The $4B Tech Startup Solving Crime with AI

you've got almost a 90% chance of getting away with stealing someone's car and you've got like a 50ish per chance of getting away with we build technology that helps law enforcement through one way or another solve crime our goal isn't just to solve crime our goal is to eliminate crime the way you eliminate it is make it harder to do welcome to the Logan Bartlet show on this episode what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Garrett Langley now Garrett is the CEO and co-founder of flock safety a business most recently valued at over $4 billion and their most recent stats has indicated that they have played a role and solving over 10% of crimes in the United States it's okay to be optimistic but you do actually have to have a plan I do generally think that in 10 years from now flock will have eliminated crime in America got a lot of problems I got to go solved later today when we wrap up but like in 10 years I think we're going to do great flock is one of the most interesting private companies that I've ever come across Garrett is a very impressive leader that's been building an important company for society really fun conversation that you'll hear now Garrett thanks for doing this yeah I'm excited to be here so can can we bat off maybe uh with you describing what flock safety does yeah yeah so it's a it's an interesting business because at the end of the day we view ourselves as a crime fighting company um kind of a it's a noble Mission yes uh there are like many things in life that I think we should try to fix uh Elon is working on a bunch of them i' like to think we're like a small version of that uh trying to help the at least the people that live on Earth today uh and so for us we're a crime fighting company now the way we do that though isn't through traditional means you know we're not a law enforcement agency uh we're not a nonprofit know we build technology that helps the people who have been tasked with fighting crime do it more effectively more objectively and more successfully uh the kind of eye openening thing for me you know I I have always been an entrepreneur never had like a real job before and about seven years ago when we were trying to figure out what to do next in life I saw this statistic that I I didn't believe was accurate which is that roughly you've got almost a 90% chance of getting away with stealing someone's car and I was like man that just that can't be right you know like that that that that doesn't seem accurate and thankfully in some cities that is an accurate right that's a national average that's not the case for you know New York New York has actually has a better clearance rate um than a lot of cities but that's kind of what we do we build technology that helps law enforcement through one way another solve crime um and the main reason why is when you look at the kind of primary research done by academics our goal isn't just to solve crime our goal is to eliminate crime and the way you eliminate it is make it harder to do it's fascinating I assume that was a fork in the road of like do I do crime with a 90% chance of getting away with it uh you know that that entrepreneurial Pursuit versus do I try to solve crime I'm glad you landed on the side you did uh it sounds like crime itself is a fairly profitable uh business at least in terms of the nonviolent uh stuff if you really have if you have a 90% success rate uh I mean that's that's way way higher than I would have guessed and it's just kind of a troubling uh stat I realize that's a national average and uh you know there's a bunch of different inputs into it but if you were to distill down the reason for that and I guess goes to the root of what flock actually does like why is the clearance rate so low for uh solving non-violent crime yeah so you you bring up a good point I was actually uh I was with the mayor of Atlanta last night they're a great flock customer and obviously I live in Atlanta so I I care a lot about what happens in my hometown and he he developed one of these awesome programs um he calls it the year of the Youth and what he realized is like look we've all been 15 before right and in an abundance of free time you just make not the best decisions and so what he realized is like if we create jobs for these kids they'll be too busy to commit crime because you see most criminals are not evil they're opportunistic and some to your point are are doing it from a profit perspective but a lot of crime is also due to boredom um now maybe you were setting firecrackers off or you were you're doing something less malicious but a lot of the crime we see is semi-organized auto theft rings and it's just oh we're 16 and we're goofing off there's there's no Mal intent out of you know oh we're goingon to go steal this car which actually pretty pretty painful um and and when you look at it the reason why it's so hard to solve these crimes is there's never any evidence if you imagine you're like an SDR imagine being told like go book this deal but I'm not going to give you their phone number the name of the company their email address but I need you to go book this deal and that's the effective job of your average detective hey this car was stolen we think it was stolen around 2 am that's all we have and that's actually really hard right like H how H how do you go solve that uh it's pretty tricky um and so when you look at it the clearance rates are linearly correlated to the lack of evidence and I would say lack of objective evidence too because there was this one case um in Tennessee where there it was a it was a um was an armed robbery of a vehicle so person was held at gunpoint and when they were held at gunpoint um they said it was a black male and a 49ers hoodie and they were in a pickup truck like pickup truck pulled up to them you know do this thing and they got two things right in that eyewitness description the person was wearing a 49ers hoodie they were driving a truck but they were actually White H and and look I don't I don't think that I'm not you know I bring this up not to say oh that person is like bad eyewitness testimony is really hard imagine if you were sitting there and then all of a sudden you have a gun to your head you're not like oh am I accurately describing this scenario you're thinking like oh my gosh I want to live through this scenario and now with flock I me mentioned the objective piece that officer in Tennessee was able to go in and say hey show me all the pickup trucks in this area around this time that leads to a license plate then leads to a search warrant they find the guy is still wearing that 49ers hoodie Le he admits to doing the crime and like that's the type of thing that happens thousands of times a day where not only are we actually solving more crime we're introducing a new level of objectivity because we're focusing on the vehicle and not in this case an eyewitness testimony well so in that case um so so so the mission is obviously uh um is noble and the uh the specific examples are uh I mean I mean incredible but as you as that problem first presented itself and seven years ago your car is gone the pharmacy gets hit up car gets abandoned and all of that you you landed on a uh something that I don't know in retrospect maybe maybe is obvious like anything is in hindsight but but landed on a a specific problem and technology and so maybe can you talk about like the initial I realize you guys have a plethora of products today but like very first thing that you landed on and decided to go after and describing like what that is and how it works yeah for sure so so when we started the company it was just a project right like I I called paig and Matt two my closest friends they had worked for me at my last company and I said hey I I think like I think crime is a really interesting problem and I wonder why people aren't solving it and I have no background on law enforc no background in criminal justice never owned a gun then start calling these police Chiefs and I'm like hey why can't you solve crime because look I think a lot of us assume there's some level of apathy as a part of the problem like you can go look these are public salaries you don't make a lot of money being a cop uh even you know I think like uh you know police Chiefs are still making 100,000 $100,000 and that's they're at the peak of their career there no getting bigger my cousin my cousin's a cop in chattanoga so I I know yeah it's it's not you know it's it's tough right it's not like they they don't have any scrutiny day-to-day and so you look at these these men and women you go okay maybe it's apathy but then you talk to them and you go no it's not apathy they're they're no different than nurses and teachers they they just were born with this strong desire to serve their community so then you start to go okay well why is it you go okay it's evidence well why don't you have enough evidence and they're like oh well it's because it's really expensive it's like what do you mean well the evidence we need is a license plate and and I was like that's that seems really weird to me why why would you need a license plate and they're like oh it's the number one piece of evidence in solving a crime 70 plus percent of crimes happen with a vehicle like this is what we need and so I'm looking into it with Paige and Matt and we're like oh but there's like there's there's vendors that do this right like a camera that can read a license plate is not a New Concept but what we noticed was that there was these two underlying problems with the existing Solutions it was all Central centralized on cost at the time seven years ago the average camera fully fully deployed was about $50,000 per unit and so maybe if you're New York like you cover your egress points because you're one of the biggest cities in America and like you can afford it but like what about New York what about Elizabeth what about like go down to your average city and you're like no that's that's that's so much money and the reason why I was so expensive is twofold one was infrastructure and one was bill of materials on the infrastructure side traditional systems required Hardline power and Hardline internet and if you've ever built a home construction's expensive it's like really expensive to dig holes really expensive to conduit power and fiber hundreds of feet so You' effectively sign up for a construction project so we said okay what if we got rid of all the infrastructure like what if it was just a cell phone on a poll that would then remove that cost and the second thing we looked at was said well wait a second why are they using these very proprietary bespoke DSP chips I was an electrical engineer and so we're breaking it down of like they're using an infrared array with a DSP chip to do a very very Legacy approach to optical character recogition or OCR and Matt and I were like why wouldn't you just use computer vision like it can't be that hard it wind up being harder than we thought but like it a phone should be able to do this so we literally got some old Android phones um I tore them apart soldered together a bigger battery and a solar panel and Matt who's like one of the best developers I've ever met maybe the best develop I've ever met quickly like put together a computer vision model an Android app put it up on my street and all of a sudden we were reading license weights now in the middle of the summer in Atlanta an Android phone outside is gonna overheat pretty quickly so like realize that like okay this isn't gonna scale but we've built a you know a competitive product that had zero implementation cost and had a bill of materials that was a couple hundred bucks and that felt like really special and the like Peter teal saying we had these two secrets that no one else knew which was like we could dramatically deploy more devices at a lower cost like a 10x better product at T to the price the timing of every Market's obviously pretty important and uh the set of circumstances that led to this opportunity was there a window of time that 5 years earlier it wouldn't have worked uh because of the camera technology OCR solar whatever it was and you guys happened to catch it then like how how how wide open was the window that that flock could have worked uh for for for you know you guys or if someone had started it before yeah I think we got you know we got very lucky with timing I would like to think that we were like super super thoughtful about it but the the smartphone was key because the camera technology you've got people like Apple and Samsung deploying billions of dollars a year into smartphone technology which is mostly low power devices with really good cameras and that's effectively what we are so like we're we're riding the tail of that wave and then what you also have is this dramatic reduction in Cloud compute um and it's weird probably for you and I to think about an environment where on Prim is default but when you're talking about service servicing you know our average camera does 30 or 40 gigabytes of data a month that's a lot of data not only to push through push through the internet but also to store it online and that