Elon Fired Him, Now His AI Writes Every Police Report | Daniel Francis (Abel Police)

0:00If the software is 10 % worse and we got 1 ,100 people on the platform, you just killed someone. Every 115 officers on our platform, one life gets saved per year. Officers spend one-third of their time writing reports. You wear a body cam on your chest, you should not spend one-third of your time filling out forms. That's when I decided we could do that. Giving 50 % of my equity for someone to argue with me, who I think is just wrong most of the time. And I can't fire them too. An insane equity package for a founding engineer is 5%. That's bonkers. I could get 10 of those. I could fire someone who's not measuring up.

0:30There's also just the people who don't want to do sales. If you don't want to pick up the phone because of that, you're going to give up 50 % to a co-founder. Don't even start a company. You're not serious enough. Let's flip it to the case for solo founding. You don't have to carry someone's dead body up a mountain. You can get, for 50 % equity, an army of people to be working for you. That's a way better situation. Somebody said we were recording commentary earlier. They said that they feel like, for them, the platonic ideal is still like this incredible co-founder matchup but they said that the actual reality is is that that is so infrequent that they would much prefer to have a solo founder that they're working with right uh this is an investor sometimes sometimes i meet co-founders and they're so cute they're so cute together and i'm like you two like if you weren't both straight men you should be married yeah like and and those ones i'm like okay i get it i have never been cute with anyone like that.

1:25I'm just not a nice enough person. I just don't, I just don't have, I'm just not like, I think there's, if you're a solo founder, a lot of times you're prickly. There's like certain prickliness and it's like, like even like Elon Musk is famously prickly, right? And he's got solo founder energy, right? I wish I could have that relationship, but I can't. And so I must be a solo founder. At what point did you realize that about yourself? So I've done two companies where I had a co-founder and after both of them I was just like especially the second one, it was like a month. It just immediately blew up.

2:03Was this the fitness one? No, the fitness one was like a year and that one was like a fine working relationship. I still felt like, and we both brought things to the table that made that work. The second one was a rag for code bases and it was just like immediate distrust and tension and talking over each other and stuff like that. And I just realized after that I was like, giving 50 % of my equity for someone to argue with me who I think is just wrong most of the time. If I was giving a bunch of equity to someone and I can't fire them too. You know what is an insane equity package for a founding engineer is 5%.

2:49that's bonkers. I could get 10 of those and fire them when I want. That's next level. That's a way better situation. If you are an engineer, then you should be a solo founder. Or if you're a really smooth talking idea guy who can raise, then you should be a solo founder. That's my firm belief. But I do sometimes see really cute couples and I'm like, you too. It feels like that is exceedingly rare. Yeah, it's exceedingly rare. You said that you're just not a fan of co-founders. I'm curious, you talked a little about your personal experiences and sort of that equity equation, but I'm curious if there are other stories of people that you know.

3:27Obviously, you know other founders. What are some other things that you've observed around co-founder relationships and also maybe juxtaposing that with people that you know who are solo founders? I do think it's valid that the idea that you do need to work with someone, and I know obviously this is against your original thesis, So the two co-founder relationships that I've seen that seem like really happy marriages, they met in undergrad. And that creates a basis of trust that's really powerful. It's not just trust like, I know you won't try and fuck me over on some kind of equity thing or something like that.

4:09But it's also trust like, I know how you're thinking and you know how I'm thinking and we're aligned in some deeper way. So when I do see it work, it works because it's been a long relationship. Yeah, it's always like at least like five years. And even my CTO, who was my first major hire, he was someone that I've known for five years. We actually met online during COVID and became friends. and so yeah I think it's I wanted to have this experience of like meeting someone and starting a company with them but I was just like I was an econ major I was an economics and math major and so I just never all my friends went off to go work in policy or become actuaries or something and it was just like none of my friends went into coding and none of them are out here and so I was like guess I'm a solo founder here we go.

5:11I'd be really curious because oftentimes, you know, in Silicon Valley, there's like sort of the standard person who starts a company, you know, went to an Ivy League school. They majored in CS. They dropped out and it was like very often sometimes performative, like going to the Ivy League school in the first place, maybe dropping out to actually start the startup. It's a performative startup. Like there's this aspect of a lot of pattern matching. You come from just a really interesting background, both where you went to school, what you studied. How has that sort of informed you as a builder and just how you think about startups in general?

