Garrett Langley of Flock Safety on building technology to solve crime

Garrett Langley started Flock Safety in 2017 after a crime in his neighborhood went unsolved. Flock is now one of the most successful companies selling to law enforcement, known for their camera network across the roads, and even drones to support police officers. Cheers. Good to see you.

Likewise, thanks for having me.

Okay, so maybe start by describing how does the Flock product work?

Yeah. Maybe we go, we rewind like all the way back, because it's evolved. You know, so eight years ago, living in Atlanta, and there's a fun fact, is if you're in a place like Atlanta or Memphis or pick a town in the southeast, if you just pull 10 F-150 door handles, some, let's call it three at a 10, will be unlocked. And like one at a 10 will have a firearm in the glove box. Which is like, regardless of the firearm, your point of view on it, it's like, you should keep the firearm in the safe.

And you should keep it in a safe, not in a glove box. Like, that's just like really bad. But that's what people do. And so if you're, you know, a gang member and you're trying to obtain a firearm, like the easiest way is just to just like drive into a neighborhood, six kids, because they're kids, like jump out, you start pulling door handles. You don't have anything breaking into the car, you're just pulling door handles. So this happened in my neighborhood.

Someone got a gun. Someone posts on Nextdoor like, oh my gosh, I forgot my gun in my car and it's now gone. And so the Atlanta Police Department comes and the major was like fairly apathetic. Like, hey, sorry. good luck. Like, we're not going to... So to your Bosch thing, they're not going to fingerprint the vehicle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, no one's been hurt. Yeah, yeah. And for most major cities... There's no stakeout happening. There's no stakeout.

There's no, like, oh, we're going to go do all this research. So for most major cities, if a human is not physically hurt, the crime goes just to the bottom of the list. And I find that really frustrating. Because, like, this should be, like, really easy. Like, these people drove into our neighborhood. They stole a firearm. I'm like, we should go after these people. And he was like, well, we don't have any information. I was like, okay, what do you need?

He's like, we need a license plate. Okay, great. So I was an electrical engineer. So I called a buddy of mine who studied computer science with me at Georgia Tech. And I was like, look, we're going to go build this camera. So I would just like track license plates. That's it. That's what the Atlanta police department said. So we were like, okay, great. So we built this thing. And if you ever come to Atlanta office, we still have the original camera, like on, you know, pedestal.

It looks like garbage. I'm not a mechanical engineer. we put it up and all it did was track every car that came into our neighborhood but as you can imagine like after 30 days you start to be able to know like that person clearly lives here they're in the neighborhood twice a day four times a day and so about two months later another car gets broken into another firearm stolen the same major comes back and I was like oh by the way here's the only car that doesn't live in our neighborhood that was here last night that car gets put on what we call like a bolo like be on the lookout for a couple hours later they find that

vehicle the gun's in the car person goes to jail and uh what was really interesting uh is like the we were like very proud of ourselves this was not a business at the time um single project and so the five o 'clock news would like do the story so i'm on the five o 'clock news and the next morning like i had five emails from neighborhoods and i think i might be the we might be the only company that for the first let's call it 20 or 30, 40 million of ARR, strictly driven off of 5 o 'clock news.

That was our only growth channel. 5 o 'clock news.

That actual media appearance didn't strike.

No, and every time we solved a crime, we'd be like, hey, do you want to cover this story at 5 o 'clock? And they'd be like, we'd love to. We'd love talking about crime.

Because this is local news. It's local news.

We're not going to go to the New York Times. No one cares about like a stolen sofa. Yeah, yeah. Or like a stolen dog. Okay, but that's interesting.

Did you start with, because I associate Flock today with being plugged into the stolen car databases. But you started without that, just looking up suspicious stuff.

Yeah, well, I mean, if you think about it, in the classic, I don't know who gets credit for it, there's 400 ,000 neighborhoods in America and there's no consolidation of providing safety for those communities. And when I say neighborhood, that is a legally binding organization that can sign a contract. Yes, yes. Not like you and me just put 20 bucks together and say, let's buy this thing on the street. So that felt really interesting. And then the other kind of interesting insight that we developed, which took time, is I imagine at your house, you have a security system.

You might have a gate to your house. You probably have a dog. You have all these things, right? They do two things that are actually not helpful. They tell you a crime has happened. They don't actually help you solve it. And then what about your neighbor? And so what we'd realize is that every single security system was focused on the individual. Yes. But like I think about my life in Atlanta, there was this crazy random act of violence a couple of years ago.

Like my wife wouldn't run outside for a year. And I go, it had nothing to do with us. It was like a mile away. And so the whole premise became that you had to build a safety system for a community. Yes. Because that's actually what you feel. I mean, you live in San Francisco, you get it. Like even if you've never been the victim, if crime is up, it's really bad. So it was all neighborhoods for the first three or four years of the business.

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

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

What does help clear mean?

So we want to be clear that similar to probably how you feel in that like you help businesses grow, but like you didn't do the hard stuff. You just involved in them. You made it really easy for me to grow Flock by making payments simple. I don't actually have to do any of the hard work of chasing bad people, putting my life at risk. We write code in design circuits. It's not hard work. So we like to be very careful of not overstating our value.

So we were involved in the arrest, in clearance, or successful arrest of over a million crimes. And in a lot of those cases, we are the end, the beginning, and everything. Outside of the human putting handcuffs on. and in some cases we might be the tip of the spear. And so like for more sophisticated investigations like the Brown shooter and the MIT shooter, there was a tip on Reddit, but then Flock was the way they found them.

Like we weren't the tips. Like we can't take full credit. So maybe I'll walk you through like a recent example. And I won't name the city because the case is still going through prosecution. But so there was a 911 call. This is a major city in America. Our system here is 911 calls. We can tap into 911 calls. this is kind of wild if you think about 911. Today, when you call 911 in San Francisco, it's going to get about 3,000,911 calls a year.

A human picks up every single time. A human manually listens, manually types in information. Imagine if you were running Stripe and every single lead you received was human routed. You'd say, this is crazy. That's how we work in cities today. So we hear the 911 call in real time. What that allows us to do is then figure out what are they talking about? Is there any interesting information in the system that could find beneficial. So in this case, we had heard that it was an attempted homicide.

Someone was bleeding on the street. And all they could remember was that the suspect was wearing white Converse sneakers. Now, we have a product called Flock OS that allows us to integrate all the cameras in a city, whether their Flock develops or not. And so that 911 call pops up. The operator is like, oh my gosh, there's a 911 call right there. They can listen to the call. They're like, this is a really violent situation. There's a privately owned camera.

I can tap in that, double-click that camera. They can use one of our products called Freeform. They can say, I'm looking for any individuals in the last 30 minutes that are wearing white Converse sneakers. They then find the individual. They can then push that video to the nearest officer. So we run on the dash of the police vehicles. And then that person gets arrested. And so if you think about the way it used to work, that case never would have been solved.

Like it would have been weeks, maybe months, and it would have gone a cold case. And in this case, this person was from a 911 call to an arrest in about 17 minutes. So we can do that on people. We do that on vehicles. So in that same version of the story, I'll give you one other story and then I'll give you a sense of it. So in a town in Colorado, there was an armed robbery of a Levi's outlet.

Got to get your jeans one way or another. This is a funny one, actually. So they call 911. So we're plugged into 911, right? Their real-time crime center operator hears its armed robbery. They also hear two things. The person has already fled the store, and they drove away in a white van that looks like a black and blue cow. It's like mistake number one is criminal. Like, don't drive a weird car. Now, this police department also has our drone that we build here in America.

So they immediately click a button. The drone automatically flies at 400 feet to the Levi's outlet. That drone knows what to look for. It has the visual kind of nomenclature of a white van with black and blue spray paint. Using that same freeform, we can start to look for it. we get another 911 call of another outlet that's having the same time. So the drone is ready in the air, zooms over. Drone has eyes on it.

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

It's quite a robust portfolio.

And what is Flock by the numbers today? So how many cameras, how many drones, how many law enforcement agencies, how many individual entities?

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

By population.

Yeah, by population. because there's about 17 ,000 cities in the US and we have all the big ones outside of Manhattan at this point. That's like the last one to go get. I'm not sure if that's going to happen anytime soon, the current situation there. But yes, it's pretty well deployed. And then the business has gone from zero to about 500 million in ARR in the last seven years, building cameras, drones, and selling them to the government, which is like three strikes are out.

That's incredible.

And I feel like something non-American listeners mightn't realize is, so I grew up in Ireland, a country of 5 million people, and there is just a police force, the Gardaí Shakana. For the whole country. Exactly, police force for the whole country. And that is a relatively common model in lots of places. In the United States, it's very localized. And just maybe you want to talk about the average size. And I feel like what you're providing is, in some ways, scale economies and helping police forces coordinate with other agencies.

There's a dynamic that people don't understand, which you're right. So Ireland, most of the EU, Australia has six police departments. So I mean, let's call it effectively the same. It's a really big country. It's a lot of land. Most of South America, like America is really the only country that operates under a model where local municipalities provide a law enforcement service. It's very rare. And the benefit, the pro is to be straightforward, which is like, you actually have a good chance of knowing the police officer that has your territory and has your patch of dirt.

