Flock CEO Garrett Langley on Public Backlash, Surveillance Expansion

0:00Hi, I'm Connie Loizos. And this is Alex Gove. And this is Strictly VC Download.

0:13Hello and welcome back. This week's episode is a conversation that I had on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco with Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock Safety. Langley and I covered a lot of ground. We talked about why he started the company, what he says to critics who call it mass surveillance, and the changes that Flock has made to how long it keeps data and how police searches are tracked. We also got into the company's drone program, the rumors that it has talked to a rival about a sale, and what the past year has been like for him personally, including the death threats and doxing.

0:50On a personal note, I really enjoyed meeting him. He's warm, he's thoughtful, and he took the tough questions head on. But I did leave the conversation feeling more conflicted about Flock than when I walked in. I want to flag one moment before you hear it. Near the end of the interview, I asked about an audio detection product, the microphones that Flock sells to listen for gunshots. Langley told me in real time that it detects gunshots and nothing else. When I said the company's own marketing suggested otherwise, he pushed back. But the marketing does say otherwise. Flock promotes the product as able to pick up more than gunshots, including, in the company's words, sideshows and other disruptive community events.

1:35So however you feel about the license plate readers, know that this company's technology can do much more than read plates, whether you like it or not. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and learned something from it. I certainly did. And we will be back here next week.

1:55I think it is. Hello. Welcome back to Disrupt. Our next guest has built a company that many of you have probably encountered without even necessarily knowing it. If you have driven by a camera on a pole outside of a neighborhood, it's possibly his product. CEO, Garrett Langley, founded Flock nine years ago in Atlanta after a theft in your own neighborhood, from what I understand. And as Anthony mentioned, police forces across the country in thousands of communities, 49 states, now helps them solve crimes, helps them find missing people. It is one of the most debated companies in America. I think it's probably safe to say at this very moment, cities are both signing up and they are also canceling their service because a lot of their residents are increasingly concerned about privacy and surveillance and have tough questions about who gets to see the data that Flock collects.

3:01So thank you so much, Garrett, for joining us to have a discussion about your product and hopefully help us all to understand it a little bit better. Maybe as a starting point, tell me how you would describe Flock to somebody who is not familiar with what you built.

3:15Garrett Langley: Yeah. So nine years ago, I was sitting in a part of Atlanta and just asking the question with my two co-founders, like, why does crime exist? Why is crime so easy to get away with? If you're not familiar with the data, you know, if you commit homicide in America, you have a 50 % chance of getting away with it. And that felt wrong. If you steal a car, you have a 87 % chance of getting away with it. And that also felt wrong. And so we said, well, could technology help? And like most entrepreneurs, most technologists, we said, I think technology could help. It's not a will problem. Law enforcement wants to solve crime.

3:55Garrett Langley: Community leaders want to build safer communities, but there was an evidence gap. And so that's where we come in. We have this belief as a company that everyone deserves the right to be safe. To me, it's not just that depending on what zip code in San Francisco you live in determines your safety levels. And you go out to California and it's very different. Go across the country and it's very different. And so we build technology that allows communities to provide an equal level of safety for their entire community. Now that starting product was a camera that reads a license plate. Sounds very basic in nature, right?

4:28Garrett Langley: Literally a car drives past one of our cameras, it reads the license plate, it checks if it's wanted for something, could be a felony warrant, could be an Amber Alert, could be a Silver Alert. And then if not, save that data for seven days by default, cities can choose to store it longer if they'd like, just in case there's a crime later. Okay, great. And there's obviously much more to tell, but explain to the crowd how a critic might describe Flock. I think a critic would describe it, I think I saw one person describe it as reading a license plate of every single citizen, regardless if they're a criminal.

5:10Garrett Langley: And that would be their biggest punch. And I guess is that a fair criticism? I think from a definition perspective, yes. We capture every car, regardless of actually who's inside. And that's actually one of the more interesting things. I was speaking to the police chief in Atlanta, my hometown, as you were acknowledging earlier, and he was presenting to community leaders in Atlanta about kind of a pre-flock and a post-flock. and he's pretty well spoken on the topic and he was describing that too often as a society we judge technology not on how it compares to the past but how it compares to perfect and flock is far from perfect I'm far from perfect I've made plenty of mistakes but he was describing this case where there was a double homicide in Atlanta it's a horrible situation this this one suspect vehicle drives past a gas station they have a grainy picture of the vehicle it's a white pickup truck.

