What It Takes to Clear a Million Crimes a Year with Flock Safety's CEO

22:27Garrett Langley:There is. I mean, I think you're right on the controversy. I would articulate it as like, if you're building a business that impacts millions of people's lives, it's going to be controversy of some degree. Like I'm sure people, I'm sure there's someone who hates Stripe. I don't know why they would, but I'm sure that person exists. Just like there's someone who hates Walmart. It's like they're trying to sell cheap groceries. Why do you hate, it's like, people hate every company. Maybe they hate us more, I don't know. I think there's a few things that make it for the steel man argument. One is you can see it.

22:58Garrett Langley:So I bet you if we pulled up your iPhone and we looked at the number of apps that you've given full-time local location services, it would shock both of us. And then if we looked at the number of data brokers who then leverage that data to sell you ads, we'd be really shocked. And I think if we rewinded 30 years ago and said, imagine these private companies tracked your location in real time and sold that to advertisers, we'd be like, that is unacceptable. But because we can't see it, we kind of let it go. We have this perception of anonymity or being anonymous. Anonymity. Anonymity, thank you.

23:35Yet, like, you're an engineer.

23:38Garrett Langley:How many data points do you need to triangulate where someone is? How about where they sleep and where they work? and I know exactly who you are. And so like there is that one piece, which is because we operate in the physical world, we are held to a higher standard, which I think is a shame because personal opinion, what I do online is way more interesting and telling about my personality and my life than what I do in the real world. Like I go from work to home and to like kids' birthday parties on the weekends. That's my life. So there's that piece. I mean, the second piece is like, there is a appropriate debate of what level of privacy erosion are we willing to take for an increase in safety?

24:19Garrett Langley:Now, you and I both choose to live in cities that have governments, so we've already chosen to remove some of our privacy. We drive on public roads where constitutionally we have no explanation of privacy because we're using the government's roads with the government's license plate. Like, we have a driver's license in our pocket. Driver's licenses are a modern thing. That hasn't been around for 200 years. It's a newer concept to have a driver's license. So we've accepted all those. The articulation that I would have is like, I want my kids to be safe. And like, as long as there's accountability of like how the information is used, which we do, every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity and it's publicly available.

24:53Garrett Langley:And there, for us, like we really believe in this concept of a certain data retention, which kind of limits the level of abuse. It doesn't eliminate abuse. There's still going to be abuse, but it limits that, hey, if it's seven days, 14 days, 30 days of data, it's just not that interesting. Yeah. Relative to what you see with data brokers online where they have your entire internet history stored forever. You're interested in fresh data. That's what's useful. Yeah, but criminals, yeah. There's a really fast drop-off of where have you been in the last couple days versus like where were you a year ago?

25:26Garrett Langley:It's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation. Yes, yes. Or it's protected behind a warrant, which is fine. Right. You talked about cell phone locations and your cell phone having your GPS location. and I'm reminded of the phenomenon where it feels like the balance of power and the offense-defense mix within crime fighting tends to change over the years as new technologies are invented and, you know, criminals get wise to fingerprinting exists and things like that. It feels like cell phone locations have had a huge impact on crime fighting. Not even GPS location, but just the coarse cell tower data and in particular in murder cases, it's had a huge impact.

26:10I'm curious just what are the other major trends going on from a technology point of view in how crime gets fought?

26:15Garrett Langley:Yeah, that's CDRs would be the nomenclature in the law enforcement. What's CDR? Cell phone data dump or CDR cell data records. Something like that, yeah. But it's your point, it's the broader, like you hit these three towers, therefore you're in this general vicinity. That is like one of the best kept secrets for law enforcement of how to solve crime, which people dumbly commit crime with their cell phone in their pocket every time. It's very, I think I've heard of one case in the last 12 months where someone was smart enough to commit a homicide and left their cell phone at home by design. It was very intentional.

