What It Takes to Clear a Million Crimes a Year with Flock Safety's CEO

In this episode, previously aired on Cheeky Pint, Garrett Langley describes how a stolen gun in his Atlanta neighborhood led him to build Flock Safety, now deployed in more than 6,000 cities and involved in clearing over a million crimes last year. He covers how the product has evolved from license plate cameras to drones, real-time 911 integration, and an AI-powered orchestration layer for city safety.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in. I was working with a town in Tennessee. It's a good city. Their average response time to 911 call is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. It's just like a better quality of service. You don't end up policing where crime has happened historically. You end up policing where crime is happening right now, in real time. And that is a fairly fundamental shift in how policing works. The majority of criminals, let's call it 99% criminals, are not evil people. They're not.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Like, evil is a random act of violence, and that is exceptionally rare.

• 0:46Erik Torenberg?

  It's both in the top of extremism.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  It's all part of extremism.

• 0:50Erik Torenberg?

  In 2017, someone stole a gun from a car in Garrett Langley's neighborhood. The Atlanta Police Department came, shrugged, and left. No fingerprints, no investigation. The crime would go unsolved. So Langley, an electrical engineer, built a camera to track every car entering the neighborhood. Two months later, another gun was stolen. This time, he handed police a single plate, the only car that didn't belong. Hours later, an arrest. That prototype became Flock Safety, now deployed in more than 6,000 American cities. Last year, the company helped clear over a million crimes. The product has grown from license plate readers to drones,

• 1:35Erik Torenberg?

  911 integration, and an AI layer that turns city safety into a real-time operating system. In this conversation, previously aired on Cheeky Pint, Garrett Langley talks with John Collison about building hardware for law enforcement, why crime is down but clearance rates matter more, and what it would take to make every city a safe city.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Good to see you.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Likewise. Thanks for having me.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Okay. So maybe start by describing, how does the flak product work?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Maybe we go, we rewind like all the way back. Um, because it's evolved.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  You know, so eight years ago, living in Atlanta. And there's a fun fact is if you're in a place like Atlanta or Memphis or pick a town in the Southeast. If you just pull 10 F-150 door handles, some, let's call it three out of 10 will be unlocked. And like one out of 10 will have a firearm in the glove box. Which is like, regardless of the firearm, your point of view on it. It's like, you should keep firearms in a safe.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Shouldn't be unlocked.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  And you should like keep it in a safe, not in a glove box. Like, that's just like really bad, but that's what people do.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  And so if you're, you know, a gang member and you're trying to obtain a firearm, like the easiest way is just to just like, drive into a neighborhood, six kids, because they're kids, like jump out and start pulling door handles. You don't have anything breaking into the car. You're just pulling door handles. So this happened in my neighborhood. Someone got a gun. Someone posted on next door like, "Oh my gosh, I forgot my gun in my car and it's now gone." And so the Atlanta Police Department comes and the major was like fairly apathetic. Like, "Hey, sorry, good luck." Like, "We're not gonna..." So to your Bosch thing, they're not gonna, they're not gonna fingerprint the vehicle. Like, no one's been hurt.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  And for most major cities.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  There's no stakeout happening for this F-150.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  There's no stakeout. There's no like, "Oh, we're gonna go do all this resources." For most major cities, if a human is not physically hurt, the crime goes just to the bottom of the list. And I found that really frustrating. Because like, this should be like really easy. Like, these people drove into our neighborhood. They stole a firearm. Like, we should, we should after these people. And he was like, "Well, we don't have any information." "Okay, what do you need?" "We need a license." "Okay, great." Uh, so I was an electrical engineer. So I called a buddy of mine who studied computer science with me at Georgia Tech. And I was like, "Well, we're gonna go build this camera." So he just like track license plates. That's what the Atlanta Police Department said. So, "Okay, great." So we built this thing. And if you ever come to the Atlanta office, we still have the original camera, like on, you know, pedestal. It looks like garbage. I'm not a mechanical engineer.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Um, we put it up. And all it did was track every car that came into our neighborhood.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  But as you can imagine, like after 30 days, you start to be able to know like that person clearly lives here. They're in the neighborhood twice a day, four times a day. And so about two months later, another car gets broken into, another firearm stolen. The same major comes back and I was like, oh, by the way, here's the only car that doesn't live in our neighborhood. That was here last night. That car gets put on what would be called like a BOLO, like be on the lookout for. Couple hours later, they find that vehicle, the gun's in the car, person goes to jail. And what was really interesting is like the, we were very proud of ourselves. This was not a business at the time, it's a project. And so the five o'clock news would like do the story.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  So I'm on the five o'clock news and the next morning, like I had five emails from neighborhoods. And I think I might be the, we might be the only company that strictly driven off of five o'clock news. That was our only growth channel.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that actual media appearance.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  And every time we solved a crime, we'd be like, hey, do you want to cover the story at five o'clock? And they'd be like, we'd love to, we'd love, we love talking about crime.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, because this is local news.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  It's local news. It's not, we're not going to go to the New York Times. No one cares about like a stolen sofa.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Or like a stolen dog.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Okay, but that's interesting. Did you start with, because I associate Flock today with being plugged into the stolen car databases. But you started without that, just looking at suspicious stuff.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, if you, if you think about it, in the classic, I don't know who gets credit for it. You know, there's 400,000 neighborhoods in America and there's no consolidation of providing safety for those communities. And when I say neighborhood, that is a legally binding organization that can sign a contract.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Not like you and me just put 20 bucks together and say, let's buy this thing on the street. So that felt really interesting. And then the other kind of interesting insight that we developed, which took time is, I imagine at your house, you have a security system, you might have a gate to your house, you probably have a dog. You have all these things, right? They do two things that actually are not helpful. They tell you a crime has happened, they don't actually help you solve it. And then what about your neighbor? And so what we'd realized is that every single security system was focused on the individual.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  But like I think about my, my life in Atlanta, there was this crazy random act of violence a couple of years ago. Like my wife wouldn't run outside for a year. And like, it had nothing to do with us.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  It was like a mile away.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  And so the whole

• 6:43Speaker 02

  You live in a community.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  premise became that you had to build a safety system for a community.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Because that's actually what you feel. I mean, you live in San Francisco, you get it. Like, even if you've never been the victim, if crime is up.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  It's really bad. So it was all neighborhoods for the first three or four years of the business.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So give me the stats on Flock today. Just how many cameras out there, crime stopped. Because again, and maybe just describe the product as it exists.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  As it is today now. So now it's a much, much more sophisticated product in that sense. So we're, last year, we helped clear just north of a million crimes in America.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  What does "help clear" mean?

• 7:17Speaker 00

  So I mean, we want to be clear that, similar to probably how you feel in that, like, you help businesses grow, but like, you didn't do the hard stuff.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  I did.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  You made it easier. You made it really easy for me to grow Flock.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  By making payments simple.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  I don't actually have to do any of the hard work of like, chasing bad people, putting my life at risk. Like, we write code and design circuits. Like, it's not hard work.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  So we like to be very careful of like, not overstating our, our value. So we were involved in the arrest, in clearance or successful arrest of over a million crimes.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  And in a lot of those cases, we are the in, the beginning and everything.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Outside of the human putting handcuffs on. And in some cases, we might be the tip of the spear. It's like, for more sophisticated investigations, like the Brown shooter and the MIT shooter, there was a tip on Reddit, but then Flock was, was the way they found them. Like, we weren't the tips.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  We can't take full credit. So maybe, maybe I'll walk you through like a, a recent example. And I won't name the city, because it's, the case is still going through prosecution. But, so there was a 911 call. This is a major city in America. Our system here is 911 calls. We could tap into 911 call. This is kind of wild if you think about 911. Today, when you call 911 in San Francisco, it's going to get about 3 million 911 calls a year. A human picks up every single time. A human manually listens, manually types in information. Imagine if you were running Stripe and every single lead you received was human routed. You'd say this is crazy. Well, that's how we work in cities today. So we hear the 911 call in real time. What that allows us to do is then figure out, what are they talking about?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Is there any interesting information in the system that could find beneficial? So in this case, we had heard that it was an attempted homicide. Someone was bleeding on the street. And all they could remember was that the suspect was wearing white Converse sneakers. Now, we have a product called Flock OS that allows us to integrate all the cameras in a city, whether they're Flock developed or not. And so that 911 call pops up. The kind of an operator is like, oh, my gosh, there's a 911 call right there. They can listen to the call. They're like, this is a really violent situation. There's a privately owned camera. I can tap in that, double click that camera. They can use one of our products called Freeform and say, I'm looking for any individuals in the last 30 minutes that are wearing white Converse sneakers. They then find the individuals. They can then push that video to the nearest officer.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  So we run on the dash of the police vehicles. And then that person gets arrested. And so if you think about the way it used to work, that case had never would have been solved. Like it had been weeks, maybe months, and you'd gone a cold case. And in this case, this person was from an 911 call to an arrest in about 17 minutes. So we can do that on people. We do that on vehicles. So in that same version of the story, I'll give you one other story and then I'll give you a sense of it. So in a town in Colorado, there was an armed robbery of a Levi's outlet. Got to get your jeans, one way or another. This is a funny one, actually. So they call 911. So we're plugged into 911, right? The real time crime center operator hears it's an armed robbery. They also hear two things.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  The person has already fled the store and they drove away in a white van that looks like a black and blue cow. It's like, mistake number one is criminal. Like, don't drive a weird car. Now, this police department also has our drone that we build here in America. So they immediately click a button. The drone automatically flies at 400 feet to the Levi's outlet. That drone knows what to look for. It has the visual kind of nomenclature of a white van with black and blue spray paint. Using that same Freeform, we can start to look for it. We get another 911 call of another outlet that's having the same time. So the drone is already in the air. Zoom's over.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Drone has eyes on it. That video feed can now be sent straight to the nearest officer. And so in a traditional response, you're going to come in hot, blue lights flashing. Someone's going to get hurt. This case, the drone's four feet up in the air. You have no idea. The drone's there. The guy drives home. As soon as he pulls in his driveway, two cops, pin them in. Safe tactical apprehension. So it's drones, it's some computer vision, it's cameras that track cars. It's quite a robust portfolio.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  And what is flock by the numbers today? So how many cameras? How many drones? How many law enforcement agencies? You know, how many individual entities?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's just over 6,000 cities. So it's like well north of 50% of America. That's covered by flock.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  By population.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, by population. There's about 17,000 cities in the US. And we have all the big ones outside of Manhattan at this point. That's like the last, the last one to go get.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  I'm not sure if that's going to happen anytime soon, the current situation there. But yes, it's pretty, pretty well deployed, building cameras, drones and selling it to the government, which is like three strikes you're out.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  That's incredible. And I feel like something non-American listeners mightn't realize is, so I grew up in Ireland, you know, a country of 5 million people. And there is just a police force, the Gardaíche Chana, like the national. Exactly, police force for the whole country. And that is a relatively common model in lots of places. In the United States.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  It's the opposite.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  It's very localized and just maybe want to talk about the average size of it. And I feel like what you're providing is in some ways, scale economies and helping police forces coordinate with other agencies.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  There's a dynamic that people don't understand, which you're right. So Ireland, most of the EU, Australia has six police departments. So I mean, let's call it effectively the same. It's a really big country, it's a lot of land. Most of South America, like America is really the only country that operates under a model where local municipalities provide a law enforcement service. It's very rare.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  And the benefit, the pro is very straightforward, which is like, you actually have a good chance of knowing the police officer that has your territory and has your, your patch of dirt. The downside is criminals don't really care where cities start and stop. They don't care where states start and stop. Yet historically, law enforcement agencies were incapable of sharing information. To give you a sense of timeline, the cloud.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Was only recently made legal in Florida as recently as 2022. So if you were a law enforcement agency, you could not host your data in the cloud until 2022. Maryland was 2023. So like.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  So any coordination between agencies was very manual.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  All phone calls.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Faxing files. And so one of the big kind of unlocks of Flock was this realization that you could drive better collaboration. Because like if you're you're you're kind of low level criminal, isn't maybe changing cities. But you look at some of the most like successful cases we've helped work. It's like multiple states, right? Like we did a huge human trafficking bust. Seventy some 76 people arrested across four states, like all organized on Flock. And like.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  And it's really hard for one agency to wrap their hands around that whole thing.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  No, at that point, you've got like six different local cities, two different, sorry, three different state agencies and the US Marshals.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  All collaborating inside of Flock.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  And like, that's, that's how it should work.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Because in Ireland, that is actually the only option because you're the same police department. It's a very unique problem that America has created.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Law enforcement coordination.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Like it should be, it shouldn't be controversial.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  But it's actually a very controversial topic.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  What's controversial about it? I'm not aware of this controversy.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Um. This is, it's an interesting question of like you.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Your trust in government probably follows some type of, you know, logarithmic expectation or linear expectation of like the farther you are removed from those people, the least trust you have. And so most people's trust of the federal government is very low. State, a little bit lower, local, full trust.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And so there's this interesting dynamic where, let's talk about my most recent case. My guess is that most people don't have a lot of trust for certain federal agencies. But when stuff goes really bad, like the Guthrie kidnapping, it's the federal government that runs the investigation. Like they are the only ones with the actual resources to work these cases. It's the FBI that's running that investigation, the brown shooter, the FBI, the Mar-a-Lago assassination attempt. The Secret Service, like it goes down, but people have this big distrust. And so we actually see it in places like California. There is state legislation that law enforcement is not allowed to collaborate with the federal authorities.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Because.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  On certain topics because of all of the, it's just different politics. And so we kind of have to sit in the middle. And when it's clearly legislated, like in California, it's actually, it's fine. It's, that's the law. That's actually very simple. It's in other states where it's opinion.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  And that's like, oh, that's really messy because we should just write laws. I mean, you, we operate in a regulated space. Regulation, when done properly, just defines the rules of engagement. Sometimes it's better or worse, but like at least everyone knows these are the rules.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. As I think about where Flock grew up and the