The downside is, criminals don't really care where cities start and stop. They don't care where states start and stop. Yet historically, law enforcement agencies were incapable of sharing information. To give you a sense of timeline, the cloud was only recently made legal in Florida as recently as 2022. So if you were a long-forsed agency, you could not host your data in the cloud until 2022. Maryland was 2023. So any coordination between agencies was very manual.

All phone calls, faxing files. And so one of the big kind of unlocks of Flock was this realization that you could drive better collaboration because like if you're you're you're kind of low-level criminal isn't maybe changing cities but you look at some of the most like successful cases we've helped work it's like multiple states right like we did a huge uh human trafficking bust it's 70 some 76 people arrested across four states like all organized on flock and like

it's really hard for one agency to wrap their hands around that whole thing no at that point

you've got like six different local cities, two different, sorry, three different state agencies and the U .S. Marshals all collaborating inside a flock. And like that's how it should work. Because in Ireland, that is actually the only option because you're the same police department. It's a very unique problem that America has created.

Law enforcement coordination.

Yeah. Like it should be, it shouldn't be controversial. But it's actually a very controversial topic. What's controversial about another way of this controversy? um this is it's an interesting question of like you um your trust in government probably follows some type of uh you know logarithmic expectation or linear expectation of like the farther you are removed from those people the least trust you have and so most people's trust in the federal government is very low state a little bit lower local full trust yeah and so there's this interesting dynamic where, let's talk about like a most recent case.

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

Because of all the other stuff.

On certain topics, because it's all of the, it's just different politics. And so we kind of have to sit in the middle. And when it's clearly legislated, like in California, it's actually, it's fine. That's the law that's actually very simple. It's in other states where it's opinion. And that's like, oh, that's really messy because we should just write laws. I mean, you operate in a regulated space. regulation when done properly just defines the rules of engagement sometimes it's better or worse

but like at least everyone knows these are the rules yes yes um as i think about where fluck grew up and the um uh helping with flagging stolen vehicles and kind of a very vehicle oriented product how does that work at a technical level like you guys that there was a stolen database for stolen cars already, but that's an example of prior cross-law. Like, who maintains that database? How does it work?

Yeah, so it's a good question. So you think about a couple of fun engineering problems that Flock had to solve. The first is, how do you do what's described? Read a license plate, track a car on solar power with a 5G backhaul. Which is the camera that you have installed like a traffic light. Yeah, exactly.

But you very rarely have fiber or power where you want to put a camera. So you want a self-sufficient box that you can throw up at an intersection.

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

Yeah, that would have been a huge disaster for us. But so the FBI maintains a list called the NCIC, which is about quarter to half a million known vehicles with other warrants. Could be the Amber Alert System, the Silver Alert System. We saw, sadly, a ton of silver alerts, too. I think we did just over 1 ,000 Amber and Silver Alerts last year that we helped clear. It's like missing adults, missing seniors and missing kids, which is pretty sad stuff.

And so we have a direct integration with the FBI for that. And then at a local level, let's say like the Bay Area, there is a Bay Area hot list that we maintain with those agencies.

Oh, wait. So I assume that there was a single integrated, when a car is called in and stolen. I assume that went somewhere integrated.

So this is kind of scary. So let's say your car is stolen and you're in South San Francisco. They will immediately put it in the Bay Area Flock hot list immediately. It will take 24 hours to make it to the FBI hot list. And that's a CSV file that gets sent around on FTP servers across the US.

As much the economy runs. We're very used to that model. You should be used to that at some point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

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

wide. Okay. So, uh, local entities have some kind of local lists and those propagate to a national database, which is an FBI database. And what you guys are doing is making that real time, which obviously if a crime is unfolding in real time is a big deal. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's not good to wait a day. Yes. Like you can, you can drive really far in 24 hours. It turns out. Yes. Yeah. And then you had some great stuff before about just a fraction of like stolen cars are bad news.

like the fraction of crimes

that involve stolen cars. There's an interesting phenomena where you don't, no one really steals a car for fun. Like there's not much you can actually do. Is that true, like all the sideshows and stuff? Like isn't there a little bit of stealing cars for fun? Well, the sideshows are definitely, they look fun. Never participated in it. Neither have I, but yeah, I just want to make clear here. Yeah, yeah. It's my official statement of the matter.

Dirt bikes, haven't ridden a dirt bike in a sideshow, but have watched plenty of videos online. That's fun. You're typically not stealing a car, you're typically driving your own car in those. You typically, while there are some people, I guess, who would steal a car and just drive it for fun, the main use case is when my car was stolen. My car was stolen, and then they used it to go rob three CVSs, did a bunch of drugs in the car, and then ditched it.

And that's like a normal, you steal a car to go do something bad. Yeah, or you steal a car to go shoot someone, because you don't want to shoot someone in your own car if you're thinking ahead, you want to do it in a stolen car.

We've all watched Pulp Fiction.

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

But then like if we detect an anomaly that the same car is in two places at once, we'll flag that. It's like, that's kind of weird. That's like a glitch in the matrix. So we have all these, and we would call them more like anomaly detections, where it's like, this isn't illegal yet, but it sure is kind of weird. Yes.

And it provides enough reason to pull someone over.

Yes. And depending on the size of the city, it's enough to dispatch an officer. I think if you're a major city like San Francisco, you have enough going on. But if you're, you know, a foster city, you're a smaller town where thankfully you don't have violent criminals running around every day. You're like, oh, that's weird. We have two cars at the same license plate in different parts of the city. We should go see what's going on.

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

and yet this kind of stuff ends up super controversial from a i don't say super controversial but it ends up controversial from a privacy point of view and so i don't know is is that take too generous it's a steelman of the other side why is it there is i mean i think

you're right on the controversy i would articulate it as like if you're building a business that impacts millions of people's lives it's going to be controversy of some degree like i'm sure people i'm sure there's someone who hates stripe i don't know why they would but i'm sure that person exists Just like there's someone who hates Walmart. It's like they're trying to sell cheap groceries. Why do you hate? It's like people hate Airbnb. People hate every company.

Maybe they hate us more. I don't know. I think there's a few things that make it for the Steelman argument. One is you can see it. So I bet you if we pulled up your iPhone and we looked at the number of apps that you've given full-time local location services, it would shock both of us. And then if we looked at the number of data brokers who then leverage that data to sell you ads, we'd be really shocked.

And I think if we rewinded 30 years ago and said, imagine these private companies tracked your location in real time and sold that to advertisers, we'd be like, that is unacceptable. But because we can't see it, we kind of let it go. We have this perception of anonymity or being anonymous. Anonymity. Anonymity, thank you. Yet, like, you're an engineer. how many data points do you need to triangulate where someone is? How about where they sleep and where they work?

And I know exactly who you are. And so there is that one piece, which is because we operate in the physical world, we are held to a higher standard, which I think is a shame because personal opinion, what I do online is way more interesting and telling about my personality and my life than what I do in the real world. I go from work to home and to kids' birthday parties on the weekends. That's my life.

So there's that piece. The second piece is like, there is a appropriate debate of what level of privacy erosion are we willing to take for an increase in safety? Now, you and I both choose to live in cities that have governments. So we've already chosen to remove some of our privacy. We drive on public roads. We're constitutionally, we have no explanation of privacy, but we're using the government's roads with the government's license plate. Like we have a driver's license in our pocket.

Driver's licenses are a modern thing. that hasn't been around for 200 years. It's a newer concept driver's license. So we've accepted all of those. The articulation that I would have is like, I want my kids to be safe. And like, as long as there's accountability of like how the information is used, which we do, every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity and it's publicly available. And for us, like we really believe in this concept of a certain data retention, which kind of limits the level of abuse.

It doesn't eliminate abuse. There's still going to be abuse, but it limits that, hey, if it's seven days, 14 days, 30 days of data, it's just not that interesting. Yeah. Relative to what you see with data brokers online where they have your entire internet history stored forever.

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

Yeah, there's a really fast drop-off of where have you been in the last couple of days versus like, where were you a year ago? It's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation. Yes, yes. Or it's protected behind a warrant, which is fine.

Right. You talked about cell phone locations and your cell phone having your GPS location. And I'm reminded of the phenomenon where it feels like the balance of power and the offense-defense mix within crime fighting tends to change over the years as new technologies are invented. And criminals get wise to fingerprinting exists and things like that. it feels like cell phone locations have had a huge impact on crime fighting. Not even GPS location, but just the coarse cell tower data.

And in particular in murder cases, it's had a huge impact. I'm curious just what are the other major trends going on from a technology point of view in how crime gets fought?

Yeah, that's CDRs would be the nomenclature in the law. What's CDR? Cell phone data dump or CDR cell data. Something like that, yeah. But it's your point. It's the broader, like, you hit these three towers, therefore you're in this general vicinity. That is, like, one of the best kept secrets for law enforcement of, like, how to solve crime. Which, you know, people dumbly commit crime with their cell phone in their pocket every time. It's very, I think I've heard of one case in the last 12 months where someone was smart enough to commit a homicide and left their cell phone at home by design.

It was very intentional. They were very organized. A couple other ones. How did they get caught? uh it's actually a flock obviously um so they were smart enough to leave their cell phone yeah they were dumb enough so they drove from la up to san francisco um general area um they had a bunch of flock cameras along the way um they didn't pick up their cell phone until they went back to lax and we have cameras all around lax um and like they finally made that one mistake they had it was a completely cold case until they got a hit on the car pulling into lax then got the cell phone could do the whole thing.