6:05Garrett Langley: Now before Flock, what would happen is they would canvas that neighborhood for every white pickup truck. Every single person is going to get a traffic stop. Every single person is going to be questioned. With Flock, they look for that car in our system. They find the one vehicle that's in the area. They put a hot list entry out. So they're going to look at a BOLO. I'll be on the lookout for this vehicle. Hours later, they make an arrest. One person. So my pushback to the person who would say, oh, you read the life of every single car. I say, true. But what about the traffic stops that we've reduced?

6:39Garrett Langley: What about the subjectivity that's been removed from the system? And so if you judge us against perfect, we're far from it. If you judge us from the past, though, every police chief in America would say it's definitively more objective and more effective than what they used to do. I don't doubt that there's a lot of crime that gets solved in part because of flock. I do wonder if, you know, to your point, how many of these cases would be solved? without Flock, and I wonder if anyone has measured that, because I have heard the company talk about solving a million crimes and finding 10 ,000 missing people, and I just wonder, and I think critics wonder what those numbers really mean.

7:15Garrett Langley: Yeah, I mean, I'd like to believe that every crime would have been solved, because I spend most of my time with our customers, and they're out there fighting crime, doing hard work, but if you look at where kind of policing has gone over the last decade, but particularly post-COVID, Law enforcement employment is declining rapidly. You know, I think about a place like San Francisco, and there's hundreds of open positions. They will probably never be filled. And so you have a growing city that has a growing desire to be safe, backed by a mayor and DA who are committed to making San Francisco a safe place to live.

7:51Garrett Langley: And so then you're just saying, okay, we're going to put more work on a smaller number of people. And so I do think efficiency matters. And I think, you know, I was speaking to a victim whose car was stolen with her two-year-old in the backseat. Would they have found that kid? Probably. A day later? Two days later? With Flock, it was minutes. And so I think she would tell you she's not interested in a solution that takes two hours. She wants a solution that's almost instant. Well, there's lots of stories like that that I've read that are amazing. I've also read stories that are alarming, of course.

8:24It's a law of large numbers, I guess, but there was a story that made headlines last year of a woman who went missing for the police department in a Texas town, but she was actually, I think, escaping a violent domestic partner. So I think it's the stories like that that have, obviously, people so alarmed. I know that you've made changes. as you sort of made some announcements this past summer to change some of the way that things are done. So historically, it's my understanding that you thought it wasn't really Flock's role to tell city municipalities and police departments how to use your technology, and you're kind of leaning into trying to give them more guardrails.

9:14Can you talk a little bit about what you've rolled out and the response you've done?

9:18Garrett Langley: Yeah, I mean, I think if you would have asked Garrett and Matt and Page nine years ago, like, wake up and you've built the most effective crime fighting tool that's ever been created. Many chiefs joke that it's more effective than DNA. And the consequence of that being consequential is you need to make some difficult decisions. And I think for the longest time, to your point, our position was we don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job. We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies. Because we've always held this belief that a thriving community where everyone has the right to be safe requires really good products, really good people, law enforcement, first responders, and then really good policy.

10:07Garrett Langley: But what we noticed, as I think a lot of us in technology have realized, is that technology moves faster than policy. and I've met at this point thousands of city leaders and most of them are in a part-time voluntary position. The average American city is 80 ,000 people with seven democratically elected city councilors that have a full-time job and a family. They receive maybe$25 ,000 in compensation. It is probably asking too much of them to be experts on every single new piece of technology. And so in August, we took a kind of pause and said, let's review everything we do. And we made a handful of changes.