• 16:33Speaker 02

  helping with flagging stolen vehicles and kind of a very vehicle oriented product. How does that work at a technical level? Like you guys, there was a stolen database. There was a database for stolen cars already, but that's an example of prior cross law. Like who maintains that database? How does it work?

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's a good question. So there's, you think about a couple of fun engineering problems that Flock had to solve. The first is how do you do what's described, you know, read a license plate, track a car on solar power with a 5G backhaul and.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Which is the camera that you have installed.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But, but you very rarely have fiber or power where you want to put a camera.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  So you want a self sufficient box that you can.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Totally infrastructure free.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  In your section.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and be able to track a car going 100 miles an hour and do some level of computer vision on top of it. And like, that was a pretty fun problem because if you put, you know, let's say you wanted to put a GPU in it. You're going to, you can't run on solar power then. And so then it's like, all right, well then what do you do on the edge? What are you doing?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  And you can't buy any GPUs these days.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, yeah, that would have been a huge disaster for us. But so the FBI maintains a list called the NCIC, which is, you know, about quarter to half a million known. In vehicles with other warrants, could be Amber, the Amber Alert system, the Silver Alert system, like we solve sadly like a ton of Silver Alerts too. I think we did just over a thousand Amber and Silver Alerts last year that we helped clear. It's like missing adults, missing seniors and missing kids, which is pretty sad stuff. And so we have a direct integration with the FBI for that. And then at a local level, let's say like the Bay Area.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  There is a Bay Area hot list that we maintain with those agencies.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Oh, wait, so I assume that there was a single integrated when a car is called in as stolen.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  I assumed that went somewhere integrated.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Ah, so this is, this is kind of scary. So let's say your car is stolen and you're in South San Francisco. They will immediately put it in the Bay Area Flock hot list immediately. It will take 24 hours to make it to the FBI hot list.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  And that's a, you know, CSV file that gets sent around on FTP servers across the US.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  As much the economy runs.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yes, you should be used to that.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  But so the real time happens on Flock and then there's about a day lag to make it nationwide.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so local entities have some kind of local lists and those propagate to a national database, which is an FBI database. And what you guys are doing is making that real time, which obviously if a crime is unfolding in real time is a big deal.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  It's not good to wait a day.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Like you can, you can drive really far in 24 hours.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  It turns out, yes.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  And then you had some great stat before about just a fraction of like stolen cars are bad news. Like the fraction of crimes that involve stolen cars.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  There's an interesting phenomenon where you don't, no one really steals a car for fun. Like there's not much you can actually do.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Is that true, like all the sideshows and stuff? Like, isn't there a little bit of stealing cars for fun?

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Well, the sideshows are definitely, they look fun, never participated in it.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Neither have I, but yeah, just want to make clear here.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  It's my official statement on the matter.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Dirt bikes, haven't ridden a dirt bike in a sideshow, but have watched plenty of videos online. That's fun. You're typically not stealing a car, you're typically driving your own car.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  And those, you typically, like, well, there are some people, I guess, who would steal a car and just drive it for fun.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  The, the main use case is like when my car was stolen, my car was stolen. And then they used it to go rob three CVSs.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Did a bunch of drugs in the car and then ditched it. And that's like a normal, you steal a car to go do something bad.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, or you steal a car to go shoot someone because you don't want to shoot someone in your own car. If you're thinking ahead, you want to do it in a stolen car.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. We've all watched Pulp Fiction.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is like how you do this, right? And so we do a bunch of other interesting things. Like we have this, this feature called cold plating, where if we detect that the vehicle, from an AI perspective, the make and model doesn't match the DMV record, that clearly the person's driving with a stolen license plate. That's another thing you can do. It's easier than stealing a car, you just steal someone's tag. So then you got to go down to like, we got to steal the same license plate from the same type of car. But then like if we detect an anomaly that the same car is in two places at once, we'll flag that.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  It's like, that's kind of weird. That's like a glitch in the matrix. So we have all these, and we would call them more like anomaly detections, where it's like, this isn't, this isn't illegal.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Yet, but it sure is kind of weird.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yes. And it's enough of, is, provides enough reason to pull someone over.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Yes, and depending on the size of the city, it's enough to dispatch an officer. I think if you're a major city like a San Francisco, you have enough going on.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  But if you're, you know, a foster city, you're a smaller town where thankfully you don't have violent criminals running around every day.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  You're like, oh, that's weird. We have two cars with the same license plate in different parts of the city. We should go see what's going on.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yes. It strikes me that

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Flock, a way you can think about what Flock is doing is

• 21:39Speaker 02

  not changing any of the norms around privacy, but really expanding law enforcement's bandwidth to go deal with stuff. And so I don't think anyone really has an expectation of, you know, a right to privacy, of the car they are driving just being observed from a distance, or their license plate being readable when out on a public road. But if a car is called in and stolen, rather than officers manually, you know, looking for that car and that license plate, instead you can just kind of much more quickly get it. And yet, this kind of stuff ends up super controversial from a, I don't say super controversial, but it ends up controversial from a privacy point of view.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  And so, I don't know, is that take too generous? Is there a stealman of the other side? Why is it?

• 22:27Speaker 00

  There is, I mean, I think you're right on the controversy. I would articulate it as like, if you're building a business that impacts millions of people's lives. It's gonna be controversy of some degree. And I'm sure people, I'm sure there's someone who hates Stripe. I don't know why they would, but I'm sure that person exists. Just like there's someone who hates Walmart. It's like they're trying to sell cheap groceries. Why do you hate, it's like, people hate Airbnb, people hate every company. Uh, maybe they hate us more, I don't know. Um, I, I think there's a few things that make it for the, the steel man argument. One is you can see it. I'd say I bet you if we pulled up your iPhone and we looked at the number of apps that you've given full-time local location services, it would shock both of us. And then if we looked at the number of data brokers

• 23:12Speaker 00

  who then leverage that data to sell you ads, we'd be really shocked. And I think if we rewound it 30 years ago and said, imagine these private companies tracked your location in real time and sold that to advertisers, we'd be like, that is unacceptable. But because we can't see it, we kind of let it go. Um, we have this perception of anonymity, anonymity or being anonymous. Anonymity. Anonymity, thank you. Um, yet like you're, you're an engineer. How many data points do you need to triangulate where someone is? How about where they sleep and where they work? And I know exactly who you are. Yep. Um, and so like, there is that, there is that one piece, which is because we operate in the physical world, we are held to a higher standard, which I think is a shame because personal opinion,

• 23:53Speaker 00

  what I do online is way more interesting and telling about my personality and my life than what I do in the real world. Like I go from work to home and to like kids' birthday parties on the weekends. That's my life. Um, so there's that piece. I mean, the second piece is like, there is a appropriate debate of what level of privacy erosion are we willing to take for an increase in safety? Um, now you and I both choose to live in cities that have governments. So we've already chosen to remove some of our privacy. We drive on public roads. Uh, we're constitutionally, we have no expectation of privacy, but we're using the government's roads with the government's license plate. Like we have a driver's license in our pocket. Driver's licenses are a modern thing. That's not a, that hasn't been around for 200 years. So the newer concept of a driver's license.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  So we've accepted all of those. The articulation that I would have is like, I want my kids to be safe. And like, as long as there's accountability of like how the information is used, which we do, every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity and is publicly available. And there, for us, like, we really believe in this concept of a certain data retention, which kind of limits the level of abuse. It doesn't eliminate abuse. There's still gonna be abuse, but it limits that, hey, if it's seven days, 14 days, 30 days of data, it's just not that interesting.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  And relative to what you see with data brokers online, where they have your entire internet history stored forever.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  You're interested in fresh data. That's what's

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but criminals, yeah, there's a really fast drop off of where have you been in the last couple of days versus like, where were you a year ago? It's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Or it's protected behind a warrant, which is fine.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Right. You talked about cellphone locations and, you know, your cellphone having your GPS location. And I'm reminded of the phenomenon where it feels like the balance of power in the offense-defense mix within crime fighting tends to change over the years as new technologies are invented. And, you know, criminals get wise, fingerprinting exists and things like that. It feels like cellphone locations have had a huge impact on crime fighting. Not even GPS location, but just the coarse cell tower data. And in particular, in murder cases, it's had a huge impact. I'm curious, just what are the other major trends going on from a technology point of view in how crime gets fought?

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, CDRs would be the, you know, the nomenclature in the law.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  What's CDR?