This is a good case.

And I guess the thing you can do is you can know that a cell phone's in a car because you can cross-reference. We don't touch that,

but the law enforcement can.

Sorry, law enforcement can cross-reference cell phone location would flock.

So they knew that the vehicle was in a certain parking lot. They can then use, they have to have a warrant at this point. Sure. They have a warrant to pull what cell phones were in that area and then start to build the case. But to your question, I'd say the most, the current phenomena that is causing a ton of problems domestically is drones. And this is an example where it's asymmetric. warfare that law enforcement is being put up against where criminals have no rules.

How are criminals using drones? So here's a good example. In one of the counties we work with, it's an affluent-ish county in the Virginia area, South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in. They don't want a confrontation. They just want to do so much stuff. People are using drones to case houses? To scope out. Yep. Wow. And this is where the downside is.

Law enforcement has just recently in the last year been allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight. These guys have been operating for years. They jerry-rig, you know, an LTE modem to a cheap drone. They can fly it anywhere, however they want. And then legally, even to today, law enforcement is not allowed to engage that drone. They can't take it down. It's FAA airspace. It's not law enforcement airspace. Sure, yeah, yeah. And so they just sit there.

And so that's a problem in neighborhoods. It's also a problem in prisons. It's probably the number one problem we have in our prison system today. Well, a lot of problems in prisons. But one of the leading problems for enforcement officers is you've got these pretty incredible, actually, from an engineering perspective, drones that are carrying 10, 20, 30-pound payloads, flying them over the prison walls. And, like, they'll literally dangle it down to, like, the prison cell, and the person will reach out and grab it.

Cell phones, drugs, guns. We have Keller from Zipline out here. It's Zipline for criminals.

And these guys have built a comparable product. And I was with a sheriff that I know really well, and he was like, if I shoot that down with a shotgun, I'm technically breaking the law. I'm breaking federal law if I shoot this down with a shotgun. And so you're seeing states now pass, like Louisiana has a state bill, Georgia's working on a state bill that says, sorry, FAA, we're going to do what we want. And that creates a problem, because most law enforcement officers just want to follow the law.

Yeah, and presumably that won't stand up from a federal preemption point of view.

No, and like the other challenge is like, I think you and I would say like, who's going to enforce this? The FAA is not an enforcement body, but these people want to follow the law and the law says clearly like, you can't shoot a drone down. Yes. You can detect it. You can't mitigate. Ah, I have no idea. It's a totally crazy law.

Yeah. What else has made, what else has gotten worse from an offense perspective?

I mean, this is one that's like a, you know, I don't know if I have strong feelings on this topic, but this concept that we appropriately hold local law enforcement to a very high standard of accountability and audibility. And I think that's very good. The downside is like, we don't with criminals. And so as a citizen, you don't be the victim of a crime. You get really frustrated that they're not working hard enough. And it's very, really that it's that they don't have the tools, they don't have the data, or they're not legally allowed to get to the data.

And the warrant system is a very, very good thing. It's like a very effective tool. But like there's a debate of like, should law enforcement have more ability to solve crime faster? And the example of the framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is that the severity of a crime should be commiserate with the sophistication of technology. And I'll give you an example. Facial recognition. Hot topic. There are thousands of cities in America that have banned law enforcement from using facial recognition.

John, facial is not bad. That's the technology. It's not good either. It's just technology. I think a way more effective measure would be to say, hey, look, facial rec has its pros and cons. You can't use it for shoplifting, but for homicides, crimes against children, like go to your list of things that like we as a society care deeply about. Law enforcement should do everything in their power to solve those cases. And then, yeah, the like petty stuff, we should say, look, like we got to make progress there, but you stole a pack of Skittles.

We probably shouldn't deploy a drone to find you. If you kill someone, I think we should work really, really hard as a society to hold you accountable. But there's no nuance. That nuance does not come through. No. They're just like, facial rec is bad. And we don't do facial recognition for that reason, because it's too controversial. But it's counterintuitive to me when the technology

gets better every day. Yes. Yes. And obviously, another interesting thing that's happening amongst these trends is the prevalence of body cams, which I think maybe was in some corners promoted by law enforcement skeptics, but I think now has... It's backfired? I wouldn't say backfired, but just like it's actually in a lot of cases been somewhat exonerative, right?

Yeah, no, I think in many cases police were really hesitant to get body cameras. Just like, I mean, imagine if you wore a body camera or all day at work, you'd be like, ah, I'm not sure if I love that idea. It's kind of a little bit invasive, but they did. And I would say in the majority of cases that I see where foul play is called, it is almost always the inverse where law enforcement officer was just trying to do their job.

And on the other side, there was other mental health issue. There was something gone wrong and it actually exonerates the officer, which is kind of interesting. And I think the same thing is true. What at least we're seeing on the camera side, on the streets is, you know, historical policing, sadly, is quite prejudiced, right? We all have our biases, whether it's conscious or unconscious. So you have bad data in, you get bad data out. And so the traditional way of policing is like, you go to dangerous neighborhoods, look for suspicious people and arrest them.

So it's like you're perpetuating a trend against a certain community. And when you look at like Oakland as a good example, who's quite a big supporter of Flock, they're like, we need a more objective way to police. Let's just focus on stolen cars. We don't care who's inside. We will find out eventually that car was stolen. And then you don't wind up policing where crime has happened historically. You wind up policing where crime is happening right now in real time.

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

I think it'll continue to go down. COVID was like really bad. So it surged during COVID? Crazy surge. Okay. People lost their minds. I think we tested society of like what happens if you keep people inside for too long. And people got really violent.

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

But I mean, I'm obviously not a, you know, clinical psychologist, by any means. But it's like, you look at the data and there's no other way to articulate why, you know, homicides three to four X'd and then plummeted back down to let's call it somewhat reasonable levels. There's a very few number of cities that are left at COVID levels. Most cities had this massive spike. And like the way to, if you look at the people who were committing that violence, they tended to be 16 to 22 male and very online.

Very online? Yeah. And so like this is really sad. That's right. How do you measure very online? Let me give you an example. I was in a town, a major city not too long ago, and I was asking the chief to tell me kind of what's going on. This is a couple of years ago, right? Like during COVID. And she was like, Garrett, these kids are just killing each other. I was like, what? She's like, yeah, they're literally getting in their car and just shooting each other.

I'm like, why? I'm like, oh, because this guy posted a picture of him with that guy's girl on Instagram. And I think in a normal situation, you might've called that person and been like, hey bro, that's my girl. And in other cases, they're getting in a car and shooting someone. And that's not normal. That's not normal behavior. And it wasn't normal before COVID. And it happened a lot during COVID. And then it's largely gone away. But it was a very specific social phenomena where the race to violence was so dramatic.

It was so scary. And I don't think society has necessarily gone fully back to normal. But if you look at the data, it's hard to articulate that. That's the most obvious explanation to me.

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

Everything went up. Like everything. People just literally lost their minds. I think we need to be outside. Yeah.

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

So, so, so, every city is a little bit different. Major cities still have major crime problems. I would argue, you know, I live in Atlanta and the mayor, he's made it very clear, anything greater than zero homicides is a tragedy. And therefore we're on the race to zero still, like as an unacceptable level. And we're down historic lows over the last decade, but it's still pretty hard to wake up and go, oh, only 52 people died in Atlanta last year.

You can't pat yourself on the back for that. I think where we're focused on is more so clearance rates. And that's actually getting better, but only better in certain cities. Now, we track it across Flock, you know, not to overly promote, like, tends to be that if you have a Flock product, your city has a much higher clearance rate. You look at San Francisco as a great example. The new chief, the prior chief, Mayor Lurie, like, they are making crime a focus.

And the focus is on solving crime. And when they solve it, as I'm sure you follow on the news, they talk about it. And they should, because, like, it's really cool. They're working very hard. and what you'll see is back to the online point I made, all these people are online. And so when San Francisco PD is dominating X, It has a deterrent effect. Oh, gosh, yeah. You don't want to get caught. Yeah. And that's like the unintuitive or the counterintuitive point on crime is that most people would intuitively say, oh, if the punishment's really, really bad, people will do less of it.

But you were 16, 18 at one point. You operate on a Boolean mindset. I will get away with this. Therefore, I will do it. I'm going to sneak out of my house I'm not going to get caught. You don't care if the punishment is being grounded for a week or a month. You're going to get away with it. You're 17.

It's just whether I get caught or not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And so when you flip - I'm not realized criminals are so online. So if you flip that, oh, it's like, it's a subculture. You got to get there. But I mean, you'll see -

Sorry, is this like Reddit, Twitter?

They're everywhere. Pinterest? I don't know. Probably less Pinterest. But I mean, TikTok's really big. Yeah. Instagram's really big. Snapchat's really big. And like it is, it's how they recruit though, right? Because like the whole recruitment and effort is, you know, I'm going to show a lifestyle online that seems dream worthy to recruit these people. And then they're in and they're going to perpetuate that. And the data actually showed it's actually not a very good job. You actually don't make very much money being a criminal.

It's like the medium income for your average criminal is like it's very, very low. But they promote a lifestyle of wealth. So if you look at those cities, like so you take San Francisco, crime's coming down, clearance rates are going up. And I would say like as soon as we can get somewhere like San Francisco, to 100 % clearance rate, which we have in other cities, crime goes down.