5:50Yeah, I guess I was really... So I dropped out of high school. And I ended up going to Florida State University, which was a miracle. I was really looking at not going to college. I was like, my dad's a contractor. And I was like, maybe I'll just be doing subcontractors. tracking gigs and building stuff. And so it was just really like a small miracle that there happened to be at Edison State College in my hometown a professor of economics who was deeply, deeply intellectual. He was such a weird guy. Everyone went to Harold Van Boven. And he's like this really skinny German guy who kind of bounces when he talks and wears these old Versace suits.

6:38And he was such an interesting character. And he really made me love economics. And then that's when I got into going to school. But Florida State University was an incredible miracle that I ended up even going to this, right? So yeah, from teenage years, I was a very non-compliant person and very difficult to get along with. And then I ended up going to Florida State. When I was a teenager, my dad would tell me we would work jobs together. my dad would tell me that I should get a job where I can work inside. That was the goal. That's like the aspiration. And so when I got out of college, I was like, okay, I ended up working kind of boring nonprofit jobs in D.C.

7:24And I was like, I work inside. I work in an office. That's the miracle, right? How great is that? And then coming out here, I realized I am not learning to code. I found coding very interesting. I found it to be a better way to make money and I came out here and I really realized I am not happy working for other people I'm really fundamentally not happy with that so through that being a founder started making a lot more sense to me I'd always loved starting little businesses as a kid and stuff like that so it kind of made sense to me and then being a solo founder also was probably inevitable given how disagreeable I am and in terms of uh in terms of coming out here for the first time what was the story behind that like take can you can you take me back to like what you were actually doing that caused you to come out here and you you said that coming out here made you realize that you didn't want to work for someone else um what was it what was it about that was it that you didn't realize how different it could be when you were sort of on the east coast you were experiencing that and and only when you got the juxtaposition that that dawned on you or what was the story behind it I think it's just the, so I had, I was working at a nonprofit research center called Mercatus Center.

8:43And it's Tyler Cowen's thing. And I think Mercatus does great work. And one thing that they let me do was teach myself to code and become like a programmer for them. And so I like originally was working like communications and I rolled over to coding for them. and I ended up getting a job opportunity out here from a friend who was hiring for a small business CRM company. And so coming out here, seeing what it was like working in an actual dev environment, like an actual engineering shop, and really realizing that I could do this from beginning to end. seeing the marketing decisions they made and the design decisions they made and how they manage things.

9:38If you're not in software, then the idea of starting a company can be pretty daunting. But if you are in software, you start to realize, hey man, I got all the tools right here. If you can work Photoshop and you can make the marketing materials and you can write the code and just imagine how a user might deal with something and then build that interface for them all the you know you can you can use words to write a machine that prints money that's crazy and so yeah it wasn't until i really got out here that i realized like why am i like why are people telling me what to do like i could go do something myself and that's what building the fitness app was was me for the first time being like okay i see a need um from beginning to end i can imagine how a user might use this.

10:28I was a data engineer, so I was like, we'll see what all this front-end stuff looks like. But I just figured it out and was able to build a product that we got up to$30 ,000 monthly recurring revenue. Awesome for two guys sitting in an office in Berkeley. It was like, okay, we're done. This is cool. So yeah, that's how I came to start companies for the first time, like a real actual company. And it was exhilarating. It's exhilarating to see that Stripe dashboard and just see money coming in. It was exciting. When you think about that first company with what you're building now with Able, I'm curious how you think about how you came to build both of those and how those paths might have differed.

11:15I think that there's always something that changes when somebody's working on their second company, or I guess, I don't know if you qualify Able as your second or third. But there's always some difference between how people approach the first one and the second. The classic thing is thinking about distribution before thinking about product. But I also think that there's often a transition that happens in parallel to the first-time founder, second-time founder thing, which is when you're a co-founder of the first company to being a solo founder of the second. I'm curious how both of those things might have played a role and how you thought about building ABLE?

11:54With the first one, I actually did think about distribution quite a bit. That's why I had the partner I did. The partner I had was a famous weightlifting coach and we were building a weightlifting app. To me, it was like, oh, you'll handle that end of it. You'll give us the legitimacy and connect us with people and stuff like that. What really was different this time around was that I made the jump to building something that I wouldn't use myself because I am not a police officer. and it's a very foreign world it's a whole different interface for reality when you're a police officer that very few people understand and so building something in that felt like really blinding like it was like I'm just going on ride-alongs watching people use things it was much more focused on product I would say the second time actually ironically enough the first one was like a real mercenary play and the second this second one i was like okay my experience with the police on the victim side tells me that somebody that there's a lot a lot of work to do here um like somebody should do something here uh but i i have no idea what that is and so i literally just have to absorb myself deeply in the product uh now obviously there's a lot of distribution concerns with uh with policing and it's actually a very unique distribution channel, which we could talk about more later, but it's like nothing else in my experience.