• 26:20Speaker 00

  Cellphone data dump or CDR cell.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Something like that, yeah. But it's your point, it's the broader, like, you hit these three towers, therefore you're in this general vicinity. That is like, one of the best kept secrets for law enforcement of like how to solve crime, which, you know, people dumbly commit crime with their cellphone in their pocket every time.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  It's very, I think I've heard of one case in the last 12 months where someone was smart enough to commit a homicide and left their cellphone at home by design. It was very intentional. They were very organized in the area. Couple other ones.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  How did, how did they get caught?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  It's actually a flock, obviously. So they were smart enough to leave their cellphone.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  They were dumb enough, so they drove from LA up to San Francisco, general area. They had a bunch of flock cameras along the way. They didn't pick up their cell phone until they went back to LAX. And we have cameras all around LAX. And like they've finally made that one mistake. They had, it was a completely cold case until they got a hit on the car pulling into LAX, then got the cell phone, could do the whole thing. This is a good case.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I guess the thing you can do is you can know that a cell phone's in the car because you can.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  We don't touch that, but the law enforcement can.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Sorry, law enforcement can cross-reference cellphone location of a flock.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  What were all this, so they knew that the vehicle was in a certain parking lot?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  They can then use, they have to have a warrant at this point.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Get a warrant to pull what cell phones were in that area and then start to build the case. But to your question, I'd say the most, the current phenomenon that is causing a ton of problem domestically is drones. And this is an example where it's asymmetric warfare that law enforcement is being put up against where criminals have no rules.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  How are criminals using drones?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  So here's a good example. In one of the counties we work with, it's an affluent-ish county in the Virginia area. South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in. They don't want a confrontation, they just want to.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  People are using drones to case houses?

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  And, and this is where the downside is. Law enforcement has just recently, last year, been allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight. These guys have been operating for years.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Just, they jerry-rig, you know, an LTE modem to a cheap drone. They can fly it anywhere, however they want. And then legally, even to today, law enforcement is not allowed to engage that drone. They can't take it down. It's FAA airspace. It's not law enforcement airspace.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, yeah.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  And so they just sit there. And so that, that's a problem in neighborhoods, also a problem in prisons. It's probably the number one problem we have in our prison system today, or a lot of problems in prisons. But one of the leading problems for enforcement officers is. You've got these pretty incredible, actually, from a engineering perspective, drones that are carrying 10, 20, 30 pound payloads, flying them over the prison walls. And like, they're literally dangling it down to like the prison cell and the person will reach out and grab it. Well, um. Cell phones, drugs, guns. We had Tyler from ZipLine here. It's ZipLine for criminals. And these guys have built a comparable product. Yeah. And I was with a sheriff that I know really well and he was like, if I shoot that down with a shotgun, I am technically breaking the law. I'm breaking federal law if I shoot this down with a shotgun.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  And so you're seeing states now pass, like Louisiana has a state bill, Georgia's working on a state bill that says, sorry, FAA, we're gonna do what we want. And that, you know, creates a problem because most law enforcement officers just want to follow the law. Yeah, and presumably that won't stand up from a federal preemption point of view. No, and like the other challenge is like, I think you and I would say like, who's gonna, who's gonna, who's gonna enforce this? The FAA is not an enforcement body, but these people want to follow the law and the law says clearly like, you can't shoot a drone down. Yes. You can detect it, you just can't, you can't mitigate. Ah, no idea. It's a totally crazy law. Yeah. What else has made, what else has gotten worse from an offense perspective? Um, I mean, this is one that's like, uh, you know, I don't know if I have

• 30:18Speaker 00

  strong feelings on this side, on this topic, but this concept that we appropriately hold local law enforcement to a very high standard of accountability and audibility, and I think that's very good. Yes. The downside is like, we don't with criminals. And so as a citizen, you don't be the victim of a crime, you get really frustrated that they're not working hard enough. And it's just generally that, it's that they don't have the tools, they don't have the data, or they're not legally allowed to get to the data. And the warrant system is a very, very good thing. It's like a very effective tool, but like, there's a debate of like, should law enforcement have more ability to solve crime faster? Um, and the example, the framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is

• 31:03Speaker 00

  that the severity of a crime should be commensurate with the sophistication of technology. And I'll give you an example. Facial recognition, hot topic. There are thousands of cities in America that have banned law enforcement from using facial recognition. Facial recognition is not bad as a technology. It's not good either. It's just technology. I think a way more effective measure would be to say, hey, look, facial rec has its pros and cons. You can't use it for shoplifting, but for homicides, crimes against children, like go to your list of things that like we as a society care deeply about. Law enforcement should do everything in their power to solve those cases. And then, yeah, the like petty stuff, we should say, look, like we got to make progress there. But you know, you stole a pack of Skittles.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Like, we probably shouldn't deploy a drone to find you. Like, if you kill someone, I think we should work really, really hard as a society to hold you accountable.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  But there's no, there's no nuance.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  That nuance has not come through.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  No, they're just like facial rec is bad. And we don't do facial recognition for that reason because it's too controversial. But that's, it's counterintuitive to me when the technology gets better every day.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And obviously, another interesting thing that's happening amongst these trends is the prevalence of body cams, which I think maybe was in some corners promoted by law enforcement skeptics, but I think now has.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  It's backfired?

• 32:24Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say backfired, but just like it's actually in a lot of cases, being somewhat exonerative, right?

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think, I think in many cases, police were really hesitant to get body cameras. Just like, I mean, imagine if you wore a body camera all day at work, you'd be like, ah, I'm not sure if I love that idea. It's kind of a little bit invasive, but they did. And I would say in the majority of cases that I see, where foul play is called, it is almost always the inverse. Where law enforcement officers are just trying to do their job. And on the other side, there was other mental health issue. There was something gone wrong and it actually exonerates the officer. Which is kind of interesting. And I think the same thing is true. What at least we're seeing on the camera side on the streets is, you know, historical policing sadly is quite prejudiced, right?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  We all have our biases, whether it's conscious or unconscious. So you have bad data in, you get bad data out. And so the traditional way of policing is like you go to dangerous neighborhoods, look for suspicious people and arrest them. So it's like you're perpetuating a trend against a certain community. And when you look at like Oakland is a good example. Who's quite a big supporter of Flock, they're like, we need a more objective way to police. Let's just focus on stolen cars.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  We don't care who's inside. We will find out eventually.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  That car was stolen.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  And then you don't wind up policing where crime has happened historically. You end up policing where crime is happening right now.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  In real time. And that is a fairly fundamental shift in how policing works. And it, for many cities we work with, changes the perception of this, the kind of community with law enforcement. Because they're no longer felt like they're being targeted. It feels like it's wherever crime happens, we're going to go chase it. And if there's not been crime in the last couple of days, then we're good.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. Is crime up or down in the US?

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Hmm, it is down. Um, I think it'll continue to go down. Covid was like really bad.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  So it surged during Covid?

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Crazy surge.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  People lost their minds. I think we tested society of like, what happens if you keep people inside for too long? And people got really violent.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So do you have an explanation? Is it that like it was a mental health issue? Or was it kind of a crime of opportunity that, you know, things were less well guarded? And you know, there's more opportunities for crime. But you think it was just people went a bit batty being locked up?

• 34:48Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  And resort to crime.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  But I mean, I mean, I'm obviously not a, you know, clinical psychologist, funny, but it's like, you just, you look at the data and there's no other way to articulate why, you know, homicides three to four axed. And then plummeted back down to let's call it somewhat reasonable levels. Like there's a very few number of cities that are left at Covid levels. Most cities had this massive spike.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  And like the, the way to,

• 35:16Speaker 00

  if you look at the people who were committing that violence, they tended to be 16 to 22, male and very online.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  And

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Very online?

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so like, this is, this is like, this is really sad.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  That's right. How do you measure very online?

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Uh, let me give you an example. Um, I was in a town, a major city not too long ago, and I was asking the chief to tell me kind of what's going on. This is a couple of years ago, right? During, during COVID. And she was like, Garrett, th- these kids are just killing each other. I was like, what? She's like, yeah, they're, they're literally getting in their car and just shooting each other. I'm like, why? Like, oh, because this guy posted a picture of him with that guy's girl on Instagram. And I think in a normal situation, you might have called that person and been like, hey, bro, that's my girl. And in other cases, they're getting in a car and shooting someone. Like, that's not normal. That's not normal behavior. And it wasn't normal before COVID.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  And it happened a lot during COVID. And then it's largely gone away. But it was a very specific social phenomenon where the, the race to violence was so dramatic. It was so scary.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  And I don't think society has necessarily gone fully back to normal, but like, if you look at the data, i- it's hard to articulate that's, that's Yeah. the most obvious explanation to me.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  And I guess there are other empirical measures like, um, air rage incidents, road rage incidents, like all of that kind of stuff went up during COVID.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Everything went up.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Like, everything. People just literally lost their minds. I think we, like, need to be outside.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, okay, so how are we doing now on crime? Is, you say it's down. Um, is that across all categories? Cause you know, you read Twitter and it's like, everything's locked up at CVS and, you know, San Francisco is fully, you know, you're like, there's all these memes, which are, maybe do some debunking and confirming of all the memes.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  So, so, uh, every city is a little bit different. Um, major cities still have major crime problems. Um, I, I would argue, you know, I live in Atlanta. And the mayor, you know, he's made it very clear, anything greater than zero homicides is a tragedy, tragedy, and therefore we're on the race to zero still, like, as an unacceptable level. And we're down historic lows over the last decade, but it, it's still pretty hard to wake up and go, you know, only 52 people died in Atlanta last year. But you can't pat yourself on the back for that. I think where we're focused on is, is more so clearance rates. Um, and that's actually getting better, but only better in certain cities. Um, now, we track it across Flock.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  You know, not to overly promote like tends to be that if you have a flock products, your city has a much higher clearance rate. You look at San Francisco as a great example. The new chief, the prior chief, Mayor Lurie, like they are making crime a focus. And the focus is on solving crime. Yes. And when they solve it, as I'm sure you follow on the news, they talk about it. Yeah. And they should because like it's really cool. They're working very hard. And what you'll see is back to the online point I made, obviously people are online. And so when San Francisco PD is dominating X. It has a deterrent effect. Oh gosh, yeah. You don't want to get caught. Yeah. And that's like the unintuitive or the counterintuitive point on crime is that most people would intuitively say, oh, if the punishment's really, really bad, people will do less of it.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  But you were 16, 18 at one point, you operate on a Boolean mindset. I will get away with this, therefore I will do it. I'm gonna sneak out of my house because I'm not gonna get caught. You don't care if the punishment is being grounded for a week or a month, you're gonna get away with it. It's just like a caught or not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so when you flip. Criminals are so online. So if you, if you flip that, oh, it's like, it's, it's a subculture. You gotta get there. But I mean, you'll see. Is this like Reddit, Twitter? They're everywhere. Pinterest. I don't, probably less Pinterest, but I mean, TikTok's really big. Yeah. Instagram's really big. Snapchat's really big. And like it is, it's how they recruit though. Right. Because like the whole, the whole recruitment effort is, you know, I'm gonna show a lifestyle online that seems dream worthy to recruit these people.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  And then they're in, then they're gonna perpetuate that. And the data actually shows it's actually not a very good job. You actually don't make very much money being a criminal. It's like the median income for your average criminal is like, it's very, very low. Yeah. But they promote a lifestyle of wealth. So if you look at those cities, like, so you're saying San Francisco, crime's coming down, clearance rates are going up. Hundred percent clearance rate is like a hundred percent solved? Yes. And it's doable. We have it in major cities. And like, like Cobb County would be one, which is like the second largest county. Cobb County has a hundred percent. Yep. If you commit violence in Cobb County. Yes. You will get arrested. And that's a crosswalk emphasis. That's the second largest county in Georgia. So let's call it, you know, a couple million people, almost a million people. So a decent number of violent crimes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  And like, but it's going down every year. Sure. So like a places like that. You will get caught. Yeah. And so like, we have this new concept that we've developed called like Safe City. And we'll go into a town and say, look. This is the platform you need to solve all the crime in your city. It's your choice. It tends to be like about 20 bucks a citizen a year. It's like it's your choice. And like what's what's fun to watch is we find these mayors with really strong backbones. And they're like, I want to be a safe city. There's like this awesome town Greenville, Mississippi, you've probably never heard of it. 26,000 people. They have our drones, they have our cameras, they have our AI, they have everything we do. And they are lighting it up. And like kudos to the mayor in chief, like every crime they solve.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  They're on the five clock news.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  So these are highly effective cities. What effect does this? What happens to the criminals? Does it shift it to other localities? And like you need to, it's like, you know, disease eradication. You ultimately need to do kind of enough to blanket it, to snuff it out. Because if just kind of one municipality does it, it'll shift to a local municipality. Does it actually, within that municipality, people just go to something non criminal? I'm curious, what are the effects of one municipality getting rid of?