10:50Garrett Langley: The first was that we reduced our data retention recommendation from 30 days to 7 days. Now, you have to imagine nine years ago, data retention in the industry was indefinite. So if you got your car read by a license plate reader, it would most likely be held forever. And we knew nine years ago that was too long. 30 days felt better. But we looked at the data and saw that about 90 % of our criminal cases were solved within seven days. So we said, we're going to move it to seven days. Now, if a democratically elected body like the supervisors in San Francisco or the city council in Atlanta says, no, we want longer, because the consequence of seven days is that if you're the victim of rape and you wait five days to call it in because you feel guilt, you feel shame, it's normal reactions, the police now has two days.

11:38Garrett Langley: They're probably going to miss your case. So we're not going to tell cities you can't stay longer. We're going to say seven days are default. We also had built in auditing into the product from the onset, and we assumed that every single one of our customers would audit their systems pretty regularly. That seemed natural. Lower staffing. Other priorities. So we said, okay, we're now going to make that mandatory. So a number of changes like that that just kind of, in our opinion, push the policy conversation forward. And now I think if you look at the conversation, I think it's largely working.

12:09Garrett Langley: And I think Mayor Lurie is a good example of a Democratic leader who's leaning into the policy debate and providing his opinion as the person in charge of San Francisco, not me, and saying, hey, Garrett, appreciate your feedback. Here's what we're going to do in San Francisco. And we say, great. I'm glad you're providing a point of view. Well, there's obviously a lot of pushback that continues despite these sort of recommendations. So the proposed window by which departments keep data moving from seven to 30 days is interesting, but that's not being, you're switching that default on January 1st.

12:47I'm just wondering why not sort of do that a little sooner?

12:50Garrett Langley: Why not faster? Yeah. I mean, look, we debated this one a lot, and it came down to me making a decision of, you how fast do we want to push, in this case, 6 ,000 cities to change how they completely operate? And what I wanted to not do was create an environment where they were now poorly trained on new policies, new rules. And while I'd love to tell you that I have enough employees to do a one-on-one training with 6 ,000 customers in 30 days, I don't. We have maybe 50 customer success managers. And so we did the math and said, look, we're going to give our customers the better part of six months to know this is coming.

13:28Garrett Langley: We're going to start training now. And look, over 50 % of our customers have already turned this all on, which is what we were hoping to see. And another 50 % that want more training, it's typically bigger cities. A place like San Francisco just isn't going to change their entire policy in one week. That's just not how, I don't know, how many sworn officers and employees, probably 2 ,000 employees. It takes a little bit of time to get that training right. I also think it's interesting and helpful that you've made it mandatory that police officers now have to associate a case number with a search.

13:58But you also at the same time announced a feature called evidence mode, which in some ways seems to undermine that in that you have to put a case number in, but if it's an active case, you can keep that data, I guess, in the cloud, I mean, almost indefinitely. So how do you sort of square those two things?

14:16Garrett Langley: So the easiest way to think about it is that LPR data, which is what I would call it, right, is just car drives past, we capture that information, capture that data. I would like to live in a world where that data is stored only as long as it is legally necessary to solve a crime. And the shorter the period, the better. But then if you go talk to our customers, who their sole mission is to keep you safe, they would say, but Garrett, our focus is actually solving as much crime as possible. How do we square those two? And what we found is, I think, a very happy medium where by pushing it to seven days, and customers can go shorter, they could do 24 hours, they could do zero days.

14:59Garrett Langley: But then creating this concept of an evidence mode says, well, look, as soon as a crime has actually occurred, and there's a reasonable belief that this data is no longer data, is now evidence, it should exist under those pre-existing laws. And so if I go to a crime scene and collect DNA, there are laws around how long that data has to be stored. And that's both for the criminal investigation and the prosecution for both the defendant and the opposing side. That's for both parties' benefit. So we look at LPR data becoming evidence once a crime has occurred. And in an ideal world, what we're doing is creating that balance of the safety that law enforcement is being tasked to provide for you with the privacy that the Constitution also is supposed to be providing for us.

15:45I think it's, again, just to state the obvious, the trade-off of that data about all of us living in some space unbeknownst to us. And I'm hearing what you're saying about 90 % of crimes being solved in the first seven days, and then perhaps outliers, some of the worst outliers being solved in a longer time window. But to your point, again, I think the question is, what role does FLOC play? how necessary is it to solve, say, a rape case when, as you know, there's DNA, there's forensics, there's witnesses, there's other tools that police have always used. So do we really need Flock to solve that particular case?

