EP 99: Garret Langley (CEO, Flock Safety) - The $4B Tech Startup Solving Crime with AI

Garrett Langley is the CEO of Flock Safety, a $4B company helping solve 10% of US crimes with AI-powered tech. Garrett offers an in-depth look into Flock Safety’s ambitious vision to eliminate crime in America and all the operating lessons he’s learned along the way, including how to build a strong and motivated team, keep people accountable, and leverage PR for rapid growth. (00:00) Intro (01:03) The Mission to Eliminate Crime with Innovative Tech (01:54) The Genesis of Flock Safety: A Response to High Crime Rates (07:48) The Evolution of Flock Safety's Crime-Fighting Technology (24:37) Impact Stories: How Flock Safety is Changing Lives (31:00) Navigating the Balance: Safety, Privacy, and Community Impact (36:58) Exploring the Universal Appeal of Safety Across America (37:38) The Role of Community Decisions in Public Safety (39:02) Addressing Misinformation and Enhancing Safety with Technology (39:58) Collaboration and Data Sharing Among Cities (41:26) The Impact of Technology on Policing and Public Safety (43:24) Innovative Solutions to Modern Policing Challenges (49:18) Flock's Vision for the Future of Public Safety (56:05) Building a Business on Solving Crime (56:38) The Importance of Team and Culture in Business Success (01:10:45) Navigating Growth and Maintaining Culture in a Scaling Company (01:12:33) Cultivating a Strong Remote Work Culture (01:12:46) The Power of Cultural Norms in Business (01:13:01) Building Accountability and Responsiveness (01:14:16) The Importance of In-Person Interactions in a Hybrid Company (01:14:50) Assessing Substantive Work Over Managing Up (01:17:50) The Strategy of Being a Macro Optimist and Micro Pessimist (01:20:16) Celebrating Milestones and Focusing on Impact (01:21:58) The Unique Dynamic of Working with Family (01:30:42) Reflections on Early Success and the Drive to Build Meaningful Companies (01:37:58) Overcoming Fundraising Challenges and Understanding Market Dynamics (01:46:55) Concluding Thoughts and the Future of Flock Safety Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Levin Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Garrett Langley. Now Garrett is the CEO and co-founder of Flock Safety, a business most recently valued at over $4 billion. And their most recent stats has indicated that they have played a role in solving over 10% of crimes in the United States. Flock is one of the most interesting private companies that I've ever come across. Garrett is a very impressive leader that's been building an important company for society. A really fun conversation that you'll hear now. Garrett, thanks for doing this.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

• 0:36Logan Bartlett?

  So can we bat off maybe with you describing what Flock Safety does?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So it's a, it's an interesting business because at the end of the day, we view ourselves as a crime fighting company.

• 0:53Logan Bartlett?

  It's a noble mission.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Yes, there are like many things in life that I think we should try to fix. Elon is working on a bunch of them, but to think we're like a small version of that, trying to help the, at least the people that live on earth today. And so for us, we're a crime fighting company. Now, the way we do that, though, isn't through traditional means. You know, we're not a law enforcement agency, we're not a nonprofit. We build technology that helps the people who have been tasked with fighting crime, do it more effectively, more objectively, and more successfully. The kind of eye-opening thing for me, you know, I have always been an entrepreneur, never had like a real job before. And about seven years ago, when we were trying to figure out what to do next in life,

• 1:39Speaker 01

  I had saw this statistic that I didn't believe was accurate, which is that roughly, you've got almost a 90% chance of getting away with stealing someone's car. And I was like, man, that just, that can't be right. You know, like that, that, that, that doesn't seem accurate. And thankfully, in some cities, that isn't accurate, right? That's a national average. That's not the case for, you know, New York. New York actually has a better clearance rate than a lot of cities. But that's kind of what we do. We build technology that helps law enforcement through one way or another, solve crime. And the main reason why is when you look at the kind of primary research done by academics,

• 2:20Speaker 01

  our goal isn't just to solve crime. Our goal is to eliminate crime. I mean, the way you eliminate it is make it harder to do.

• 2:28Logan Bartlett?

  It's fascinating. I assume that was a fork in the road of like, do I do crime with a 90% chance of getting away with it? You know, that entrepreneurial pursuit versus do I try to solve crime? I'm glad you landed on the side you did. It sounds like crime itself is a fairly profitable business, at least in terms of the nonviolent stuff. If you really have, if you have a 90% success rate, I mean, that's, it's way, way higher than I would have guessed. It's just kind of a troubling stat. I realize that's the national average and, you know, there's a bunch of different inputs into it. But if you were to distill down the reason for that, and I guess just the root of what Flock actually does, like,

• 3:10Logan Bartlett?

  why is the clearance rate so low for solving nonviolent crime?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you, you bring up a good point. I was actually, I was with the mayor of Atlanta last night. They're a great Flock customer and obviously I live in Atlanta, so I, I care a lot about what happens in my hometown. And he, he developed one of these awesome programs. He calls it the year of the youth. And what he realized is like, look, we've all been 15 before, right? And in an abundance of free time, you just make not the best decisions. And so what he realized is like, if we create jobs for these kids, they'll be too busy to commit crime. Because you see, most criminals are not evil. They're opportunistic. And some, to your point, are, are doing it from a profit perspective. But a lot of

• 4:00Speaker 01

  crime is also due to boredom. Now, maybe you were setting firecrackers off, or you were doing something less malicious. But a lot of the crime we see is semi-organized auto theft crimes. And it's just, oh, we're 16 and we're goofing off. There's, there's no malintent out of, you know, oh, we're gonna go steal this car, which is actually pretty, pretty painful. And, and when you look at it, the reason why it's so hard to solve these crimes is there's never any evidence. If you imagine you're like an SDR, imagine being told like, go book this deal, but I'm not going to give you their phone number, the name of the company, their email address, but I need you to go book this deal. And

• 4:42Speaker 01

  that's the effective job of your average detective. Hey, this car was stolen. We think it was stolen around 2 AM. That's all we have. And that's actually really hard, right? Like, how, how, how do you go solve that? Uh, it's pretty tricky. Um, and so when you look at it, the clearance rates are linearly correlated to the lack of evidence. And I would say the lack of objective evidence, too. Uh, but there was this one case, um, in Tennessee where there was a, it was a, um, it was an armed robbery of a vehicle. So a person was held at gunpoint. And when they were held at gunpoint, um, they said it was a black male in a forty-niners hoodie.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  And they were in a pickup truck, like pickup truck pulled up to them, you know, do this thing. And they got two things right in that eyewitness description. The person was wearing a forty-niners hoodie. They were driving a truck, but they were actually white.

• 5:41Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And, and look, I don't, I don't think that I'm not, you know, I, I bring this up not to say, oh, that person is like bad. Eyewitness testimony is really hard. Imagine if you were standing there and then all of a sudden you have a gun to your head. You, you're not like, oh, am I accurately describing this scenario? You're thinking like, oh, my gosh, I just, I want to live through this scenario. And now with Flock, I mentioned, mentioned the objective piece. That officer in Tennessee was able to go in and say, hey, show me all the pickup trucks in this area around this time. That leads to a license plate, then leads to a search warrant. They find the guy is still wearing that forty-niners hoodie. He admits to doing the, the crime and like, that's the type of thing that happens thousands of times a day where not only are we actually solving more crime,

• 6:25Speaker 01

  we're introducing a new level of objectivity because we're focusing on the vehicle and not, in this case, an eyewitness testimony.

• 6:32Logan Bartlett?

  Well, so in that case, um, so, so, so the mission is obviously, uh, it, um, is noble. And the, uh, the specific examples are, uh, I mean, I, I mean incredible. But as you, as, as that problem first presented itself and seven years ago, your car is gone. The pharmacy gets hit up, car gets abandoned and all of that. You, you landed on a, uh, something that, I don't know, in retrospect, may Maybe maybe is obvious like anything is in hindsight, but but landed on a a specific problem in technology. And so maybe can you talk about like the initial, I realize you guys have a plethora of products today, but like

• 7:13Logan Bartlett?

  very first thing that you landed on and decided to go after and describing like what that is and how it works.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So so when we started the company, it was just a project, right? Like I I called Paige and Matt, two of my closest friends. They had worked for me at my last company. And I said, hey, I I think I I think crime is a really interesting problem. And I wonder why people aren't solving it. And I have no background in law enforcement, no background in criminal justice, never owned a gun. Then start calling these police chiefs and I'm like, hey, why can't you solve crime? Because look, I think a lot of us assume there's some level of apathy as a part of the problem. Like you can go look, these are public salaries. You don't make a lot of money being a cop. Uh, even, you know, I I think like, uh,

• 8:01Speaker 01

  you know, police chiefs are still making hundred thousand, hundred thousand dollars, and that's they're at the peak of their career.

• 8:09Logan Bartlett?

  My cousin's my cousin's a cop in Chattanooga, so I I know.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  It's it's not, you know, it's it's tough, right? It's not like they they don't have any scrutiny day to day. And so you look at these these men and women, you go, okay, maybe it's apathy. But then you talk to them and you go, no, it's not apathy. They're they're no different than nurses and teachers. They they just were born with this strong desire to serve their community. So then you start to go, okay, well, why is it? Okay, it's evidence. Well, why don't you have enough evidence? And they're like, oh, well, it's because it's really expensive. It's like, what do you mean? Well, the evidence we need is a license plate and and I was like, that's that seems really weird to me. Why? Why would you need a license plate? And they're like, oh, it's the number one piece of evidence in solving a crime. Seventy plus percent of crimes happen with a vehicle. Like this is what we need. And so I'm looking into it with Paige and Matt and we're like, oh, but there's like, there's there's vendors that do this, right? Like

• 8:57Speaker 01

  um, a camera that can read a license plate is not a new concept. But what we noticed was that there was these two underlying problems with the existing solutions. It was all central on centralized on cost. At the time, seven years ago, the average camera fully de- fully deployed was about fifty thousand dollars per unit. And so maybe if you're New York, like you cover your egress points because you're one of the biggest cities in America and like you can afford it. But like, wh- wh- what about Newark? What about Elizabeth? What about like, go down to your average city and you're like, no, that's, that's, that's so much money. And the reason why it was so expensive is twofold. One was infrastructure and one was bill of materials. On the infrastructure side, traditional systems required hardline power and hardline internet.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  And if you've ever built a home, construction's expensive. It's like really expensive to dig holes, really expensive to conduit power and fiber, hundreds of feet. So you've effectively signed up for a construction project. So we said, okay, well, what if we got rid of all the infrastructure? And what if it was just a cellphone on a pole? That would then remove that cost. And the second thing we looked at was said, well, wait a second. Why are they using these very proprietary bespoke DSP chips? I was an electrical engineer. And so we're breaking it down of like, they're using an infrared array with a DSP chip to do a very, very legacy approach to optical character recognition or OCR. And Matt and I were like, why wouldn't you just use computer vision? Like, it can't be that hard. It wound up being harder than we thought, but like, a phone should be able to do this.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  So we literally got some old Android phones. Um, I tore them apart, soldered together a bigger battery and a solar panel. Uh, and Matt, he's like one of the best developers I've ever met, maybe the best fellow I've ever met. Quickly like put together a computer vision model, an Android app, put it up on my street and all of a sudden we were reading license plates. Um, now in the middle of the summer in Atlanta, an Android phone outside is gonna overheat pretty quickly. So I realized that like, okay, this isn't gonna scale, but we've built a, you know, a competitive product that had zero implementation cost and had a bill of materials that was a couple hundred bucks. And that felt like really special.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And they're like Peter Thiel saying, we had these two secrets that no one else knew, which was like, We could dramatically deploy more devices at a lower cost, like a 10x better product at the price.