• 41:07Speaker 00

  There's two phases. The first phase, you're spot on, like people that just change cities. It's like when San Francisco started adopting Flock, Oakland crime went up. So then Oakland needed to adopt Flock.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  And now like a couple of false starts now that it's fully going. They will have the same, but like first is the shift.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  And then you're right, like this is, people don't, the majority of criminals, let's call it 99% criminals are not evil people. They're not. Like evil is a random act of violence and that is exceptionally rare.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  It's both opportunism.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  It's all opportunism. And like you and I were fortunate enough to be born in a family, in a social construct that we could go build great companies. But not everyone had that chance. And some people get pushed in the wrong direction. And that that's what we have to stop. It's like as a business, we don't. While we're proud of the impact, you know, making a million arrests, it's actually quite disheartening because that means like a million people will not have to go through the criminal justice system, which doesn't work that well. There's a million victims, like it's bad in every single way. It's also crazy expensive as a society to jail that many people. It's like, it's a double negative bottom line where it's costly and prohibitive that they'll probably never reenter society. So we're, we're much more focused on the preventative mechanisms of like, how do you convince someone? This is not a good lifestyle. This is not a long-term plan.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  And eventually what you will see is like, they will go get jobs. Like, these are functional members of society. They can be functional members. We should push them in that direction. What kind of crime is on the increase? So I'll tell you one that's like pretty fascinating. So if you look in the enterprise community, organized resale crime in stores was really hot during COVID and right after COVID. That's why you saw CBS lock their stuff up. You saw, you know, places like In-N-Out leave Oakland. Like this was, this was a huge problem. And it's still, you know, for someone like Walmart, I think they reported just shy of a billion dollars of theft last year. So it was a lot of, it's a lot of money. Yeah. And like their peers aren't doing dramatically better. Now, flock customers are doing really well. Yeah, and Walmart has heified to this stuff, you know? Yeah. They have a law of prevention.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll get there with Walmart. But like, you look at some of our partners like Lowe's, you know, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not, it's not really a problem anymore. Yeah. But where the criminals have moved is to the distribution facilities. It's safer and bigger loads. And so probably the most sophisticated one that I've heard of is, it's an Eastern European group. They went and bought a legal, like well-running freight broker. They now own this asset and they bid on all these, low bid on all these projects, show up with real paperwork, fill up a 20-foot with product, drive away, dissolve the company. Seven million dollars in a single day.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Like, that's pretty good business.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  That's very sophisticated, though. That's harder to solve. That's very, that's much harder to solve.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Because every car, phone, like, everything will be disposable used in this.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Everything's gonna leave the country as fast as possible and just show up on a street somewhere. And then the other interesting challenge is you have to unpack, this is like a little bit complicated, who's liable. So as soon as the product goes into a store, that retailer is liable for the theft. Like, it hits their bottom line. For a lot of these companies, they negotiate it such that, you know, there is insurance coverage from a different broker that owns that asset until final delivery. And so it's not super clear, like, who actually cares?

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And it's gonna take-

• 44:46Speaker 02

  The insurer cares.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  The insurer cares eventually.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  But when you talk about the scale of, let's call it, you know, tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of product being moved, you're like, oh, you know, we lost a couple hundred million.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  I see. Yeah, yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  We'll be fine. We have insurance.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  It will catch up eventually, but that's probably the most interesting type of crime we're tracking is the tacking on the distribution. So we have a lot of partners on the distribution side where we're now deploying our product to try to prevent this becoming an epidemic.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  But it's much harder to solve. Like, it's a real company.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Like-

• 45:19Speaker 02

  I want to ask you more about this, but I'm gonna get into the goodness.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  This is a good segue into your corporate business, because, again, people associate you with selling to municipalities, but obviously you sell a lot to corporates as well.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's a big part of our business.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. Well, you had some dregs left. I'll get-

• 45:40Speaker 00

  That's my fault.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  Like, a real one.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  You want to just go full up and, yeah, you'll get more of a head that way. And it's perfectly, it's the correct-

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Oh, it is?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  You can trust us. Yeah. Okay, so the corporate business.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  Corporate business. Yeah, north of a hundred million, they are probably fastest-growing segment.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  There's some wild stories. So we help businesses solve two problems. How do you keep your employees safe? And how do you keep your assets or your stuff safe? So it's kind of funny because we have a Fortune five company as a customer.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  And you probably don't want to talk about specifics, but we should just imagine big box stores. They're kind of.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Is it the same thing? It's like we have this Fortune five company as a customer and they spend like a hundred thousand dollars a year. Because they have like three locations in the country. That's it. They have like three really big campuses. So they're actually like, we don't proxy towards necessarily like market cap or revenue. We proxy to physical locations, like how many locations? So someone like a Dollar General is a way better prospect for us because Dollar General has 7,000 stores.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, on Subway.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, you want Subway is a good example. So we tend to focus on retail, healthcare and logistics. They tend to have big physical footprints, a lot of employees and a lot of challenges.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  And is there a main challenge theft? Like that's what they're worried about. That's they want to prevent stolen cars coming to steal stuff.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  I'd say employees is, I'd say three years ago when we started the business unit, it was assets. It was like, oh my gosh, coming out of COVID, everyone's stealing everything. It is much more shifted now to keeping employees safe. So you think about some of these businesses, they might terminate half a million people a year, quarter million people a year. Takes one angry employee to come back. And so in our system, you can have it automated, you know, with the HRS that like when employees terminated, they're added to a localized hot list. That employee ever comes back on campus, it's not illegal, but notify security is why people have security teams. Like, don't let them in the building. So it's about kind of moving that layer of safety farther out.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  The other example is like, we do quite a bit of work like in executive protection. So I'll give you like a good example. Uh, you think like a Fortune 2000 CEO.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Uh, our stuff's deployed at her house. We also deploy at corporate. It's not illegal, but it's quite weird if the same vehicle on the same day goes to both locations. Um, and so if I can.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  That is not that person.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not that person or their EP, EP team. And so like, we're, I think keeping people safe is the number one thing. And then the assets is like, it's good, but worst case, you just raise prices, which is not good. But like, we had this crazy case, um, with one of our healthcare partners, where the, this group, pretty smart, actually, would show up to the hospital, dressed in like a certain company's uniform. And be like, oh, the robotic surgical arm is, it needs to be repaired. Can you help me grab it? And some clinical, you know, clinical surgeon's like, oh yeah, let me show you where it is. Don't worry, it's, don't worry, John. Walk in there. This is a, you know, multimillion dollar piece of equipment.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  And they literally walk out with it. Uh, and this is, this, this happened in.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Some Thomas Crown affair kind of stuff.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  But it's like, I mean, you're a physician. You're not thinking like, oh, is John actually working at this company? Is the product, I think I used it yesterday. You're like, oh yeah, we got, that sounds right. It's super expensive product. Um, so this is an example to, to, to your conversation of like where the business gets interesting is we then connected that healthcare provider with federal authorities. It's like, this is not a, a low, this isn't going to be a local authority. It's always going to be a crime. It's a federal crime at this point. But they were taking the product, exporting it and selling it in a different country. Um, for kind of, you know, clinical work. So we, I think that one is pretty interesting. There's like, and that's an asset one where actually the healthcare system is like, this is a 20 something million dollars of product stolen, like.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  We're in the back. Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Are, is your business going international? Which countries is this best suited to? Like, is this a universally applicable product? Do those differences in, you know, law enforcement agency structure make it, I'm just curious.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  I mean, we're, we're dabbling.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  But.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  I think payments is probably like a very global, like everyone wants to process payments, I think.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Yes, there's a lot of local nuance.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think for us, maybe our ambitions aren't big enough, but when I look at the domestic opportunity, you know, we should be able to get to five, 10, 15 billion of revenue in America. And like, we're not, we're not there.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  And so it's the difference of, to your point of the nuance in payments, it's probably comparable to the nuance of working with local government, but then your overlay hardware, that just gets maybe two steps too difficult for my stomach today.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Today.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  But there's, I mean, we get an inbound, I got, I saw an email this morning from an Australian police department, it's like, we'd love to do a demo, and it's like.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Why not just do, I mean, I agree there's a lot of nuance. Is there some aspect of your tech, like you've put a lot of work into the cameras, vehicle recognition, stuff like that. Cause I know, again, from painful experience, that localization is never easy and never as easy as you think.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  But maybe it's easy.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Well, so here's the argument. So we pursued one really big deal last year in Mexico. We had support from one of our investors, like, we should go after Segar, great. And they had connections to the, to the Mexican government. And so we got all the way to the finish line, and it was us versus Hikvision. Hikvision is a, is a Chinese camera manufacturer, arguably a subsidiary of the CCP. And we were almost 10 times the price. And it came down to like, well, is the, is the Department of Homeland Security going to subsidize for this for the Mexican government? Because this, we know their list price is way more than this.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  It's very clear this is being subsidized for the Mexican government to make this purchase decision, of which case they will most likely be giving away real time feeds to another government.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  And we didn't win that deal. And like, I think that if you look at, there's a great book on this topic. If you look at what China was able to do in Africa with their infrastructure deployments on connectivity.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  That stuff, yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  They own those countries.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  What's the book, Eddie Krass? Okay, well, we'll pop it in.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  I'll find the book, but the book pretty much shows that like, one of the maybe smartest moves that China did was going to these developing countries and saying, we will give you 5G. Really low cost, we'll bond it for like 100 years, so we're not giving away for free, but guess what now? Chinese government has access to your pipes. And maybe that's not scary for some countries, for me, I'd be a little afraid. And that was our, that was our pitch to the Mexican government is like, you don't look at just cost, look at the sovereignty of the data and who has access and look, we'll domicile this data in your country, we won't domicile it in America. And they were like, sorry, it's too expensive. And we've seen that. We've done a couple of other projects like that, not just picking on Mexico, countries where we're not competitive with China,

• 52:51Speaker 00

  not because our products are better and much better, but we're not being subsidized by the federal government.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  But presumably NATO countries, you know, Australia.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Should be better, but I mean, no, I mean, I can, we should go walk around, you know, a strip mall and I could probably point out 80% of the cameras are Chinese manufactured. And your average would be business owner is like, yeah, I got it for 15 bucks on Amazon.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  And I don't know if you know that story on kind of like the, you know, vacuum cleaners? That someone like hacked into, it's like.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  The robot vacuums, yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  You should care about where your data is stored and who's storing it and that kind of stuff matters to me, but not everyone.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  As we've learned from Flock Safety, fighting crime is most effective with network data on your side. The same is true for payment fraud. Most businesses only see their own transactions, which makes it very hard to spot patterns and prevent future attacks. But Stripe Radar tackles fraud using the power of the Stripe network. Our machine learning models train on hundreds of billions of data points across the $2 trillion of payments we see on the Stripe network each year. When new fraud patterns emerge, our models can quickly learn and start blocking similar attacks immediately. So if you want to fight fraud like Flock Safety fights crime, check out Stripe Radar.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  As I think about your competitive landscape in the US and companies that sell to law enforcement, I think about Axon, which people would associate with making the body cameras, but they make lots of, and tasers, I think, but they make lots of other stuff. And then Motorola Solutions, which does kind of the radios and like the get up in the cars and things like that. Are you three the main three players? Are there others I should be thinking about? And how will this, presumably you guys compete more over time?