is still like if you look at the camera Market in general it is still mostly on Prim um and so that Evolution I think is still happening like we're still actually right well smartphones are are quite like there's Innovation still happening but it's it's mostly moved to AI like we do quite a bit of of AI on our on our Imaging platform the the cloud piece is really interesting because you look at companies like rata and and I know you've talked with them and you look at companies like us and me if the cloud wasn't getting Cheaper by the quarter by the day we wouldn't exist so as it currently stands so that was the thesis originally uh and the the belief around it where where are you in that Journey how would you describe the product today it seems like it's solar powered I I I I had heard something there's like two different cameras it's angled that just license plate readers can you just give like the the you know jumping forward to 2024 and where you are with that yeah so uh if we go back all the way to that Vision um I remember during YC uh we had a slide we only had one slide in our pitch deck and it was a mug shot and we said we built a product that actually solves crime we don't know who we're going to sell to we don't know how we're going to sell sell it we don't know how we're going to charge but I fundamentally believe that if you pass that toothbrush test everyone wants to live in a Crim less society and we built a product that does that that is largely still the same case now I think we have figured out who we sell to we like we've done a pretty good job figuring that out we've done a pretty good job building out a business but if you go to a place like San Francisco who's recently coming online with flock you know they've got about 400 devices now in in the downtown area that as a car drives by a few things happen uh the first is we within a few seconds read the license PL plate and then we have a direct integration with the FBI and we can check is that car stolen is that car on an amber alert is it on a silver alert uh does it have an outstanding felony warrant but there's a there's A's a list of objective things that makes that car either illegal to be on the road or legal to be on the road and if it's illegal on the road let's say it's got an amber alert or a felony warrant we immediately notify the nearest officer in their vehicle so now within let's call it 5 to 10 seconds from a car driving by the nearest officer is notified hey uh this this Kia this white Kia uh that's stolen is at this location um we don't know who's inside we don't care who's inside which know that car is stolen um and that that leads to about 2,000 arrests every single day like that that feature the second thing that happens is when that car does drive by we also do what what's called capture its vehicle fingerprint um that's a list of about 26 different unique attributes of a vehicle that with our computer vision model we say okay it is white it's a white car it's a Honda it's an accord uh it's got a Nevada license plate it's got a roof rack it's got bumper stickers anything a human would not notice on the vehicle we also tag and so from a retrospective so let's say that a crime happened and you didn't know the car was stolen already and detective can then go in and say hey I'm looking for any white Honda with a Nevada license plate that was here yesterday at 2:00 in this area show me all the cars and that tends to be the beginning of a case we're never the end all Beall in a criminal investigation we're typically the first step of a process that gets the detective on their way and you're actually removing the subjectivity of a lot of the inputs right uh where there's not the same bias you're not actually even capturing who the driver of the car is purposefully right uh and so it's really just focused on the vehicle itself yeah I mean I I was shocked at just how important a vehicle could be in a criminal investigation like still kind of confuses me to this day as someone who's been in it for a long time now um it is the beginning of the case and whose inside is kind of irrelevant until you you get a human involved until detective takes over the case and then yeah you got to go to drive an investigation because you can't arrest a vehicle um but to my earlier point on kind of the eyewitness story a a lot of subjectivity in placing by Design it's subjective game we're trying to put a little bit more objectivity into it can we talk about um the nature of of crime and I I feel like you you have some interesting perspectives on nonviolent versus violent crime and what serves as deterrence uh of uh different types of crime in in a modern society and how incentives and and and punishments actually kind of play a role or lack thereof in different circumstances yeah I mean I think as a as a country um we've unfortunately made a decision historically that crime is okay and there are some people who live in this country that are generally fine with crime they think crime is just a cost of doing business crime is a is a mandated requirement of living in a big city or in a in a modern society and I just I just deeply disagree with that sentiment um that's a saying that like poverty is a requirement I don't think so actually I think the quality of life has gone up decade over decade it will continue to go up hopefully and like some of these big issues we face as a country I think are actually quite solvable now I think you know it's unlikely a technology company alone can solve these things and that's kind of our our point of view our point of view is that it's a combination of people policy and Technology like I mentioned the story earlier of what mayor Dickens is doing on the youth side that's policy right like he's trying to stop kids from even thinking about becoming criminals giving them jobs that's awesome that's a policy thing that's a people thing and then where technology comes in is that if you look at the underlying reason why people do commit crime it's a Boolean decision right your average criminal is a 16 to 22 22 year old male and there's a reason why they won't let you rent a car until you're over 22 it's because your brain isn't fully develops you tend to make Boolean decisions as an adult now you and I make a calculus decision we think about the probability of something happening that weighs our decision framework and then we make a yes or no decision eventually as a as a as an adolescent it's yes or no and if you believe you can get away with something you do it and so what we believe is that in cities that have deployed flaw they are starting to change that calculus to say hey actually clearance rates have gone from 133% to 30% to 50% to 80% and we've got some cities that are at 100% clearance rate which means if you live in that City you know if I commit this crime I will get held accountable guess what crime goes down it's like it's a very very simple concept um but it actually is working where as clearance rates go up crime rates goes down because the majority of crime right you move remove the 0.001% of people that are just truly evil which we're not trying to get rid of we're not trying to fix that we're trying to fix the 99.99% of crime that is simply opportunistic that can be solved by driving clearance rates in the punishment side of things like hey if I uh break into a car I get 10 years in prison versus 10 months versus probation I guess there's there's been different studies that I'm not uh appropriately educated on but I'm sure you've seen some of the the data that the the the nature of the punitiveness of the uh of the crime actually doesn't serve as much as a deterrent versus just simply getting caught it there's zero academic studies that have proven any correlation between the severity of penalty and the impact on crime now guess back to your Boolean point it's not a it's not a you're just like I'm not gonna get I mean you think about it right like you probably took statistics in college if you know the average is a 13% chance of getting caught like everyone you assume you're above average right because why would I be below average at anything I do and as a 16-year-old you definitely thought you were above average at everything you did invincible so like well I might I'm not get caught he might get caught but I won't get caught uh and you're you're not thinking about punishment because you don't assume you're going to get caught now I am sure there is a a trailing point where it's like well if there's no punishment well then clearly that's probably not enough but the difference between a month six months a year in jail just doesn't matter um what matters is people believe that we have created a society that upholds the rules we've agreed to because like one of the interesting Dynamics and this is actually a beautiful part about our country we live in the rules are not evenly enforced and I actually think that's like quite good uh because the rules in Georgia the rules in Atlanta even though we have the similar federal laws and our state laws are a little bit different we as a society as a community choose what's socially enforced so flock goes into a city I realize there's there's a split between selling to homeowners association and so kind of private citizens and increasingly you're selling into uh State local governments as well but can you uh I guess a commercial for for for the efficacy of what you're doing can you give some stats around like the Delta and clearance rate of uh maybe some city that you went in and how many cameras were installed and what that did to to you know the efficacy of solving crime yeah yeah I mean literally when we roll out with a city if they don't make an arrest within their first hour of deployment something's wrong we either haven't properly trained them the cameras are somehow in like the wrong place are not working like it I don't know of a single customer we've rolled out that hasn't solved a crime within their first hour when you look longer term you know I think about a place like cob County which was one of our first customers and you go to the chief there and he will tell you that they have backtack years with 100% clearance rate on violent crime and if it wasn't for flock that wouldn't be the case you go on public record and say this and I think it's true and I think you know obviously just like with a lot of things it is hard to drive very very hard hard science on efficacy I think what we look for is you know what percentage of crimes are are being solved using the product we're at about 10% nationally but the impact is is is pretty demonstrable overnight can can you speak to a specific example and I know there's there's tons of them but just to really make it concrete of a situation that and maybe how it played out uh in and case study maybe sounds uh too too uh too business oriented uh but but but a situation that that really makes this uh tangible of X person did y thing and flock was able to solve it just one that sort of stayed with you as you know something you're particularly proud of yeah I I mean I think so there's probably two moments if you'll give me the chance to share two of them yeah got time the the first one and this is like the company might have been six months old maybe um and we had deployed the cameras in my neighborhood uh and this single woman's home was broken into and all of her stuff was stolen she wasn't at home and if you talk to this this woman you the stuff is it's a bummer to lose your stuff right but she has a job she has Insurance the issue was this sense of violation like her safety had been violated her is a deep fear now and within about an hour of her calling the police an arrest was made uh because she did have a camera at her house and so she had the vehicle description they were able to plug that into flock they then had to make a model on a license plate and then pretty quickly they were able to then find that vehicle and make an arrest and it was it was important for two reasons one from personal level one from business level from personal level you you I talked to this woman and there was this a glimmer of hope right and maybe one of the worst days in her life we were able to provide just a little bit of piece of mind a little bit of like no Society is just the world is just like you're you're going to be protected and that's like I get goosebumps to this day thinking about like that's still happening all the time I'm not as aware of it because I don't don't get the chance to talk to all of our our our our customers or in customers but like that was I remember paig saying like man I I could spend the rest of my life doing this like if this is the impact we make on people's lives every day like and you're we're going to get paid to do this and get paid well like this is crazy so that one was like one of the first times on a personal level on the business level was also the first time we realized that every day at five o'clock the news is going to want to talk about crime they're going to talk about politics about sports they're talking about crime and it was the first time we were ever on TV and it's kind of realized like what was one of