16:29Garrett Langley: Yeah, and I think you have to go back. So I've never had a badge or a gun. I've never solved a crime before. So I can only speak on behalf of the thousands and thousands of police chiefs. And I think it just gets back to efficacy again, which is like, if we want to live in a society where if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn't pause progress, right? And I think we're in San Francisco. This is a great place to be to have this conversation. Technology at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect, it's just doing things better.

17:07Garrett Langley: And I think that driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there's one accident, I don't think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, hey, let's talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future. So when I look at our technology, we've made huge leaps and bounds on the efficacy and the value we provide for cities. And then now I think we're having the appropriate discourse of, okay, where do we need to pull back? Where do we need to have a substantive debate so we can continue to push forward.

17:42Well, I think it's, again, you've made some proposed changes, you've made some mandatory changes, but there is still a lot of strong feelings about this company out there. A lot of, you know, it's on the sort of ballot in a lot of places around the country right now. Do you think that Flock needs to go further? I mean, it is interesting to me because I think there are so many other companies that that are not the center of everyone's ire right now, like Palantir or Meta, which has much more information about all of us than we would probably like, although we've also given Meta our information, and of course it's also done a lot of triangulation, but I do wonder if you are thinking about taking things even a step further, considering that what you've done has not qualmed everyone.

18:28Garrett Langley: I had a really interesting conversation with a city councilor in Illinois. They had recently canceled Flock. I was like, I want to understand why. On the one hand, this is his democratic right. He was elected to make the decision, so I'm not going to push back. But I understand why. He's like, Mr. Langley, I canceled your contract because I disagree with facial recognition. I said, great, we don't do that. He said, oh. It's like, I must have been on the wrong website. And so so much of the challenge that I'm facing right now is, look, we have a lot of problems I need to solve. We need to solve as a business.

19:11Garrett Langley: But whether it's facial recognition, which we don't do, we've said many times we will never do, which is not an ARP mandate, that's a big issue. I saw a post on X that, be careful what you say near a flat camera because they can read your lips while you're driving a car. I think we have a very good engineering team, but I don't think we crossed that chasm. Right? I saw a post that had no less than 10 million views that, be careful having your cell phone near flock because it can track your Bluetooth device, it can connect that to your persons. And I'm like, we don't do any of this. And so I think so much of the problem that I'm facing right now is this newer landscape where social media is so interwoven in politics and is so rife with misinformation.

19:57Garrett Langley: And I'm not the only company that experiences this. And nor am I the only topic, right? Where it just gets, it's very easy for things to get out of control. And so I think that is really the big opportunity for us as a business is to figure out how do we better control our story and make sure that when elected officials are making pretty critical decisions. Like I had this one town in Texas that canceled Flock and within their first month post-flock, stolen vehicles were up 54%. That's real consequences. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was going to say the one independent study I've seen, and I'm sure there's probably others, showed that flock reduced vehicle theft by something like 11%.

20:35But I haven't seen numbers to support some of the other crimes that we talk about. And if you can point me to one, I'd be thrilled. But I guess what I would like to see personally is potentially a judge signing off on a search as one would have to obtain a warrant. And I wonder if that's something that you think about or just making it a little bit harder for a police officer beyond having to put in a case number. Maybe there's two people, maybe there's a consortium of people.

21:02Garrett Langley: Yeah. Is that something? We've thought about a lot of these. I was actually talking to an elected official in Ohio this morning about this very topic. And he said, hey, Mr. Langley, we're thinking about mandating our law enforcement officers to obtain a warrant before they do a search and flock. And he said, you know, would you support that? And I said, I don't think it's really my place to weigh in. That's up to you. But I want to be clear with you. You can't force a judge to give you a warrant. And the judge is going to tell you, I have no legal reason to give you a warrant, so I'm not going to waste my time giving you a warrant.

21:39Garrett Langley: And so there is this conundrum where even if that elected official feels that's what what feels like it should be right, the courts follow the law, not opinion. And they're going to say, look, that's not necessary. We're not going to do it. Now, to your question, though, what you're really trying to get to is my opinion, at least. How do you prevent misuse? Because a warrant would prevent misuse. A second approver would prevent misuse. And I think the way we've thought about it is you have to get to the intent. So when we started the company, we started with an empty field that you could type in anything while you're running a search.