• 54:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I remember in 2020, trying to raise our series B.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  And every investor came to the same conclusion, three strikes, you're out. Like strike one, you're based in Atlanta. Now, like post-COVID, that's become like less of a problem. But you know, strike one, you're in Atlanta. Strike two, you're doing hardware. But that's really bad. Hardware is like really expensive now.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Now it's the only business returning value.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  I would argue that like AI is not going to like replace cameras or dig holes.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  It's like, I mean, a third of our employees dig holes for a living. Like that's just, AI is a long ways away from, I think, replacing that.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Sorry, what are they digging holes for?

• 55:20Speaker 00

  It was like, most of the time you want a camera where you don't have any infrastructure.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  I see, it's like a free selling post or something.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  We dig the hole, we trench it, we pour concrete, put our pole up. I mean, I might.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Okay, so it's on your own pole. I assume it was mounted on an existing pole.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  I should pull this data. I would not be surprised if I'm the largest general contractor in America. We pulled 77 permits a day last year. And if you've ever built a house, you know how difficult it is to permit something. 77 permits a day, like crazy scale.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  AI is not going to replace that. It's like a very safe asset.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  But, but, but so, yeah, so, so when we were trying to raise that, that series B, the third strike was, second strike was hardware, third strike was, and you're trying to sell to the government? The last company to go public was Axon. They went public in 2005, which would have been 15 years prior. And in the VC speak, it's like, well, if you can't get big enough to go public, you're not worth investing in. It's like, well, crap. Luckily, Gary Tan shared my beliefs of like, safety should be a public right. It shouldn't be a privilege. It should be a right if you live in America. So he did our Series B, which is, to say, only Series B's ever done.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  And he was right. And I was right. So it's the three of us now. It's Motorola, who's the biggest, they're about a $90 billion market cap, 120 years old, invented the radio, still are the, I think they have 80% market share globally of landmass radio. Just like crazy scale.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  It's funny how durable some of these businesses, Garmin and other, like you just start doing GPS, you start doing radio and you stay doing radio.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Own it. Own it. And to like Motorola's credit, like they've driven a ton of innovation on the radio itself, similar to Garmin, which like you'd thought Garmin would have been crushed. And it's like.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  They've been so creative in creating verticals, you know, aviation burning and all this stuff.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Awesome products. And no one would debate whether Motorola's radios work really well. And when you need them, which would be like a natural disaster.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  They work especially well.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  And that's like, pretty compelling when your job is to respond to natural disasters.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Totally, yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  So you have Motorola. Every single thing we do, we compete with Motorola in. So that's fun. They're big. Second one would be Exxon. You know, like I said, public in 2005, about a $40 billion market cap.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Where'd they come out of? Like, I understand where Motorola came out.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Rick Smith, the founder, graduated Harvard, took a fund from that. He plays it off as a very smart guy. Graduated Harvard, found this Taser company. It wasn't called Taser at the time.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Okay. So they started with Tasers.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. Found that, found those, kind of the IP, the product.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  And then tried to commercialize it. And it's if you're, you love a good founding story. It's a good one where, you know, almost went out of business, his like dad mortgaged the house. He mortgaged the house, went public because they couldn't finance it. I think they went out at like a $50 million, you know, market cap. This is like when people would public, you know, much earlier. And just has done a really good job of growing the business in the public markets.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  And Taser is a brand. It's like QNEX. They own, so they started as.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  They started a Taser and rebranded to Exxon in 20. 12 or 2015?

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  And got into body cams via acquisition. So they bought a company that had just won the contract in the New York, for the New York Police Department to do body cams. So bought that. They have a dash camera and they'd recently launched a competitive product with me. So now we compete. Everything we do, we compete with Axon too. It's fun.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  So it's just a Mexican standoff.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Every single, every single city, every single city. And there was interesting, because your question was also in the future. There's just really interesting phenomena happening now where because Flock's been somewhat successful, VCs have like poured in. And when I used to call a police department seven years ago.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Ah, now you have a bunch of competitors.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  No one would, no one would, no, like, you could literally just walk into a police department, be like, I'm going to meet the chief. They're like, oh, that's great. Now chiefs are like, great, 17 different people calling me for the exact same. Now, they don't compete with us, thankfully. But like, you think about, um, take like, uh, trying to deploy AI to monitor body cam footage. There is seven different companies with VC backing doing that. There's not, it's not a big enough market.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  I think, you know, your annual report was great, by the way. You're all at, what, 1% of GDP or something, probably? Okay. I'm in, I'm in 60 to 70% of the cities that matter.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  There's just not enough space for seven competitors. Like, it is, it won't, the market's not big enough. And we're not creating new cities. There's new businesses created every single day.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  I think you tend to see structurally in these, um, smaller, I mean, it's a large market in total, but where there's a finite universe of buyers, the distributional advantages are very powerful. I think that's what you're saying.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  And I think so. And so I think what we'll see is, you know, I, I see a new VC backed company every day. And I'm like, there's just, all these things are going out of business, so there's just going to be consolidation. And so you see, you know, I think Motorola's done 40 acquisitions in the last two years. Axon did five last year. We did one last year. I just think you're going to see.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Everyone in this space is going to be.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  A ton of consolidation. Because like, once someone builds a good product, you go, great, I already have a sales force, I have the customer base.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  We'll just pick you up.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I had no idea about the, um, uh, you know, you're talking about where the tech goes. I had no idea about, two things, actually, I learned here. One is that you're doing real time analysis of 911 calls.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  And so is that, I mean, is that being fed to an LLM, basically? Or like, 911 calls now scored by an LLM?

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  So the, the, the way I think about it is. We are trying to build an orchestration layer for a city's safety.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  The majority of police departments are understaffed. I think the worst I've heard recently, I was at a higher ed, so a college campus, a large college campus, you know, a football school. They're 40% of staffing. Could you imagine if like tomorrow you woke up and Stripe had It was 40% staffed. 40% staffed? Yeah, it'd be tough. You would like figure it out. Yeah. But a lot of things that you would deem core today would just stop. Yes, yes. And so that's how most of our customers operate. Which is not sustainable. Yes. And so we view our job as like being that force multiplier, or I like to think of this orchestration layer where every manual thing that's done by a human should be automated. Now, the difference in public safety versus maybe payments is like, I think you want humans at the start and finish still.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  It's like if I call 911, still kind of want a person to pick up. And those dispatchers are incredibly well trained. They're very well trained, they're very calm. Now, where I think it gets valuable is like, but let's say there's a mass event. AI is way better because if you have a surge of demand and you go from only one call a minute to 10 calls a minute. Yeah, yeah. AI is better than a busyton. Yep. And that makes sense. And then I think about for us, we call it amplified intelligence. When that 911 call comes in, LLM is able to pick up the call, is able to determine where the characteristics, can I go sort of build an investigation? Can I go pull this up so that if you're the detective, whereas historically you walk in, you're like, all right, I'm gonna go get the call transcript, I'm gonna go look up my record system, I'm gonna go do a bunch of analysis. It's the equivalent of having, you know, whether you use something like a glean

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  or another product that's like, you're gonna do a lot of the hard work. So then as a sales rep, you show up and you're like, got it. Yep, yep. And so we do that for investigators. So they show up to, they get delivered a case and a lot of the busy work has been done for them so they can use the human part of their job. I'm having all the data they need, this. All different data, like, let's go do this. Like, we solved, one of the cooler cases we've solved was a armored, you know, armored trucks, they bring, they move money around.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Was one of the best, it's called like a jugging case. It's very popular in Texas where you like, you follow these armored trucks. And you typically have like a shooter on a nearby building. And when the person walks out, the shooter shoots him, another guy runs in, grabs all the money and runs away. It's like a very, it's obviously sad, but it's a very, very profitable thing. So we built an agent that tracks armored cars.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  And so at all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's our truck. If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically. Now, that's not illegal.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Right? But it is enough that if you're a city like Houston, who has a jugging problem, you want to get a subscription to like, you let me know whenever you see someone doing that because I want to know.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  I want to get a step ahead.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  So there's all these types of crimes that you can sort of say, okay, this is helping officers not do something new. It is just doing things that when you're at 50%, 40% staffing.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Sure, 100% you'd have been doing this yourself. You'd be checking the cars, you'd be in flock, you'd be running searches, but you can't do that anymore.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, what you're describing is again, having this data to be able to do anomaly detection just allows for a new kind of police work that otherwise just wouldn't have gotten done.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  No, it's breaking, it's, and it's like people's lives, you know?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  And then the other thing I hadn't realized you guys were doing is the drone assistance where, again, this sounds to me like, you know, obviously already it's a case that, you know, many police departments have a helicopter. And then for very serious crimes, you know, they will, they will task it. But that's expensive, very limited resource. And so I think what you're doing is allowing for some manner of air support to just be much more cost effective and available to more officers.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. I mean, I think it's another example where there's just a lot of tasks. We ask law enforcement officers to conduct that a drone could do faster, more effectively and cheaper.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  And so if it's, you know, calling out a hit and run, great, send the drone. I was working with a town in Tennessee, it's a pretty, it's a good city. Their average response time to a 911 call is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. Just like a better quality of service, like in the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer. I guess just, it's, it's really nice when you see technology. Deliver both like a 10x better products at a dramatically lower cost.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  That's how it's supposed to work and it's working for them.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Where are the drone, what kind of task or intervention are the drones best suited for?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  I mean, the two most, there's three primary use cases. The first would be vehicular pursuits. It's like one of the most dangerous things cities conduct is high speed pursuits.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  Typically, it's not the suspect that dies. It's some random person.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Or something, yeah.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they end pursuits? They don't pursue anymore. Send the drone. Just send the drone. Way better.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  It's way safer.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  So you don't have like a police car running at 80 miles an hour down the residential streets.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  No, you just have a drone four feet up in the air.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  Quietly, safely, waiting for the car to pull into a gas station, pull into their home, pull in somewhere safe, get to a red light. And then meanwhile, that video feeds being broadcasted to the entire police department. It's like, great, John's over here.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Block him in.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  It's, you know, every pursuit goes to GTA level five immediately.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, if you're, if you're smart.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  So that's a big one. The second is 911 calls. So what's been interesting is that, you know, we'll send the drone first. It takes someone like Elk Grove up in Northern California. They've got a bunch of our drones flying the 911 calls.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  So where's Elk Grove?