the first kind of go to market hacks we realized was that PR could be a really big growth Channel I've yet to meet another company that leveraged PR like we did uh most people talk about oh PR is a great strategy no no no PR was our only growth engine for the first two three years of the business um because what we realize is every single time a crime happens news wants to cover it uh and so like I went on TV and it was this really fun experience uh being on like local news uh so that that was the first one I'd say the most impactful one is I'm a father of two young kids and anytime we help parents with their kids it's particularly Tes home and most of our employees our average age of employees is in their mid-40s and so most of us have families with kids you know whether it's elementary school or Junior High and thankfully most child abductions are not Strangers Like if you look at the we work really closely with the national Center of endangered and missing children it's one of our like strongest Partnerships most abductions are an estranged parent and so it's scary but it's very solvable like we you can solve it within a day stranger to stranger abduction are not only really rare they're really hard to solve and there was there's a town that we work with and it's predominantly an immigrant kind of uh Community it's a large percent of the population is immigrants and due to that they tend to be targeted for Crime because the assumption is like if you steal from these people they won't call the police which is like really like multiple levels of ickiness because like not only you committing a crime against someone you're doing it against a a community that you believe like is less safe and so this woman is walking her child car pulls up jumps out steal the two-year-old boy out of the out of the stroller total stranger mom is panicking she calls 911 she all she has is that it's a white SUV now this community is one of our was one of our better customers the time is still a great customer they pluging in the system now one of the cool things about flock is that it is a network right so when you think about the the why we called it flock it's because we believe that as a community if we work together we're safer and that extends not only out of my neighborhood out of my city but the cities around me because criminals don't they don't tend to care where like cities start and stop and so like you don't I doubt you even think about it as like a normal person of like oh am I in New York right now or am I in a different neighborhood or different city and so they plug it into flock they find the license plate and they realize the car has now gone on the highway huge this is like really bad now because once you get on a highway it's very hard to know where you're going they then plug it into flock and that creates a Statewide hot list looking for this vehicle we get a hit about 45 miles away that notifies the nearest that notifies like that police department and notifies the gbi which is like our our local version of the FBI have one in New York and California and they safely return the kid this is like all in three hours uh there's like half a dozen police departments involved and this kid's I guess like five or six now and we we we met up one of our employees met up with the family recently and like the mom is still so thankful and sadly like that kind of stuff does happen every single day thankfully not every single day in you know in my town or your town but like you look at those kind of stories and like I I often just reflect like I don't know if I'll ever get to work on a company like this again yeah it's it's hu I mean it's hugely uh impactful and I'm sure super gratifying to um to to to have even uh one situation like that that that you had a role in solving let alone the the the the thousands a day or whatever it is that you guys contribute to um I guess to uh to to uh to talk about the the trait like anything in uh any decision we make there's there's two sides of a coin tradeoffs around this and I I think I'd be remiss not to ask about the the the Axis or the spectrum of safety and privacy and uh like implicitly we're we're making uh decisions on a daily basis that uh are are on one end of the spectrum over the other and there's there's countries like uh China that that you know we we're giving up a lot of uh privacy in exchange for for safe and I I don't particularly want to live in that Society but you know it's it's one that seems to be pretty effective and deterring crime then on the other end of the spectrum there's uh there's definitely some uh wildernesses that we can go live in that have no rules and no laws and all of that and so I guess how do you think about um data has become so uh in privacy increasingly with uh you know whatever the things around Facebook and and app track tracking transparency and GDP and and all these different things we're sort of living in this world where there's a there's a Continuum and people have different perspectives around it and so I guess how do you think about that and where you fall and your responsibility within it no it's a good question and I think there's probably two sides to it there's one we make our own decisions as a company for what we want to build and what we want to enable um and so good example of that is you know we don't do facial recognition I don't I don't think it's inherently evil I think it's an effective product we just choose not to build it which is a decision we've made as a company and then I think the other thing that's really important is we live in a society that individuals are elected democratically to make decisions on our behalf and that covers things like roads and sewage and parks and Public Safety and we don't do anything without the support of the community and so I look at it and go let's talk about something that's really easy data retention I think it's a it's a subjective decision and so you go to places like uh Dallas Texas and they have a 90day storage period and you go to a place like Austin Texas and it's seven days I I I don't care if that's what Austin thinks is best for their Community that's great that's like that's exciting so we believe it's our job to give communities the kind of levers to to make that to make those decisions because to be very clear Austin will solve less crime than Dallas that's like it's a it's just a fact but they're making that trade-off I'm not making that trade-off for them the city council and the police chief they sat down and the city manager and said hey we think seven days is right for us Dallas said 90 in New Jersey it's five years I don't live in any of those places so on a personal level I don't think it matters as a business though we look at it across the Spectrum and say what are the things we can do to provide our customers the ability to customize what they're doing so it makes sense for their Community I mean I guess police aren't elected officials but they are those uh that we trust uh through the process of of you know whatever Democratic elections and then the people that you know end up end up hiring them what about on the the HOA or on the private citizens side and uh maybe talk a little bit about like I guess as it relates both HOA and and and uh police officers the the access and rights and and all of those things um and how you think about it yeah so well so the cool part is the way we built product is that most of our neighborhoods don't even have access to the cameras they buy it goes straight to the police department because you and I don't have the right to arrest someone we don't have the right to do a criminal investigation nor what I would imagine you want to I don't do that like there's a crime in my neighborhood I don't have I'm not I got a family I got a business so the way the product's built is like if you look at my neighborhood the cameras go straight to the Atlanta police department and not a single person that lives in our community has access to the cameras because what would you do with it uh and that's like the default now in an environment where either there's an off-duty police officer a security team or there's just a an HOA that that that wants to have access that's fine they're the ones paying for it but what we really emphasize is coming back to the name of the company like your job is to support the community deploy this product it goes straight to law enforcement they will use it when they need to but otherwise just beond your mer way and that I think is like a really nice kind of model because then it solves a lot of the privacy concerns I think that exist I'm sure you get um some uh uh criticism that is not totally rooted in sensible uh logic and uh you know maybe just fud and and hey this seems bad and uh um I don't know I can I can imagine the types of people that might claim uh these things but um outside of outside of those that are uh maybe less uh within the bounds of of reasonable conversation um are there particular discussions that you welcome um having about these different tradeoffs and like where the the lines of consideration exists and I assume data retention sounds like one of them maybe and who has access is another but are there other things that you think are actually worthwhile philosophical debates to have about like your role in society yeah so I think the the cool thing about flock is whether you're blue red or purple you have flock like we we've got Berkeley California uh and we've got Southern texus right down on the border like it's like as red as you can get and as blue as you can get and then we go to New York we go to Maine we go to Oregon Washington like there isn't EST estate that doesn't have flock at some level and I think it's because when you remove the politics of it everyone wants to be safe like I've never met someone who's like oh I would like to be less safe uh that's like it's a very odd feeling uh so then to your point it's like a question of okay well well how safe do we want to be U because in in in some environment I don't if you saw the news like I think Miami uh during spring break had a midnight curfew or like 11m curfew that's safer it like bad stuff happens at 2 am like nothing good happens in the middle of the night uh it's so like Miami made a decision on their own accord that like hey during spring break we just want to be a little bit safer now I don't think Miami is going do that forever because it's fun to stay out late and so you look at those kind of decisions and like we're one of those types of decisions where you can say look you know if we want to be safer there's this product called flock that will solve more crime do we want it as a community and I think last year you know I think three out of about a thousand cities said no we don't want flock and we're okay it's like okay great no hard feelings like you know what what call us if you change your mind um your neighboring is it saying no I guess I don't know enough governments city city council so I mean and and it's I think it's great like the chief of police will present an option it's his job or her job to to keep the community safe and they'll present us as an option and and in three cases I think last year a city said hey you know we just don't think it's right for us and we go that's great you know like that's no hard feelings um I hope they change their mind um to your point a lot of the time it is misinformation um so as an example one of those three uh last year uh originally said no because they thought we were doing facial recognition on the cameras and we're like we don't do facial recognition on the cameras and they voted that way because look it's you know most of these people are volunteers it's not a full-time job you don't get paid to be on City Council in in a small town in a bigger city you do and it's a little bit manageable but a small town you don't you don't get paid so these are volunteers trying to make the best decisions they can so they they did eventually come back around because we were able to educate them of like no we don't need facial recognition that like these are very focused on cars and that's not how the technology works so most of the time it is either the fear of the unknown um or or just misinformation like they just they don't fully understand the technology um I I do think though to your point there's there's data retention that's an interesting one and then the other one is data sharing you know who who do you want to share with uh most of our cities work really closely with their neighboring cities so if you're in the Bay Area and you're in you know Aon you work with copertino and uh Redwood City and Foster City and like San Mato because you're solving cases together all the time anyways um but it is up to a city like we have one customer that I know of in Illinois that does not share with anyone and that that as a city they decided they want to keep this information just to themselves and that's fine I I think that they will solve less crime um but that's important to them and I think that's great um and so we're always trying to figure out the same point of view would be on the overall auditing and transparency