13:23But I had seen other SaaS companies specifically start up in policing and get traction. So I was like, there's a way. I know that. What I really got to make sure is I can build something useful for these guys having no experience with their life. Now, I know you've talked about this elsewhere, but just for people who maybe are hearing from you for the first time, maybe you could share a little bit about that backstory that gave you the insight that, wow, this is a really underserved group of people who have a really important function in society. Can you share a little bit more about that backstory about how you arrived at realizing this is a real problem that you want to work on?

14:05Yeah. So a friend of mine who I hadn't talked to in years reached out to me said she needed help um started talking to her it turns out she had moved to the bay area she uh had uh married a guy um and he had started abusing her and she didn't feel free to easily leave the house and things like that so uh i ended up helping her get out get an apartment, get a domestic violence restraining order, kind of start all the wheels of justice there, but get her those protections that the law affords. Having no experience with these things, I was like, oh, he's got a restraining order, there we go. That's just a piece of paper, man.

14:55The restraining order doesn't have a gun, it can't do anything. There was a mistake at the courthouse where they sent the paperwork with her address to her husband. And then he came over and started banging on the door and saying he was going to kill her. And it took the police 45 minutes to get there. And this was in Oakland, which is an agency that has a lot of challenges. It's a very difficult, and I don't, you know, no discredit to the agency itself. It's a difficult city government. There's a lot of challenges there. Um, but yeah, I showed up one of these times after it took them 45 minutes to get there.

15:38And I approached the officer and I said, Hey man, 45 minutes for a domestic violence restraining order violation seems like a long time. And he like immediately slumped and he was like, dude, I'm sorry. He was like, I, the agency's all short staffed. It's screwed up. Uh, we had a shooting this morning. Everyone's on an overtime right now. I agree it's not great, but we're doing the best we can, but I apologize. And he was a really good police officer because he has the important skill of getting people on your side at a scene. I was instantly like, what can I build for these guys to make this better?

16:17Because this is insane. And I actually had a couple ideas. At the time, I didn't think any of them would be good. I now disagree with myself actually on that. I think a lot of those ideas we will eventually build. But I had spent a decent amount of time just researching and reading and looking through PDFs. And if you ever spend time in the PDF minds, just finding weird PDFs online about the topic you're interested in and going on deep dives. There's a cool thing that a lot of agencies have to do called staffing analysis where they pay consultants a bunch of money to come in and write 100 pages about their staffing every few years.

16:59And SFPD's 2021 staffing analysis said that the officers spend one-third of their time writing reports. I was like, I started command effing around the document looking for reports, paperwork, efficiency, any of that, and there was nothing. I was like, this seems like it. This is the thing. This is nuts that they're spending this much time doing this. uh so yeah if you wear a body cam on your chest you should not spend one third of your time filling out forms so that's when i decided we could do that when you sort of came across this insight or you were helping this friend and you talked to that police officer who in many ways i'd be very curious if if you'd even be working on this how that person just not reacted positively you know or or in a way that was good at getting you on their side yeah because if they had said something negative to you.

17:51You've been just been frustrated with them and sort of thrown up your hands and maybe you wouldn't be working on this important problem and helping all these people. So in many ways it seems like, I don't know, not to put your words in your mouth, but it seems like that person, their one reaction potentially changed policing. Yeah, it's true actually. I didn't think about that. I was really just there to issue a customer service complaint. And yeah, he changed my life and maybe policing. It's crazy. I guess my point about that though is what were you doing at that time? So you were helping your friend, but where were you personally at that point?

18:29I was still doing the fitness app. And yeah, it actually took a while of me looking at this kind of stuff until I decided that I didn't want to do the fitness app. What actually happened was that I pretended to be a laid off Twitter employee and I got hired by Elon Musk to be a real Twitter employee and then fired by Elon Musk from being a real Twitter employee. But he called me and apologized, which was really nice of him. But it was working with Elon that changed my mind. Because I was looking into this in the same kind of mercenary mindset. like oh what kind of like thing could i build that like would be like a good lifestyle business um and then working with elon i saw him firing people and i asked him one day if he felt weird firing people like that and he's like kind of terse voice he's like no what we're doing here matters if they're in the way they have to go i was like oh okay that's kind of a weird perspective but I guess that makes sense.

19:41And I realized everything he does is like that. Like everything he does. And I was like, that is so aligning. Like you have no internal qualms. There's a lot of studies about the impact of marginal officers on the homicide rate. And with how effective our software is at saving report writing time, the math shakes out that basically every 115 officers on our platform one life gets saved per year. I could fire someone who's not measuring up. If the software is 10 % worse and we got 1 ,100 people on the platform then you just killed someone. That is aligning. I like that. That's something I could really work on.