26:49Garrett Langley:They were very organized. How did they get caught? It's actually a flock, obviously. So they were smart enough to leave their cell phone. they were dumb enough. So they drove from LA up to San Francisco, general area. They had a bunch of flat cameras along the way. They didn't pick up their cell phone until they went back to LAX. And we have cameras all around LAX. And like they finally made that one mistake. It was a completely cold case until they got a hit on the car pulling into LAX, then got the cell phone, could do the whole thing. This is a good case. And I guess the thing you can do is you can know that a cell phone's in a car because you can...

27:29We don't touch that, but the law enforcement can. Sorry, law enforcement can cross-reference cell phone location with flock.

27:34Garrett Langley:So they knew that the vehicle was in a certain parking lot. They can then use, they have to have a warrant at this point. Sure. They can have a warrant to pull what cell phones were in that area and then start to build the case. But to your question, I'd say the current phenomena that is causing a ton of problems domestically is drones. And this is an example where it's asymmetric warfare that law enforcement is being put up against where criminals have no rules. How are criminals using drones? So here's a good example. in one of the counties we work with, it's an affluent-ish county in the Virginia area, South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods.

28:13Garrett Langley:They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in. They don't want a confrontation. They just want to know so much stuff. You bring drones to case houses? Just go out, yeah. Wow. And this is where the downside is. Law enforcement has just recently, in the last year, been allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight. These guys have been operating for years. They jerry-rig, you know, an LTE modem to a cheap drone. They can fly it anywhere, however they want. And then legally, even to today, law enforcement is not allowed to engage that drone. They can't take it down.

28:46Garrett Langley:It's FAA airspace. It's not law enforcement airspace. Sure, yeah, yeah. And so they just sit there. And so that's a problem in neighborhoods. That's a problem in prisons. That's probably the number one problem we have in our prison system today. Well, a lot of problems in prisons. But one of the leading problems for enforcement officers is you've got these pretty incredible, actually, from an engineering perspective, drones that are carrying 10, 20, 30-pound payloads, flying them over the prison walls. And, like, they'll literally dangle it down to, like, the prison cell, and the person will reach out and grab it.

29:16Garrett Langley:Cell phones, drugs, guns. We had a teller from Zipline out here. It's Zipline for criminals. And these guys have built a comparable product. Yeah. And I was with a sheriff that I know really well, and he was like, if I shoot that down with a shotgun, I am technically breaking the law. I'm breaking federal law if I shoot this down with a shotgun. And so you're seeing states now pass, like Louisiana has a state bill, Georgia's working on a state bill that says, sorry, FAA, we're going to do what we want. And that creates a problem, because most law enforcement officers just want to follow the law.

29:47Garrett Langley:Yeah, and presumably that won't stand up from a federal preemption point of view. No, and like the other challenge is like, I think you and I would say, who's going to enforce this? The FAA is not an enforcement body, but these people want to follow the law. And the law says clearly, you can't shoot a drone down. You can detect it. You can't mitigate. Ah, I had no idea. It's a totally crazy law. Yeah. What else has made, what else has gotten worse from an offense perspective? I mean, this is one that's like, I don't know if I have strong feelings on this topic, but this concept that we appropriately hold local law enforcement to a very high standard of accountability and audibility.

30:28Garrett Langley:And I think that's very good. The downside is like, we don't with criminals. And so as a citizen, you don't be the victim of a crime. You get really frustrated that they're not working hard enough. And it's very, really that. It's that they don't have the tools, they don't have the data, or they're not legally allowed to get to the data. And the warrant system is a very, very good thing. It's like a very effective tool. But like there's a debate of like, should law enforcement have more ability to solve crime faster? And the example of the framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is that the severity of a crime should be commiserate with the sophistication of technology.

31:07Garrett Langley:And I'll give you an example. Facial recognition, hot topic. There are thousands of cities in America that have banned law enforcement from using facial recognition. John, facial recognition is not bad. That's the technology. It's not good either. It's just technology. I think a way more effective measure would be to say, hey, look, facial rec has its pros and cons. You can't use it for shoplifting, but for homicides, crimes against children. Like, go to your list of things that, like, we as a society care deeply about. Law enforcement should do everything in their power to solve those cases. And then, yeah, the, like, petty stuff, we should say, look, like, we got to make progress there, but, you know, you stole a pack of Skittles.