22:16Garrett Langley: And that wasn't good enough, so then we added case codes. But that's not good enough either because you could put in six digits that are random, that match the kind of regis for, like, what is a case code. And so one of the things that we're developing right now is what could you do to actually build intent? Because one of the cool things about the business is that, you know, we help solve millions of crimes. We know what good criminal investigations look like. And I can tell you that there's a detective in San Francisco who's really good at homicides. And there's a detective in Houston who's really good at jugging, which is like when you attack someone while they're getting money out of an ATM.

22:51Garrett Langley: All these very, very smart, fun things you learn today, right? And all these people, they don't share how best practice is. And so part of what we're thinking about is what is a world that we could build where we could say, hey, Connie, don't tell us, tell us the case number. Oh, great. Now, based on the case number, we know that you're investigating an aggravated assault in the Pacifica or something, you know, in some part of the town. Here's the recommendation we have for how you should go run your investigation. And if you go, no, no, no, I don't want to do that. I want to go look over here.

23:24Garrett Langley: We go, ooh, time out. Why? What's your intent then? And so I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there's a way to do that that doesn't disrupt the legal system, that doesn't disrupt the efficacy and kind of flow of a police department that's already understaffed, but takes abuse out of the equation. And that's like something that we're very focused on right now. Well, luckily, we do see stories of police departments firing police officers who misuse the system. But does Flock ever take action against a police department that doesn't take action and there are abuses? It's such an interesting question.

23:57Garrett Langley: because we've had this debate internally. Like, would we ever fire a customer? Like, would you ever fire a customer? And there's two sides to that equation, right? Because if you believe, which we do at Flock, that we are very net positive for society, should we be taking our product away from a community that needs it? It's like, oh, that doesn't feel good. And so then you go, well, is there a certain threshold? And I think that, to be clear, if a customer knowingly broke the law, we would fire them immediately. That's very easy. But most of the debate you're talking about is nuanced into, well, what if two officers out of 50 were caught illegally using it?

24:37Garrett Langley: Would you fire their customer? And today we haven't fired any customers, but I think that's not off the table in the case of some pretty drastic law-abiding issue. I think just also just providing more visibility into the data would put communities' minds at ease. I mean, I think they would like to know how many searches are done for, you know, related to immigration. For example, in Denver, there was something like, this was before you, I think, mandated that there was a search number, a case number be associated with a search, but you have this national database that is very interesting and a big part of your product, National Lookup.

25:13And I think it's on by default. Off by default. Oh, it's off by default.

25:18Garrett Langley: When you buy Flock, if you're Emeryville, California, you buy Flock, you start with the cameras that are in your city. And then if you so choose, you can reach out to San Francisco and say, hey, we'd love to work with you. And then that's a two-way handshake. And then there's state laws that have to be followed. So in the case of California, you can't leave the state. So when Emeryville becomes a customer, all they see is California police departments. And if you're in Washington, Washington has a similar state regulation. So all you can see in Washington is Washington. You can't see anyone in California.

25:48Garrett Langley: And then if you're in a state that doesn't have that bill, which is the majority, then you have a choice to participate in a national collaboration. Right. And I do think it's the national collaboration that has some people sort of concerned. So there was a case, well, one story that became another big story about Flock, which was something like 1 ,400 queries had reached the city of Denver that were tied to immigration-related searches. and the city realized this and opted out of that national lookup. So I just think if people sort of understood, even in communities, what police are looking for and could make better decisions based on that information, I think that could be interesting.

26:30Is there a world in which you are providing more of that information to the public?

26:35Garrett Langley: Yeah, it's an interesting debate because I was thinking about this. Yom Kippur was just a couple weeks ago, and I was at a Georgia Tech football game with my family, my two older kids, and I got a phone call. And it was from the FBI. And that's like, if you've ever been to a college football game, that's not the phone call you want to get on a Saturday. I was like, okay, what's going on? And they had said, you know, Mr. Langley, we wanted to verify a couple of pieces of information about the flock system. Okay. And they were tracking an individual that had left Jacksonville, Florida, had been posting anti-Semitic rhetoric online, and had escalated over the course of the weekend and on Saturday morning had posted a video of himself in a vehicle full of assault rifles driving on the highway.