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Elk Grove? It's a suburb of Sacramento.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  But maybe 75,000 people. So I say suburb, it's like a pretty big town. But so like they'll dispatch for 911. Majority of the calls actually never need a human to show up. And the example I'd give you is like, you see a fistfight. So you call 911. And then what happens is historically like seven minutes later, someone shows up. Guess what? They're no longer fighting, but now we've dispatched this officer. He's like, well, I'm in the area. Maybe I'll grab a Gatorade, walk around, check it out. 30 minutes later, like we've wasted a bunch of time.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  You send the drone. In best case, you see the guys fighting and you're like, great, I'm gonna keep an eye on them. And like, and allow the officer to do his job, or if there's never, there's not a fight anymore. You dismiss the call. And so you actually increase, sorry, decrease the response time for situations you really do need to go to by removing the junk in the system. So the second one and the third one is search and rescues. Not every city has a helicopter. Cities that do, it's a very expensive proposition. And so sadly, like, people go missing all the time. And you can, you know, pop up the drone, throw on thermals. Show it's a night, you know, and you find the person.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Actually, I hadn't thought of that, but drone plus thermal camera is very transformative for S A R.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had a, we had an interesting case in a, in a cold state right now, who's flying our drone.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  There was a, sorry, a lot of my cases involve homicides. I'm gonna find a better topic than homicides at some point.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  I have a better topic for you in a second.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Okay, great. So, so there, there's this 911.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Car on the side of the street.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Launch the drone, throw on thermals, actually see where the person went. Like, sensitive enough to see like the heat pattern, like there's like different layers of snow. Want to find the guy, want to find himself and everything. But it's interesting, like, to your point, I think we're still very early on in the use case exploration. And I think it's this type of technology that until it's fully proliferated, which give it two or three more years. I think we'll continue to find more like ways to augment how we respond. Because I think, I guess the last example I'll give you is, we typically launch the drone for all first responders. So it's not just law enforcement, it's fire, it's EMS, like, the whole community gets advantage of it.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. Okay, my fun example, because I agree, a lot of the, you know, crimes are quite heavy topics. So I feel like one of the most satisfying genres of YouTube video to watch is people who laser aircraft. But they are mistakenly lasering a police helicopter. So this is insane crime that happens.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  Why do they do that?

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Okay, so there's this insane crime that happens.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Isn't that bad? It's like very dangerous.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  It's very bad, it's very dangerous, yeah, but like bored people, to your point of just. Maybe people going mad during COVID and being cooped up. People just for fun, laser aircraft. It's very dangerous. It's dangerous for anyone's eyes shining a laser into them. But like a pilot who is flying a plane full of people at that moment, it's especially bad. But it's a real problem that happened. You listen to like ATC recordings all the time, like airliner going into LAX, you know, getting lasered by someone on the ground. And so people buy these lasers on Amazon.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're like, they're very powerful lasers.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. They're very powerful and they're just lasering the cockpits of aircraft. But occasionally what happens is they're lasering an aircraft, but it turns out that aircraft is the police helicopter.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  They're just like, gotcha.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  And they got the thermal and they're just like, and so you get to watch the whole thing unfold. There's a bunch of these on YouTube where like you see the squad cars coming up and it's, yeah.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  That's odd to check that out.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  But it's a, it's such an odd crime and yeah, it's, it's very satisfying to see them caught in real time.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Yes. Uh, that's a really weird, the other interesting thing too, because I know you, you like aviation stuff. Yeah, we're having to see, we're seeing more and more police helicopters have to turn off ADS-B as well. Cause like criminals have the same data that you have.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  It's a, most of the police helicopters actually fly without ADS-B now, which is like a whole challenge.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Sure, from a separation point of view.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Okay, I have so many more things to, to go into or kind of jumping around, but I like this.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  How's the business evolved? So you're now, you said around 500 million in ARR, selling to both law enforcement agencies and corporates. Just have there been interesting changes in how you monetize? Is it just questions given up?

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'd say the biggest challenge is, you know, two, three years ago, we were single product, single customer. Like we had our neighborhood business. It was growing 20, 30% year over year, but it was kind of just operating. And law enforcement was going really, really fast. We had one product and then maybe made a mistake. I know RJ from Rivian was here and shared some story, like probably built too many products for too many customers really quickly. And in hardware, that's really expensive. Hardware tends to follow this J curve of like huge capex investment upfront to get the thing going. And then you monetize and it actually winds up being.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  And there's very significant scale economies as. Very high orders of magnitude.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  Yes. And so, you know, we went from one camera that tracks cars to a camera that's focused for for people, a drone, this trailer, multiple customer segments. And that's really hard.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  So looking back at it, you think you went too broad too quickly?

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would have better.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  So did you discontinue products and stuff?

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  No, we just muscled through it. Still muscling through it.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Slow down the race of adding products.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  We were like, we cannot do any new hardware products this year. Like, we need to take a year or two off of hardware products. We can debate software products because there's no incremental burn or cash outlay for it. But we just, we know what the J curve looks like. Like, we saw it in the core business and like the core business now is profitable, which is great. Like, we'll generate free cash flow, hundreds of millions of dollars of operating cash flow this year. But like, those new businesses are effectively like Flock five years ago.

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  And we know how painful that is, but we were just like, oh, it'll be great, it'll be fine. And so I think that's been, that's been challenging for us is how do you balance from a product roadmap, servicing two customers with just very different use cases? Like, your average Amazon distribution facility is, you know, 30 acres, 50 acres. That's, it's like a neighborhood block.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  And then you've got like a San Francisco that's got hundreds of square miles. It's the problems are different. So that, that is probably like the hardest thing that we're, we're still

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  trying to muscle through that. And like, how do you organize your company to service these two different customers without having redundancies? Have to figure that out.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  What have you learned, other than don't make too many products? What have you learned by building hardware? Or what have you learned about?

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I think the, I mean,

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  a couple of things that I would jump to, the first would be. I don't know how you guys think about forecasting demand. It's a full-time profession at Flock.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  True.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  And it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  And if you look at the like hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where they fail.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, we ended up with, I mean, our hardware business is a very small part of our overall business, but we wildly overproduced at one point.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  And just sitting in a warehouse like, there's all my money.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Sitting in a warehouse.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Sitting around.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  Now luckily, it's not, you know, it's not going to go bad.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  It's not like bananas. It's like, oh gosh, we have like a week to move this product.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  But.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  But it kind of goes bad.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  But it does go bad at some point. And I think like, you know, I remember during YC, many, many years ago, talking to Eric at Pebble of how it's like the irony that in the best year ever of the company in terms of revenue is the year they went out of business.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  And like, that's crazy.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  But they just, they overproduced in Q4, even though it was still a record quarter, it just still wasn't enough. So I think like, that has been amplified by also our distribution process, like which we're full first party. So we not only design the stuff, build the stuff, we install the stuff. And so I have to have forecasting.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Maintain it presumably.

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  Maintain it as well. So I have to have forecasting, not just at the product level, but at the geographic level by product. With some level of discrepancy, I don't need to know this city versus that city, but at least the general area. So I think forecasting, I just, that's been pretty hard. And the second is every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimal and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of like, everything's a two-way door.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  You want to pick that part?

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Great. We're gonna live with it for the next five, 10 years.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And like, I don't know, you probably don't track this as much, but probably the dumbest financial mistake I've made in the last year is our supply chain team came to us like six months ago and they were like, Solid state memory is getting really expensive. And like we had, we had this one part, and those are our cameras. And the price had gone up 4X in near time, which indicates that typically one much, much larger company placed a massive order.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  And so we've seen this time and time again where an Apple or a Sony or some consumer or Samsung will pick apart for a new product that's coming out in 12 months and the supply globally disappears.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're feeling the AI data center build out in your supply chain?

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Yes, and so my, our supply chain leader was like, this is getting crazy. And I was like, well, who do we use? And they go, use SanDisk. And so I'm looking at their stock and I'm like, oh, should we be buying like San... I started my CFO, I was like, should we be buying SanDisk stock? I was like, their prices are going up 3X. It means that like a lot of people are buying a lot of products.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Now, of course, the stock's up like 1,200%.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  And I feel like an idiot for not like following that conviction. But no, yeah, I mean, our bomb, now luckily it's a small part of our bomb.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  But like, we have a full team of people who all they do is mitigate global supply chain risk because parts just disappear.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  Okay, so just getting the products into the hands of customers as already spec is non-trivial.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  So what we wind up doing, which I think a lot of companies do, I'm not sure if we're special, but it's just like a, you don't think about this, is, you know, when we look at a bomb of a product, we'll risk purchase, not necessarily the whole thing, but the cheapest, highest risk things. Like we should have bought, and we did, we bought a ton of memory so that we didn't run out because we can't.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  But I would have thought, you know, often these supply chain crunches come on the leading edge where, you know, everyone's fighting over TSMC, you know, 3 nanometer node production capability, but you know, the auto chips as, you know, much larger gate sizes are not, or larger nodes are not as contended. And I would have thought that you guys are not using tippity top end cameras and lenses and memories and things like that. So, but, but that's not a panacea.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  It's like capacitors.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  And, and the point I give you is like, let's say, let's say we ship, you know, 100,000 units.

• 1:17:23Speaker 00

  That's tiny. And so all it takes is, you know, if we need this capacitor from Texas Instruments, all it takes is Apple saying, well, the iPhone 27 isn't have that capacitor. And Apple's like, cool, we'll buy everything for the next three years. And then we go, oh crap, we got to completely.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  But I'm just surprised you're using, you're competing with Apple for components. Like I would have thought their capacitors.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  Everything, I mean, they, well, capacitor is a capacitor, but so it's actually know the capacity you want, you have to have a supply chain to buy it. You have to have enough inventory within a lead time like it is.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  Not, and so what you wind up doing is like early on, your, your designs are very simple. You buy everything from, you know, out of fruit or whatever. You buy everything like from easy places where you can buy 50 at a time.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  And when you move to like 10s of thousands at a time.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  You start having to have designs that have four different derivatives for every part so that your supply chain doesn't have to call engineering being like this part's out. They know like these parts are all sub-ins.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  You're describing the scale diseconomies of manufacturing where it's easier to buy three of something than it is to buy 30,000.

• 1:18:21Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. And I never would have thought we would need like a team of people who all they do is spend money for a living, just buy stuff.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  What's hard about operating the hardware? Like, how do you keep the lenses clean on the cameras? And just how do you, I don't know.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's like a, on the one hand, you know, we're some of the best weather forecasters, you know, it's like we keep track of every major storm.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  Uh, it's like storm, like we, we need to be back up. So we do like, we have a pretty cool, we call it our flight team. Uh, and there are technicians that only fly.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  It's like that big storm in New York and Boston, like they were flying in to the storm. Like we had surge demand to fix stuff.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  To be on site to when they get a call that something is down, go repair it.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, so everything's, everything, we have really good telemetry on the equipment. So like if a customer calls, something's gone.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  Like we've really screwed up.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  You know, before the customer.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  We know before the customer knows. And most of the maintenance at this point is fairly predictive. Like we know this mechanical part malfunctions after between 100 and 200,000 uses. So like, if you're in the area, it's ironic that the, the largest cost structure in replacing equipment is the driving.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  It's driving. And so like, if we think a part we need a replacement in six months.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  And we're nearby, it's cheaper just to replace it, reaffirm it and get it back in the field. So that part's been like, we had to build a software company, a hardware company, and a field services business.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Do you have parts that wear out? I would have thought the whole thing is fairly solid state.

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  We, most of it's, well drones obviously.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Sure, different kettle of fish.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  But on the camera side, there's one part, which is the IR cut filter. So when we operate at night, we operate on infrared and you need a different filter so that you don't have pink images during the day. So that literally changes twice a day.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  Oh, like something mechanically?

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Put a lens over it.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  I see.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  And after a couple of thousand uses.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  The one moving part.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  It's the one, and it is the only part that breaks.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  Why not just have two lenses?

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  Uh, with two different image sensors too?

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  Boom.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  No good dike, no.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  No good reason.

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  Other than it would just be more expensive.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  But yeah, that part's like, I think a third of the company, like I said, digs holes, drives bucket trucks.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  Keeps track of all the kind of inventory, but if you look at it, you know, I didn't want to build that business.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  But early on in the company, there was this horrific case in Atlanta where a woman was just running in, you know, our version of like Mission Dolores or pick your like nice park in the city, random act of violence. There's cameras everywhere in the park.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  None of them were working. And the city got blasted appropriately for it. And they're like, well, but also like, do we really want our police department being in charge of like camera uptime?