• 11:18Logan Bartlett?

  The timing of every market is obviously pretty important and the set of circumstances that led to this opportunity. Was there a window of time that five years earlier it wouldn't have worked because of the camera technology, OCR, solar, whatever it was, and you guys happened to catch it then? Like, how wide open was the window that that flock could have worked for, you know, you guys or if someone had started it before?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we got, you know, we got very lucky with timing. I would like to think that we were like super, super thoughtful about it. But the smartphone was key because the camera technology, you've got people like Apple and Samsung deploying billions of dollars a year into smartphone technology, which is mostly low-power devices with really good cameras. And that's effectively what we are. It's like we're riding the tail of that wave. And then what you also have is this dramatic reduction in cloud compute. And it's weird probably for you and I to think about an environment where on-prem is default.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  But when you're talking about service servicing, you know, our average camera does 30 or 40 gigabytes of data a month. That's a lot of data, not only to push through, push through the internet, but also to store it online. And that is still like, if you look at the camera market in general, it is still mostly on-prem. And so that evolution, I think, is still happening. Like, we're still actually right, while smartphones are quite like, there's innovation still happening, but it's mostly moved to AI. Like, we do quite a bit of AI on our, on our imaging platform. The the cloud piece is really interesting because you look at companies like Rakata and I know you've talked to them and you look at companies like us and if the cloud wasn't getting cheaper by the quarter, by the day, we wouldn't exist.

• 13:14Logan Bartlett?

  So as it currently stands, so that was the thesis originally. And the the belief around it, where where are you in that journey? How would you describe the product today? It it seems like it's solar powered. I I I had heard something. There's like two different cameras. It's angled at just license plate readers. Can you give like the the, you know, jumping forward to 2024 and where you are with that?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if we go back all the way to that vision, I remember during Y C. We had a slide and we only had one slide in our pitch deck and it was a mugshot. And we said, we built a product that actually solves crime. We don't know who we're going to sell to. We don't know how we're going to sell sell it. We don't know how we're going to charge. But I fundamentally believe that if you pass that toothbrush test, everyone wants to live in a crimeless society. And we built a product that does that. That is largely still the same case. Now, I think we have figured out who we sell to. We've like, we've done a pretty good job figuring that out. We've done a pretty good job building out a business. But if you go to a place like San Francisco, who's recently coming online with Flock.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  You know, they've got about 400 devices now in in the downtown area that as a car drives by, a few things happen. Uh, the first is we, within a few seconds, read the license plate. And then we have a direct integration with the FBI and we can check, is that car stolen? Is that car on an amber alert? Is it on a silver alert? Uh, does it have an outstanding felony warrant? But there's a, there's a, there's a list of objective things that makes that car either illegal to be on the road or legal to be on the road. And if it's illegal on the road, let's say it's got an amber alert or a felony warrant, we immediately notify the nearest officer in their vehicle. So now, within, let's call it five to 10 seconds from a car driving by, the nearest officer is notified, hey.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Uh, this, this Kia, this white Kia, uh, that's stolen is at this location. Uh, we don't know who's inside. We don't care who's inside, which is that car's stolen. And and that that leads to about 2,000 arrests every single day, like that that feature.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  The second thing that happens is when that car does drive by, we also do what's called capture its vehicle fingerprint. And that's a list of about 26 different unique attributes of a vehicle that with our computer vision model, we say, okay, it is white, it's a white car, it's a Honda, it's an Accord, it's got a Nevada license plate, it's got a roof rack, it's got bumper stickers, anything a human would notice on the vehicle, we also tag. And so from a retrospective, so let's say that a crime happened and you didn't know the car was stolen already. And detectives can then go in and say, hey, I'm looking for any white Honda with a Nevada license plate that was here yesterday at 2 o'clock in this area. Show me all the cars. And that tends to be the beginning of a case. We're never the end all be all in a criminal investigation.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  We're typically the first step of a process that gets the detective on their way.

• 16:12Logan Bartlett?

  And you're actually removing the subjectivity of a lot of the inputs, right? Where there's not the same bias, you're not actually even capturing who the driver of the car is purposefully, right? And so it's really just focused on the vehicle itself?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was shocked at just how important a vehicle could be in a criminal investigation. Like still kind of confuses me to this day as someone who's been in it for a long time now. It is the beginning of the case and who's inside is kind of irrelevant until you get a human involved, until detective takes over the case. And then, yeah, you gotta go to driver investigation because you can't arrest a vehicle. But to my earlier point on kind of the eyewitness story, a lot of subjectivity in policing. By design, it's a subjective game. We're trying to put a little bit more objectivity into it.

• 17:05Logan Bartlett?

  Can we talk about the nature of crime? And I feel like you have some interesting perspectives on nonviolent versus violent crime and what serves as deterrents of different types of crime in a modern society and how incentives and punishments actually kind of play a role or lack thereof in different circumstances?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think as a country, we've unfortunately made a decision historically that crime is okay.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  And there are some people who live in this country that are generally fine with crime. They think crime is just a cost of doing business. Crime is a mandated requirement of living in a big city or in a modern society. And I just deeply disagree with that sentiment. That's a common saying that poverty is a requirement. I don't think so. Actually, I think the quality of life has gone up decade over decade. And it will continue to go up hopefully. And like some of these big issues we face as a country, I think are actually quite solvable. Now, I think, you know, it's unlikely that a technology company alone can solve these things. And that's kind of our point of view. Our point of view is that it's a combination of people, policy and technology.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Like I mentioned the story earlier of what Mayor Dickens is doing on the youth side. That's policy, right? Like he's trying to stop kids from even thinking about becoming criminals, giving them jobs. That's awesome. That's a policy thing. That's a people thing. And then where technology comes in is that if you look at the underlying reason why people do commit crime, it's a Boolean decision, right? Your average criminal is a sixteen to twenty-two-year-old male. And there's a reason why they won't let you rent a car until you're over twenty-two. It's because your brain isn't fully developed. You tend to make Boolean decisions. As an adult now, you and I make a calculus decision. We think about the probability of something happening that weighs our decision framework. And then we make a yes or no decision eventually.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  As an adolescent, it's yes or no. And if you believe you can get away with something, you do it. And so what we believe is that in cities that have deployed Flock, they are starting to change that calculus to say, hey, actually, clearance rates have gone from fifteen, thirteen percent to thirty percent. It's a fifty percent to eighty percent. And we've got some cities that are at a hundred percent clearance rate, which means if you live in that city, you know, if I commit this crime, I will get held accountable. Guess what? Crime goes down. It's a very, very simple concept. Um, but it actually is working. Whereas clearance rates go up, crime rates goes down. Because the majority of crime, right? You move, remove the point zero zero one percent of people

• 19:51Speaker 01

  that are just truly evil, which we're not trying to get rid of. We're not trying to fix that. We're trying to fix the ninety nine point nine nine percent of crime that is simply opportunistic. That can be solved by driving clearance rates up.

• 20:02Logan Bartlett?

  In the punishment side of things, like hey, if I uh break into a car, I get ten years in prison versus ten months versus probation. I guess there's, there's been different studies that I'm not appropriately educated on, but I'm sure you've seen some of the, the data that the, the, the nature of the punitiveness of the, uh, of the crime actually doesn't serve as much as a deterrent versus just simply getting caught?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  It, there's zero academic studies that have proven any correlation between the severity of penalty and the impact on crime.

• 20:39Logan Bartlett?

  Now, I guess back to your bullying point, it's not a, it's not a problematic calculation.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  I mean, you think about it, right? Like, you probably took statistics in college. If you know the average is a thirteen percent chance of getting caught, like everyone, you assume you're above average, right? Because why would I be below average at anything I do? And as a sixteen year old, you definitely thought you were above average at everything you did and miserable. So like, well, I might, I'm not gonna get caught. He might get caught, but I won't get caught. Uh, and you're, you're not thinking about punishment because you don't assume you're gonna get caught. Now, I am sure there is a, a trailing point where it's like, well, if there's no punishment, well, then clearly that's probably not enough. But the difference between a month, six months, a year in jail just doesn't matter. Um, what matters is people believe that we have created a society

• 21:30Speaker 01

  that upholds the rules we've all agreed to. Because like, one of the interesting dynamics, and this is actually a beautiful part of our country we live in. The rules are not evenly enforced. And I actually think that's like quite good. Uh, because the rules in Georgia, the rules in Atlanta, even though we have the similar federal laws and our state laws are a little bit different. We as a society, as a community, choose what's socially enforced.

• 21:54Logan Bartlett?

  So Flock goes into a city. I realize there's, there's a split between selling to homeowners associations and so kind of private citizens. And increasingly you're selling into uh state, local governments as well. But can you, uh, I guess a commercial for, for, for the efficacy of what you're doing? Can you give some stats around like the delta and clearance rate of uh maybe some city that you went in? And how many cameras were installed and what that did to, to, you know, the efficacy of solving crime?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, li- literally when we roll out with a city, if they don't make an arrest within their first hour of deployment, something's wrong. We either haven't properly trained them, the cameras are somehow in like the wrong place or not working. Like it, I don't know of a single customer we brought out that hasn't solved a crime within their first hour. When you look longer term, you know, I think about a place like Cobb County, which was one of our first customers. And you go to the chief there and he will tell you that they have back-to-back years with a hundred percent clearance rate on violent crime. And if it wasn't for Flock, that wouldn't be the case. I mean, you go on public record and say this, and I think it's true.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, obviously, just like with a lot of things, it is hard to drive very, very hard, hard science on efficacy. I think what we look for is, you know, what percentage of crimes are, are being solved using the product? We're at about 10% nationally, uh, but the impact is, is, is pretty demonstrable overnight.

• 23:33Logan Bartlett?