so everything you do in the system is fully audited and stored in perpetuity some of our customers share that audit publicly it's great so in uh in pedmont California great Police Department there the camera locations the search history it's like a ton of information publicly available we built we built that form we call it our transparency portal it's great other of our customers say h it's not for us we don't want to do that okay so we're always trying to figure out like how do we help our customers achieve their goal which is solve more crime be safe in an framing that makes the most sense for their own communi kind of other goals you know I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that the job of a a police officer should be a noble one in the society that we live in or in a modern and sophisticated Society uh but um there's been some circumstances over the course of the last couple years that have drawn attention and I'm sure it's been going on uh I mean I know it's been going on far longer than just the last couple years we just happen to have technology to capture it and document it in ways that have illuminated some of the uh some some Bad actors within um police departments or or unfortunate set of circumstances that have led to loss of life and just you know terrible circumstances right yeah I mean you're you're you're right I mean I think just like in every industry you know there's something like you know a million police officers in America you put a million people in a room there's going to be some bad people yes and I think we've we've we've these are people that are uh entrusted to try to um bring stability to society and I think it's uh it's particularly troubling when um when when it's not accountants committing fraud or you know shitty podcasters or whatever it is like it's particularly troubling uh when it's when it's the people that we trust with with great power within Society but I think um it's it's a lot of the rhetoric has led to a uh a disproportionate number of resignations early retirement uh lack of enrollment into uh the service C can you just talk about maybe some of the broad trends that are going on in policing uh today and then what role you feel like Flock can yeah play in this yeah so it is a challenging time time um more than 80% of police departments are underst staffed and that's not like oh the police chief saying I want more people that's the government City the local government has given them budget for X number of people and they're at why and and in this case Y is less than x so the majority of police departments are underst staff and that is a new problem that was not a problem 10 years ago that's a problem that's happened over the last three years now covid was particularly bad like that was not good and then the social unrest was not good I don't know if it's ever going to get better um I would equate it similar to probably the problem we have with teachers like I I don't know how we're going to get more teachers Teach for America was pretty interesting maybe maybe one of the best ideas I've heard is like why don't we have a Teach for America for policing uh like that's an interesting idea that's like one I've heard I think what what mayor bib has done Cleveland is pretty interesting what he did was said look you know we've got Staffing for a th000 officers we only have 800 we have no line of sight to get back to a th I'm actually going to decrease the headcount allocation down to 800 and that extra budget I'm just going to raise everyone's wage that helps with enrollment you know like and also helps with retention you give everyone a 20% raise and like oh man you know I will put it in a couple more years so it is a pretty big problem because there there's pretty consistent data that shows a lack of a law enforcement agency just leads to unrest and if you look at the cities and the number of cities that did this was very small a lot of cities talked about defunding the police only two or three cities across the entire country actually did it and they have had a massive spike in crime they are in a massive hole now in terms of recruiting and and running people through Academy and it's going take them another five or seven years to actually get out of it and just get back to where they were so I think most cities realized you know reform is always necessary it's good right like you know the probably the best example is I've never met a cop that wants to respond to non-law enforcement related activity they still can ask to like if there's an individual with a mental health issue and you send a law enforcement officer that has zero training I I don't know what we expect like to I mean to go perfect no they're going to like really struggle with that when they're actually people who have been trained to deal with mental health and so you do see cities I think moving in the right direction saying hey we've got to we've got to increase the number of First Responders we have uh we have fire as a first responder we have law enforcement responder we need a medical team like we actually need more types more diversity that's expensive right but like I don't know how else to fix that so it is a troubling problem i' would say the only thing that I think is the Silver Lining amongst all this is technology is becoming more available I think one of the benefits that flock has brought to the market is not only are we a forceable slier like you can get more done as a police department because you're not you know the traditional view of policing is you drive around the neighborhoods you know there are problems looking for suspicious activity one that's incredibly wasteful and two it's incredibly subjective because you wind up going after the same people that it's like double bad with flock you talk to most of our customers and they'll say we're too busy chasing stolen cars to do that kind of stuff anymore so driven up productivity and driven up objectiv from a more Venture perspective though we have proven that you can build a venture business selling to local government and like one of the things that I I love now is God at least once a week I'm getting a a pitch deck from an early stage company that's trying to go after local local government and I think that's awesome like it is a market that's so underserved now you know competitive a little bit like all right well I want to build I want to build a really really big business so like you know I'm always looking out for like what are the what are the more interesting ones happening but if you if you go back seven years ago before flock we got no after no after no from investors was they would say like oh local government is not a venture backal Market the the last IPO that serviced local government was in 2003 was the last IPO you know you you've got one of your peers and and Andre and horwith who's an investor in flock with their American dynm fund and you see more investors like y'all saying wait a second actually like some of the these more industrial markets you look at companies like samsara leading their way as well of saying like actually vertical SAS can be really effective it's hard it's really hard but when you gets right like you've got incredible grr you've got bigger TMS than you ever imagin because you see this Evolution and we're seeing it in ping now where budget is shifting from headcount to technology and so the first time this ever happened to us was in KD Texas I think and the police chief went to his city council and said look I have a I have a head problem and I have no plan to fix it I I do not have an answer but I do have this thing called technology and the fully loaded cost when you include pension and benefits it's about $150,000 a year for an entry-level officer that's the same cost of 50 cameras now I can't get rid of all my police officers and we don't that'd be a horrible idea but man to take two officers off of of of headcount which I can't even fill anyways and go get 100 cameras that will impact our entire police department like that's such an obvious Roi and so I I'm seeing more and more of these police Chiefs in the newer Command Staff saying we we got to find the right balance got to find the right balance of sworn versus unsworn technology versus headcount there there is there's a balance there to be had and I think that's really exciting to watch so so what's next for uh for flock so we talked about license plate readers which uh I I think is still the majority of the revenue and uh you know a big component of solving crime for you all I've seen now there's there's a product called raven as well that you guys have launched around gunshot detection can can you talk through like the the site that you have today and the aspirations of where you're going to go yeah so I'll start with the aspirations and come back to what we do today uh at every quarter the the team looks at all the crimes that happened in America and try to draw a direct line to a product we've built to help solve them and there's a lot of crimes we help with so you you mentioned uh our core product Falcon reading license plates that solves a lot of crimes entering uh entering Auto residential burglaries a bunch of that we never had a product that helped solve violent crime particularly gun related so we developed Raven which is our gunshot detection technology which solves gun violence every single day which is a sad reality of Society but it is a reality and so we built this product to go help solve it and there are cases you know whether you go to a Witchita Kansas or an Albany Georgia where they're shocked at the level of gun violence they had because no one calls 911 um when someone gets shot and so that's been really interesting to watch we have developed a new product called flock 911 it's it's really cool one of the things I didn't realize is that if you call 911 today until you effectively finish the phone call it's not entered into what's called CAD or computerated dispatch and no one on the first respond side has any idea you're having a problem you could have an officer like a block away from you you've got a two to five minute lag before them even being notified and so flos 911 allows us to co- list kind of like dial into a bridge of the 911 call and send that directly to the nearest officer so now if you called 911 we find the nearest officer and if if they're within a relative distance right so if it's Manhattan that might be like a block two blocks traffic is really bad if you're in a more Suburban town that might be a mile or three miles but if you're in that radius we will ping the nearest officer and say hey there's an active 911 call happening right now click play they can click play they can listen to the call they can make a judgment call of like is this appropriate for me to start to dispatch and if it is what we're seeing is that response times are going down dramatically often beating the call from hanging up and that's like the dream state or dream state said if you call 911 before you even hang up an officer is on site uh I think that will dramatically change how officers dispatch and to our ear conversation on on human capital when we're in and we're in a shortage of humans this is a way to actually increase their effectiveness we can get them going before things get started so we have like a whole slew of products like that where we're looking for these kind of pinpointed problems of what's happening in this town what's happen happening in that town how do we help them solve more of their crimes and like one of the favorite things that I get to do is I travel the country and I'll sit down with a mayor and a police chief and say hey tell me about a crime that didn't get solved pull up one of your cold cases let's like work through that and that that that kind of becomes our road map for what products to go build and and so so today this the the the the suits that you sell like the incremental things we' got yeah so we've got a camera focused on cars yep um we have a a camera that's focused on intersections kind of like live view uh live view camera so if you take someone like uh Fresno um they've bought almost our entire Suite it's pretty awesome they have our lprs so track cars LIC reader yeah license play reader uh they have our product called Condor which is for situational awareness so they deploy those at intersections right so they want they want to know what's happening in an intersection they can click play and PLO right up uh they have Raven which is gunshot te detection technology um and then they have flock OS which is really our our kind of situational awareness platform uh and that allows them to go into the community and say hey if you're a business owner homeowner you can subscribe and we can now have access to your cameras um and what that means is in a single pane of Glass Fresno can pull up and say hey there's a there's a 911 call happening right now and this local community this local business owner whether it's a strip mall or gas station they've allowed us to integrate with their cameras we can now pull that up um and it's like this dramatic increase of productivity in deeper engagement with