100 % clearance rate is like 100 % solved?

Yes. And it's doable. We have it in major cities. Like which? Like Cobb County would be one, which is like the second largest county. Cobb County has 100 % cleared to happen. Yep. If you commit violence in Cobb County, you will get arrested. And that's across what sample size? That's the second largest county in Georgia. So let's call it, you know, a couple million people. Almost a million people. So a decent number of violent crimes. Oh, yeah.

But it's going down every year. Sure. So you look at places like that. Because you look at college. Yeah. And so we have this new concept that we've developed called Safe City. And we'll go into a town and say, look, this is the platform you need to solve all the crime in your city. It's your choice. It tends to be about $20 a citizen a year. It's your choice. And what's fun to watch is we find these mayors with really strong backbones.

And they're like, I want to be a safe city. There's just like this awesome town, Greenville, Mississippi. You've probably never heard of it. 26 ,000 people. They have our drones. They have our cameras. They have our AI. They have everything we do. And they are lighting it up. And like kudos to the mayor-in-chief. Like every crime they solve, they're on the 5 o 'clock news.

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

I'm curious, what are the effects of one municipality getting really good? There's two phases. The first phase, you're spot on. Like people that just change cities. It's like when San Francisco started adopting FLOC, Oakland crime went up. So then Oakland needed to adopt FLOC. And now like a couple of false starts now that it's fully going, they will have the same. But like first is the shift. And then you're right. Like this is people don't, the majority of criminals, let's call it 99 % of criminals are not evil people.

They're not. Like evil is a random act of violence. And that is exceptionally rare. It's very rare. It's opportunism. It's all opportunism. And like you and I were fortunate enough to be born in a family, in a social construct that we could go build great companies. but not everyone had that chance. And some people get pushed in the wrong direction and that's what we have to stop. It's like as a business, we don't, while we're proud of the impact, you know, making a million arrests, it's actually like quite disheartening because that means like a million people will not have to go through the criminal justice system which doesn't work that well.

There's a million victims. Like it's bad in every single way. It's also crazy expensive as a society to jail that many people. It's like, it's a double negative bottom line where it's costly and prohibitive that they'll probably never reenter society. So we're much more focused on the preventative mechanisms of like, how do you convince someone this is not a good lifestyle? This is not a long-term plan. And eventually what you will see is like they will go get jobs.

Like these are functional members of society. They can be functional members. We should push them in that direction. What kind of crime is on the increase? So I'll tell you one that's like pretty fascinating. So if you look in the enterprise community, organized resale crime in stores was really hot during COVID and right after COVID. That's why you saw CVS lock their stuff up. You saw, you know, places like In-N -Out leave Oakland. Like this was a huge problem.

And it's still, you know, for someone like Walmart, I think they reported just shy of $1 billion of theft last year. So it was a lot of money. And like their peers aren't doing dramatically better. Now, Flock customers are doing really well.

Yeah, Walmart's on neophytes at this stuff. Yeah, but they'll get there.

Yeah, we'll get there with Walmart. But like you look at some of our partners like a Lowe's, you know, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not really a problem anymore. Yeah. But where the criminals have moved is to the distribution facilities. It's safer and bigger loads. And so probably the most sophisticated one that I've heard of is Eastern European group. They went and bought a legal, like well-running freight broker. They now own this asset.

and they bid on all these, low bid on all these projects, show up with real paperwork, fill up a 20-foot with product, drive away, dissolve the company. $7 million in a single day. Like, that's pretty good business. Yeah. That's very sophisticated, though. That's harder to solve. That's very, that's much harder to solve.

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

Everything's going to leave the country as fast as possible and just show up on a street somewhere. And then the other interesting challenge is you have to unpack, this is a little bit complicated, who's liable. So as soon as the product goes into a store, that retailer is liable for the theft. It hits their bottom line. For a lot of these companies, they negotiate it such that there is insurance coverage from a different broker that owns that asset until final delivery.

and so it's not super clear like who actually cares uh um and it's gonna take insurer cares eventually yeah but when you talk about the scale of what's called you know tens of billions of dollars hundreds hundreds of billions of dollars of product being moved you're like oh you know we lost a couple 100 million i see yeah we'll be fine we have insurance yeah it will catch up eventually but that's probably the most interesting type of crime we're tracking is the tacking on So we have a lot of partners on the distribution side where we're now deploying our product to try to prevent this from becoming an epidemic.

Yes. But it's much harder to solve. It's a real company. Yes, yes. I want to ask you more about this, but I'm going to give you another goodness.

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

Yeah. It's a big part of our business. Can you say how big? um north of 100 million of ar oh okay so like it's real probably fastest growing segment um there's some like wild there's some wild stories so you know we we help businesses solve two problems um how do you keep your employees safe and how do you keep your assets or your stuff safe yeah so it's like kind of funny because we have a a fortune five company that's a customer and

you probably don't want to talk about specifics but we should just imagine big box stores that

kind of home depot walmart it's like we have this like fortune five company as a customer and they spend like $100,000 a year because they have like three locations in the country that's it they have like three really big campuses so they're actually like we we we don't proxy towards necessarily like market cap or revenue we proxy to physical locations like how many locations so someone like a a dollar general is a way better prospect for us because dollar general has 7,000 stores yeah um on subway yeah you want subway is a good example uh So we tend to focus on retail, healthcare, and logistics.

They tend to have big physical footprints, a lot of employees, and a lot of challenges.

And is there any challenge theft? Like that's what they're worried about, that they want to prevent stolen cars coming to steal stuff?

I'd say employees is, I'd say three years ago when we started the business unit, it was assets. It was like, oh my gosh, coming out of COVID, everyone's stealing everything. It is much more shifted now to keeping employees safe. So you think about some of these businesses, they might terminate half a million people a year, quarter million people a year. It takes one angry employee to come back. And so in our system, you can have it automated with the HRS that when employees terminated, they're added to a localized hot list.

If that employee ever comes back on campus, it's not illegal. But notify security is why people have security teams. Don't let them in the building. So it's about kind of moving that layer of safety farther out. Yes. The other example is we do quite a bit of work in executive protection. So I'll give you a good example. I think a Fortune 2000 CEO. Our stuff's deployed at her house. We also deploy at corporate. It's not illegal, but it's quite weird if the same vehicle on the same day goes to both locations.

That is not that person. Yeah, it's not that person or their EP team. And so like we're, I think keeping people safe is the number one thing. And the assets is like, it's good, but worst case, you just raise prices, which is not good. But like we had this crazy case with one of our healthcare partners where this group, pretty smart actually, would show up to the hospital dressed in like a certain company's uniform. And be like, oh, the robotic surgical arm is, it needs to be repaired.

Can you help me grab it? And some clinical surgeon's like, oh yeah, let me show you where it is. Don't worry, John. Walk in there. This is a multi-million dollar piece of equipment and they literally walk out with it. This happened in - Some Thomas Crown affair kind of stuff. But it's like, I mean, you're a physician. You're not thinking like, oh, is John actually working at this company? Is the product, I think I used it yesterday.

You're like, oh yeah, that sounds right. It's super expensive product. So this is an example to your conversation of where the business gets interesting is we then connected that healthcare provider with federal authorities. This is not going to be a local authority to solve this kind of crime. It's a federal crime at this point. They were taking the product, exporting it, and selling it in a different country for clinical work. So we think that one is pretty interesting.

That's an asset one where actually the healthcare system is like, this is $20-something million of products stolen. That's a problem.

Is your business going international? which countries is this best suited to, like, is this a universally applicable product? Do those differences in, you know, law enforcement agency structure make it? I'm just curious. I mean, we're dabbling,

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

Yes, there's a lot of local nuance.

Yeah. I think for us, maybe our ambitions aren't big enough, but when I look at the domestic opportunity, you know we should be able to get to five ten fifteen billion of of revenue in america and like we're not yeah we're not there yes and so it's the the difference of to your point on the nuance and payments it's probably comparable to the nuance of working with local government but then you overlay hardware and that just gets maybe two steps too difficult for my stomach today got it today yeah but there's i mean we get an inbound i got i saw an email this morning from an Australian police department.

It's like, we'd love to do a demo. And it's like, oh.

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

Yeah, here's - But maybe it's easy. Well, so here's the argument. So we pursued one really big deal last year in Mexico. Mm-hmm. And we had support from one of our investors, like, we should go after Cigar and Great. And they had connections to the Mexican government. And so we got all the way to the finish line. And it was us versus Hickvision. Hickvision is a Chinese camera manufacturer, arguably a subsidiary of the CCP. And we were almost 10 times the price.

And it came down to, like, well, is the Department of Homeland Security going to subsidize for this? for the Mexican government? Because we know their list price is way more than this. It's very clear this is being subsidized for the Mexican government to make this purchase decision, of which case they will most likely be giving away real-time feeds to another government. And we didn't win that deal. And I think that if you look at, there's a great book on this topic, if you look at what China was able to do in Africa with their infrastructure deployments on connectivity.

They own those countries. What's the book, Caddy Crass? I'll find it for you. Okay, we'll pop it in. I'll find the book. But the book pretty much shows that one of the maybe smartest moves that China did was going to these developing countries and saying, we will give you 5G. Really low cost. We'll bond it for like 100 years. So we're not giving away for free, but guess what now? Chinese government has access to your pipes.