  Can, can you speak to a specific example? And I know there's, there's tons of them, but just uh really make it concrete of a situation that, and maybe how it played out, uh, and, and case study maybe sounds uh too, too uh, too business oriented, uh, but, but a, a, a situation that, that really makes this uh tangible of X person did Y thing and uh Flock was able to solve it. Just one that sort of stayed with you as, you know, something you're particularly proud of?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I mean, I think so. There's probably two moments, if you'll give me the chance to share two of them. Yeah. Uh. The the first one, and this is like, the company might have been six months old, maybe. Um, and we had deployed the cameras in my neighborhood. Uh, in this single woman's home was broken into. And all of her stuff was stolen. Um, she wasn't at home. And if you talk to this this woman, you know, the stuff is it's it's a bummer to lose your stuff, right? But she has a job, she has insurance. The issue was this sense of violation. Like her safety had been violated, her, it's a deep fear now.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  And within about an hour of her calling the police, an arrest was made. Uh, because she did have a camera a- a- a- at her house. And so she had the vehicle description. They were able to plug that into Flock. They then had to make a model and a license plate. And then pretty quickly, they were able to then find that vehicle and make an arrest. And it was it was important for two reasons. One, from personal level, one from business level. From personal level, you you you I talked to this woman. And there was just a glimmer of hope, right? And maybe one of the worst days in her life. We were able to provide just a little bit of peace of mind, a little bit of like, no, society is just, the world is just like, you're you're gonna be protected.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  And that's like, I get goosebumps to this day, thinking about like, that's still happening all the time. I'm not as aware of it because I don't don't get the chance to talk to all of our our our our customers or end customers. But like, that was, I remember Paige saying like, man, I I I could spend the rest of my life doing this. Like, if this is the impact we make on people's lives every day, like, and you're we're gonna get paid to do this? You get paid well? Like, this is crazy. So that one was like, one of the first times on a personal level. On the business level, it was also the first time we realized that every day at five o'clock, the news is gonna wanna talk about crime. They're gonna talk about politics, they're gonna talk about sports, they're talking about crime. And it was the first time we were ever on TV.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  And it's kind of realized like what was one of the first gonna go to market hacks we realized was that PR could be a really big growth channel. I've yet to meet another company that leveraged PR like we did. Uh, most people talk about, oh, PR is a great strategy. No, no, no. PR was our only growth engine for the first two, three years of the business. Uh, because it realizes that every single time a crime happens, news wants to cover it. Uh, and so like I went on TV and it was this really fun experience, uh, being on like local news. Uh, so that was the first one. I'd say the most impactful one is I'm a father of two young kids and anytime we help parents with their kids, it's particularly at home and most of our employees, I think our average age in employees is in their mid forties.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And so most of us have families uh, with kids, you know, whether it's elementary school or junior high. And thankfully, most child abductions are not strangers. Like if you look at the, we work really closely with the National Center of Endangered and Missing Children. It's one of our like strongest partnerships. Most abductions are an estranged parent. And so it's scary, but it's very solvable. Like you can solve it within a day. Stranger to stranger abductions are not only really rare, they're really hard to solve. And there was, there's a town that we work with and it's predominantly an immigrant kind of uh, community. It's a large percent of the population is immigrants.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And due to that, they tend to be targeted for crime because the assumption is like, if you steal from these people, they won't call the police. Which is like really like multiple levels of ickiness. Cause like not only you committing a crime against someone, you're doing it against a, a community that you believe like is less safe. And so this woman is walking her child. Car pulls up, jumps out, steal the two-year-old boy out of the, out of the stroller. Total stranger. Mom is panicking. She calls nine one one. She, all she has is that it's a white SUV. Now, this community is one of our, was one of our better customers, the time's still a great customer. They plug it in the system. Now, one of the cool things about Flock is that it is a network.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Right? So when you think about the, the, why we called it Flock, it's because we believe that as a community, if we work together, we're safer. And that extends not only out of my neighborhood, out of my city, but the cities around me because criminals don't, they don't tend to care where like cities start and stop. And so like you don't, I doubt you even think about it as like a normal person of like, oh, am I in New York right now or am I in a different neighborhood or different city? And so they plug it into Flock. They find the license plate. And they realize the car has now gone on the highway. It's a huge, this is like really bad now, because once you get on the highway, it's very hard to know where you're going. They then plug it into Flock and that creates a statewide hot list looking for this vehicle. We get a hit about forty five miles away.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  That notifies the nearest, that notifies like that police department. And notifies the GBI, which is like our, our local version of the FBI, I have one in New York and California. And they safely return the kid. And this is like all in three hours. Uh, there's like half a dozen police departments involved. And this kid's, I guess, like five or six now, and we, we, we met up, one, one of our employees met up with the family recently. And like the mom is still so thankful. And sadly, like that kind of stuff does happen every single day. Thankfully, not every single day in, you know, in my town or your town. But like you look at those kinds of stories and like I, I often just reflect like, I don't know if I'll ever get to work on a company like this again.

• 30:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's, it's hu, I mean, it's hugely impactful and I'm sure super gratifying to, um, to, to, to have even, uh, one situation like that, that, that you had a role in solving, let alone the, the, the, the thousands a day or whatever it is that you guys contribute to. Um, I guess to, uh, to, to, uh, to talk about the, the trait, like anything in, uh, any decision we make, there's, there's two sides of a coin.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:31Logan Bartlett?

  Trade offs around this and I, I think I'd be remiss not to. Ask about the the the axis or the spectrum of safety and privacy and like implicitly, we're we're making decisions on a daily basis that are on one end of the spectrum over the other and there's there's countries like China that that you know, we we're giving up a lot of privacy in exchange for for safety and I I don't particularly want to live in that society, but you know, it's it's one that seems to be pretty effective in deterring crime. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there's there's definitely some wildernesses that we

• 31:13Logan Bartlett?

  can go live in that have no rules and no laws and and all of that. And so I guess, how do you think about data has become so and privacy increasingly with, you know, whatever, the things around Facebook and and app trash tracking transparency and GDPR and and all these different things, we're sort of living in this world where there's a there's a continuum and people have different perspectives around it. And so I guess, how do you think about that and where you fall and your responsibility in it?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  No, it's it's a good question. And I think there's probably two sides to it. There's one, we make our own decisions as a company for what we want to build and what we want to enable. And so a good example of that is, you know, we don't do facial recognition.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I don't think it's inherently evil. I think it's effective products. We just choose not to build it, which is a decision we've made as a company. And then I think the other thing that's really important is we live in a society that individuals are elected democratically to make decisions on our behalf. And that covers things like roads and sewage and parks and public safety. And we don't do anything without the support of the community.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  And so I look at it and go, let's talk about something that's really easy, data retention. I think it's a, it's a subjective decision. And so you go to places like

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Dallas, Texas, and they have a 90 day storage period. And you go to a place like Austin, Texas, and it's seven days. I, I, I don't care. If that's what Austin thinks is best for their community, that's great. That's like, that's exciting. So we believe it's our job to give communities the kind of levers to, to make that, to make those decisions. Because to be very clear, Austin will solve less crime than Dallas. That's like, it's a, it's just a fact. But they're making that trade off. I'm not making the trade off for them. The, the city council and the police chief, they sat down and the city manager and said, hey, we think seven days is right for us. Dallas said 90. In New Jersey, it's five years.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  I don't live in any of those places. So on a personal level, I don't think it matters. As a business, though, we look at it across the spectrum and say, what are the things we can do to provide our customers the ability to customize what they're doing? So it makes sense for their community.

• 33:46Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, I guess police aren't elected officials, but they are those that we trust through the process of, of, you know, whatever democratic elections and then the people that, you know, end up, end up hiring them. What about on the, the HOA or on the private citizen's side? And maybe talk a little bit about like, I guess as it relates to both HOA and, and, and police officers, the, the access and rights and all of those things and how you think about it.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, well, so the cool part is the way we built products is that most of our neighborhoods don't even have access to the cameras they buy. It goes straight to the police department. Because you and I don't have the right to arrest someone. We don't have the right to do a criminal investigation, nor would I would imagine you want to. I don't have time to do that. Like, there's a crime in my neighborhood. I don't have, I'm not, I got a family, I got a business. So the way the product's built is like, if you look at my neighborhood. The cameras go straight to the Atlanta Police Department and not a single person that lives in our community has access to the cameras because what would you do with it? Uh, and that's like the default now i- in an environment where either there's an off-duty police officer, a security team, or there's just a

• 35:03Speaker 01

  an HOA that that that wants to have access, that's fine, they're the ones paying for it. But what we really emphasize is coming back to the name of the company, like your job is to support the community, deploy this product, it goes straight to law enforcement. They will use it when they need to, but otherwise, just be on your merry way. And that I think is like a really nice kind of model because it it solves a lot of the privacy concerns, I think, that exists.

• 35:28Logan Bartlett?

  I'm sure you get um some uh uh criticism that is not totally rooted in sensible uh logic. And uh, you know, maybe just tried and and hey, this seems bad and uh um, I don't know, I can, I can imagine the types of people that might claim uh these things. But um, outside of, outside of those that are uh maybe less uh within the bounds of of reasonable conversation. Are there particular discussions that you welcome um having about these different trade-offs?

• 36:13Logan Bartlett?

  And like where the the lines of consideration exist? And I assume data retention sounds like one of them maybe, and who has access is another. But are there other things that you think are actually worthwhile philosophical debates to have about like your role in society?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the the cool thing about Flock is whether you're blue, red, or purple.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  You have flock. Like, we we've got Berkeley, California. Uh, and we've got Southern Texas right down the border. Like, it's like as red as you can get and as blue as you can get. And then we go to New York, we go to Maine, we go to Oregon, Washington, like, there isn't a state that doesn't have flock at some level. And I think it's because when you remove the politics of it, everyone wants to be safe. Like, I've never met someone who's like, oh, I would like to be less safe. Uh, that's like, it's a very odd feeling. Uh, so then to your point, it's like a question of, okay, well, well, how safe do we want to be? Uh, because in in in in some environment, I don't know if you saw the news, like, I think Miami, uh, during spring break had a midnight curfew or like eleven P M. curfew. That's safer. It like, bad stuff happens at two A M.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Like, nothing good happens in the middle of the night. Uh, and so like Miami made a decision on their own accord that like, hey, during spring break, we just want to be a little bit safer. Now, I don't think Miami isn't do that forever. Because it's fun to stay out late. And so you look at those kind of decisions, and like, we're one of those types of decisions where you can say, look, you know, if we want to be safer, there's this product called flock that will solve more crime. Do we want it as a community? And I think last year, you know, I think three out of about a thousand cities said, no, we don't want flock. And we're okay. It's like, okay, great. No hard feelings. Like, you know, what, what? Call us if you change your mind.

• 38:04Logan Bartlett?