the community so we got that product um and then a whole bunch of stuff coming down the line too that's cool what um if you're if you're painting a utopian version of the future for flock and the impact on uh Society is there any um what would be the the most concrete kind of utopian vision for for where you uh where you want to go in the coming decade yeah so my kids are in starting kindergarten so I got like 10 years until they're in high school i' say my goal is that by the time they're in high school crime is largely not a problem anymore in America we're not going to be get rid of evil people right let me clarify there's still going to be evil people but if you talk about you know will I feel good that my 15 or 16y old daughter is is driving in Atlanta well I feel like she's safe all the time I think if we solve that problem like that that's what we're out to do and I think we'll do it like the cool thing is that it is happening in small pockets of the country um and it's just a question of I guess it's the is it Mark Andre who said you know the the future is ready here it's just unevenly distributed yeah I think that's the case for us too where we see these Pockets where crime is largely a thing of the past and I I I imagine that world where you you just don't talk about crime anymore uh and I know it's probably hard for people to imagine but I guess I would quate it to you know the idea of having like one drink and driving used to be pretty normal right like taxis were kind of complicated you know black cars were way too expensive so you have like one drink of dinner then drive home now it's like why would you do that like yeah ride sharing has completely changed the way we move around cities and Uber is not even that old of a company and like fundamentally changes change transportation and I look at Public Safety and like that just hasn't happened and I think we're the ones who are going to be able to do it it's exciting I want to transition a little bit to to operating and some of the beliefs you have around around running a business um so there's always a balance uh between a market and a team in in starting a company uh and it sounds like you've much more gravitated while you're Market opportunity is as compelling as it is you've gravitated more to the to the people side of things can you talk about how you think about uh the the trade-off between those two and and idea and Market Centric versus people and uh you know that side yeah I am a staunch believer in that people Trump's product Trump's Market I think great teams build great products and find great markets yeah I just I don't I don't know any way to do it uh like I don't know it's kind of even hard to imagine how you start otherwise and so I've just always believed if you have a great team that the rest comes with that in absence of great team I think it's really hard and I look at flock as a great example if you look at that the the original kind of pitch or our our seed and our series a there was nothing about local government we were 100% focused on neighborhoods and we've now realized that local government is a really good Market but it's because we had a great team like the the team found that market uh so like for me at least I've had the same team three companies in a row and flock is by multiple or of magnitude the business big biggest business we've built and I think it's we have a really good team that works really well together we've built three really good businesses together this is the biggest because we Haven to get the best Market but like absent that team I just I don't know I think it's so hard to get the team right um and I think also this might be a a maybe a southern perspective I just think like one of the best parts about being an entrepreneur is you get to pick who you work with if I didn't want to have to get to pick who I work with I go work at someone else's company it's so like why would you not focus on a team when that's one of the only things you actually can control and I I would go sell you know water to the ocean with the right people like I I don't know I just find the market and the product to be less interesting than like who I spend my life with yeah interesting um one of the things we talked about before we we hopped on is uh you all have a unique approach to hiring and the onboarding process where there's there's kind of a two-way pip or there's there's expectations set up around a job spec and what the job to be done is can you can you talk through that method of of how you make that work yeah I we go the record saying I hate the idea of job descriptions I think they're just they're really dumb because they're creating they're cre they're creating this like artificial layer between what we're going to ask you to go do it's like you need seven years of product marketing experience it's like why why why why is that relevant why is that relevant at all and it's like oh you will own this this like Bland it's like such fluff when the fact of the matter is like at flock at least we only open a role if the person's going to make an immediate measurable impact to the business within their 90 days and if they're not going to do that then it's not a job you're just adding a body to a problem potentially it's like I just very deeply there's a there's a saying Michael seel at YC said this during our batch like the fastest your company will ever run is during this batch so set the velocity as high as possible and hold on to dear life that you can maintain it and I think people are the same and so like I have this strong belief that if you come out of the gate slow you will never speed up I've never met an individual that like picks up pace at like oh their third year being a flock they're now operating at Max Capac like no like their first week is going to tell me exactly how they're going to operate and so what we tend to do is put together a very very actionable 90-day plan for every new employee was during the interview process so literally the beginning of every quarter when we do uh budgeting uh my co-founder Pig and I review every single 90day plan and that's how we decide what roles actually get open I don't I trust my CFO James to keep keep us honest on like budget but Pig and I look like actually G to make an impact is the plan actionable and what that does is it drives this deep of alignment between a new employee and their manager because you're effectively telling them this is how I'm going to keep score as your manager and like so few jobs actually give that to you most jobs are like oh I mean maybe in your line of work it's like quite easy which is like invest in good companies you still have like a what five year delay on whether know you made a good decision it's actually quite hard because there's so many different people that do it very differently so there's no like pattern matching that you could do of how to practice the craft right no and so like we just say look we're a very unique culture we expect people to come out the gate very fast we expect people to make an impact within their first 30 days and at the end of 90 days if you're not like super happy and want to still be here you should just leave because this will never show up on your resume no one will look down upon it and like you're in and out there like very little loss and as a hiring manager you're also going like if you can't make an impact to this company within your first 90 days there's zero reason to believe you ever will and that's okay hey like let's do this now let's not wait and so I view it as a two-way thing um because we're not I think there are a lot of great companies we run ours very specifically and it's not for everyone and that's okay uh but we found it to be really effective it's like an awesome tool it also is just a we've now noticed as we've got employees get into their third fourth fifth year at the company that we use that same tool pretty pretty often um so now it's like if you have a new manager you have to have a 90-day plan if you have a new responsibility in the company you get in yourday plan if you just feel like you're lacking alignment with your manager like as a as an employee you can tell your manager like I want a 9-day plan like I I want to know how you're tracking My Success uh and we see like our best people tend to ask for it the most because those people want to be on the steepest career trajectory and the easiest way to get more responsibility is like tell me how you're keeping score because I want to go one step above it like if that's what you think success is then like great I'm gonna add four more bullets and go do these too uh and it's been it's been a really really impactful tool your mission is such that um I assume it draws people that are in particular uh uh feel motivated and empowered to help U solve crime and and believe in what you guys are doing I think one of the tensions that ultimately exists when you have a very Mission driven uh company is that um people are going to be on different lines of uh of uh the Spectrum uh when it comes to different considerations and debates and things things like that uh and it's not always going to be consistent and people are going to view it as something more than just a job uh it's it's it's viewed as you know some some level of to Total fulfillment because they're there for something Beyond just the ability to make money um I guess one you do you agree with that and two in those situations present themselves like how do you lead to resolution uh when a lot of these things maybe are opaque or there's there's often two sides of the coin uh that that both could be true but you need to ultimately come up with one side yeah it's so we do this we do this thing Paige and I do this thing every Friday for new employees we got like our cultural norms we walk through in more detail like what you're expected how you're expected to behave and one of the topics is Mission versus profit because a lot of our employees I'd say the majority of them would work for free of flock maybe not forever but as long as they could because they just they they didn't necessarily have the desire to carry a gun in a badge but they had a desire to impact their community and most of our employees are a lot of our employees at least are at a a career point where they've had a lot of success they've kind of hit a point and they're now looking for more they want more than just compensation they want fulfillment in their career and we we give that to people but it creates this challenge right because we're not a nonprofit to be very clear every one of our employees has equity in the business they're owners and like businesses generally are measured by some discounted cash flow so like we got to make money uh and what we try to remind people what I try to remind people it's like if you look at the history of companies the biggest companies actually tend to be the ones that have the biggest impact on the world and you look at someone like apple and it was a good company but it has reached trillion dollar status because of the iPhone which makes sense the iPhone has like changed the world you look at Google and it's like literally is a verb like it should be a massive company it's changed the way we access information so the point I try to make to the team is like the worst thing we could actually do is go out of business if we don't charge our customers if we don't make money we will go out of business and that could be that is the worst thing so we try to find that balance of like you know we we the best thing we can do is succeed solve crime make money build a big business but I do think that business model aside let's assume we fast forward 10 years from now and crime is largely gone and it's because of us it's like hard to imagine a world where we're not a 100 plus billion dollar company um that's at least my belief I hope I hope I hope that comes true but I just think those two are actually like pretty correlated um and you don't have to give one without the other your self- professed um micromanager uh or or uh I don't know if that's the term you would use but very in the details of of of things how do you think about that as part of your job versus the other thing of um I don't know autonomy empowerment all whatever the the other side of of that uh coin would be uh in your responsibility as CEO yeah I do think and and this might be a uh a southern thing or a Georgia thing like I I I everyone in the company eventually reports to me and so this like this this this newer concept that I shouldn't care about every detail of what you do is really weird to me because like it is my job to care about what you're doing it is my job to give you Direction it is my my job to sweat the details and it it's like it it just is weird to me that not every CEO and every employee or person like gets that um because like we're not a democracy at flock there's it's a pyramid like I sit at the top which means I'm also ultimately responsible like every quarter my board sits around the table and says is Garrett still the best CEO to run this company they sit above me and at some point they might decide I'm not and then