people time, he's like, this is really interesting. Thanks for the time. But when you show him a product that within minutes helps him solve crime. He will move mountains to buy that product. And that's what Flock does.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Like, we go in and we are revenue generating for a city in that regard. And so things just happen faster.

• 44:43Auren Hoffman?

  You're solving crimes. And every police chief has like, they've got stats on what they have to solve and how stats work. And they've got to move the stats, right?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  He's going to show up. And you think about this in the case of maybe example that's closer at home for you guys. Like, if there goes an unsolved murder in your town in Northern Virginia, that police chief's going to lose his job over not being able to solve that crime.

• 45:04Auren Hoffman?

  There were companies like this in the past. ShotSpot or all these other companies that have been, you know, around for a while that didn't grow as fast, it had difficulties at their CEO. Is it just because their product wasn't it like? I assume at some point, like, you have to have a great product here, right? You know?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  The product just wasn't as good. I mean, I think the ShotSpotter product's a good example. ShotSpotter in itself is a product that works. It will try and make a gunshot. It will not solve a homicide, though. It will give you a data point. And so what we figure out is, well, if you combine gunshot detection with license rate readers and a drone, I know the gunshot happened, I can get a camera on site in 30 seconds and I can track the car.

• 45:42Auren Hoffman?

  You got to launch the drone right away to get there. So you can have eyes in the sky, right? Okay, yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  That's a fundamentally, we don't commit to know when a crime happened.

• 45:51Auren Hoffman?

  By the way, I love that. Like, okay, great. Like, you hear a gunshot, you should have at least one drone, maybe more in the air, like, as soon as possible, covering that area, looking for anomalies, looking for things that are going on, getting all the license plates in that area, getting all the other people fleeing or whatever else. Yeah, that makes complete sense to me.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  And then we're not going and selling, hey, we can tell you a gunshot occurred. That's not actually that interesting. We can say, chief, we will get you to 100% clearance rate on homicides. That's our commitment to you. You know, to buy this whole suite of products. That's the big difference.

• 46:24Auren Hoffman?

  Couple of personal questions. So I'm obsessed with people's names. Okay, your last name is Langley, which, you know, and many people equate with being a spy and law enforcement and things like that. Do you think your last name has something to do with what you're doing today?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Oh, man, no. So it's an interesting story. So it's your intro. I was fortunate to sell two companies before this and I wasn't sure if I was going to work again. And my uncle, who's kind of my closest mentor. Said, look, you're good, clearly like finding problems and building companies around it. Go build something that's not so dopey. And he kind of looked at the prior businesses I had started, and I think in his eyes, they were dopey. Which kind of businesses that like, they help people, but they don't really matter. Like they disappeared, no one cares.

• 47:07Auren Hoffman?

  If it didn't exist, it wouldn't really change people's lives.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Doesn't really matter. And so when we started Flock, Paige and Matt and I said, okay, we're only going to build non-dopey businesses. And we looked at a bunch of ideas and Flock's just the one that kind of got product market fit first. And eight years later, here I am solving a lot of crime.

• 47:24Auren Hoffman?

  Cause speaking of businesses, you have like a list of startup ideas on your website. Some of them are a little dopey. The number one is in toilets. What's the vision in the toilets?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  So toilets have not largely changed since the Roman Empire. And I'm not that guy who's going to go on a long tangent on Roman Empire. But largely the Romans developed what we would consider as modern toilets today, where you sit down, there's water flowing, there's a sponge. We've made some things better. They're less communal today than they used to be. It used to be pretty open air kind of group concept. We've made it a little more private, but it hasn't changed. And I think there's a couple of companies, one of those is called Throne, which I think is pretty cool. They're trying to introduce kind of a modern take on the biome is like very, we don't track ourselves very well. And what you excrete is actually like a really good indicator of what's going on in your body.

• 48:14Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, totally. You should have some sort of like, that should be a really great way of like getting some data or something.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  So I look at that and I look at the ergonomics. There's a handful of things that are fundamentally wrong with toilets today. And if I could be able to convince my wife that it was a good use of my time, I probably would be in the toilet business, but she felt like crime was better.

• 48:33Auren Hoffman?