27:26Garrett Langley: They apprehended that individual in Texas on his way to California to shoot up synagogues on Yom Kippur. That case is definitively harder, if not almost impossible, to solve without Flock. And that's because Jacksonville and the parts of southern Florida could communicate with agencies in Texas, could put that on a hot list without having to alert, you know, and so these cases like this happen every day. And the question is, as a society, would we be happier knowing about them? And that's a very difficult question to answer because you think about products like Citizen, and I had Citizen for a while, and then I was like, actually, I'm good.

28:06Garrett Langley: Ignorance is a little bit of bliss here. I don't need to know about every single 911 call happening in my city. Like, I'm good with just, you know, the ones within like half a mile. But there is this interesting concern that I've actually talked to a lot of our police chiefs about, which is, why don't you talk about your success more often? And they're good. The community doesn't actually want to hear it. They say they do, but they don't actually want to hear about all the nasty, evil things happening in our city. That's really interesting. I'm sure it is, you know, again, a trade-off at all times.

28:32I did want to talk before we run out of time about two of your other products, speaking of 911 calls. So I know that one of your biggest sort of initiatives right now is drones. So drones are so interesting because this is a very different product than the Flock camera, which as you said doesn't do the things that people think that it does. But the camera is like a, I'm sorry I'm trying to find it in my notes right now, but like a high, it's able to spot licenses from 2 ,000 feet away, flies 60 miles per hour, has this sort of incredible lens. So I think the question relatedly is, and it's sending video back to the police department.

29:18So you've got two very different products. I wonder how they sort of fit together. And also, again, sort of relatedly how you convince people that these things are not filming their backyards. Yeah.

29:29Garrett Langley: You know, I think one of the most surprising things about our drone product is when we designed the product, the intent was, like a lot of our products, solve more crime. And what we've noticed though in usage is crime tends to be one of the least frequented use cases, which was counterintuitive to me. But I was in this town in Texas, in the kind of Dallas-Fort Worth area, and I was kind of touring their facility and they were showing me how they were using our drones. It was great. And I was like, oh, but do you have any great success stories? And they're like, oh, actually, we're about to respond to 911 right now.

30:05Garrett Langley: Do you want to see? It's kind of common. I was like, sure. And this is a town that borders the main highway that cuts through DFW, and there was a traffic accident on the highway. And they were using the drone to go clear the traffic accident. Because historically, it takes about an hour for an officer to get to that kind of a highway incident because you've got to get on the right exit, and then there's traffic, and it's this huge mess. And in Texas, you don't actually have to have a human clear an accident. So they send the drone over, they zoom in, they make sure no one's hurt, they're talking to 911, hey, do you need ambulance?

30:32Garrett Langley: No, we have video footage of the scene, you're good to go. They literally do that dozens of times a day. And I'm like, this is actually safety. It's not crime. It's safety. It's great. But again, who sees that footage? Who authorizes that drone being sent? And how can we? So in the case of this town and in most of our customers, they write a policy that's then adopted by city council that articulates the use cases and the cases that cannot be used for drones. So typically it is only when a 911 has occurred. and it is typically one operator that's sitting in a real-time crime center or sitting behind a desk at a police station and they fly.

31:09Garrett Langley: And there's a lot of smaller nuances we do in the product. As an example, when the drone takes off, the camera is focused on the horizon and it doesn't point down until the operator actually forces it down. Because one of the most common questions is like, oh, I don't want it recording in my backyard while it drives there. Great, let's shoot it straight out until you get to the 911 and then you can point down. And I'm sure in the vast majority of cases it's used as it's intended, but I did see a study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that said it sometimes gets pulled into use for houseless people or mental health issues or things that are not the cases that you intend the product to be used.