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  That's like, that's a dumb idea.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  We should like pay a company, I flock in this case, so just like make sure the stuff always works.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:13Speaker 00

  So it's not the, you know, my favorite part of the business in that sense of, I guess, just it's a lot of stress, it's very operationally intense, but I think it's valuable to our customers.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. How do you think about the right, you talk about cameras in the park, you know, many movies center on this idea of universal surveillance, you know, in the Born at Entity or something, you know, they have cameras on absolutely everything, or I guess the supremacy, I think it's more the Waterloo Station scene, and same with lots of other things. Just how do you create the right guardrails once you move off roads and into parks and public spaces and kind of creating access controls around that?

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. The cop out answer is like, I don't want to be in charge of deciding that. Thankfully, we have elected officials who. We vote to make that decision. But what do you think is sensible place for them to land is? I think it's way higher than we have now. Like, I think that, for me at least,

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  for every crime that occurs that doesn't get solved, means we didn't have enough cameras.

• 1:22:22Speaker 00

  Like, that's, to me, the easiest rubric. Now, I think to your question, though, it's a question of where they are, who has access to them. And I think it's one of the few cases where, you know, the disparity between, maybe, my knowledge and your knowledge of how the technology works and how elected officials work is, like, it's pretty big.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  And, like, their dreams of how it might work versus actually how it works, like, it's much less sophisticated than they think or dream up. It's just a camera. So for me, at least, we should have an abundance of cameras and have incredibly restrictive controls of how and when they're used. And the example I'd give you is, like, today, everything in Flock, you can generally do. There's data retention, where we protect, you know, how long something is stored. So for live video, it's typically seven days. For LPR data, it's typically 30 days. You can go longer or shorter if it democratically elected body votes on it.

• 1:23:16Speaker 00

  But, like, I would challenge, why not do more cameras and have a warrant restriction?

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  Like, why not do 30 days of LPR data? But if you have warrant, you have a year. Yeah. You need less cameras. And so I do think there are some nuanced ways to do it. And, you know, thankfully, we have a really good government affairs team that is lobbying for that kind of legislation to say, like, there's a way for us to both be safe and maintain civil liberties. And it needs to be legislated, though. Yes. Like, I can't...

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  Those ideas are not in line with what my customers want. And my law enforcement customers. They just want to go catch bad guys. They want to follow the Constitution, catch bad guys. But that nuance in the middle of, like, but what is societally acceptable today really belongs in your elected officials to make that decision, so as it can change. And so we push them to, like, let's legislate this now before it becomes a problem. Where do you think has passed sensible rules? Um, sensible. Um, I think Virginia's bill last year was pretty good. It defined, it did a few things well, and one thing I don't agree with. What it did well is it defined a modest data retention period of 21 days.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  And that's fine. I like 30, but tomato, tomato, it's fine. It wasn't, I think the ACLU was lobbying for three minutes. It's a little tough. It's hard to swallow. I, you know, seven, 14, 20 something days is like enough. There's a trade off there. They mandated formal auditing, which I think is great. Enough of, not enough of our customers audit themselves on a regular basis. We can build software to make that easier, but we need to be pushed to do that. It's like customers don't want it and they need to be told to do it. So I think that was good. It also validated that this can only be used for criminal investigations. And I think it's really good. While that's, that's obvious, it's helpful to write in law. I think the only thing that I disagree with is they did say, you know, effectively,

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  there's no participation with the federal government.

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  I think that's just, it's their choice. Yeah. I think it's their choice. Yeah. And that's the beauty of the country is like Virginia should do what feels right for Virginia. Yeah. But I worry about the types of cases that you, you don't want to read about on the news that tend to get solved by the US Marshals, the DEA, the ATF, the FBI. And like, they can't use our technology in Virginia. Which is, like I said, I live in Georgia, so thankfully it doesn't really impact me. Yes. But as a business, I'm like, I don't know if that's right. But I'm more than anything just happy they passed some legislation. Yes. Um, New Mexico passed a similar bill this year. California has a similar-ish bill. I think a couple of other states have, I think the worst type of bill is actually not, you know, whether it's 14 days or 30 days of detention.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  To me, the worst bill is an unenforceable bill.

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  So you can imagine a bill that's like, this product cannot be used for, via possession of marijuana. Like, who's going to enforce it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, you might, It's not noble. You might believe that. Yeah. And that's great, but someone has to enforce this. And actually what's going to happen is no one's going to enforce it now. And that's, I think, like really bad law in this case. Yeah. Myself. I'm curious.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  What your view is on police department procurement? What do they do? What do they buy not enough of? What do they buy too much of?

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  I don't, they don't feel like they're swimming in, you know, procurement dollars. But yeah, I'm curious.

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the thing they buy too much of is, and not to pick on Motorola, things that only matter in the point zero zero one percent case.

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  So it's like, guys, why don't you just use like cell phones? Well, natural disaster. And it's like, got it, okay. Like, how often? So you look at like a landmass radio contract and it's in a cost of like San Francisco County, you know, $200 million. Like, I mean, like.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  You're talking about that kind of money?

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  On a, on a TCV basis. Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  I mean, I mean, I think Motorola is a really big company.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it says you don't get there. And you, and you go, well, I get it. Like, if there's an earthquake and every single cell tower goes down, law enforcement definitely needs a way to communicate.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  Man, is that, is that really the only way?

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  Like, could you guys just like have your own tower? There's gotta be something. But you look into it.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Is this a your margin is my opportunity situation for you guys?

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  Maybe because law enforcement is unique in this case in which like they really also like that they own the infrastructure, like they own that bandwidth. And so they can do whatever they want with it.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Speaker 00

  I don't think they do anything interesting with it, but they can.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  Versus if they're riding on Verizon or AT&T, they have no control over that.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  Why don't you guys just have the exact same products, like?

• 1:28:15Speaker 00

  And have a good.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Radio in the spectrum.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  Probably should.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Speaker 00

  But we got a lot of things.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  That's my, you know, like a VC in the board.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  You should talk to that $80 billion company that's been in business for 130 years. Like, I mean, I guess you did it in payments and it worked out pretty well. But yeah, so I think like, that part, I think is really, really kind of crazy. At least I can the business where I feel like I buy for my majority case.

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:28:38Speaker 00

  And I deal with the ramifications of the edge case or build around it. And they, they do that. I think procurement is exceptionally slow and exceptionally laborious. Everything goes to RFP.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  But the RFP is written for one vendor. So all it does is one end, wind up taking an extra year.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  Six months. That's like, that's. I get why RFPs exist.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  But they're not actually RFPs. I've never seen an RFP that's not written for one vendor.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  Um, I'm sure it exists somewhere.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  I haven't seen it. But what I think they do well is like, one of the things that I think the government did figure out is maybe you need to have an RFP for a $200 million contract. What about get $10,000 contract? Great. So they do have spin levels where, you know, if you're a complete chief, you can go spend $25,000 or $5,000 and like not have to go through the entire process. But no, it's tough. Like it's, I would not wish upon anyone selling to local government. It's more negatives than positives in all ways.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And again, that's procurement process has evolved for a reason, you know, and to protect against certain other failure modes, but yeah.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you think about it in business and like, I know you.

• 1:29:47Speaker 00

  We use Stripe. I'm sure you have like six competitors. I don't know. But like, I know you, so I'm sure like by Stripe.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  And that in the business world is considered very normal.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  In the government world, that is called illegal.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:29:59Speaker 00

  Which is really, it's, it's really interesting.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

  Like what we.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  But again, it's evolved for a reason, you know, the rules are written in blood.

• 1:30:06Speaker 00

  Uh, well, no, and then like you, you have plenty of cases where it's, you know, it's, it's gone sideways.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  But it is just interesting dynamic, right? For so many things that we take for granted as normal business practice are definitively illegal when procuring with government.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  How do you guys use Fed?

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  I mean, a lot of our customers, a lot of our private sector customers pay either via credit card or check.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 1:30:25Speaker 00

  A lot of checks.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Okay. So for the, um, uh, public sector stuff, that'll generally be via a torturous, you know, RFP process and PO and something like that. But if you're a private sector.

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  And then, but even, I mean, when we don't want to be in the check deposit business and you guys.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  So you strike for the check functionality, because no one knows about our check functionality that Stripe can accept checks for you.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Am I allowed to talk about it?

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  No, no, no one knows because we're bad at marketing.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  Oh, I was just, I was just like, oh.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Not because it's a secret.

• 1:30:53Speaker 00

  No, yeah, no, it's like, we don't want to be in that business.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30:56Speaker 00

  Um, it's like, it's a remote deposit box or whatever it's called.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 00

  Uh, but yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We can give you an address that you can give to your customers and they can mail checks to us. Uh, and we will turn it into digital money. And the fact that a bunch of atoms and, you know, an envelope going through the postal system were involved. You can be, um, you can forget about those details.

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  Not a single customer of ours pays via ACH, either a check or credit card. We do a lot of checks. I'd probably say eighty percent, ninety percent are checks, maybe higher.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  You're, you're one of the few tech companies to mostly use Stripe for checks.

• 1:31:26Speaker 00

  Uh, it's, you know, trying to buck the trend every day of the week, so.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  That's really funny. I love that. Um, you were talking about police departments maybe being, um, over fixated on kind of a zero, one percent, uh, zero point one percent cases. Does that apply to, you know, a common critique that you hear of police department procurement is the sort of militarization of police departments? And, you know, what we really need is a bear cast, you know, for this town of twenty thousand people, which is like an armored personnel carrier.

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, and it's like a three million dollar vehicle. And it's like, why couldn't we just like get an F one fifty?

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  So do you think that applies also to kind of the shiny stuff?

• 1:32:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, you look at like early on when we were building the company, they would, we'd get the question of like, well, can it, can it track? Can your license plate reader work on a car going a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour? I was like, probably not. I've, I've never driven that fast. I'd have to rent a runway to go like test this.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  And they're like, it's really important. I'm like, uh, really? Like, how often does it happen? They're like, in a high-speed pursuit, people drive very fast. And I'm like, in a high-speed pursuit, you know where, who they are. Like, we, we were criticized and had to build a product. Like, we, until we got to like one twenty, one fifty, it was a major blocker to sales.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  I mean, it's like, we built a camera that, I mean, we tested it on roads that we drove on. So we'd get up to like eighty or ninety, it worked fine. But we had to eventually, we rented a, um, like, you know, an amateur racing track.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  And just drove around in circles at a hundred and twenty miles. We, we emailed the employees and we're like, who owns a car that goes really fast? And that was actually kind of funny because a lot of people were like.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  What cars do you use to test this?

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  Uh, we, we had some like, there's some fast cars, putting it Teslas, Rivians, some other nicer cars.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  Uh, drive really fast. Uh, and like, that was like a fun day because I put the cameras up and like, and do it, but.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  And did the cameras work out of the box or did you have to tune the, on the performance? Yeah, okay, so it just, it worked.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  They're the only place where, we had to make one modification, which is kind of interesting. We deploy our radar. So on really busy roads where our angle of incident is particularly tight, I like, we can't shoot super far down to shoot at a sharp angle. We have a radar attachment that we tilt backwards to notify like the cars on the way, like get ready, which helps, but that's like a very like far edge case. But the camera doesn't actually-

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  You prime the camera essentially?

• 1:33:42Speaker 00

  Yes, to get ready for a car coming.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  Huh, I'm sorry.