And maybe that's not scary for some countries. For me, I'd be a little afraid. And that was our pitch to the Mexican government. It's like, you don't look at just cost. Look at the sovereignty of the data and who has access. And look, we'll domicile this data in your country. We won't domicile it in America. And they were like, sorry, it's too expensive. And we've seen that. We've done a couple other projects like that, not just picking on Mexico.

But other countries where we're not competitive with China, not because our products aren't better, they're much better, but we're not being subsidized by the federal government.

But presumably NATO countries, you know, Australia should be better.

But I mean, no, I mean, I can, I can, uh, we should go walk around, you know, a strip mall. And I could probably point out 80 % of the cameras are Chinese manufactured. And your average would be business owners like, yeah, I got it for 15 bucks on Amazon. And I got it, you know, that's that story on kind of like the, you know, vacuum cleaners. that someone like hacked into. It's like, you should care about where your data is stored and who's storing it.

And that kind of stuff matters to me, but not everyone.

That makes sense. As we've learned from Flock Safety, fighting crime is most effective with network data on your side. The same is true for payment fraud. Most businesses only see their own transactions, which makes it very hard to spot patterns and prevent future attacks. But Stripe Radar tackles fraud using the power of the Stripe network. Our machine learning models train on hundreds of billions of data points across the $2 1 trillion of payments we see on the Stripe network each year.

When new fraud patterns emerge, our models can quickly learn and start blocking similar attacks immediately. So if you want to fight fraud, like flock safety fights crime, check out Stripe Radar. As I think about your competitive landscape in the US and companies that sell to law enforcement, I think about Axon, which people would associate with making the body cameras, but they make lots of, and Tasers, I think, but they make lots of other stuff. And then Motorola Solutions, which does kind of the radios and like the get up in the cars and things like that.

Are you three, the main three players? Are there others I should be thinking about? And how will this, like presumably you guys compete more over time?

Yeah. So I remember in 2020, trying to raise our Series B, and every investor came to the same conclusion. Three strikes are out. Strike one, you're based in Atlanta. Now, like post-COVID, that's become less of a problem. But strike one, you're in Atlanta. Strike two, you're doing hardware. But that's really bad. Hardware is really expensive. Now it's the only business with terminal value. I would argue that AI is not going to replace cameras or dig holes.

Yes, yes. I mean, a third of our employees dig holes for a living. That's just AI is a long ways away from, I think, replacing that. Sorry, what are they digging the holes for? It was like most of the time you want a camera where you don't have any infrastructure. We actually show up. We dig the hole. We trench it. We pour concrete. Put our pole up. I mean, I might be.

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

I should pull this data. I would not be surprised if I'm the largest general contractor in America. We pulled 77 permits a day last year. And if you've ever built a house, you know how difficult it is to permit something. 77 permits a day. By crazy scale. Yes. AI is not going to replace that. It's like a very safe asset. But so, yeah, so when we were trying to raise that Series B, the third strike was, second strike was hardware.

Third strike was, and you're trying to sell to the government? The last company to go public was Axon. They went public in 2005, which would have been 15 years prior. And in the VC speak, it's like, well, if you can't get big enough to go public, you're not worth investing in. It's like, well, crap. So luckily, Gary Tan shared my beliefs of like, safety should be a public right. It shouldn't be a privilege. It should be a right if you live in America.

So he did our Series B, which is, I think, to say only Series B he's ever done. That's awesome. And he was right. And I was right. So it's the three of us now. It's Motorola who's the biggest. They're about a $90 billion market cap, 120 years old, invented the radio, still are the, I think they have 80 % market share globally of landmass radio, just like crazy scale.

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

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

And it's like - They've been so creative in creating verticals, you know, aviation, marine, all this stuff. And they built an awesome product.

And no one would debate whether Motorola's radios work really well. And when you need them, which would be like a natural disaster, they work especially well. Yeah. And that's like pretty compelling when your job is to respond to natural disasters. So you have Motorola. Every single thing we do, we compete with Motorola. So that's fun. They're big. Second one would be Axon. You know, like I said, public in 2005, about a $40 billion market cap. Where'd they come out of?

Like I understand where Motorola came out. Yeah, so Rick Smith, the founder, graduated Harvard. It's like a fun fact, he plays it off, he's a very smart guy. Graduated Harvard, found this Taser company. It wasn't called Taser at the time. Okay, so they started with Tasers. Yeah, found those kind of the IP, the product, and then tried to commercialize it. And if you love a good founding story, it's a good one where almost went out of business.

His dad mortgaged the house. He mortgaged the house. Went public because they couldn't finance it. I think they went out at a $50 million market cap. This is when people went public much earlier. And just has done a really good job of growing the business in the public markets.

And Taser is a brand. It's like Keenex. So they started as Taser, the brand.

We did a taser and rebranded to Axon in 2012 or 2015 and got into body cams via acquisition. So they bought a company that had just won the contract for the New York Police Department to do body cams. So bought that. They have a dash camera and they'd recently launched a competitive product with me. So now we compete. Everything we do, we compete with Axon too. It's fun.

So it's just a Mexican standoff, ironically.

Every single city, every single city. And there was interesting, because your question was also in the future, there's this really interesting phenomenon happening now where because Flock's been somewhat successful, VCs have like poured in. And when I used to call a police department seven years ago. Now you have a bunch of competitors from below as well. No one would, no one would, you could literally just walk into a police department and be like, I want to meet the chief.

They're like, that's great. Now chiefs are like, great, 17 different people calling me for the exact same price. Now they don't compete with us, thankfully. but like you think about take like trying to deploy AI to monitor body cam footage. There's seven different companies with VC backing doing that. There's not it's not a big enough market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you know your annual report was great by the way. Y 'all are at what 1 % of GDP or something probably?

Okay. I'm in 60 to 70 % of the cities that matter. Yes, yes. There's just not enough space for seven competitors. It won't the market's not big enough and we're not creating new cities. There's a new business that's created every single day.

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

Yeah, I think so. And so I think what we'll see is, I see a new VC-backed company every day. And I'm like, there's just, all these things are going to be a business, so there's just going to be consolidation. And so you see, I think Motorola has done 40 acquisitions in the last two years. Axon did five last year. We did one last year. I just think you're going to see a ton of consolidation. Because once someone builds a good product, you go, great.

I already have a Salesforce. I have the customer base. We'll just pick you up.

So I had no idea about the, you know, you're talking about where the tech goes. I had no idea about two things, actually, I learned here. One is that you're doing real-time analysis of 911 calls. And so is that, I mean, is that being fed to an LLM, basically? Are like 911 calls now scored by an LLM?

So the way I think about it is we are trying to build an orchestration layer for a city's safety. The majority of police departments are understaffed. I think the worst I've heard recently, I was at a higher ed, so a college campus, a large college campus, you know, a football school. They're at 40 % of staffing. Could you imagine if, like, Tamar, you woke up and Stripe had— It was 40 % staffed. 40 % staffed? Yeah, it'd be tough.

You would, like, figure it out. Yeah. But a lot of things that you would deem core today would just stop. Yes, yes. And so that's how most of our customers operate, which is not sustainable. Yes. And so we view our job as being that force multiplier, or I like to think about this orchestration layer where every manual thing that's done by a human should be automated. Now, the difference in public safety versus maybe payments is like, I think you want humans at the start and finish still.

It's like if I call 911, still kind of want a person to pick up. And those dispatchers are incredibly well-trained. They're very well-trained. They're very calm. Now, where I think it gets valuable is like, but let's say there's a mass event. AI is way better because if you have a surge of demand and you go from normally one call a minute to 10 calls a minute, AI is better than a busy tone. And that makes sense.

And then I think about for us, we call it amplified intelligence. When that 911 call comes in, LLM is able to pick up the call, is able to determine what are the characteristics? Can I go sort of build an investigation? Can I go pull this up so that if you're the detective, whereas historically you walk in, you're like, all right, I'm going to go get the call transcript. I'm going to go look up my record system.

I'm going to go do a bunch of analysis. It's the equivalent of having, you know, whether you use something like a Glean or another product that's like, you're going to do a lot of the hard work. So that as a sales rep, you show up and you're like, got it. And so we do that for investigators. So they show up to, they get delivered a case and a lot of the busy work has been done for them so they can use the human part of their job.

I'm grabbing all the data that needs this.

All the different data, like let's go do this. Like we solved one of the cooler cases we've solved was armored, you know, like armored trucks, like brinks, they move money around. It's one of the best, it's called like a jugging case. It's very popular in Texas where you like, you follow these armored trucks and you typically have like a shooter on a nearby building. And when the person walks out, the shooter shoots him, other guy runs in, grabs all the money and runs away.

It's like a very, it's obviously sad, but it's a very, very profitable thing. So we built an agent that tracks armored cars. And so in all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's an armored truck. If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically. Now, it's not illegal. Yeah, yeah, sure. Right? But it is enough that if you're a city like Houston who has a jugging problem, you want to get a subscription to like, you let me know whenever you see someone doing that because I want to know.

Yeah. I want to get a step ahead. So there's all these types of crimes that you can sort of say, okay, This is helping officers not do something new. It is just doing things that when you're at 50%, 40 % staffing, if you're at 100%, you'd have been doing this yourself. You'd be checking the cars, you'd be in flock, you'd be running searches, but you can't do that anymore.