  And who is it saying no, I guess? I don't know enough about local governments. City, city councils.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  So, I mean, so and it and it's, I think it's great. Like, the chief of police will present an option. It's his job or her job to to keep the community safe. Then they'll present us as an option. And and and three cases, I think, last year, a city said, hey, you know, we just don't think it's right for us. And we go, that's great. You know, like, that's no hard feelings. Um, I hope they change their mind. Um, to your point, a lot of the time, it is misinformation. Um, so as an example, one of those three. Uh, last year, uh, originally said no because they thought we were doing facial recognition on the cameras. And we're like, we don't do facial recognition on the cameras. And they voted that way because look, it's, you know, most of these people are volunteers. It's not a full-time job.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  You don't get paid to be on city council in a, in a small town. In a bigger city, you do, and it's a little bit manageable, but in a small town, you don't, you don't get paid. So these are volunteers trying to make the best decisions they can. So they, they did eventually come back around because we were able to educate them of like, no, we don't do facial recognition. That like, these are very focused on cars and that's how the technology works. So most of the time it is either the fear of the unknown. Um, or, or just misinformation, like they're just, they don't fully understand the technology. Um, I, I do think though, to your point, there's, there's data retention. That's an interesting one. And then the other one is data sharing. You know, who, who do you want to share with? Uh, most of our cities work really closely with their neighboring cities. So if you're in the Bay Area

• 39:41Speaker 01

  and you're in, you know, Atherton, you work with Cupertino and, uh, Redwood City and Foster City and like San Mateo because you're solving cases together all the time anyways. Um, but it is up to a city, like we have one customer that I know of in Illinois, uh, that does not share with anyone.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And that, that as a city, they decided they want to keep this information just to themselves. And that's fine. I, I think that they will solve less crime. Um, but that's important to them and I think that's great. Um, and so we're always trying to figure out the same point of view would be on the overall auditing and transparency. So everything you do in the system is fully audited and stored in perpetuity. Some of our customers share that audit publicly. It's great. So in, uh, in Piedmont, California, great police department there.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  The camera locations, the search history, took a ton of information publicly available. We built, we built that for us. We call it our transparency portal. It's great. Other of our customers say, eh, it's not for us. We don't want to do that. Okay. So we're always trying to figure out like, how do we help our customers achieve their goal, which is solve more crime, be safe, in and in framing that makes the most sense for their own communities, kind of o- other goals.

• 40:59Logan Bartlett?

  You know, I, I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that the job of a, a police officer should be a noble one in the society that we live in, or in a modern and sophisticated society. Uh, but, um, there's been some circumstances over the course of the last couple of years that have drawn attention, and I'm sure it's been going on, uh, I, I mean, I know it's been going on far longer than just the last couple of years. We just happen to have technology to capture it and document it in ways that have illuminated some of the, uh, so, so, so, some bad actors within, um, police departments or, or unfortunate set of circumstances that have led to

• 41:44Logan Bartlett?

  loss of life and just, you know, terrible circumstances, right?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you're, you're, you're right. I mean, I think, just like in every industry, you know, there's something like, you know, a million police officers in America. You put a million people in a room, there's going to be some bad people.

• 42:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, and I think we've, we've, we've, these are people that are, uh, entrusted to try to, um, bring stability to society. And I think it's, uh, it's particularly troubling when, um, when, when it's not accountants committing fraud, or, you know, shitty podcasters, whatever it is. Like, it's particularly troubling, uh, when it's, when it's the people that we trust with, with great power within society. But I think, um, it's, it's, a lot of the rhetoric has led to a, uh, uh, a disproportionate number of resignations, early retirement, uh, lack of enrollment into, uh, the service.

• 42:43Logan Bartlett?

  Can, can you just talk about maybe some of the broad trends that are going on in policing, uh, today? And then what role you feel like Flock can play in this?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  It is a challenging time. Um, more than eighty percent of police departments are understaffed. And that's not like, oh, the police chief saying, I want more people. That's the government, the city, the local government has given them budget for X number of people. And they're at Y, and in this case, Y is less than X. So the majority of police departments are understaffed. And that is a new problem. That was not a problem ten years ago. That's a problem that's happened over the last three years. Now, COVID was particularly bad. Uh, like that was not good. And then the social unrest was not good. I don't know if it's ever gonna get better. Um, I would equate it similar to probably the problem we have with teachers.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Like, I, I don't know how we're gonna get more teachers. Teach for America was pretty interesting. Well, maybe one of the best ideas I've heard is like, why don't we have a Teach for America for policing? Uh, like, that's an interesting idea. That's like one I've heard. I think what, what Mayor Bibb has done in Cleveland is pretty interesting. What he did was said, look, you know, we've got staffing for a thousand officers. We only have eight hundred. We have no line of sight to get back to a thousand. I'm actually gonna decrease the headcount allocation down to eight hundred. And that extra budget, I'm just gonna raise everyone's wage. That also enrollment, you know, like, it also helps with retention. You give everyone twenty percent raise and like, oh, man, you know, I will put in a couple more years. So it is a pretty big problem because

• 44:30Speaker 01

  there, there's pretty consistent data that shows a lack of a law enforcement agency just leads to unrest. And if you look at the cities and the number of cities that did this was very small. A lot of cities talked about defunding the police. Only two or three cities across the entire country actually did it. And they have had a massive spike in crime. They are in a massive hole now in terms of recruiting and, and running people to the academy. And it's gonna take them another five or seven years to actually get out of it and just get back to where they were. So I think most cities realize, you know, reform is always necessary. It's good, right? Like, you, you, you know, the, probably the best example is I've never met a cop that wants to respond to non-law enforcement related activity. They're still gonna ask to.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Like, if there's an individual with a mental health issue and you send a law enforcement officer that has zero training. I don't know what we expect, like, I mean, to go perfect? No, they're gonna like really struggle with that when they're actually people who have been trained to deal with mental health. And so you do see cities, I think, are moving in the right direction, saying, hey, we've got to, we've got to increase the number of first responders we have. We have fire as a first responder, we have law enforcement, we need a medical team, like, we actually need more types, more diversity. That's expensive, right? But like, I don't know how else to fix that. So it is a troubling problem. I'd say the only thing that I think is the silver lining amongst all this is technology is becoming more available. I think one of the benefits that Flock has brought to the market is not

• 45:59Speaker 01

  only are we a force multiplier, like, you can get more done as a police department because you're not, you know, the traditional view of policing is you drive around the neighborhoods, you know, there are problems, looking for suspicious activity. One, that's incredibly wasteful. And two, it's incredibly subjective, because you wind up going after the same people in our area. It's like double back. With Flock, you talk to most of our customers and they'll say, we're too busy chasing stolen cars to do that kind of stuff anymore. So driven up productivity and driven up objectivity. From a more venture perspective, though, we have proven that you can build a venture business selling to local government. And like, one of the things that I love now is, God, at least once a week, I'm getting

• 46:44Speaker 01

  a pitch deck from an early-stage company that's trying to go after local, local government. And I think that's awesome. Like, it is a market that's so underserved now, you know, competitive a little bit, like, all right, well, I want to build, I want to build a really, really big business. So like, you know, I'm always looking out for like, what are the, what are the more interesting ones happening? But if you, if you go back seven years ago before Flock, we got no after no after no from investors, because they'd say like, oh, local government is not a venture backable market. The, the last IPO that serviced local government was in 2003. The last IPO, you know, you've you've got one of your peers and Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Flock with their American Dynism Fund.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  And you see more investors like y'all saying, wait a second, actually, like some of these more industrial markets. You look at companies like Sam Sarr leading the way as well of saying like actually vertical SaaS can be really effective. It's hard, it's really hard, but when it gets right, like you've got incredible G R R, you've got bigger Tams than you ever imagined because you see this evolution and we're seeing it in policing now where budget is shifting from headcount to technology. And so the first time it's ever happened to us was in Katy, Texas, I think. And the police chief went to his city council and said, look, I have a I have a headcount problem. And I have no plan to fix it. I do not have an answer, but I do have this thing called technology. And the fully loaded cost, when you include pension and benefits, it's about $150,000

• 48:11Speaker 01

  a year for an entry level officer. That's the same cost of 50 cameras. Now, I can't get rid of all my police officers and we know that'd be a horrible idea, but man, to take two officers off of of headcount, which I can't even fill anyways, and go get 100 cameras, that'll impact our entire police department. Like, that's such an obvious ROI. And so I'm seeing more and more of these police chiefs and the newer command staff saying, we got to find the right balance, got to find the right balance of sworn versus unworn, technology versus headcount. There is, there's a balance there to be had, and I think that's a really, really exciting to watch.

• 48:51Logan Bartlett?

  So, so what's next for for Flock? So we talked about license plate readers, which I think is still the majority of the revenue and, you know, a big component of solving crime for you all. I've seen now there's, there's a product called Raven as well that you guys have launched around gunshot detection. Can you talk through like the, the suite that you have today and the aspirations of where you're going to go?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'll start with the aspirations and come back to what we do today. Every quarter, the, the team looks at all the crimes that happen in America and try to draw a direct line to a product we've built to help solve them. And there's a lot of crimes we help with. So you, you mentioned our core product Falcon reading license plates, that solves a lot of crimes, entering, entering auto, residential burglaries, a bunch of that.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  We never had a product that helped solve violent crime, particularly gun related. So we developed Raven, which is our gunshot detection technology, which solves gun violence every single day, which is a sad reality of our society, but it is a reality. And so we built this product to go help solve it. And there are cases, you know, whether you go to Wichita, Kansas, or in Albany, Georgia, where they're shocked at the level of gun violence they had because no one calls 911

• 50:16Speaker 01

  when someone gets shot. And so that's been really interesting to watch. We have developed a new product called Flock S911. It's, it's really cool. One of the things I didn't realize is that if you call 911 today, until you effectively finish the phone call, it's not entered into what's called CAD or computer aided dispatch. And no one on the first responder side has any idea you're having a problem. You have an officer like a block away from you. You've got a two to five minute lag before them even being notified. And so Flock S911 allows us to co-listen, kind of like dial into a bridge of the 911 call and send that directly to the nearest officer. So now if you called 911,

• 51:00Speaker 01

  we find the nearest officer and if, if they're within a relative distance, right? So if it's Manhattan, that might be like a block, two blocks, because traffic is really bad. If you're in a more suburban town, that might be a mile or three miles. But if you're in that radius, we will ping the nearest officer and say, hey, there's an active 911 call happening right now. Click play, they can click play, they can listen to the call. They can make a judgment call of like, is this appropriate for me to start to dispatch? And if it is, what we're seeing is that response times are going down dramatically, often beating the call from hanging up. And that's like the dream state, or dream state, that if you call 911 before you even hang up, an officer is on site. Uh, I, I think that would dramatically change how officers dispatch. And to our other conversation on, on human capital,

• 51:44Speaker 01

  when we're in, and we're in a shortage of humans, this is a way to actually increase their effectiveness. We can get them going before things get started. So we have like a whole slew of products like that where we're looking for these kind of pinpointed problems of what's happening in this town, what's happening in that town? How do we help them solve more of their crimes? And like one of the favorite things that I get to do is I travel the country. And I'll sit down with the mayor and the police chief and say, hey, tell me about a crime that didn't get solved. Pull up one of your cold cases. Let's like work through that. And that that that kind of becomes our roadmap for what products to go build.

• 52:16Logan Bartlett?

  And so today, the the the the sweets that you sell, like the incremental things.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we've got, yeah, so we've got a camera focused on cars.

• 52:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Um, we have a a camera that's focused on intersections, kind of like live view, uh, live view camera. So if you take someone like Fresno, um, they bought almost our entire suite. It's pretty awesome. They have our LPRs, so you can track cars.

• 52:43Logan Bartlett?