I'm out um and I guess the way I look at it is I think about my job in in three functions um some days I'm I'm my direct reports manager and I'm deep in there stuff um and I want to get into every single detail and it makes makes people very uncomfortable um but people assume falsely that it is a trust issue like I don't trust you so I want to micromanage you it's like no I actually I actually want to help you be successful and in an environment at least I'm in now in a company that's about a thousand people fully distributed I don't know how else to make good decisions without access to the primary raw data and that looks like micromanagement but it's really like I don't know how else to make good decisions second part of my job is to be a peer right so it's like how are we making decisions together and the third job I actually view is like how do I work for you and so if you think about like my my our cro I'm on the road every single week visiting with customers on our biggest deals I'm working for him to help him hit his number now when I'm also there I'm assessing what's the quality of our demos what's the quality relationships we have with these prospects like how are we progressing this deal and so I guess for me like I expect my team to do the exact same thing and I just don't believe that the right management approach is to hire smart people and let them run I think that's crazy because like how will they know where to run like it's your job as a manager to to force that alignment and I think uh one of my board members once described it as uh it often feels like you have the ifsar on you know from like the Lord of the Rings uh because it seems like wherever we put our energy behind things get better and at least that's what I've noticed is the places I tend to direct my energy tend to get better a lot faster and so you know on a quarterly basis monthly basis that energy tends to shift and people go a little bit uncomfortable but people come out of the other end of it quite happy because they got the force of the company behind them because if it's truly a problem it's unlikely a performance issue it's most likely a lack of resourcing like i i l we have a swim problemin in company today and it's like was kind of on the side it wasn't a big deal started seeing customer data come back that the people our customers really frustrated and I dig in and I'm like this is just a staffing issue like I think we're literally under staffed by 3x like we just Pro we just didn't we didn't design this right and then was able to immediately open up budget to go triple the team so that person the person was like really uncomfortable for about a month because he was she was like man Garrett's like really digging into this topic and like I'm not used to this level of scrutiny but then you walk out of it and it's like no I think you're doing a great job just don't think you enough people let's go hire like let's go hire 12 more people like now now she's super excited so I don't know I guess for me I've just always been a person that just loves to be in the details and loves to see raw progress in work in progress and I hate hate this idea that as a CEO like I only get delivered polished Goods it's just like that's boring I don't know like I don't want to just sit here and get presentations all day of like how good we're doing and all the things that are going well but it's like I don't know I I don't work at a company that's hundred years old that's generating lots of cash flow like I work at a a company that's growing like a weed where we have only problems so like I just want to go solve those problems speaking of growing like a weed uh so so you're you said you're roughly a thousand people today is that right yeah about a thousand people yeah uh and what what were you I don't know two years ago or three years ago probably three or 400 300 three or 400 okay so we doubled headcount year of year for a while and I think we grew headcount by about 40% last year so so so doubling H count year-over-year uh means that you're uh you know counting some some attrition then that means that uh you know usually when you look around a room um half or more than half of the people have been there for less than less than 12 months right uh so how do you think about the B bance or how have you been able to balance um scaling a team as fast as you have while making sure people are aligned and you know keeping a culture that is consistent across an organization when so many of the the bodies are new at any given time yeah yeah uh I don't know if we do it well I think we're definitely trying um a few things that have worked well though I mentioned this briefly but I'll come back to it every new employee gets two touch points with Paige and myself in their first month uh and the first one is just like a a wide open just like let's just have a coffee chat you know it's on Zoom which is not ideal um and like that that's really helpful the more helpful one though is about four years ago when the business was really starting to scale I got this advice from from Ben Horowitz that like if you don't write your culture down it is inherently weak in the absence of like a written culture it you will your culture will just fade away and in a remote environment even harder right because like you don't see these people you don't interact with these people and so Paige and I looked around the room and said who are best people and why do we think they're the best and what do they do like how are they making decisions so we started this document and it evolves right it's continued to evolve but we call it our cultural norms and is like it is a representation of the best people on their best days and is perfect like I fail all the time on this document but like when I'm having my best day I'm hitting all of these and it and it is not the soft and fluffy like you know be nice you know like it's like actual actionable things um like like one being you know responsiveness like our best people are really really responsive and I think that's common across a lot of companies but like it's important to us and so when we have our new employees Paige and I sit down and we read this document together out loud and share stories and every employee has to go through this and every employee exits saying you've all read this you're all signing up that you will hold each other accountable to this and I think it works because like I can't be everywhere Paige can't be everywhere Matt can't be everywhere and we all then have this single kind of the Testaments of like what it means to work at flock and how we're going to live these values and being responsive as one being Mission oriented as one um you can kind of go down this list of like things that are very uniquely flocked the the other thing that I think has worked well is I'm just on the road non-stop um and when I'm on the road I'm not only there to visit customers I'm there to visit employees and so that gives me a chance to see our people in kind of like in real life not just like oh let's grab dinner but like let's go visit a customer let's go do an install um let's go do whatever it may be and I I just I think that even in a hybrid company you cannot remove the human element of it and so we have an expectation that every every employee will get at least two in-person touch points a year one with their team and one with the whole company and so I guess I'd say like we we tend to be very designed about wi of those touch points um I think the general rule of thumb is like you've got about 90 to 180 days before those touch points fade and they lose the impact that kind of emotion and excitement so I guess we we try to be pretty thoughtful about how we do that one one of the things that often uh happens and I I've talked uh uh different folks on the podcast before about this but um uh sometimes you run into the issue that you're um your senior leaders or people uh in the organization are better at um managing up and communicating than they are doing real substantive work and I think it's true of any organization I one of your board members told me that you had um maybe some interesting thoughts or Frameworks about how you go about assessing if people uh full of uh and and all talk or actually substantive in the work that they're doing yeah I think the natural tendency for companies is to spend more time talking about work than actually working uh which is like kind of weird but starts to happen like it's very it's a very natural thing that I've noticed is even happening at flock and I think some of it is like well if you have enough people you just have to talk more is not desirable but it happens for us the thing that always look at is so like a lot of companies we do some variant of okrs um but what's different is for us is at the end of that process we do it once a quarter we look at okay across the executive team what's the distribution of ownership and like generally for us anyone below a director should never own a okr because it's intended to be a team it's to be an output that the company cares about so if it's like a it's an IC that's now like a performance review and that's not the goal so should be a director and I expect anyone pretty much VP and above to own at least one if not two okrs every quarter and when I say own I expect them actually putting pin to paper like not like oh yeah I'll manage the team and I'll set the goals it's like no no like real actual work and and one of the ways we're able to do that is like every two weeks when we do a like a check-in whoever is the owner is actually one writing the update and it goes to the entire executive team and it is very very easy to smell because you notice that their updates aren't very detailed their updates don't have any actual action that was done and it's like oh here's the update on the metric it's yeah but what what did you do like uh what did you get done in the last two weeks um as an individual um and when that accountability is coming across their peers versus just me it sets the bar pretty high um because now whether it's the general counsel or it's this VPS sales this VP avenge uh that is really really I think better we used to do it way that I was the one driving this and now this kind of a pure accountability has leveled the expectations that no one we're not a big enough company for Pure people managers no one is allowed to just manage people myself included um I carry a bag and figure out what are the you know five or 10 deals I can help move across the Finish Line what what is the one or two products that I can help push to production uh and so for us it's just like it's a critical part of who we are one of the things I've heard you talk about is um the the being a macro optimist but Micro pessimist within a uh within your business can can can you can you speak to that what what does that mean how do you internalize it how do you go about actionized it yeah the the I I like the says I think it does describe how we act what it looks like though is it means we never as a business talk about success like if it's working why are we talking about it just let it go let it keep running so like as an executive team it can be depressing at times because we only talk about problems uh we only talk about the things that are failing because on a local level on a on a small time scale all we should be doing is being worried about the things that are going wrong and and the job I think as an executive is to hold two truths that can be opposite which is I can be incredibly depressed and frustrated and focused on these things that are broken well at the same time like I just said I do generally think that in 10 years from now flock will have eliminated crime in America a lot of problems I got to go solve later today when we wrap up but like in 10 years I think we're going to do great uh and like that's because I generally am am am optimistic for that long-term perspective but I think that what Founders in particular and Executives have a problem of doing is when you only present that optimistic perspective you lose the confidence of your team because they're living in the every single day of all the problems that are happening like they're living in this reality that like well this customer's mad and and this this new product is delayed or and when you Go on stage in an all hands and say like we're a great company they're like well maybe but my world is a mess and so we try to find that balance of saying like you can be happy and optimistic while saying we have a lot of problems and like here's the plan and so our internal kind of cultural value is optimism but with a plan it's okay to be optimistic but you do actually have to have a plan like because most of the things we are working on are a problem you can smile about it but what we have seen people go off track on I think I've worked with a lot of Founders as well it's like they're optimistic so much so that they lack the plan I'm like uh like excited that you think you're going to 10x your business and revenue this year do you actually have the pipeline to do that do you actually have the headcount the quota to do that like it's