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  Because the camera is offline.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:33:49Speaker 00

  Unless there's a vehicle.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  I see, so you boot it up. And that's a power-saving measure?

• 1:33:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, the most expensive thing we do is like take a picture.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  The second most expensive thing we do is send stuff to the cloud. Third is just like being a computer turned on.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:34:04Speaker 00

  And so it's similar to your iPhone, you know, turning your screen off.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  So we added the button, you know, to take a photo right away.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  The continuously running radar is very low power?

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  It's negligible.

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  I see, that's cool.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a fun one.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  We were talking about how hardware previously, but um, how's putting your own drones been like?

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  A lot of fun.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  Sounds fun.

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  No, it's fun, but it's like, you like, um, you know, I've, I've, I've kids and you have a kid. It's like really fun to build a product that your kids understand.

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  It's like we, we drive around Atlanta and my son will count the cameras from like home to school. You know, or we're going to like the airport or we'll go like to the park and like, I, I love that he can actually like understand what dad does.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:34:52Speaker 00

  I'm not sure if you've taught your son like-

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  I'm screwed on this.

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah, I got, yeah. We process the world's payments. And so when you show him a drone, he's like, oh, this is so cool. And he has like a little miniature drone.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  Also, you don't only do drones, but you do drones to catch bad guys.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's like very convoluted.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  Very early age.

• 1:35:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, you like, you get like, yeah, to be clear, like he'll watch Paw Patrol and be like, that's what dad built. It's like, that's the, that's the helicopter, but we don't put any people in it. But I think what's, what's been fun is we made a, a hypothesis that, you know, if you studied planes, I think the most interesting plane military-wise is the Warhawk. Whereas traditionally, you built a plane.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  One thing.

• 1:35:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, what do we, what kind of business can we add? And they're like, no, no, let's design the best missile. It's very precise, very big, and then we'll figure out how to fly it. And so our thesis was, well, we're really good at cameras. A drone is really just a camera that flies. Let's build the best payload and then figure out how to fly it. And so if I showed you, I could show you the payload the next time you're in Atlanta, or we could fly one out here. It's like the coolest camera ever. It's huge. It's like this big. And it's got, you know, four different, I think it's four different image sensors, maybe six, different optical lenses, like we can zoom, we can read a license plate almost a mile away. Like crazy specs, great thermal. Then we're quick to fly. So like, I don't know, I was an electrical engineer. One of my co-founders was a mechanical engineer. It's fun to build things that fly.

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  So it's like, all right, we have payload, we have this airframes, we have aeronautical engineers now. Like, it's been fun to grow the engineering team.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  An imaging team, you think about the dock that it lives in. It's effectively a commercial-grade HVAC system. Like, the drone lands, it needs to be cold, it needs to be hot. It has to charge. If you know anything about lithium ion, lithium ion doesn't like to be too hot or too cold. So you've got to keep that well-conditioned. It's like huge compressor, it's this massive thing that opens and closes. And if it's snowing, if it's frozen, like, all of these engineering problems.

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  And that's like, that's the fun part of this stuff.

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  Everything else is, you know, selling is good, but like, building stuff's fun.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  How many drones do you have out there in the world?

• 1:36:53Speaker 00

  Oh, we don't, we don't.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Okay. But decent number.

• 1:36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's hundreds of cities that are flying.

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  I find drones.

• 1:36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  That's cool. It's funny, when you talk about the A-10 Warthog, you're reminding me of the Boyd book, which Robert Coram, which I only read recently, but it's like one of those kind of Silicon Valley canon. And everyone talks about, and everyone talks about him in the context of his Uda loop, you know, Orient something, decide.

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  But that's actually kind of overrated. And actually, the main reason Boyd is interesting is helping the Pentagon procure better planes. And just reminded that with the Warthog and also, you know, your description of needing to run at 170 miles an hour. Because basically, he came into a Pentagon that had a bunch of bad planes because all the generals were just obsessed with specs.

• 1:37:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  And they wanted, you know, a high top speed and like they really judge planes on specs. And actually, you know, the fighter pilot joke is that there are only two throttle settings in a dogfight. You know, maximum full military power or throttles idle. Like those are the only two.

• 1:38:00Speaker 00

  The only two that actually matter.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Energy states that you're in. And what matters is maneuverability and the ability to add energy or lose energy quickly. So anyway, he was involved in basically all of the good planes.

• 1:38:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  That were produced, including the A10 Warthog, because he got them out of the mindset of just kind of speeds and feeds.

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  Well, and that's like for us, the spec we track is like time on scene.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Speaker 00

  And so one of the reasons why we care so much of payload is like, if you have a payload that can see really far away, you don't have to fly there. So actually, you get there faster virtually.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 1:38:28Speaker 00

  Which is what like, if this was a drone that was carrying a payload like a zipline or something else, like actually physically in there matters. But for us, it's just about time on virtual scene.

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:37Speaker 00

  So that's what we measure ourselves to. So that's why we fly high because like physics allows you to see farther.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  That's why we have these huge payloads. You don't have to actually fly there and then you don't have to fly as fast, which means you can conserve battery life, which means you're in the air longer. Like all these designs were around.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  That use case versus like, you know, I'm sure a sure zipline went through in a whole separate use case of like, what's the max payload and that kind of stuff, so.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  How many drones does a city the size of San Francisco need?

• 1:39:01Speaker 00

  12.

• 1:39:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:39:02Speaker 00

  So a very small number. No, it was me. Our average drone can cover a 30 square mile radius and get there within under a minute. And thankfully, you know, knock on wood, like there aren't that many 911 calls that merit a response. So we look at it both ways. We look at it in terms of geography and then 911 density. So in more rural parts, you need less drones because there's less call for service. And then in more dense urban areas, you need more drones, mostly from a volume of service.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:29Speaker 00

  But even in our most dense customers, like it's pretty rare that they fly. Two drones at once.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  It it happens, but it's like, I think our busiest drone is being flown, you know, 90 hours a week.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  That's like, that's a lot of flight time.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  And sorry, do you dispatch the drone when it's needed from its charging dock? Or is the idea that it's out there flying already and you just task it?

• 1:39:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's like, it lives in the dock.

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  Um, there is some, there's debate of whether a drone should be in the air at all times.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Does that actually save you meaningful time?

• 1:40:00Speaker 00

  Being in the air?

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  I would save a lot of time.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, but like you look at the Carpenter case in Baltimore and they had a airplane with a very powerful camera. 24 hours a day and that was deemed like a unwarranted search. And so it got killed.

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:40:17Speaker 00

  And so we're very conscious, like we have a, uh, you, other part of our business that is interesting now at scales. Like we have a full team of constitutional attorneys.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:40:25Speaker 00

  And I'm sure you have like a regulatory team that when you want to build something, they're like, let's check it before we ship.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:40:30Speaker 00

  We have a constitutional team. It's like, cool idea. Let's actually make sure this doesn't violate the constitution.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  Look up the fourth amendment here real quick.

• 1:40:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's just like double check this thing. Um, and so when you look at the drone, like we believe, and there hasn't, this has been tested in court, but these are smart people. They're like, look, we just, it's unclear how that would end in court.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Speaker 00

  But if you call 911, there is a reason to fly the drone.

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  Um, if there's a gunshot, if there is a gunshot detection, if there's a stolen car, like that is a reason to dispatch. Versus just like flying around looking for stuff is not, it's not, it's not unconstitutional, but we would not push that as a use case.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  Sorry, like a lot of this, um, precedent, you know, uh, as new technologies come along, you know, people reason by analogy of like, you know, uh, cars sometimes somewhat like your house, but somewhat different, you know, whatever. Like, isn't a drone flying around just like a police cruiser on its patrol?

• 1:41:22Speaker 00

  So the, the, and I'm not, I'm not an attorney.

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Speaker 00

  It hasn't been tested.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  Neither have I, but never stop the ass.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  The other analogy that would be the butterfly effect, which is like, when things are much, much cheaper, much, much easier. Uh, historical precedent gets thrown away.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:41:36Speaker 00

  And so take the helicopter example, you could say, oh, well, helicopters fly sometimes, but yeah, but helicopters are so expensive. It's not practical.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:42Speaker 00

  To have 24 seven, you know, aerial coverage with a drone, it's not impractical.

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 00

  Um, it's the same reason why like when we launch our drone, we want to go from like the launch location to the, you know, in-location. The cameras point the horizon the whole time. We don't want to look in your backyard. Um, that's like, I feel really strong and that's not a law. That's just like our point of view of where the law should be.

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:42:05Speaker 00

  So we'll build the product for that.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 1:42:06Speaker 00

  And then if the operator wants to tilt down, that's their control. But as a default, we're fine.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  That's very interesting. Last question, you know, so you guys have grown with cameras out there in cities now getting into drones, building the software OS to help law enforcement agencies and others kind of synthesize all the information they have. Just what comes next? What future product ideas are being with where do we go?

• 1:42:32Speaker 00

  So I think about it, um, we talked about this earlier. Failure for Flock is prison population goes up. It's actually like really bad. Um, and we look at, you know, the products today are very much focused in the middle of a crime. A crime has already happened and therefore we should solve it. And that's really good. And I think we're definitely not done, but we've, we've done a lot of work in that category. I get pretty interested in, in expanding that and going, well, what about, what can we be doing from a product perspective to prevent crime from happening? And that actually doesn't necessarily look like software. It's like one of the interesting things that we started last year. So we call our thriving cities fund. It's probably an analogy similar to your like Stripe press,

• 1:43:17Speaker 00

  which is like, it's never going to be the core of your business, but like you feel really good that it's a part of your business. And so when we go in places like Greenville, Mississippi, we also commit to deploy capital as, as growth partners to those businesses. Because if we want to convince that 16 year old to not be a criminal, there does need to be jobs, jobs that like a 16 year old can get. And so we deploy capital in, you know, restaurants, nail salons, like pick your business that you can be 16 and work at easily. And like, we want more of those to exist in the cities that also choose to be safe. I don't want to go deploy capital in a place that doesn't want to be safe.

• 1:43:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:43:50Speaker 00

  With that, so I'm like, I want to do more there. And then I think to our conversation on the, on the other half, you know, the majority of the crime we solve is not violent. It's nonviolent. And today, the, the discrepancy for a juvenile, non juvenile, you still wind up in some type of, of penitentiary or prison system. I think that's crazy. Like, all the data shows, as soon as you wind up in prison, you're gonna get violent and you're gonna come back. And so I would articulate there is an opportunity, don't know yet what it is, to say, oh, hold on, hold on, hold on. If this was an opportunistic criminal,

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  is there a product with a capital P? Because it might not be software, it might be hardware or software, I don't know, that allows that person to have a second chance? And in a way that is not gonna increase their likelihood of doing it again? Like, that's bad, but like, prison can't be the answer.

• 1:44:49Speaker 00

  Like, it just doesn't work. And the whole concept of prison will never work. Like, and there are some incredibly well-run prisons with really well-intentioned wardens doing the best of their ability, but the concept of putting a bunch of violent people together is like, by default, flawed. And so I question, like, what could Flock be doing to say, "I'm gonna prevent kids from becoming criminals, and if you do wind up on that path, how do I get you back on track as fast as possible? And we're a for-profit business, so I'm not looking to be a nonprofit, but I think there is something there. I mean, talking about millions and millions of people who really need, like, it's actually as a society, in our best interest to get them back in and productive. And I wanna do both of those.

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  So fewer crimes, fewer people in prisons?

• 1:45:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, the same goal.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:45:36Speaker 00

  Thank you, it was fun.

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  It was awesome.

• 1:45:40Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:46:06Erik Torenberg?

  This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.