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

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

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

That's right. Yeah. I mean, I think it's another example where there's just a lot of tasks we ask law enforcement officers to conduct that a drone could do faster, more effectively, and cheaper. And so if it's, you know, calling out a hit and run, great, send the drone. I was working with a town in Tennessee. It's a pretty good city. Their average response time to 911 calls is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds.

just like a better quality of service. And the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer. It's really nice when you see technology deliver both, like a 10x better product at a dramatically lower cost. That's how it's supposed to work, and it's working for them.

What kind of task or intervention are the drones best suited for?

I mean, there's three primary use cases. The first would be vehicular pursuits. It's like one of the most dangerous things cities conduct is high-speed pursuits. Typically, it's not the suspect that dies. It's some random person.

Restrain or something, yeah.

So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they end pursuits. They don't pursue anymore. Send the drone. Oh, wow. Just send the drone. Yeah, yeah. Way better. Yeah, yeah. It's way safer.

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

No, you just have a drone four feet up in the air, quietly, safely, waiting for the car to pull into a gas station, pull into their home, pull in somewhere safe, get to a red light. And then meanwhile, that video feed's being broadcasted to the entire police department. It's like, great, John's over here. Block them in.

It's, you know, every pursuit goes to GTA level five immediately. Yes, if you're smart.

So that's a big one. The second is 911 calls. So what's been interesting is that, we'll send the drone first. It takes someone like Elk Grove up in North California. They've got a bunch of our drones. flying to 911 calls. So where's Elk Grove? Elk Grove? It's a suburb of Sacramento. Oh, okay. But maybe 75 ,000 people. So I say suburb, it's like a pretty big town. But so like they'll dispatch for 911. Majority of the calls actually never need a human to show up.

And the example I'd give you is like, you see a fist fight. So you call 911. And then what happens is historically like, seven minutes later, someone shows up. Guess what? They're no longer fighting. but now we've dispatched this officer. He's like, well, I'm in the area. Maybe I'll grab a Gatorade, walk around, check it out. 30 minutes later, like we've wasted a bunch of time. You send the drone. In best case, you see the guys fighting and you're like, great, I'm going to keep an eye on them and like, and allow the officer to do his job or there's never, there's not a fight anymore.

You dismiss the call. And so you actually increase, sorry, decrease the response time for situations you really do need to go to by removing the junk in the system. That's the second one. And the third one is search and rescues. not every city has a helicopter as soon as I do it's a very expensive proposition and so sadly people go missing all the time and you can pop up the drone throw on thermals particularly at night and you find the person

actually I hadn't thought of that but drone plus thermal camera is very transformative for us here

we had an interesting case in a cold state right now he's flying our drone there was a sorry a lot of my cases involve homicides I'm going to find a better topic than homicides at some point I have a better topic in a second so there's this 911 car on the side of the street launched the drone thrown thermals actually see where the person went sensitive enough to see the heat pattern there's like a dip in the snow wanted to find the guy I want to find myself on everything.

But it's just interesting, to your point, I think we're still very early on in the use case exploration. And I think it's the type of technology that until it's fully proliferated, which give it two or three more years, I think we'll continue to find more ways to augment how we respond. Because I think, I guess the last example I'll give you is we typically launch the drone for all first responders. It's not just law enforcement, it's fire, it's EMS.

The whole community gets advantage of it.

Yep, yep. Okay, my fun example, because I agree, a lot of the crimes are quite heavy topics. So I feel like one of the most satisfying genres of YouTube video to watch is people who laser aircraft, but they are mistakenly lasering a police helicopter. So this is insane crime that happens. Wait, why do they do that? Okay, so there's this insane crime that happens. Isn't that bad? It's like very dangerous. It's very bad. It's very dangerous, yeah.

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

And so people buy these lasers on Amazon. Yeah, they're like, they're like very powerful lasers. Exactly, they're very powerful. And they're just lasering the cockpits of aircraft. But occasionally what happens is they're lasering an aircraft, but it turns out that aircraft is the police helicopter.

They're just like, gotcha.

And they got the thermal and they're just like, and so you get to watch the whole thing unfold. There's a bunch of these on YouTube where you'd like see the squad cars coming up. That's odd to check that out. But it's such an odd crime. And yeah, it's very satisfying to see them caught in real time.

Yes. That's a really weird, the other thing too, because I know you like aviation stuff. Yeah, we're having to see, we're seeing more and more police helicopters have to turn off ADS-B as well. Because like criminals have the same data that you have. Yeah, yeah, sure. And so most of the police helicopters actually fly without ADS, you know, which is like a whole challenge.

Yeah, sure. From a separation point of view. Okay, I have so many more things to go into or kind of jumping around, but I like this. How has the business evolved? So you're now, you said, around $500 million in ARR selling to both law enforcement agencies and corporates. Just have there been interesting changes in how you monetize? Is it just a question of scaling up?

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

And there's very significant scale economies at very high orders of magnitude Yes

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

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

Yeah. I would have better... So did you discontinue products and stuff? No, we just muscled through it. Still muscling through it.

Will you slow down the race of adding products?

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

But like those new businesses are effectively like flock five years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we know how painful that is, but we were just like, oh, it'll be great, it'll be fine. And so I think that's been challenging for us is how do you balance from a product roadmap servicing two customers with just very different use cases? Like your average Amazon distribution facility is 30 acres. 50 acres that's that's like a neighborhood block yeah yeah and then you've got like a san francisco that's got hundreds of square miles it's the problems are different so that that is probably like the hardest thing that we're still yes trying to muscle through that and like how do you organize your company

to service these two different customers without having redundancies haven't

figured that out what have you learned other than don't make too many products what have you learned by building hardware? Or what have you learned about building hardware?

Yeah, I think the, I mean, there's a couple of things that I would jump to. The first would be, I don't know how you guys think about forecasting demand. It's a full-time profession at Flock. Sure. And it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out. Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where they fail.

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

And just sitting in a warehouse, like there's all my money. Exactly. Sitting in a warehouse. Sitting around. Now, luckily, it's not, you know, it's not going to go bad. It's not like bananas. It's like, oh gosh, we have like a week to move this product. Yes. But it kind of goes bad. But it does go bad at some point. And I think like, you know, I remember during YC many, many, many years ago, talking to Eric at Pebble of how it was like the irony that in the best year ever of the company in terms of revenue is the year they went out of business.

they're like that's crazy yes um but they just they over overproduced in q4 even though it's still a record quarter it still wasn't enough um so i think like that has been amplified by also our distribution process like which we're full first party so we not only design the stuff build the stuff we install the stuff and so i have to have forecasting maintain it as well so i have to have forecasting not just at the product level but at the geographic level by product with some level of discrepancy.

I don't need to know this city versus that city, but at least the general area. So I think forecasting, that's been pretty hard. And the second is, every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimum and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of like, everything's a two-way door. Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door. You want to pick that part?

Yeah, yeah. One-way door.

We're going to live with it for the next five, 10 years. Yeah, and like, I don't know, you probably don't track this as much, but probably the dumbest financial mistake I've made in the last year is our supply chain team came to us like six months ago, and they were like, solid state memory is getting really expensive. And like, we had this one part, those are our cameras, and the price had gone up 4x in near time, which indicates that typically one much, much larger company placed a massive order.

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

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

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

Now, of course, the stock's up like 1 ,200%. and I feel like an idiot for not following that conviction. But no, yeah, I mean, our bomb, now luckily it's a small part of our bomb, but we have a full team of people who all they do is mitigate global supply chain risk because parts just disappear.

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

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

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

So, but, but that's not a panacea.

It's like capacitors. And the point I give you is like, let's say, let's say we ship, 100 ,000 units. That's tiny. And so all it takes is, if we need this capacitor from Texas Instruments, all it takes is Apple saying, well, the iPhone 27 is going to have that capacitor. And Apple's like, cool, we'll buy everything for the next three years. And then we go, oh crap, we've got to completely change that capacitor.

You're competing with Apple for components. I would have thought their capacitors and your capacitors.

Capacitor is a capacitor. but so to actually know the capacity you want you have to have a supply chain to buy it you have to have enough inventory with enough leave time like it is yeah not and so what you wind up doing is like early on your your designs are very simple you buy everything from you know add a fruit or whatever you buy everything like from easy places where you can buy 50 at a time and when you move to like tens of thousands at a time yeah you start having to have designs that have four different derivatives for every part so that your supply chain doesn't have to call engineering being like Like this part's out.

They know like these parts are all sub-ends.

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

100%. And I never would have thought we would need like a team of people who all they do is spend money for a living.

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

It's like on the one hand, you know, we're some of the best weather forecasters. You know, it's like we keep track of every major storm. Yes. It was like storm, like we need to be back up. So we do, like we have a pretty cool, we call it our flight team. And there are technicians that only fly. It's like that big storm in New York and Boston. Like they were flying in to the storm. Like we had surge demand to fix stuff.

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

Yeah. Well, so everything's, everything, we have really good telemetry on the equipment. So like if a customer calls, something's gone. Yeah. Like we've really screwed up. Yeah, you know, you know before the customer knows. We know before the customer knows. And most of the maintenance at this point is fairly predictive. Like we know this mechanical part malfunctions after between 100 and 200 ,000 uses. So like if you're in the area, it's ironic that the largest cost structure in replacing equipment is the driving.