  License play reader.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yep, license play reader. Uh, they have our product called Condor, which is for situational awareness. So they deploy those at intersections. Right. So they want to, they want to know what's happening in an intersection and click play and pull it right up. Uh, they have Raven, which is gunshot detection technology. Um, and then they have Flock OS, which is really our our kind of situational awareness platform. Uh, and that allows them to go into the community and say, hey, if you're a business owner, homeowner, you can subscribe and we can now have access to your cameras. Um, and what that means is in a single pane of glass, Fresno can pull up and say, hey, there's a, there's a nine one one call happening right now. And this local

• 53:26Speaker 01

  community, this local business owner, whether it's a strip mall or a gas station, they've allowed us to integrate with their cameras. We can now pull that up. Um, and it's like this i- dramatic increase of productivity and deeper engagement with the community. So we got that product, um, and then a whole bunch of stuff coming down the line too.

• 53:44Logan Bartlett?

  That's cool. What, um, if you're, if you're painting a utopian version of the future for Flock and the impact on, uh, society, is there any, um, what what would be the the most concrete kind of utopian vision for for where you, uh, where you want to go in the coming decade?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my kids are in, starting kindergarten. So I got like 10 years until they're in high school. But I'd say my goal is that by the time they're in high school.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Crime is largely not a problem anymore in America. We're not gonna be able to get rid of evil people, right? Let me clarify, alright? There's still gonna be evil people. But if you talk about, you know, will I feel good that my fifteen or sixteen year old daughter is driving in Atlanta? Well, I feel like she's safe all the time. I think if we solve that problem, like tha- that's what we're out to do. And I think we'll do it. Like, the cool thing is that it is happening in small pockets of the country. Um, and it's just a question of, I guess it's the, the, is it Marc Andreessen who said, you know, that the future is ready here, it's just unevenly distributed.

• 54:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  I think that's the case for us too, where we see these pockets where crime is largely a, a thing of the past. And I, I, I imagine that world where you sh- you just don't talk about crime anymore. Uh, and I know it's quite hard for people to imagine, but I guess I would equate it to, you know, the idea of having like one drink and driving used to be pretty normal, right? Like taxis were kinda complicated, you know, black cars were way too expensive. So you have like one drink at dinner and then drive home. Now it's like, wh- why would you do that?

• 55:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Ride sharing has completely changed the way we move around cities. And Uber's not even that old of a company. And like fundamentally changes, changed transportation. And I look at public safety and like that just hasn't happened. And I think we're the ones who are gonna be able to do it.

• 55:37Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm, that's exciting. I wanna transition a little bit to, to operating and some of the beliefs you have around, around running a business. Um, so there's always a balance between a market and a team in, in starting a company. Uh, and it sounds like you've much more gravitated, while your market opportunity is as compelling as it is, you've gravitated more to the, to the people side of things. Can you talk about how you think about, uh, the, the trade off between those two? And, and idea and market centric versus people and, uh, you know, tha- tha- that side?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am a staunch believer in that people trumps product, trumps market. Yeah, I think great teams build great products and find great markets. Uh, I just, I don't, I don't know any other way to do it. Uh, I don't know.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  It's kind of hard to imagine how you start otherwise. And so I've just always believed if you have a great team, that the rest comes with that. In the absence of great team, I think it's really hard. And I look at Flock as a great example. If you look at that, the the original kind of pitch or our seed in our series A, there was nothing about local government. We were a hundred percent focused on neighborhoods. And we've now realized that local government is a really good market, but it's because we had a great team. Like the the team found that market.

• 56:58Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Uh, and so like for me, at least I've had the same team, three companies in a row. And Flock is by multiple orders of magnitude, the business biggest business we've built. And I think it's we have a really good team that works really well together. We've built three really good businesses together. This is the biggest because we happen to get the best market, but like absent that team, I just, I don't know. I think it's so hard to get the team right. Um, and I think also this might be a, uh, maybe a southern perspective. I just think like one of the best parts about being an entrepreneur is you get to pick who you work with. If I didn't want to have to get to pick who I work with, I'd go work at someone else's company. And so like, why would you not focus on a team? When that's one of the only things you actually can control. And I I would go sell,

• 57:41Speaker 01

  you know, water to the ocean with the right people. Like I, I don't know. I just find the market and the product to be less interesting than like who I spend my life with.

• 57:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Um, one of the things we talked about before we we hopped on is, uh, you all have a unique approach to hiring and the onboarding process where there's, there's kind of a two-way pip or there's, there's expectations set up around a job spec and what the job to be done is. Can you, can you talk through that method of of how you make that work?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, uh, we'll go on the record saying I hate the idea of job descriptions. And they're just, they're really dumb because they're creating, they're creating an art. They're creating this like artificial layer between.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  What we're gonna ask you to go do. It's like you need seven years of product marketing experience. It's like, why? Why, why, why is that relevant? Why is that relevant at all? And it's like, oh, you will own is this like bland. It's like such fluff. When the fact of the matter is like at Flock, at least. We only open a role. If the person's gonna make an immediate. Measurable impact to the business within their 90 days. And if they're not gonna do that, then it's not a job. You're just adding a body to a problem potentially. It's like, I just believe very deeply, there's a, there's a saying. Uh, Michael Siebel at Y C said this during our batch, like. The fastest your company will ever run is during this batch.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  So set the velocity as high as possible and hold on to dear life that you can maintain it. And I think people are the same. And so like, I have this strong belief that. If you come out of the gate slow, you will never speed up. I've never met an individual that like picks up pace. And like, oh, their third year of being a flock, they're now operating at max capacity. I'm like, no, like. Their first week is gonna tell me exactly how they're gonna operate. And so what we tend to do is put together a very, very actionable 90 day plan for every new employee. It was during the interview process. So literally. Beginning of our quarter, when we do, uh, budgeting, uh, my co-founder Paige and I review every single 90 day plan. And that's how we decide what roles actually get opened. I don't. I trust my CFO, James, to keep, keep us honest on like budget.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  But Paige and I look like, are you actually gonna make an impact? Is the plan actionable? And what that does is it drives this deep level of alignment between a new employee and their manager. Cause you're effectively telling them, this is how I'm gonna keep score as your manager. And like so few jobs actually give that to you. Most jobs are like, oh, I mean. Maybe in your line of work, it's like quite easy, which is like. Invest in good companies. You still have like a, what a five year delay. On whether or not you made a good decision like.

• 1:00:18Logan Bartlett?

  This, it's actually quite hard because there's so many different people that do it very differently. And so there's no like pattern matching that you could do of how to practice the craft, right?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  No, and so like for us, we just say, look. We're a very unique culture. We expect people to come out of the gate very fast. We expect people to make an impact within their first 30 days.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  And at the end of ninety days, if you're not like super happy and want to still be here, you should just leave because this will never show up on your resume. No one will look down upon it. And like you're in and out, like very little loss. And as a hiring manager, you're also going like, if you can't make an impact to this company within your first ninety days, there's zero reason to believe you ever will. And that's okay, like, let's do this now, let's not wait. And so I view it as a two way thing. Um, because we're not, I think there are a lot of great companies. We run ours very specifically and it's not for everyone. And that's okay. Uh, but we found it to be really effective. It's like an awesome tool. It also is just a, we've now noticed as we've got employees getting to their third, fourth, fifth year at the company,

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  that we use that same tool uh, pretty, pretty often. Um, so now it's like, if you have a new manager, you have to have a ninety day plan. If you have a new responsibility in the company, you get a new ninety day plan. If you just feel like you're lacking alignment with your manager, like as a, as an employee, you can tell your manager, like, I want a ninety day plan. Like, I, I want to know how you're tracking my success. Uh, and we see like our best people tend to ask for it the most. Because those people want to be on the steepest career trajectory. And the easiest way to get more responsibilities is like, tell me how you're keeping score. Because I want to go one step above it. Like, if that's what you think success is, then like, great, I'm going to add four more bullets and go do these too. Uh, and it's been, it's been a really, really impactful tool.

• 1:02:01Logan Bartlett?

  Your mission is such that, um, I assume it draws people that are in particular, uh, uh, feel motivated and empowered to help, uh, solve crime and, and believe in what you guys are doing. I think one of the tensions that ultimately exists when you have a very mission driven, uh, company is that, um, people are going to be on different lines of, uh, of, uh, the spectrum, uh, uh, when it comes to different considerations and debates and things, things like that. Uh, and it's not always going to be consistent. And i- people are going to view it as something more than just a job.

• 1:02:45Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, it, it's, it's, it's viewed as, you know, some, some level of to- total fulfillment because they're there for something beyond just the ability to make money. Um, I guess, one, you do, do you agree with that? And two, when those situations present themselves, like, How do you lead to resolution when a lot of these things maybe are opaque? Or there's often two sides of the coin that both could be true, but you need to ultimately come up with one side?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so we do this, we do this thing, Paige and I do this thing every Friday for new employees. We've got like our cultural norms and walk through in more detail like what you're expected, how you're expected to behave. And one of the topics is mission versus profit. Because a lot of our employees, I'd say the majority of them would work for free at Flock, maybe not forever, but as long as they could. Because they just, they didn't necessarily have the desire to carry a gun and a badge, or they had a desire to impact their community. And most of our employees are, a lot of our employees are at a career point where they've had a lot of success. They've kind of hit a point and they're now looking for more. They want more than just compensation. They want fulfillment in their career and we give that to people.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  But it creates this challenge, right? Because we're not a nonprofit. To be very clear, every one of our employees has equity in the business. They're owners and like businesses generally are measured by some discounted cash flows. Like we gotta make money. And what we try to remind people, what I try to remind people is like, if you look at the history of companies, the biggest companies actually tend to be the ones that have the biggest impact on the world. And you look at someone like Apple, and it was a good company, but it has reached trillion dollar status because of the iPhone, which makes sense. The iPhone has like changed the world. You look at Google and it's like, it's literally as a verb. Like it should be a massive company. It's changed the way we access information. And so the point I try to make to the team is like,

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  the worst thing we could actually do is go out of business. If we don't charge our customers, if we don't make money, we will go out of business. And that could be, that is the worst thing. So we try to find that balance of like, you know, we, the best thing we can do is succeed, solve crime, make money, build a big business. But I do think that.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Business model aside, let's assume we fast forward 10 years from now and crime is largely gone and it's because of us. It's like hard to imagine a world where we're not a hundred plus billion dollar company. And that's at least my belief. I hope, I hope, I hope that comes true, but I just think those two are actually like pretty correlated. And you don't have to give one without the other.

• 1:05:26Logan Bartlett?

  You're a self-professed micromanager, or, or I don't know if that's the term you would use, but very in the details of, of things. How do you think about that as part of your job versus the other thing of, I don't know, autonomy, empowerment, or whatever the, the other side of, of that coin would be in your responsibility as CEO?