cool that you think you can do it so it it works out well I'd say the downside to it is we tend to never celebrate Milestones like we got to 100 million in AR and just under four years from starting the company and it was like I sent a text to our cro and I was like nice good job and he's like thanks and then we had like a slide out in all hands and like then we just went back to work like yes it's working and it's like that's kind of a bummer because I think that I I think we could do a better job recognizing that like we're we're working hard it's generally working it's a good company but also like I think our success is somewhat from the fact that we don't weigh on our success and we f are broken yeah and also uh I think to hear you talk about it and I assume for a lot of your employees the financial uh metrics are uh validating of the the the mission uh but they're not the goal in and of themselves right as a standalone so I think the last time we checked the majority super majority of our employees this is the first ever Venture back company they've worked at before so like the finances don't even they almost don't even believe it like when we tell them like oh the company's worth X billions of dollars they're like I don't even know what that means that's an irrelevant that's like irrelevant to me like we have to spend a lot of effort reminding people that this could be financially like very very very lucrative for them it just doesn't it doesn't matter they could go get better jobs that paymore today yeah it's fascinating I um one of the one of the employees that you've had and I guess you've worked with uh for for a while um is actually your mother and and she is uh I guess I don't know what her official title is right now she is she your executive assistant she is that is her that is her title that is her title executive assistant to you how uh one how did they come to be uh what was that interview process like and what is it like uh working with I've heard a lot of uh brother sister combos you know uh I guess father son is a lot I I I I don't know if I know any examples where the the mother uh is working for the sun in that way so definitely I've actually I've yet to meet anyone else that's in this Dynamic um it's a like I'll leave it as a you know people should try it maybe more often uh so I first started working with my mother when I was 14 um I had started a business I say a business as like a gross exaggeration I started fixing people's computers and getting paid to do it um and one of the challenges is that that when I started doing that I'd make people bring me their computer and then I'd work on it at my house and then call them and say Hey you know your computer is now fixed not a lot of people want to drive their computer do you uh that's pretty annoying uh and so my mom was actually like hey you know I could just drive you to these people's houses and just wait for you and I was like well you know like yeah but you know you have a job um this would be taking away from hours you could be work like I should just pay you then it's really weird Dam we're like yeah I guess like logically this all makes sense so she became my driver and she would drive me to people's houses and these small businesses and she'd wait for wait in the car and I would do my thing and then just you know a piece of the r Avenue just went straight to her uh and this is like I'm 14 I'm in fifth grade um sorry not fifth grade I'm in six sixth or seventh grade uh it's really strange in hindsight like I I don't we obviously have a very unique relationship and then um she was working at another company when I started flock and at the point that I felt like Flock was no longer like a high risk of dying um it's like around our series B series C when it's like while things like really working uh I I called her and I was like we should get the B back together um like uh like I want this to be the the last place you work um and if you have young kids and maybe I'm unique here the biggest stress I have in life is not my job it's my family and when my kids are sick when something goes wrong at school like that that's the deepest level of anxiety exhibit and so the while she's a great admin like managing my calendar is not comp she doesn't touch my email she barely manages my manages some calendary but like the biggest thing that it provides is I now have a third parent in the equation um and I I said before I travel a lot I'm gone almost every week I have a third parent around that actually not only just like loves my kids but my kids love her and so at least for me you know it's this more holistic approach of for me to be the best version of myself to the company removing some of the stress from a personal life is actually the biggest Gap she's able to do that and like a traditional model that wouldn't work but as my mother it's like yeah so she's at my house every day she works from my house and my kids get to see her and it's I think it's a it's a better quality of life for everyone so it's pretty unique but I think more more people should try it more people should try it yes I uh uh I wonder my mom's listening right now if she's gonna have a request for a job at this point but it's an interesting Dynamic to have have that set up um performance review season is always a little tricky but yeah yeah I can imagine I can imagine I uh yeah I I don't know how that would play out for me but it's a uh I've got it's listen having especially when the line Blends between EA and Pa and you know grandmother and uh you know all of that stuff so I um yeah it's a interesting setup I'm sure but um hey guys I'm Jacob Efron a partner of Logan at redo wanted to take a quick break from the episode to let you know that red Point's AI podcast unsupervised learning now has its own YouTube channel we have an incredible set of guests really at the Forefront of the AI Revolution so if you're interested in what's happening in AI what it means for businesses in the world definitely subscribe now back to the show hey one of the things I heard you mention was that uh there's kind of this ethos and Silicon Valley of of like the 19yearold or 20-year-old or 22 whatever it is going and starting a company right away and I think a lot of it's rooted in the um you have the level of scrappiness and you're less uh income can be kind of sticky and quality of life can be sticky and so as you get used to more of the trappings of uh of of some level of wealth your ability to go back in time uh I think can be can be difficult um I I had heard you mentioned that like one of the best experiences you had was actually not starting a company right out of the gates but instead joining a company in the very early days but learning from people that have been there done that can you talk about that that um yeah that Silicon Valley ethos of like the Zuckerberg's and the cison and the whoever it is that have been sort of the canonical examples of young entrepreneurs versus um gaining a little bit of experience and how that benefited you yeah so I think there's there's two problems I think starting a company when you're like 18 or 21 uh I think one you just haven't had a lot of life and so I think you tend to make pretty bad decisions and I think there are some people clearly that muscle through it and are just incredibly smart incredibly good operators you think about someone like you know suckerberg is these examples like he just builts a great team he builts a great product like he just he figured it out fast enough I think he is one in a billion uh and I think there is a lot to learn from great leaders great people and you you just wind up being I think a better CEO or a better founder when you just had more life experience I think this Second Challenge too is you tend to pick pretty dumb ideas when you're that age you just haven't seen as much business you haven't seen as much of the world and so I think about one of my closest friends uh actually is a a pretty young CEO he fits that bucket uh and he's now running a very successful company it's awesome but like he went through four years of working on totally the wrong idea to then do a massive pivot to a much better idea and I think like it worked out well for him but I think that if he was uh four years wiser seven years wiser he never would have gone after the the dumb idea because it would have been clear to him that like this is not that actually that interesting of a business to go start and so I do feel uh maybe inappropriately strongly about it because it's my own personal experience where I got the benefit of working with some incredible people watching them build a company I was the first employee this company we then went on to co-found a company together um after that one so learned even more and by the time you know flock came around it was the third company I co-founded and I was like I I feel really comfortable I'm still a little bit uncomfortable running a company this size but like Beginnings I'm like I know we're working on as a big problem I know that if this is successful it could be a really really big business and that to me I don't know you don't life isn't endless like you only get so many shots on goal and I just would I would hate to waste because if it's if it's successful right you're going to go spend seven to 10 years working on something like God I would hate to waste any moment on on on an idea that actually not isn't big enough for at least what I want to do obviously people might have different goals but like I have always wanted to build a company that mattered that like really mattered and it's hard to do that if you're 18 or 21 or 22 how old were you when you started flock 29 30 29 30 you you you had had a couple exits right I think two $200 million exits and and it sounds like you took some time off and maybe uh got your handicap down from a a golf game standpoint like what um what uh that period of time it's a weird thing I think to have success early and especially to have been through the the mission of the company right the business had sold and you had uh you you had been through a lot of uh of that maybe that moment in time and um I I don't know quarter life crisis or existential consideration did you was that a a moment of sort of Reckoning uh of like hey what what am I going to do from here I've accomplished what I maybe dreamed of far earlier than I expected it what was that moment in time like uh it was definitely uncomfortable in hindsight um was to your point we we my wife and I kind of accomplished the financial things we really wanted to do and professionally I'd accomplished the you know at least partially the things I wanted to do and to your early question on like people versus Team versus Market you know the first business was in what would now be called fintech second business was in was in Live Events and sports built another business in automotive and what I had noticed is it was always with people that I liked working with and I guess what what I kind of came down the conclusion is like there's only one thing I can actually control which is who I spend time with and I want to go spend time with people that I like working with and the easiest way to do that is to go build a company of forces us to work together and I think what I'd also come to a conclusion of was selling companies is great but you do lose control it's no longer your company and I get the question all the time from our employees if like oh would you ever sell flock and it's like yeah I mean I get I have a fedua responsibility to our our shareholders which is all of our employees myself our investors but man it's really fun to run this company yeah like and like what would I do then just go start another company yeah like I I like the people I work with like I think buils a really good team I love my co-founders uh I love our customers like what what would I do next like I don't know I I've got too many things that are unsolved here and so I guess for me like it's been fun because at least in the last two companies we sold them because we actually kind of achieved the mission like we built the product we got market share they were small in terms of Revenue but it wasn't as if we had 10 years of road mapap waiting to be built whereas at flock man I have so many things I want to go do and we're farther ahead in Revenue were then I would say our impact you know like I I think there is so much left undone and so for me what I'm now realizing uh in hindsight is like this was a calling for me and I have the right kind of DNA or makeup to do all the political stuff that has to be done to deal with local and state government and federal government and enough engineering to prowess to like build the original product and like kind of Goldilocks type situation and also the the skin these days that's thick enough to weather the hit pieces day after day after day um knowing that we're doing better for the world so yeah it was a weird time uh and really like appreciative I had a very supportive wife who pushed me in this direction um like hey get off get off your butt stop playing golf and like go build something again like you're a builder go