20:28When I got back I remember I had a call with my

20:35partner in the fitness app and our marketing partners and they asked me like are you gonna do this again where you just like run off and maybe like join twitter or something and i was like yeah i might like yeah i might do that they're like you should probably get out of this business i was like yeah i should and at that point i sold my shares to them and got out um but yeah it was for me like a moment where i was like okay actually like this isn't just like theoretical i should actually do something where it's to me like life or death. It's someone's life or death. Because otherwise, I just can't care, honestly.

21:10And I don't think there's any problem with selling B2B SaaS marketing software. That's probably, that's fine. But I'm not motivated enough to care. Sort of in parallel to this transition from realizing that you were mostly building sort of mercenary startups and businesses to realizing that you could find this greater alignment with the company and you were moving more towards like a missionary type view of the world um i believe at some point you had sort of a religious conversion yeah um could you say sort of how that how that aligned with all this and sort of how that fit into it yeah i guess it kind of went parallel with it it was actually after selling um my shit my part of the uh fitness app and it was like i had money but i didn't it wasn't like like you know i'm gonna fly off to my new house in europe money uh and so i just woke up the next day in my apartment in north beach and i remember thinking to myself why did i wake up like what do i do now and i kind of fell into this like postpartum depression and i would just walk around and i had decided a few years earlier that I think God was real.

22:28I had come to that conclusion, but I had no idea what to do with it. I had grown up Southern Baptist, very evangelical, and I had a whole falling out with that whole worldview. And so I didn't know what to do with my belief in God, but I was like, okay. So I started walking around the city and I realized something that I never would have noticed if I didn't walk around the city, which is that Catholic churches are open all day. They're unlocked, the doors are open. Yeah, you just go in. And I hadn't realized that Protestant churches are generally not like that. And so it just became part of my daily routine that I would just go pray in the morning.

23:10And I was living in North Beach. I would go to St. Peter and Paul, which if you've ever been in there is a beautiful, beautiful church. and I met the sacristan who was like, hey, I see you in here a lot and we kind of talked about my background and it's like, well, there's like some prayers you could do that are like kind of Catholic prayers if you want. And so I kind of like learned these prayers like Hail Mary and Oh Father, I already knew, but a few other ones. And I started repeating them to myself a lot and getting into this. And then another time he saw me, is like you should come to mass i was like oh what is mass so i went to mass and it was uh the first time i actually it's contributed to my theory about uh i now have a theory about genetic blood memory uh because i'm like really irish but like not like i didn't go to ireland until this year like my family's just like you know american white people but i going to mass the first time i was oh this is how you're supposed to worship God like this is it that plus I love Guinness plus I hate English people I'm like a hundred percent I believe in blood memory now um but yeah going to Irish or going to Catholic mass for the first time I was like yeah so um I went through the the RCIA process a few years ago and ever since then I've been a devout Catholic I guess like if you can sort of share how that evolved in parallel to you making that transition from sort of the more mercenary side of businesses to i i think like this whole idea of kind of aligning who you are to like what you're building can be really valuable um i think that i think you've said in the past that you don't want to make you know you want to make your personal beliefs you know be the the main thing that's sort of front and center in your business or something like that but at the same time you know our values guide sort of how we think about how we build businesses and how we think about all these things so i'm really curious sort of how that uh evolution in your in your thinking and beliefs um happened in parallel to uh to building able yeah i think there's two things about it so in the and it's kind of funny because there is a catholic founder community and there is some debate with like like some of those guys think you should open meetings with prayer.

25:34And I'm like, never in a million years will I do that in a professional environment. I don't think it's appropriate. I think that if you want to do that, you should be a priest. And then you could open every meeting with prayer because everyone's aligned at the table. But yeah, I think that for me, what it meant was the bigger thing was, what's your goal? You cannot be a Catholic and start Pornhub. You need to start something that in some way or some shape or form honors God. And to me, the goal of Abel is that we are living in an extremely disordered world because of sin and the fall of man. And anything that we can do to restore God's order here on earth brings us closer to God.

26:28So for me, it is a matter of restoring order to the world. And, you know, we're living on this fallen plane, but as much as we can restoring order and good policing does that. Absolutely. I actually, when I started the company, so it was, there was a lapse there between me becoming Catholic and, and figuring out exactly what I was doing. I knew I wanted to do something in policing and I was researching it a lot. But when I kind of settled on it, I took it to my priest at Star of the Sea, or at, excuse me, Saints Peter and Paul, and asked him if he thought this was a good thing. And we had a conversation about it.