Yeah, yeah. It's driving. And so like if we think the part needs a replacement in six months and we're nearby, it's cheaper just to replace it, refurb it, and get it back in the field. So that part's been like, we had to build a software company, a hardware company, and a field services business. Do you have parts that wear out? I would have thought the whole thing is fairly solid state. Most of it's, well, drones obviously fly.

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

Oh, like something mechanically... Put a lens over it. I see. And after a couple 100,000 uses... That is the one moving part.

It is the one moving... And it is the only part that breaks. How do I just have two lenses? With two different image sensors, too? Yeah. Bomb. Okay. No good, like, no... Okay. No good reason. Okay. Other than it would just be more expensive. Yeah. But yeah, that part's like... I think a third of the company, like I said, digs holes, drives bucket trucks. keeps track of all the kind of inventory but if you look at it you know i didn't want to build that business yes um but early on in the company um there was this horrific case in atlanta where a woman was just running and you know our version of like mission dolores or pick your like

nice park in the city random act of violence cameras everywhere in the park yep none of them were working and the city got blasted appropriately for it and they're like well but also like do we really want our police department being in charge of like camera uptime yeah yeah that's like that's a dumb idea yeah we should like pay a company i fuck in this case so just like make sure the stuff always works yes um so it's not the you know my favorite part of the business in that sense of like it's just it's a lot of stress it's very operationally intense but i think it's

valuable to our customers yeah how do you think about the rice um you talk about cameras in the park uh you know many movies um center on this idea of um universal surveillance you know in the the born identity or something you know they have cameras on absolutely everything or i guess the born supremacy i think is more the um the waterloo station scene and um same with lots of other things just how do you create the right guardrails once you move off roads and into parks and public

spaces and kind of creating access controls around that yeah um the cop-out answer is like i don't want to be in charge of deciding that thankfully we have elected officials who we vote to make that decision but what do you think a sensible place for them to land is i think it's way higher than we have now like i think that for me at least for every crime that occurs that doesn't get solved means we didn't have enough cameras.

That's, to me, the easiest rubric. Now, I think to your question, though, it's a question of where they are, who has access to them. And I think it's one of the few cases where the disparity between maybe my knowledge and your knowledge of how the technology works and how much official works, it's pretty big. And their dreams of how it might work versus actually how it works, it's much less sophisticated than they think or dream up.

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

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

Like I can't, um, those ideas are, are not in line with what my customers want. And my law enforcement customers, they just want to go catch bad guys. They want to follow the constitution, catch bad guys. But that nuance in the middle of like, but what is societally acceptable today really belongs in your elected officials to make that decision so it can change. And so we pushed them to be like, let's legislate this now before it becomes a problem.

Where do you think has passed sensible rules? Sensible. I think Virginia's bill last year was pretty good. It defined, it did a few things well. And one thing I don't agree with. What it did well is it defined a modest data retention period of 21 days. I think that's fine. I like 30, but tomato, tomato, it's fine. It wasn't, I think the ACLU was lobbying for three minutes. It's a little tough. It's hard to swallow. I think, you know, seven, 14, 20 something days is like enough.

There's a trade off there. They mandated formal auditing, which I think is great. Not enough of our customers audit themselves on a regular basis. We can build software to make that easier, but we need to be pushed to do that. It's like customers don't want it. They need to be told to do it. So I think that was good. It also validated that this could only be used for criminal investigations, which I think is really good.

While that's obvious, it's helpful to write it in law. I think the only thing that I disagree with is they did say, you know, effectively, there's no participation with the federal government. I think that's just, it's their choice. I think it's their choice. And that's the beauty of the country is like Virginia should do what feels right for Virginia. But I worry about the types of cases that you don't want to read about on the news that tend to get solved by the U .S.

Marshals, the DEA, the ATF, the FBI. And like they can't use our technology in Virginia, which is, like I said, I live in Georgia. So thankfully it doesn't really impact me. But as a business, I'm like, I don't know if that's right. But I'm more than anything just happy they passed some legislation. New Mexico passed a similar bill this year. California has a similar-ish bill. I think a couple other states have. I think the worst type of bill is actually not, you know, whether it's 14 days or 30 days of detention.

To me, the worst bill is an unenforceable bill. So you can imagine a bill that's like, this product cannot be used for possession of marijuana. Like, who's going to enforce it? It's like, you might -

It's not noble.

You might believe that. Yeah. And that's great. But someone has to enforce this. And actually what's going to happen is no one's going to enforce it now. And that's, I think, like really bad law in those cases. Yeah. That makes sense.

I'm curious what your view is on police department procurement. What do they do? What do they buy not enough of? What do they buy too much of? They don't feel like they're swimming in, you know, procurement dollars. But yeah, I'm curious.

Yeah. I mean, the thing they buy too much of is, and not to pick on Motorola, things that only matter in the 0 .001 % case. So it's like, guys, why don't you just use like cell phones? Like, well, in a Nashville, what is that? And it's like, got it. Okay. Like how often, so you look at like a landmass radio contract and it's in a costume like San Francisco County, you know, $200 million. I mean, like, it's like.

You're talking about that kind of money?

On a TCV basis, oh yeah. Wow. I mean, I think Murrow's a really big company. Sure. Yeah. That's how. You don't get there. And you go, well, I get it. Like if there's an earthquake and every single cell tower goes down, law enforcement definitely needs a way to communicate. Man, is that really the only way? Yeah. Like, could you guys just like have your own tower? There's got to be something. But you look into it.

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

Maybe because law enforcement's unique in this case in which they really also like that they own the infrastructure. They own that bandwidth. And so they can do whatever they want with it. I don't think they do anything interesting with it, but they can. Versus if they're riding on Verizon or AT &T, they have no control over that.

But why don't you guys just have the exact same products? And have a good radio in the spectrum.

We probably should. But we got a lot of things. That's my, you know, like a VC in the board meeting. Yeah, it's okay. You should go to an $80 billion company that's been in business for 130 years. I mean, I guess you did it in payments and it worked out pretty well. But yeah, so I think that part I think is really kind of crazy. At least in the business world, I feel like I buy for my majority case.

And I deal with the ramifications of the edge case or build around it. And they do that. I think procurement is exceptionally slow and exceptionally laborious. Everything goes to RFP. But the RFP is written for one vendor. So all it does is wind up taking an extra year, six months. That's like, that's, I get why RFPs exist. Yeah. But they're not actually RFPs. I've never seen an RFP that's not written for one vendor. I'm sure it exists somewhere.

Yeah, yeah. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. But what I think they do well is like one of the things that I think the government did figure out is maybe you need to have an RFP for a $200 million contract. What about a $10 ,000 contract? Great. So they do have spin levels where, you know, if you're like a police chief, you can go spend $25 ,000 or $50 ,000 and like not have to go through the entire process.

But, you know, it's tough. Like it's, I would not wish upon anyone selling to local government. It's more negatives than positives in all ways.

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

Well, I mean, you think about it in business and like, I know you. We use Stripe. I'm sure you have like six competitors. I don't know. But like, I know you. Some of you shouldn't be like, by Stripe. That in the business world is considered very normal. Yeah. In the government world, that is called illegal. Yeah. Which is really, it's really interesting. Yeah.

But again, it's evolved for a reason.

The rules are written in blood. Well, no. And then like, you have plenty of cases where it's, you know, it's gone sideways. Yeah. But it is just interesting to get on the AMRIC. Like for so many things that we take for granted as normal business practice are definitively illegal when procuring with government. How do you guys use Stripe? A lot of our private sector customers pay either via credit card or check. Ah, okay. We have a lot of checks.

Okay, so for the public sector stuff, that'll generally be via a torturous RFP process and PO and something like that. But if you're a private sector... But even when we don't want to be in the check deposit business and you guys... So you use Stripe for the check functionality? because no one knows about our check functionality that Stripe can accept checks for you. Am I allowed to talk about it? No, no one knows because we're bad at marketing.

I was just like, oh. Not because it's a secret.

No, yeah, no. It's like, we don't want to be in that business. Yes. It's a remote deposit box, whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's great.

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

Not a single customer of ours pays via ACH to either check or credit card. And we do a lot of checks. I'd probably say 80%, 90 % of checks, maybe higher.

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

It's, you know, trying to buck the trend every day of the week.

That's really funny. I love that. You were talking about police departments maybe being over-fixated on kind of the 0 .1 % cases. Does that apply to, you know, a common critique that you hear of police department procurement is the sort of militarization of police departments. And, you know, what we really need is a bear cast, you know, for this town of 20 ,000 people, which is like an armored personnel carrier.

Oh, yeah, and it's like a $3 million vehicle. And it's like, why couldn't we just get an F-150?

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

Oh, yeah. I mean, you look at like early on when we were building the company, we'd get the question of like, well, can your license plate reader work on a car going 160? 75 miles an hour. And I was like, probably not. I've never driven that fast. I'd have to rent a runway to go like test this. They're like, it's really important. I'm like, really? Like how often does it happen? They're like, in a high speed pursuit, people drive very fast.

And I'm like, in high speed pursuit, you know who they are. Like we were criticized and had to build a product. Like we, until we got to like 120, 150, it was a major blocker to sales. Really? Huh. I mean, it's like, we built a camera that i mean we tested it on roads that we drove on so we'd get up to like 80 or 90 and it worked fine but we had to eventually we rented a um like you know an amateur racing track yes and just drove around in circles at 120 miles we had we emailed the employees we're like who owns a car that goes really fast and that was actually kind of funny because a lot

of people were like what cars are you used to test we had these some like there's some fast cars putting it teslas rivians some other nicer cars yep uh drive really fast uh and And that was a fun day, because I put the cameras up and do it.