build yeah yeah it sounds like a uh a a good um critic and also a good uh nudge along the way uh I think that that that we're all appreciative of of her her service to uh to doing that um one of the things I think uh that that I had heard and we had discussed a little bit before we started recording was that you specifically didn't want to start I think Dopey was the term that you used and maybe your uncle was the motivator uh behind behind doing that so in your mind like what does that actually mean not starting a Dopey company and how did that uh how did that like help influence the after flock yeah my uncle was my my closest mentor and he was always very very good with words and he coined the term for me of like don't go build another Dopey business calling the last three companies I had started quite Dopey which you know okay now but his his point was you know he had built a blackbox trading company and while he loved the team and they had an incredible team like loved the people the business was moving adoms sorry bits around making money but like zero incremental value to the world zero maybe negative and I think that weighed on him um and his advice to me was like you should go build something that you're really really proud of not proud of just the team because of course you'll build a great team that's kind of like a requirement but like one that if you left and the team left you'd be like man that mattered and that was our only filter for paig and M and I of like all the ideas we were thinking about building it had to be one that wasn't Dopey and we've shared a few stories together of some of the success flock has had on the impact side and like those are not Dopey um and every day we see those stories and not every company gets that um you know you think about a company I like to pick on Salesforce because they're wildly successful if Salesforce disappeared tomorrow who cares no one would care we'd all switch to HubSpot or we'd switch to whatever the next CRM winds up being but it's just it's just a CRM that's it it's just a piece of software and like it's very hard I think once you've tasted something like Flock to go back to that I think it's really hard because you realize that your skills as a technologist whether you're an engineer or a marketer or in sales or or C someone like yourself who to Bo Capital God it is way more fun to be involved in a business that really changes people's lives and like really does it not the like hand waving that's one of the reasons why I think we've been successful fundraising so the end of the day you're a human too you're a dad you're a husband you're a partner you've got grandparents and parents and friends and when you explain this crazy AI product that doesn't actually really do anything but it's going to be a great investment you're excited because that's your job you do have to go return Capital to LPS but you're so much more proud and excited when the when the company you're partnering with or working with is that actually easy to explain and makes an impact and that's you know one of the things that we hold very dearly it it sounds like you you all had a fairly serendipitous Journey uh on fundraising going to YC and you know you had good investors from the start I think Bedrock initialized uh Matrix like a bunch of people initially but there was this um this this point that I think almost every company goes through stripe is maybe the exception uh but almost every every company has like a shitty raising round uh that they really struggle to get get done I guess can you can you talk through the circumstances around being three months away from running out of capital and the business doing well but for the first time like it may be coming a little more difficult to fundraise like what were the circumstances around that and are there lessons that um can be extrapolated for the entrepreneur listening yeah um I always felt like I had a pretty good pulse on the investor market and like how people perceived the business I think what I got wrong is there are certain points in time where the investor class changes and with that perspective on a business changes and I think series B and probably let's call it like pre-ipo IO are those two trigger points where like in a series B investment I'm now learning this in hindsight uh it's not just the story anymore like the the metrics really matter because in a c or series a investment it's like pretty easy to to underwrite to attend to 100x return like if I think about in my pitch to to Gary and Alexis at initialize they're like do you think this thing can get to 100 million in AR I was like yeah let me show you why and it's like on a napkin you can say well there's 400,000 neighborhoods in America I think they all probably like want to be safe the average neighborhood spends $10,000 with us so like yeah I think I can get $100 million in AR and they're like cool then this is an easy then like we we love the story this is we can underwrite this really easily and I think even at series a they're just looking for a little bit more traction but it's the same pitch which is like can this thing get to 100 200 million in AR and therefore like this is a good investment what I noticed at least in series B is like that wasn't enough anymore because now you're talking about a price point on a business that you got to believe pretty significant Revenue growth is still ahead of it pretty significant like Moes in the business that like you can block out competitors because if you're seeing success someone's GNA come behind you uh and so this like the the most memorable thing was we never really had like a data room right like we were very much emotional triggered and investing get people really excited about the product the concept and the traction of the business and not a lot of data and we were like laughed out of the room by these later stage investors who were like your data is trash you have nothing like where's your nrr waterfall I was like what's an NR waterfall I like we're growing fast that's all I know we went from a million to six million in AR in a year and we went from six million to 17 million this year give me money like like I don't I'm not worried about the details like I just think we have a lot of space and what I didn't realize is that my job was becoming the Storyteller of how our Tam is growing how our penetration how our penetration in the markets that we're in is defensible like my job had changed and I hadn't realized it uh and I didn't pivot fast enough and so to to your point we were down to about two three months of Runway and only two of us in the company knew Sky John and I who was running Finance at the time and it was scary because like no one had any idea that like we were at pretty big risk of not hitting payroll uh the investor Community had given up on the business um or you know it I don't look fondly back on that period of time uh we wound up having to do a kind of a mini riff layoff type thing we had to like go all the way down to bare bottoms to extend Runway and I had to call Gary back at initialized and say like hey I you know I need I need $20 million and he was like I've got seven I was like well well that's not uh like H that's like less than half of 20 Gary uh he's like yeah but like we're a seed stage investor this is this is already a bit of a stretch for us uh and to his credit he believed when a lot of other people didn't um and he got a great price because I had no negotiating leverage at that point so I think he did he did uh we had about 16 million in AR and he invested at $100 million valuation and we had tripled the business the prior year and we wound up tripling the business again which we said we were going to do and everyone said that's impossible uh you're selling Hardware this company's in a flatten out you don't you don't know what you're doing uh and we wound up proving everyone wrong and I don't really even understand we put up another quarter of good results and what was different is I then told John who's in charge of our finance at the time is like dude we're going to run out of money so I chose even though Gary only gave me seven I pretended like he gave me 20 I spent it like he gave me 20 uh so I knew we were only going to have probably like three to six months of Runway again like before we would need to fund raise like we were gonna have to go back out to Market and I took the feedback from the investers like seriously which was like your data room doesn't match the story your data the data you're giving us does not match what we're seeing on the top line uh so we spent a bunch of time like redoing that and the business continued to put up good numbers the business was scaling and it felt like we were an entirely different company it and and every round I mean since then as as I uh unfortunately well know uh has been very uh competitive and uh uh you know you you you've had more uh interest than uh need for for Capital and was it really just the the the I mean there was some inflection point clearly you hit from a scale standpoint that was probably uh uh some whatever uh threshold but was it really just the storytelling and the presentation of all of it you just got crisper in that and therefore I mean the Venture Community can be sheep in a lot of ways of like sort of falling in line around stuff but is there anything else around that well I think there's there's a there's a few things right like and I think this is relevant to a lot of entrepreneurs if they're if they're trying to serve a vertical that has not been attacked by Venture successfully although I had prior success like in terms of the growth of the business we got zero credit for future goals and the reason why I think it's fair because like they're saying well who who who do you peer against who who should I look to as an investor to see what's possible and every other company we were competing with you know like axon was bootstrapped and it took Axon on you know 177 years to go public and it's a 30s something year old company now and like it's just like it's a beautiful business but man it took almost 40 years to get there yeah that's not Venture it's a great business but it's not Venture and you look at Motorola our other biggest competitor and that's a 100 plus year old company so as an investor you're going like I can't really underwrite to your future goals because you're saying that but who do I look to so I I do think to your point at a certain point people just started to believe me because I said hey look we're going to go from from 167 million to 50 million in AR people were like you're out of your freaking mind and I was like I think that's the like that's the plan like I think we're gonna hit this plan and you put up a quarter or two on that trajectory and everyone's like he might be right like this actually this actually might work and his numbers do seem pretty high but like he seems to be hitting numbers the company seems to be tracking and so I think there was inflection point where the investor Community stopped disagreeing with us and said maybe these guys just actually deeply understand this Market better than we do it's bigger than we ever expected and they've clearly figured out a way to attack it uh and so every single fundraise every single quarter you know I think as a business it took six years to have our first ever quarter that wasn't net net larger in ARR growth if that makes sense like we never not a down quarter on AR like a down quarter on the velocity of bookings yeah um so I think that was just the big that was the other one is like the lack of a pattern to follow or like a proxy to look to and even today as a as a larger company when we get the question of like oh who who do you view as as public comps it's kind of we don't samsara I guess but like they serve a totally different vertical we have a lot of commonalities in terms of our our metrix and so I do think that that is it hard to overcome until you hit some scale yeah yeah yeah well Garrett thank you for doing this this was a really fun conversation and uh it's a uh incredible business you're you're building I uh I would not categorize it as Dopey uh so yeah yeah your uncle uh can be proud uh that that he motivated you in a good direction here I think so too um well why I appreciate it he a great to SP some time together thank you for listening to this conversation with Garrett Lang co-founder and CEO of flock safety really impressive individual building a really important company if you enjoyed this discussion with Garrett please do share with anyone else that you think might find it interesting and please subscribe on whatever platform that you're listening on each additional subscription helps us drive more listeners which ultimately leads to our goal of bringing on better guests each subsequent week and so your help is really appreciated you'll hear another great guest here next week and we look forward to seeing you back on the Logan Bartlett [Music] [Music] show

Channel: The Logan Bartlett Show

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Length: 108min 12sec (6492 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024