31:47And relatedly, you've got an audio detection product that I think not a lot of people are aware of. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about this. So these are these high-powered speakers. The company is competing increasingly with ShotSpotter. So these high-powered microphones that get installed in cities can pick up gunshots and fireworks, but also distress levels. So I know that it's technologically possible if people are screaming, and that was part of sort of the pitch originally, you kind of rolled that back because people were not that excited about the way that was marketed.

32:22but I wonder how many of those microphones are out in communities and what they can pick up.

32:28Garrett Langley: Yeah. No, you bring up a good point, which is we've made plenty of mistakes as a company, where we thought it made a lot of sense to us. And I think audio is a good example, where we sell these solar powered microphones that are intended to hear gunshots. And that was the intended use case because most gun violence goes unreported. And so actually the biggest problem is knowing when did the gun violence occur and where did it happen? Most people don't call 911 when they hear a gunshot. And so that's why we built the product. And then some of our customers said, oh, you know, we have these in parking lots.

33:03Garrett Langley: It would be great if we could get alerted if someone was being abducted, if someone was being harmed. And we said, that seems really logical. And then we prototyped it and we rolled it out to a couple customers. and then we saw people with a lot of concerns and we said, ooh, we hadn't thought about that side. That's a mistake on our part. Let's undo that. So we undid it. You know, there's only a couple customers that were prototyping it with us and we said, okay, great. It's just gonna do gunshots, plain and simple. If a gun goes off, we'll notify and if not, that's all it's gonna listen to. That's not what it says though.

33:35I think in your marketing materials, I think it talks about sort of like community unrest or other ways to sort of detect things that are coming, that are brewing afoot. No, just gunshots. Okay. And how, I guess, how many of these are in the United States, would you say?

33:51Garrett Langley: I don't have the exact number. I would say we have a comparable footprint to a company like ShotSpotter. Okay. Unfortunately, I have no idea. I hope we're raising ShotSpotters. I do know that you want a contract against it. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the nice things about Flock at this point in this kind of stage of our journey is we have a fairly diversified revenue streams. So while LPR, license rate readers, is our bread and butter, it's where we got started across drones and gunshot detection and live video cameras like PIM Tilt Zooms and some of our software products, we have a lot going on, I guess, in a good way.

34:26And you also have much more diversified revenue streams in terms of your core customer, which is only 60 % law enforcement in cities and 40 % enterprise, which I didn't realize. Okay, we've got to go, but I wanted to ask you two quick questions. Some of you reported a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, that you were talking to your most direct rival, Axon, which doesn't get nearly as much grief and sells essentially the same product portfolio. Are you considering selling this company?

34:55Garrett Langley: No. I mean, if it's happening, it's not happening with my intent or my boards, so that would be a hard way to get a deal done. But no, we have no desire to sell the company. You know, and I also just wanted to ask you on a personal level. You have such a sort of lovely demeanor, but I know that you've been through a lot in the last year. You've received many death threats. You've been doxed. You're a young guy with a young family. I just wondered if you ever wonder if it's worth it. Yeah. I mean, the honest answer is like yes, right? Like I think about friends I have who run, I would call them dopey companies, where I think about it.

35:35Garrett Langley: I've got a buddy, Kyle, who is from Atlanta, started a company called Sales Loft. It's a dopey company. It helps salespeople make more money. If it didn't exist tomorrow, the world would be fine. Everyone would just go on. And I think one of the unfortunate consequences of building a consequential company is this is the price you pay. And I think it's worth it because there's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because Flock exists. And clearly we've made our fair share of mistakes and there's some folks who disagree with what we do. But it's worth it because one day they might be a victim and that would be horrible.

36:16Garrett Langley: But they'd thank Flock when their case got solved. And so I think it's worth it. It's definitely not easy every day. But then you hear a success story, you hear a solved story from someone, and you go, you know what, actually it's worth it. It's worth it for them. Well, I think a lot of people are going to be continuing to decide whether it's worth it to have it in their communities. But I so appreciate you coming and joining us today. And thank you all for sitting through this conversation. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Garrett. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much.

36:44Garrett Langley: The Strictly VC Download podcast is hosted by TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos and me, Alex Gove of Strictly VC. Strictly VC Download is produced by Maggie Nye with editing assistance by Teresa Lancansolo and Kel. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here next week.