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think, and, and this might be a, a southern thing or a Georgia thing, like I, I,

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  everyone in the company eventually reports to me. And so this like, this, this, this newer concept that I shouldn't care about every detail of what you do is really weird to me because like it is my job to care about what you're doing. It is my job to give you direction. It is my, my job to sweat the details.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  And it, it's like, it, it just is weird to me that not every CEO and every employee or person like gets that. Um, cause like we're not a democracy at Flock. There's, it's a pyramid. Like I sit at the top, which means I'm also ultimately responsible. Like every quarter, my board sits around the table and says, is Garrett still the best CEO to run this company? They sit above me and at some point they might decide I'm not, and then I'm out.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  And I guess the way I look at it is I think about my job in, in three functions.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Some days I'm, I'm my direct reports manager and I'm deep in their stuff. And, and I want to get into every single detail and it makes, makes people very uncomfortable. Um, but people assume falsely that it is a trust issue. Like I don't trust you, so I want to micro. No, I actually, I actually want to help you be successful. And in an environment that at least I'm in now, and in a company that's about a thousand people fully distributed. I don't know how else to make good decisions without access to the primary raw data. And that looks like micromanaging, but it's really like, I don't know how else to make good decisions. Second part of my job is to be a peer, right? So it's like, how are we making decisions together? And the third job I actually view is like, how do I work for you?

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  And so if you think about like my, my, our CRO, I'm on the road every single week visiting my customers on our biggest deals. I'm working for him to help him hit his number. Now, when I'm also there, I'm assessing what's the quality of our demos? What's the quality of the relationships we have with these prospects? Like, how are we putting this deal? And so I guess for me, like, I expect my team to do the exact same thing. And I just don't believe that the right management approach is to hire smart people and let them run. I think that's crazy. Uh, it's like, how will they know where to run? Like, it's your job as a manager to, to force that alignment. And I think, uh, one of my board members once described it as, uh, it often feels

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  like you have the Eye of Sauron, you know, from like the Lord of the Rings. Uh, but it seems like wherever we put our energy behind, things get better. And at least that's what I've noticed is the places I tend to direct my energy tend to get better a lot faster. Uh, and so, you know, on a quarterly basis, monthly basis, that energy tends to shift and people get a little bit uncomfortable, but people come out of the other end of it quite happy because they got the force of the company behind them. Because if it's truly a problem, it's unlikely a performance issue. It's most likely a lack of resourcing. Like, our logo is, we have this one problem in the company today. And it's like, it was kind of on the side, wasn't a big deal.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Started seeing customer data come back that the people, our customers were really frustrated. And I dig in and I'm like, this is just a staffing issue. Like, I think we're literally understaffed by three X. Like, we just, we just didn't, we didn't design this right. And then was able to immediately open up budget to go triple the team. And so that person, the person was like really uncomfortable for about a month because he was, she was like, man, Garrett's like really digging into this topic and like, I'm not used to this level of scrutiny. But then you walk out of it and it's like, no, I think you're doing a great job. She's not the enough people. Let's go hire like, let's go hire 12 more people like now. Now she's super excited. So, I don't know. I guess for me, I've just always been a person that just loves to be in the details and loves to see raw progress and work in progress.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  And I hate, hate this idea that as a CEO.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  I only get delivered polished goods.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  It's just like, that's boring. I don't know. Like, I don't want to just sit here and get presentations all day of like, how good we're doing and all the things that are going well. But it's like, I don't know. I don't, I don't work at a company that's a hundred years old that's generating lots of cash. Like, I work at a company that's growing like a weed where we have only problems. It's like, I just want to go solve those problems.

• 1:10:18Logan Bartlett?

  Speaking of growing like a weed, uh, so, so you're, you said you're roughly a thousand people today, is that right?

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, about a thousand people, yeah.

• 1:10:24Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, and what, what were you, I don't know, two years ago or three years ago?

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Probably three or four hundred, three hundred.

• 1:10:30Logan Bartlett?

  Three or four hundred, okay.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  We doubled headcount year over year for a while, and I think we grew headcount by about forty percent last year, so.

• 1:10:37Logan Bartlett?

  So, so doubling headcount year over year, uh, means that you're, uh, you know, uh, counting some, some attrition, then that means that, uh, you know, usually when you look around a room, um, half or more than half of the people have been there for less than, less than twelve months, right? Uh, so how do you think about the balance or how have you been able to balance, um, scaling a team as fast as you have while making sure people are aligned and, you know, keeping a culture that is consistent across an organization when so many of the, the bodies are new at any given time?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, uh, I don't know if we do it well. I think we're definitely trying. Um, a few things that have worked well, though, I mentioned this briefly, but I'll come back to it.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Every new employee gets two touchpoints with Paige and myself in their first month. Uh, and the first one is just like a, a wide open, just like, let's just have a coffee chat. You know, it's on Zoom, which is not ideal. Um, and like, that, that's really helpful. The more helpful one, though, is about four years ago, when the business was really starting to scale, uh, I got this advice from, from Ben Horowitz, that like, if you don't write your culture down, it is inherently weak. And the absence of like, a, a written culture. It you will, you your culture will just fade away. And in a remote environment, even harder, right? Because you don't see these people, you don't interact with these people.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  And so Paige and I looked around the room and said, who are our best people? And why do we think they're the best? And what do they do? Like, how are they making decisions? So we started this document and it evolves, right? It's continued to evolve, but we call it our cultural norms. And it is like, it is a representation of the best people on their best days. And no one's perfect. Like, I fail all the time on this document. But like, when I'm having my best day, I'm hitting all of these. And it and it is not the soft and fluffy, like, you know, be nice, you know, like, it's like actual actionable things. Um, like, like one being, you know, responsiveness, like our best people are really, really responsive. I think that's common across a lot of companies, but like, it's important to us.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  And so when we have our new employees, Paige and I sit down and we read this document together out loud and share stories. And every employee has to go through this and every employee exits saying, you've all read this. You're all signing up that you will hold each other accountable to this. And I think it works because like I can't be everywhere, Paige can't be everywhere, Matt can't be everywhere. And we all then have this single kind of the the testaments of like what it means to work at Flock and how we're going to live these values. And being responsive is one, being mission oriented is one. Um, you can kind of go down this list of like things that are very uniquely Flock. The the other thing that I think has worked well is I'm just on the road nonstop.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Um, and when I'm on the road, I'm not only there to visit customers, I'm there to visit employees. And so that gives me a chance to see our people in kind of like in real life, not just like, oh, let's grab dinner, but like, let's go visit a customer. Let's go do an install. Um, let's go do whatever it may be. And I I just, I think that even in a hybrid company, you cannot remove the human element of it. And so we have an expectation that every and every employee will get at least two in-person touchpoints a year. One with their team and one with the whole company. And so I guess I'd say like, we we tend to be very. Designed about when are those touchpoints? Um, I think the general thumb is like you've got about ninety to one hundred and eighty days before those touchpoints fade.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  And they lose the impact, that kind of emotion and excitement. So I guess we try to be pretty thoughtful about how we do that.

• 1:14:24Logan Bartlett?

  One, one of the things that often uh happens, and I I've talked to uh different folks on the podcast before about this, but um uh, sometimes you run into the issue that your um, your senior leaders or people uh in the organization are better at um managing up and communicating than they are doing real substantive work. And I think it's true of any organization. I, one of your board members told me that you had um, maybe some interesting thoughts or frameworks about how you go about assessing if people are uh, if full of shit uh, and and all talk are actually substantive in the work that they're doing.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the natural tendency for companies is to spend more time talking about work than actually working. Uh, which is like kind of weird, but it ha- it starts to happen. Like it's a very, it's a very natural thing that I've noticed is even happening at Flock. And I think some of it is, like, well, if you have enough people, you just have to talk more, which is not desirable, but it happens. For us, the, the thing that I always look at is so, like a lot of companies, we do some variant of OKRs. Um, but what's different is for us is at the end of that process, we do it once a quarter. We look at, okay, across the executive team, what's the distribution of ownership? And like generally for us, anyone below a director should never own an OKR because it's intended to be a team.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  It's to be an output that the company cares about. So if it's like a, it's an IC, that's now like a performance review, and that's not the goal. So it should be a director. And I expect anyone pretty much VP and above to own at least one, if not two, OKRs every quarter. And when I say own, I expect them actually putting pen to paper. Like not like, oh yeah, I'll manage the team and I'll set the goals. It's like, nah, nah, nah, like real, actual work. Um, and one of the ways we're able to do that is like every two weeks, when we do uh, like a check in, whoever is the owner is actually one writing the update and it goes to the entire executive team. And it is very, very easy to smell bullshit. Because you notice that their updates aren't very detailed. Their updates don't have any actual action that was done.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  And it's like, oh, here's the update on the metrics. Yeah, but what did you do? Like, uh, what did you get done in the last two weeks? Um, as an individual. Um, and when that accountability is coming across their peers versus just me, it it sets the bar pretty high. Um, but now whether it's the general counsel or it's this VP of Sales or this VP of Inge, uh, that is really, really, I think, better. We used to do it in a way that I was the one driving this. And now this kind of a peer accountability has leveled the expectations that no one, we're not a big enough company for pure people managers. No one is allowed to just manage people, myself included. Um, I carry a bag and figure out what are the, you know, five or 10 deals I can help move across the finish line? What is the one or two products that I can help push to production?

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Uh, and so for us, it's just like, it's a critical part of who we are.

• 1:17:23Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things I've heard you talk about is, um, the, the, being a macro optimist, but micro pessimist within a, uh, within your business. Can, can, can you, can you speak to that? What, what does that mean? How do you internalize it? How do you go about actionableizing it?

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the, I, I like the saying, I think it does describe how we act. What it looks like though is it means we never as a business talk about success. Like if it's working, why are we talking about it? Just let it go, let it keep running. And so as an executive team, it can be depressing at times because we only talk about problems. Uh, we only talk about the things that are failing. But on a, on a local level, on a, on a small time scale, all we should be doing is being worried about the things that are going wrong. And, and the job, I think, as an executive is to hold two truths that can be opposite, which is I can be incredibly depressed and frustrated and focused on these things that are broken. While at the same time, like I just said, I do generally think that in 10 years from now, Flock will have eliminated crime in America.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  A lot of problems I gotta go solve to it later today when we wrap up. But like in ten years, I think we're gonna do great. Uh, like that's because I generally am, am, am optimistic for that long-term perspective, but I think that what founders in particular and executives have a problem of doing is when you only present that optimistic perspective, you lose the confidence of your team. Because they're living in the shit every single day of all the problems that are happening. Like they're living in this reality that like, well, this customer's mad and, and this, this new product is delayed. And when you go on stage in All Hands and say like, we're a great company. They're like, well, maybe, but my world is a mess. And so we try to find that balance of saying like,

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  you can be happy and optimistic while saying we have a lot of problems. And like, here's the plan. And so our internal kind of cultural value is optimism, but with a plan. It's okay to be optimistic, but you do actually have to have a plan. Like, because most of the things we are working on are a problem and you can smile about it, but what we have seen people go off track on, I think I've worked with a lot of founders as well, where it's like, they're optimistic so much so that they lack the plan. And I'm like, oh, like, excited that you think you're gonna 10x your business and revenue this year. Do you actually have the pipeline to do that? Do you actually have the headcount quota to do that? Like, it's cool that you think you can do it. So it, it works out well. I'd say the downside to it is

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  we tend to never celebrate milestones. Like we got to a hundred million in ARR in just under four years from starting the company. And it was like, I sent a text to our CRO and I was like, nice, good job. And he's like, thanks. And then we had like a slide out in All Hands and like then we just went back to work. Yeah, it's working. And it's like, that's kind of a bummer because I think that I, I think we could do a better job recognizing that like, we're, we're working hard. It's generally working. It's a good company. But also, like, I think our success is somewhat from the fact that we don't weigh on our success.