  At my office, we have like the nice heated one and everything. And it is like definitely a pleasure when you're there. You're like, I'm definitely taking longer when I'm there, sitting on my phone or whatever. It's very nice. Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree.

• 48:46Auren Hoffman?

  All right, a couple more personal courses too. We ask all of our guests, what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I think paleontology is a joke of a science.

• 48:54Auren Hoffman?

  Dinosaurs.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  I think life on Earth has been around for millions of years. I've got young children in our house, my kids, and I'll read these books. And I'm looking at these pictures of dinosaurs and I'm like, this is completely made up. There's no way they knew this dinosaur had this pattern and it had feathers here and had a horn. I'm like BS. This is a bunch of people playing science. I think that is just so far off from what it probably looks like.

• 49:21Auren Hoffman?

  I think that's almost certainly true. Yes. Yeah, I agree with that. Okay.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Debate that with a paleontologist and I think they would be quite offended, but.

• 49:27Auren Hoffman?

  That's good to know. We'll have a paleontologist in the world to die soon. A last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Uh, starting companies. I mean, the number of people I see starting a company while in college, they're 18, they're 19. I think it's totally ludicrous. Like you have such a short worldview of like what problems actually matter to society. You have no experience. And I think most of those kids, because they're still kids, would be way better off joining a company that's got product market fit. And I'm not saying college is better. I actually don't think college is particularly productive. I wish more 18 year olds that were thinking about, do I want to go start a company? Do I want to go to college? We just go join a series B, series C company that's still super small. Like if you join a 200 person company, that is a tiny, tiny company. And the scale of things, you're going to learn so much so fast. You'll also build a better network.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Like to me, I don't get this big push of like, everyone should go start a company. I think entrepreneurship is incredible, obviously, but I think there's a right time and place. And I don't think it's when you're 18. I think it's when you're maybe mid twenties, late twenties. I think is like the ideal window to start a company.

• 50:38Auren Hoffman?

  Are that many people who are 18, you know, or 22, starting companies? I mean, outside of IC.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I look at my own alma mater, Georgia Tech, which is like very, very focused on trying to drive entrepreneurship for their students. And I think that that's a wasted effort compared to that same energy being applied to like, go join companies. Like go join earlier stage companies. There's no energy, in my opinion, at the collegiate level, getting students to think about joining venture backed companies. At least in the Southeast. Maybe it's different at Stanford. In the Southeast, like it is hard for me to compete with a Coca-Cola, which feels crazy. Like that feels crazy to me, but those kids who are thinking about a place like Flock and like maybe Flock two years ago. They're going to want to just go in and building a company because they can go raise a quarter million dollars in a seed round.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  And I just think they'd be more successful. To your question of like, how do we get better companies in Atlanta? That's probably what I'd push for. Go join successful companies that are ramping up and learn there first.

• 51:36Auren Hoffman?

  I went to Georgia Tech two years ago. I never actually been there. I never been to the campus before. Obviously, worked with a lot of people from Georgia Tech, but never been to the campus. Campus is awesome. And what I liked about the campus, it's like kind of integrated within the city. I walked there from where I was in the city. You could walk from even the super touristy part, like from the Coca-Cola museum, you could walk up to Georgia Tech. It's not that long of a walk even from there. I feel like it is kind of like underappreciated. It's not as well known. Why is it so underappreciated?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  It's a good question, because I think on an international scale, we probably get more respect than on a domestic scale.

• 52:13Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I know a lot of international people that went there. That's how they ended up in the United States. They came from all over the world to get their masters there or something.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish I had a great answer for you. Because for me, at least, that's the only school I applied to. I didn't even contemplate. I was like, why would I leave Atlanta when it's free to go to Georgia Tech?

• 52:33Auren Hoffman?

  I went to a Georgia, Georgia Tech football game. And while Georgia Tech did not win the football game, it was an awesome experience. Like, it was so fun. The stadium was great, because it's like, it's intimate and it was packed. I mean, completely utterly packed. It's just a really cool place to be.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  I agree. And it's in downtown Atlanta. So it's a pretty fun place to live.

• 52:53Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly. It's been amazing. Thank you, Garrett Langley, for joining us on World of DAS. I'm connected with you on LinkedIn. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been super interesting, as I knew it would be, and a ton of fun.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 53:10Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren, that's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.