27:08And he was like, yeah, I think it's absolutely a good thing. And he basically said what I've just told you. And so, yeah, for me, it's the direction. And then there is some input on how the business operates. I think that obviously you can choose good business practices or bad business practices. You can be a mean person or a nice person. I try to be a nice person. But ultimately, for me, it's the direction. And then on top of that, I think that as a Catholic, I do think you have a duty to win. and not many Catholics feel this way. This is a very not Catholic opinion. So say more about that. Yeah, I don't know much about that.

27:53So Catholics are, and having grown up Protestant, I kind of differentiate them in my mind, but in a broader sense, Christians, there's the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mound where Christ says, blessed are the poor in spirit, right? For they shall inherit the earth. And so there's this sort of, it's not nearly, it's actually really kind of weak in Southern evangelical culture. And this is really notable by how many preachers like of mega churches you see that have huge houses. And the media loves to cover this on, you know, it's kind of a recurring story. But the Catholic church has really bought into this.

28:36And a lot of Catholic priests take a vow of poverty. And so there's not this like strong sense among Catholics generally in the culture that you should be rich. I disagree. I think that the world would be a much better place if the people running large companies were Catholics. If the people controlling large, and when you, like Elon Musk is like rich, but he doesn't have like$400 billion in cash under his mattress. Like it's all equity in companies. It's his ability to control and impact the world. You'd be a much better place if the people doing that were Christians. So I think it's the duty of every Catholic to build something and build it as big as they can or to get as rich as possible and then give a bunch of that money to the Catholic Church, basically.

29:33The one thing that everybody talks about when it comes to solo founders is ownership, obviously. You start out with much more. You can do different things with that. You could be more open to dilution. You could be more open from both an investor perspective and, of course, an early hiring perspective. But I think that one thing that is particularly interesting about solo-founded companies is the level of authorship that is not split up between multiple co-founders. And I'm curious how you think about authorship as it relates to building ABLE. I mean, the name alone is a biblical reference. So I can imagine maybe unless you had somebody who had the same faith as you did, who was building this company with you, that maybe you would have arrived at that name.

30:13Can you share a little bit more just about authorship generally and how you think that that influences, influenced the company when you were getting started and how it might influence it today? Yeah. So I named it Abel because Abel was the first victim of a crime in the Bible. And ultimately, I feel like that's who the police work for. So that's who we work for. There is, and it's not necessarily, I mean, obviously, most things are not religious when you're building a software company. It's just kind of mechanistic decisions, operational design decisions. But a coherent idea of what things should look like is extremely hard to get between two people.

30:50We talked earlier about co-founders that seem married. Maybe them, right? But even then. but there was a reason that Apple had such a seamless experience from ports to kernel on a computer and it's because one guy ultimately made the call and decided things. The impact of that is, I think, really difficult to explain or estimate but once you use something, you can kind of feel it if you've got a taste for design. You can kind of feel where things feel like a mess. A lot of times when you're using things in Google products, they feel like it was wild, whatever insane group of people made this. Because there's Vertex and there's AI Studio and there's four different chat apps and it's all kinds of things going on.

31:51Whereas until maybe seven or eight years ago, Apple had a really coherent vision. It's gotten weaker for sure, but they had a really coherent vision that they inherited from one person in one mind. So I think an incredibly powerful thing about a solo founder, and it's a real waste if a solo founder is not a product guy. If they're a product person, and I actually don't even know what a solo founder would be if they were not that, but if you are not driving product, then it's kind of like you're missing out on the biggest part of being a solo founder, which is being able to offer users a really coherent feeling experience.

32:31It's constantly straying because maybe you've got stray hairs sticking out right now from our product that I can on the top of my mind I can think of that I need to have a meeting about because you also are doing marketing and sales and all these different things, but eventually everything can get hemmed in and then when a user uses your product it feels like wow one brain birthed this and the whole thing makes sense and you can kind of start to predict where things are it really it's like you transfer transfer your mind model to someone else through the software and it makes it easier for the user to use it how do you think about going from sort of sole author to primary author plus editor and and what's that what's that been like for you i don't know how large your fitness company got in terms of like teammates and things like that but you know you're scaling your organization here how do you think about like making that transition because in many ways going from two co-founders or three co-founders to adding your first teammate it's a very different transition than going from a solo person to adding your first teammate what was that like and how have you thought about how that's changed over time as you've grown the team it's really just stray hairs like Like I said, it's just like those like, like straight threads sticking around and they will evolve the, you know, they'll exist.