• 1:20:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  It's a broken.

• 1:20:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And also, I think to hear you talk about it, and I assume for a lot of your employees, the financial metrics are validating of the, the, the mission, but they're not the goal in and of themselves, right, as a standalone, so.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  I, I think the last time we checked,

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  the majority, super majority of our employees, this is the first ever venture-backed company they've worked at before.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  So like, the finances don't even, they almost don't even believe it. Like, when we tell them, like, oh, the company's worth X billions of dollars, they're like, I don't even know what that means. That's irrelevant. That's like irrelevant to me. Like, we have to spend a lot of effort reminding people that this could be financially, like, very, very, very lucrative for them. It just doesn't, it doesn't matter. They could go get better jobs that pay more today.

• 1:21:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Fascinating. I, um, one of the, one of the employees that you've had, and I guess you've worked with, for, for a while, um, is actually your mother.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:42Logan Bartlett?

  And she is, uh, I guess I don't know what her official title is right now. She, is she your executive assistant?

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  That is her, that is her title. That is her title.

• 1:21:51Logan Bartlett?

  Executive assistant to you. How, uh, one, how did that come to be? Uh, what was that interview process like? And what is it like, uh, working with, I've, I've heard a lot of, uh, brother, sister combos, you know? Uh, I guess, uh, father, son is a lot. I, I, I, I don't know if I know a, any examples where the, the mother, uh, is working for the son in that way. So definitely.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Yes. I've actually, I've yet to meet anyone else that's in this dynamic. Um, it's a, like, I'll leave it as a, you know, people should try it maybe more often. So I first started working with my mother when I was 14. Um, I had started a business, I say business, it's like a gross exaggeration. I started fixing people's computers and getting paid to do it. Um, and one of the challenges is that, that when I started doing that, I'd make people bring me their computer. And then I'd work on it at my house and then call them and say, hey, you know, your computer is now fixed. Not a lot of people want to drive their computer to you. Uh, that's pretty annoying.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Uh, and so my mom was actually like, hey, you know, I could just drive you to these people's houses and just wait for you. And I was like, well, you know, like, yeah, but you know, you have a job. Um, this would be taking away from hours you could work. Like, I should just pay you then. Uh, and it's really weird. And we were like, yeah, I guess like logically this all makes sense. So she became my driver and she would drive me to people's houses and these small businesses and she'd wait for, wait in the car and I would do my thing and then just, you know, a piece of the revenue just went straight to her. Uh, and this is like, I'm fourteen, I'm in fifth grade. Uh, sorry, not fifth grade, I'm in sixth, sixth or seventh grade. Uh, it's really strange in hindsight. Like I, I don't. We obviously have a very unique relationship and then

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  um, she was working at another company when I started Flock and at the point that I felt like Flock was no longer like a high risk of dying. Um, it's like around our series B, series C, when it's about things like really working. Uh, I, I called her and I was like, we should get the band back together. Um, like, uh, like I, I want this to be the, the last place you work. Um, and i- if you have young kids, and maybe I'm unique here. The biggest stress I have in life is not my job, it's my family. Um, when my kids are sick, when something goes wrong at school, like tha- that's the deepest level of anxiety I exhibit.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  And so the, while she's a great admin, uh, managing my calendar is not complicated. Uh, she doesn't touch my emails. She barely manages my, I mean, manage some calendar, but like the biggest thing that it provides is I now have a third parent in the equation. Um, and I said before, I travel a lot. I'm gone almost every week. I have a third parent around that actually not only just loves my kids and my kids love her. And so at least for me, you know, it's this more holistic approach of for me to be the best version of myself to the company. Removing some of the stress from a personal life is actually the biggest gap. She's able to do that and make a traditional model that wouldn't work. Uh, but as my mother, it's like, yeah, so she's at my house every day. She works from my house and my kids get to see her.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  And it's like, I think it's a, it's a better quality of life for everyone. So it's pretty unique. But I think more people, more people should try it. More people should try it.

• 1:25:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, I, uh, uh, I wonder my mom's listening right now if she's gonna have a request for a job at this point. But it's, it's an interesting dynamic to have, have that set up.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Performance review season is always a little tricky, but yeah.

• 1:25:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine. I, uh, yeah, I, I don't know how that would play out for me, but it's a, uh, I've got, it's, it, uh, listen, having, especially when the line blends between EA and PA and, you know, grandmother and, uh, you know, all of that stuff. So I, um, yeah, it's a interesting setup, I'm sure, but, um.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  Hey guys, I'm Jacob Efron, a partner of Logan's at Redpoint. Wanted to take a quick break from the episode to let you know that Redpoint's AI podcast, Unsupervised Learning, now has its own YouTube channel. We have an incredible set of guests really at the forefront of the AI revolution. So if you're interested in what's happening in AI, what it means for businesses in the world, definitely subscribe. Now back to the show.

• 1:26:08Logan Bartlett?

  Hey, one of the things I heard you mention was that, uh, there's kind of this ethos in Silicon Valley of, of like the 19 year old or 20 year old or 22, whatever it is, going and starting a company right away. And I, I think a lot of it's rooted in, uh, um, you have the level of scrappiness and you're less, uh, income can be kind of sticky and quality of life can be sticky. And so as you get. Used to more of the trappings of some level of wealth, your ability to go back in time, I think can be, can be difficult. I had heard you mention that like, one of the best experiences you had was actually not starting a company right out of the gates,

• 1:26:48Logan Bartlett?

  but instead joining a company in the very early days, but learning from people that had been there, done that. Can you talk about that, that, yeah, that Silicon Valley ethos of like the Zuckerbergs and the Colisons and whoever it is that have been sort of the canonical examples of young entrepreneurs versus gaining a little bit of experience and how that benefited you?

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think there's, there's two problems. I think starting a company when you're like 18 or 21. I think one, you just haven't had a lot of life. And so I think you tend to make pretty bad decisions. And I think there are some people clearly that muscle through it and are just incredibly smart, incredibly good operators. When you think about someone like, you know, Zuckerberg's easy examples, like he just built a great team. He built a great product. Like he just, he figured it out fast enough. I think he is one in a billion. And I think there is a lot to learn from great leaders, great people. And you just wind up being, I think, a better CEO or a better founder when you

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  just have more life experience. I think the second challenge too, is you tend to pick pretty dumb ideas when you're that age. You just haven't seen as much business. You haven't seen as much of the world. And so I think about, one of my closest friends actually is a pretty young CEO. He fits that bucket. And he's now running a very successful company. And it's awesome. But like, he went through four years of working on totally the wrong idea, to then do a massive pivot to a much better idea. And I think it worked out well for him, but I think that if he was uh four years wiser, seven years wiser, he never would have gone after the dumb idea.

• 1:28:36Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  Because it would have been clear to him that like this is not that actually that interesting of a business to go start. And so I do feel uh maybe inappropriately strongly about it because it's my own personal experience where I got the benefit of working with some incredible people. Watching them build a company. I was the first employee. This company, we then went on to co-found a company together um after that one. So learned even more. And by the time, you know, Flock came around, it was the third company I co-founded and I was like, I I feel really comfortable. I'm still a little bit uncomfortable running a company this size, but like beginnings, I'm like, I know what we're working on is a big problem. I know that if this is successful, it could be a really, really big business. And that, to me, I don't know, you don't,

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  life isn't endless. Like you only get so many shots on goal. And I just would, I would hate to waste. Because if it's if it's successful, right, you're gonna go spend seven to 10 years working on something like, God, I would hate to waste any moment.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  On on a on an idea that is actually not, isn't big enough for at least what I want to do. Obviously, people might have different goals, but like, I have always wanted to build a company that mattered, that like really mattered. And it's hard to do that if you're 18 or 21 or 22.

• 1:29:52Logan Bartlett?

  How old were you when you started Flock?

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  Twenty-nine, thirty?

• 1:29:57Logan Bartlett?

  Twenty-nine, twenty-nine. Thirty, you you you had had a couple exits, right?

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Logan Bartlett?

  I think two, two hundred million dollar exits and and it sounds like you took some time off and maybe uh got your handicap down from a a golf game standpoint, like what um what? Uh, that period of time, it's a weird thing, I think, to have success early and especially to have been through the the mission of the company, right? You had the business that sold and you had uh you you had been through a lot of uh of that. May- maybe that moment in time and um I I don't know, quarter life crisis or existential consideration, did you? Was that a a moment of sort of reckoning uh of like, hey, what what am I gonna do from here? I've accomplished what I maybe dreamed of far earlier than I expected. What was that moment in time like?

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  Uh, it's definitely uncomfortable in hindsight. Um, because to your point, we, we, my wife and I kind of accomplished the financial things we really wanted to do. And professionally, I'd accomplished the, you know, at least partially the things I wanted to do. And to your early question on like people versus team versus market, you know, the first business was in what would now be called fintech. Second business was in, was in live events and sports, built another business in automotive. And what I had noticed is it was always with people that I liked working with. And I guess what, what I kind of came down to conclusion is like, there's only one thing I can actually control, which is who I spend time with.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  And I want to go spend time with people that I like working with. And the easiest way to do that is to go build a company. Uh, so it forces us to work together. And I think what I'd also come to a conclusion of was selling companies is great.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  But you do lose control of your company. And I get the question all the time from our employees. It's like, oh, would you ever sell Flock? And it's like, yeah, I mean, I get, you know, I have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, which is all of our employees, myself, our investors, but man, it's really fun to run this company. Yeah. Like, and like,

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  what would I do than just go start another company? Yeah. Like, I, I like the people I work with. Like, oh, you have built a really good team. I love my co-founders. Uh, I love our customers. Like, what, what would I do next? Like, I don't know. I, I've got too many things that are unsolved here. And so I guess for me, like, it's been fun because at least in the last two companies, we sold them because we actually kind of achieved the mission. Like, we built the products, we got market share. They were small in terms of revenue, but it wasn't as if we had 10 years of roadmap waiting to be built. Whereas at Flock, man, I have so many things I want to go do. And we're farther ahead in revenue than I would say our impact.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  You know, like I, I think there's so much left undone. And so for me, what I'm now realizing in hindsight is like this was a calling for me. And I have the right kind of DNA or makeup to do all the political stuff that has to be done to deal with local and state government and federal government and enough engineering to prowess to like build the original product and like kind of Goldilocks type situation. And also the, the skin these days that's thick enough to weather the hit pieces day after day after day. Um, knowing that we're doing better for the world. So yeah, it was a weird time. Uh, and really like appreciative. I had a very supportive wife who pushed me in this direction.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  Um, I'm about to be like, hey, get off, get off your butt. Stop playing golf and like, go build something again. Like you're a builder, go build.