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

No, the only place where we had to make one modification, which is kind of interesting, we deploy our radar. So on really busy roads, where our angle of incident is particularly tight, we can't shoot super far down, we have to shoot at a sharp angle. We have a radar attachment that we tilt backwards to notify the cars on the way, like get ready, which helps. but that's like a very like far edge case because the camera doesn't actually prime the camera essentially yes to get ready for a car coming huh i'm sorry because the camera is offline

unless there's a vehicle i see so you boot it up and that's a power saving measure yeah okay the

most expensive thing we do is like take a picture yeah the second most expensive thing we do is send stuff to the cloud third is just like being a computer turned on yeah and so it's similar to your iPhone, you know, turning your screen off. Okay. So we added the button, you know, to take a photo right away.

The continuously running radar is very low power? It's negligible. I see. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, that was a fun one.

We were talking about hardware previously, but what's building your own drones been like?

A lot of fun. Sounds fun. No, it's fun, but it's like, you know, I have kids, I know you have a kid. And it's really fun to build a product that your kids understand. It's like we drive around Atlanta and my son will count the cameras from home to school. Or we'll go to the airport or we'll go to the park. And I love that he can actually understand what dad does. I'm not sure if you've taught your son how to use a console.

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

well also you not only do drones but you do drones to catch bad guys yeah yeah it's like very compelling from a very early age

yeah to be clear you'll watch Paw Patrol and be like that's what dad builds like that's the helicopter we don't put any people in it but I think what's been fun is we made a hypothesis that you know if you studied planes I think the most interesting plane, military-wise, is the Warthog. Whereas traditionally, you built a plane, you're like, what kind of missiles can we add? And they were like, no, no, let's design the best missile.

It's very precise, very big. And then we'll figure out how to fly it. And so our thesis was, well, we're really good at cameras. A drone is really just a camera that flies. Let's build the best payload and then figure out how to fly it. And so if I showed you, I could show you the payload the next time you're in Atlanta, or we could fly one out here, it's like the coolest camera ever. It's huge.

It's like this big. And it's got four different image sensors, maybe six, different optical lenses. Like we can read a license plate almost a mile away, like crazy specs, great thermal. Then we're going to get it to fly. So like, I don't know, I was an electrical engineer. One of my co-founders was a mechanical engineer. It's fun to build things that fly. So it's like, all right, we have a payload. We have this airframes. We have aeronautical engineers now.

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

Yes. And that's the fun part of this stuff. Yes, it is. Everything else is, you know, selling is good, but building stuff is fun. How many drones do you have out there in the world? But we don't discuss that one.

But decent number.

Yeah, it's hundreds of cities that are flying. Are flying drones.

It's funny, when you talk about the A-10 Warthog, you're reminding me of the Boyd book by Robert Coram, which I only read recently, but it's like one of those kind of Silicon Valley canon. And everyone talks about him in the context of his OODA loop, you know, Orient something, decide, act. but I think that's actually kind of overrated and actually the main reason Boyd is interesting is helping the Pentagon procure better planes I'm just reminded of that with the Warthog and also your description of needing to run at 170 miles an hour because basically he came into a Pentagon that had a bunch of bad planes because all the generals were just obsessed with specs and they wanted a

high top speed and they really judged planes on specs and actually, you know, the fighter pilot joke is that there are only two throttle settings in a dogfight. You know, maximum full military power or throttles idle. Like those are the only two energy states that you're in. And what matters is maneuverability and the ability to add energy or lose energy quickly. So anyway, he was involved in basically all of the good planes that were produced, including the A-10 Warthog, because he got them out of the mindset of just kind of speeds and feeds.

Well, and that's like for us, the spec we track is like time on scene. And so one of the reasons why we care so much about the payload is like if you have a payload that can see really far away, you don't have to fly there. So actually you get there faster virtually, which is what like, if this was a drone that was carrying a payload like a zipline or something else, like actually physically in there matters.

But for us, it's just about time on virtual scene. Yes. So that's what we measure ourselves to. So that's why we fly high because like physics allows you to see farther. That's why we have this huge payload. So you don't have to actually fly there and then you don't have to fly as fast, which means you can conserve battery life, which means you're in the air longer. Like all of these designs were around that use case versus like, you know, I'm sure ZipLine went through a whole separate use case of like, what's the max payload and all that kind of stuff.

How many drones does a city the size of San Francisco need? Okay, so a very small number.

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

But even in our most dense customers, it's pretty rare that they fly two drones at once. It happens, but it's like, I think our busiest drone is being flown 90 hours a week. Like, that's a lot of flight time.

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

Yeah, there's, like, it lives in the dock. There is some, there's debate of whether a drone should be in the air at all times. Does that actually save you meaningful time? Being in the air? Yeah. I would save a lot of time.

Oh, really?

Yeah, but, like, you look at the Carpenter case in Baltimore, and they had an airplane with a very powerful camera 24 hours a day. and that was deemed like a unwarranted search. And so it got killed. And so we're very conscious. Like we have a other part of our business that is kind of interesting now at scale. It's like we have a full team of constitutional attorneys. And I'm sure you have like a regulatory team that when you want to build something, they're like, let's check it before we ship.

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

Let's just look up the fourth amendment here real quick. Yeah, let's just like double check this thing.

And so when you look at the drone, like we believe and this hasn't been tested in court but these are smart people they're like look we just it's unclear how that would end in court but if you call 911 there is a reason to fly the drill if there is a gunshot if there is like gunshot detection if there is a stolen car like that is a reason to dispatch versus just like flying around looking for stuff it's not it's not unconstitutional but we would not push that as a use case but sorry

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

So the... And I'm not an attorney. Neither am I. Never stopped it yet. The other analogy would be the butterfly effect, which is like when things are much, much cheaper and much, much easier, historical precedent gets thrown away. And so you take the helicopter example. You could say, oh, well, helicopters fly sometimes. Yeah, but helicopters are so expensive. It's not practical to have 24-7 aerial coverage. With a drone, it's not impractical. It's the same reason why when we launch our drone, we want to go from the launch location to the end location.

The cameras point the horizon the whole time. We don't want to look in your backyard. We feel really strong. And that's not a law. That's just our point of view of where the law should be. So we'll build a product for that. And then if the operator wants to tilt down, That's their control. But as a default, we're flying straight out. That's very interesting.

Last question. So you guys have grown with cameras out there in cities, now getting into drones, building the software OS to help law enforcement agencies and others kind of synthesize all the information they have. Just what comes next? What future product ideas are you playing with? Where do you want to go?

So if I think about it, we talked about this earlier. failure for flock is prison population goes up. It's actually like really bad. And we look at, you know, the products today are very much focused in the middle of a crime. A crime has already happened and therefore we should solve it. And that's really good. And I think we're definitely not done, but we've done a lot of work in that category. I get pretty interested in expanding that and going, well, what about, what can we be doing from a product perspective to prevent crime from happening?

And that actually doesn't necessarily look like software. It's like one of the interesting things that we started last year. So we call our thriving cities fund. It's probably an analogy similar to your like Stripe Press, which is like, it's never going to be the core of your business, but like you feel really good that it's a part of your business. And so when we go in places like Greenville, Mississippi, we also commit to deploy capital as growth partners to those businesses.

Because if we want to convince that 16 year old to not be a criminal, there does need to be jobs. jobs that like a 16 year old can get. And so we deploy capital in, you know, restaurants, nail salons, like pick your business that you can be 16 and work out easily. And like, we want more of those to exist. You know, last year, I think we were at, you know, 21 % IRR. So like, it's not a bad business.

It's not, I think Fox Stocks done a lot better than 21%, but like, I feel really strongly we could deploy hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of capital in the cities that also choose to be safe. I don't want to go deploy capital in a place that doesn't want to be safe. that. So I'm like, I want to do more there. And then I think to our conversation on the other half, you know, the majority of the crime we solve is not violent.

It's nonviolent. And today, the discrepancy for a juvenile, non-juvenile, you still wind up in some type of penitentiary or prison system. I think that's crazy. Like all the data shows, as soon as you wind up in prison, you're going to get violent and you're going to come back and so i i would articulate there as an opportunity don't know yet what it is to say oh hold on hold on hold on if this was an opportunistic criminal is there a product with a capital p because that might not be software it might be hardware software i don't know that allows that person to have a second chance and in a way that is not gonna increase their likelihood of

doing it again like that's bad but like prison can't be the answer. Like it just doesn't work. And the whole concept of prison will never work. Like, and there are some incredibly well-run prisons with really well-intentioned wardens doing the best of their ability, but the concept of putting a bunch of violent people together is like by default flawed. And so I question like what could Flock be doing to say, I'm gonna prevent kids from becoming criminals.

And if you do wind up on that path, how do I get you back on track as fast as possible? and we're a for-profit business, so I'm not looking to be a non-profit, but I think there is something there. I mean, you're talking about millions and millions of people who really need, like, it's actually as a society in our best interest to get them back in and productive. And I want to do both of those.

So fewer crimes, fewer people in prisons.

Yeah, that's the end goal. That's great.

Thank you. Thank you, it was fun.

It was awesome. Yeah.