• 1:33:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. Sounds like a, a, a, a, a good, um, critic and also a good, uh, nudge, uh, along the way. Uh, I think that, that we're all appreciative of, of her, her service to, uh, to doing that. Um. One of the things I think, uh, that, that I had heard and we had discussed a little bit before we started recording was that you specifically didn't want to start, I think dopey was the term that you used and maybe your uncle was the motivator, uh, behind, behind doing that. So in your mind, like, what does it actually mean not starting a dopey company? And how did that, uh, how did that like help influence you to go after Flock?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, my uncle was my, my closest mentor and he was always very, very good with words and he coined the term for me of like, don't go build another dopey business. Calling the last three companies I had started quite dopey, which is, you know. Okay. Now, but hi- his point was, you know, he had built a black box trading company. And while he loved the team and they had an incredible team, like loved the people. The business was moving atoms, sorry, bits around. Making money, but like zero incremental value to the world. Zero, maybe negative.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  And I think that weighed on him. And his advice to me was like, you should go build something that you're really, really proud of. Not a part of just the teams. Of course you'll build a great team. That's kind of like a requirement, but like, one that if you left and the team left, you'd be like, man, that mattered. And that was our only filter for Paige and Matt and I of like all the ideas we were thinking about building. It had to be one that wasn't dopey. And we've shared a few stories together of some of the success Flock has had on the impact side. Like those are not dopey. Um, and every day we see those stories and not every company gets that. Um, you know, you think about a company, I like to pick on Salesforce because they're wildly successful.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  If Salesforce disappeared tomorrow, who cares? No one would care. We'd all switch to HubSpot or we'd switch to whatever the next CRM winds up being, but it's just, it's just a CRM. That's it. It's just a piece of software. And like, it's very hard. I think once you've tasted something like Flock, to go back to that. I think it's really hard because you realize that your skills as a technologist, whether you're an engineer or marketer or sales or, or a cat, someone like yourself who deploys capital. God, it is way more fun to be involved in a business that really changes people's lives. Like really does it. Not the like hand waving. That's one of the reasons why I think we've been successful. Fundraising, to the end of the day, you're a human too.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  You're a dad, you're a husband, you're a partner, you've got grandparents and parents and friends. And when you explain this crazy AI product that doesn't actually really do anything, but it's going to be a great investment, you're excited because that's your job. You do have to go return capital to LPs. But you're so much more proud and excited when the, when the company you're partnering with or working with is actually easy to explain and makes an impact. And that's, you know, one of the things that we hold very dearly.

• 1:37:02Logan Bartlett?

  It, it sounds like you, you all had a fairly serendipitous journey uh on fundraising, going to Y C and you know, you had good investors from the start. I think Bedrock, initialized uh Matrix, like a bunch of people initially, but there was this um. This, this point that I think almost every company goes through Stripe is maybe the exception, but almost every, every company has like a shitty fundraising round that they really struggle to get, get done. I guess, can you, can you talk through the circumstances around being three months away from running out of capital and the business doing well, but for the first time, like it may be coming a little more difficult to fundraise? Like,

• 1:37:44Logan Bartlett?

  what were the circumstances around that? And are there lessons that can be extrapolated for the entrepreneur listening?

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I always felt like I had a pretty good pulse on the investor market and like how people perceive the business. I think what I got wrong is there are certain points in time where the investor class changes and with that perspective on a business changes. And I think series B and probably let's call it like pre IPO slash IPO are those two trigger points where like in a series B investment, I'm now learning this in hindsight, uh, it's not just the story anymore. Like the, the metrics really matter because in a seed or series A investment, it's like pretty easy to, to underwrite to

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  attend to 100x return. Like everything about in my pitch to, to Gary and Alexis at initialize, they're like, do you think this thing can get to a hundred million in ARR? I was like, yeah, let me show you why. And it's like on an African, you can say, well, there's 400,000 neighborhoods in America. I think they all probably like want to be safe. The average neighborhood spends $10,000 with us. So like, yeah, I think I can get to a hundred million dollars in ARR. And they're like, cool. Then this is an easy, then like we, we love the story. This is, we can underwrite this really easily. And I think even at series A, they're just looking for a little bit more traction, but it's the same pitch, which is like, can this thing get to 100, 200 million in ARR? And therefore like, this is a good

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  investment. What I noticed at least in series B is like, that wasn't enough anymore. Cause now you're talking about a price point on the business that.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  You gotta believe pretty significant revenue growth is still ahead of it. Pretty significant like moats in the business that like you can block out competitors. Because if you're seeing success, someone's gonna come behind you. And so this like the the most memorable thing was we never really had like a data room. Right? Like, we were very much emotional triggered and investing. People really said about product, the concept and the traction of the business and not a lot of data. And we were like laughed out of the room by these later stage investors. Who were like, your data is trash. You have nothing like where's your NRR waterfall? It's like, what's an NRR waterfall? It's like, we're growing fast. That's all I know.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  We went from a million to six million in ARR in a year. And we went from six million to seventeen million this year. Give me money. Like, like, I don't, I'm not worried about the details. Like, I just think we have a lot of space. And what I didn't realize is that my job was becoming the storyteller of how our TAM is growing. How our penetration, how our penetration in the markets that we're in is defensible. Like, my job had changed and I hadn't realized it. Uh, and I didn't pivot fast enough. And so to to your point, we were down to about two, three months of runway. And only two of us in the company knew. Uh, Sky John and I, he was running finance at the time. And it was scary.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Uh, it's like, no one had any idea that like we were at pretty big risk of not hitting payroll. Uh, the investor community had given up on the business. Um, are, you know, it's. I don't look fondly back on that period of time. Uh, we wound up having to do a kind of a mini RIF layoff type thing. We had to like go all the way down to bare bottoms to extend runway. And I had to call Gary back at initialized and say like, hey, I, you know, I need, I need twenty million dollars. And he was like, I've got seven. I was like, well, well, that's not, uh, that's like, I took less than half of twenty, Gary. Uh, he was like, yeah, but like, we're a seed stage investor. This is, this is already a bit of a stretch for us.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  Uh, and to his credit, he believed when a lot of other people didn't.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Um, and he got a great price because I had no negotiating leverage at that point. So I think he did, he did, uh, we were at about sixteen million an ARR and he invested at a hundred million dollar valuation. And we had tripled the business the prior year and we wound up tripling the business again, which we said we were gonna do. And everyone said that's impossible. Uh, you're selling hardware, this company's gonna flatten out, you don't, you don't know what you're doing. Uh, and we wound up proving everyone wrong and I don't really even understand. We put up another quarter of good results.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  And what was different is I then told John, who's in charge of our finance at the time, I was like, dude, we're gonna run out of money. So I chose, even though Gary only gave me seven, I pretended like he gave me twenty. I spent it like he gave me twenty. Uh, and so I knew we were only gonna have probably like three to six month of runway. Uh, again, like where we would need to fundraise, like we were gonna have to go back out to market. And I took the feedback from the investors like seriously, which was like, your data room doesn't match the story. Your data, the data you're giving us does not match what we're seeing on the top line. Uh, and so we spent a bunch of time like redoing that and the business continued to put up good numbers.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  The business was scaling and it felt like we were an entirely different company.

• 1:43:03Logan Bartlett?

  It, it, it, in every round, I mean, since then, as, as I, uh, unfortunately well know, uh, has been very, uh, competitive and, uh, uh, you know, you, you, you've had more, uh, interest than, uh, need for, for capital. And was it really just the, the, the, I mean, there were some inflection point clearly you hit from a scale standpoint. That was probably, uh, uh, some whatever, uh, threshold. But was it really just the storytelling and the presentation of all of it? You just got crisper in that and therefore, I mean, the venture of community can be sheep in a lot of ways.

• 1:43:46Logan Bartlett?

  Sort of falling in line around stuff, but is there anything else around that?

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's, there's, there's a few things, right? Like, I think this is relevant to a lot of entrepreneurs. If they're, if they're trying to serve a vertical that has not been attacked by venture successfully. Although I had prior success, like in terms of the growth of the business, we got zero credit for future goals.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  And the reason why I think it's fair because like they're saying like, well, who, who, who do you peer against? Who, who should I look to as an investor to see what's possible? And every other company we were competing with, you know, like Axon was bootstrapped. And it took Axon, you know, seventeen years to go public and it's a thirty something year old company now. And like, it, it's just like, it's a beautiful business, but man, it took almost forty years to get there.

• 1:44:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  That's not venture. It's a great business, but it's not venture. And you look at Motorola or other biggest competitor, and that's a hundred plus year old company. So as an investor, you're going like, I can't really underwrite to your future goals because you're saying that, but who do I look to? So I do, I do think to your point, at, at, at a certain point, people just started to believe me. Because I said, hey, look, we're going to go from, from sixteen, seventeen million to fifty million in ARR. People were like, you're out of your freaking mind.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  And I was like, ah, I think that's the, I think that's the plan. Like, I think we're going to hit this plan. And you put up a quarter or two on that trajectory and everyone's like, he might be right. Like, this actually, this actually might work. And his numbers do seem pretty high, but like, he seems to be hitting numbers. The company seems to be tracking. And so I think there was an inflection point where the investor community stopped disagreeing with us and said, maybe these guys just actually deeply understand this market better than we do. It's bigger than we ever expected and they've clearly figured out a way to attack it. Uh, and so every single fundraise, every single quarter, you know, I think as a business, it took six years to have our first ever quarter that wasn't net, net larger in ARR growth, if that makes sense.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  Like, we never had that. Not a down quarter on ARR, like a down quarter on the velocity of bookings.

• 1:45:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  Um, and so I think that was just the big, that was the other one is like the, the lack of a pattern to follow. Or like a proxy to look to. And even today, as a, as a larger company, when we get the question of like, oh, who, who do you view as, as public comps, it's kind of, we don't. Sam Sarr, I guess, but like they serve a totally different vertical. We have a lot of commonalities in terms of our, our metrics. And so I do think that that is it hard to overcome until you hit some scale.

• 1:46:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Garrett, thank you for doing this. This was a really fun conversation and it's a incredible business you're, you're building. I, I would not categorize it as dopey.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  I appreciate that.

• 1:46:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, your uncle can be proud that, that he motivated you in a good direction here.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  I think so too. Well, I appreciate it. It's great to spend some time together.

• 1:46:53Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you for listening to this conversation with Garrett Langley, co-founder and CEO of Flock Safety. Really impressive individual, building a really important company. If you enjoyed this discussion with Garrett, please do share with anyone else that you think might find it interesting. And please subscribe on whatever platform that you're listening on. Each additional subscription helps us drive more listeners, which ultimately leads to our goal of bringing on better guests each subsequent week. And so your help is really appreciated. You'll hear another great guest here next week and we look forward to seeing you back on the Logan Bartlett Show.