31:48Garrett Langley:Like, we probably shouldn't deploy a drone. to find you. Like, if you kill someone, I think we should work really, really hard as a society to hold you accountable. Yeah. But there's no nuance. That nuance does not come through. No, they're just like, facial rec is bad. And we don't do facial recognition for that reason because it's too controversial. But that's, it's counterintuitive to me when the technology gets better every day. Yes, yes. And obviously, another interesting thing that's happening amongst these trends is the prevalence of body cams, which I think maybe was in some corners promoted by law enforcement skeptics, but I think now has...

32:23It's backfired? I wouldn't say backfired, but just like it's actually, in a lot of cases, been somewhat exonerative, right?

32:31Garrett Langley:Yeah, no, I think in many cases, police were really hesitant to get body cameras. Just like, I mean, imagine if you wore a body camera all day at work, you'd be like, I'm not sure if I love that idea. It's kind of a little bit invasive, but they did. And I would say, in the majority of cases that I see, where foul play is called, it is almost always the inverse, where a law enforcement officer was just trying to do their job. And on the other side, there was other mental health issue. There was something gone wrong and it actually exonerates the officer, which is kind of interesting. And I think the same thing is true, what at least we're seeing on the camera side, on the streets is, you know, historical policing, sadly, it's quite prejudiced, right?

33:14Garrett Langley:We all have our biases, whether it's conscious or unconscious. So you have bad data in, you get bad data out. And so the traditional way of policing is like you go to dangerous neighborhoods, look for suspicious people and arrest them. So it's like you're perpetuating a trend against a certain community. And when you look at like Oakland as a good example, who's quite a big supporter flock, they're like, we need a more objective way to police. Let's just focus on stolen cars. We don't care who's inside. We will find out eventually that car was stolen. And then you don't wind up policing where crime has happened historically.

33:48Garrett Langley:you end up policing where crime is happening right now. Yeah. In real time. And that is a fairly fundamental shift in how policing works. And it, for many cities we work with, changes the perception of this, the kind of community with law enforcement. Because they're no longer felt like they're being targeted. It feels like it's, wherever crime happens, we're going to go chase it. And if there's not been crime in the last couple of days, then we're good. Yep, yep. Is crime up or down in the U.S.? It is down. I think it'll continue to go down. COVID was like really bad. So it surged during COVID?

34:25Garrett Langley:Crazy surge. Okay. People lost their minds. I think we tested society of like what happens if you keep people inside for too long and people got really violent. Yeah, so do you have an explanation? Is it that like it was a mental health issue or was it kind of a crime of opportunity that, you know, things were less well guarded and, you know, there's more opportunities for crime? but you think it was just people went a bit batty being locked up? I think so. And resorts to crime. But I mean, I'm obviously not a, you know, clinical psychologist, by any means. But it's like, you look at the data and there's no other way to articulate why, you know, homicides three to four X'd and then plummeted back down to let's call it somewhat reasonable levels.

35:06Garrett Langley:There's a very few number of cities that are left at COVID levels. Most cities had this massive spike. Yes. And like the way to... if you look at the people who were committing that violence, they tended to be 16 to 22 male and very online. Very online? Yeah. And so, like, this is really sad. That's right. How do you measure very online? Let me give you an example. I was in a town, a major city, not too long ago, and I was asking the chief to tell me kind of what's going on. This is a couple years ago, right, during COVID. and she was like, Garrett, these kids are just killing each other. I was like, what?

35:45Garrett Langley:It's like, yeah, they're literally getting in their car and just shooting each other. I'm like, why? I'm like, oh, because this guy posted a picture of him with that guy's girl on Instagram. And I think in a normal situation, you might have called that person and been like, hey, bro, that's my girl. And in other cases, they're getting in a car and shooting someone. Like, that's not normal. That's not normal behavior. And it wasn't normal before COVID. and it happened a lot during COVID and then it's largely gone away. But it was a very specific social phenomena where the race to violence was so dramatic.

36:19Garrett Langley:It was so scary. And I don't think society has necessarily gone fully back to normal, but like if you look at the data, it's hard to articulate. That's the most obvious explanation to me. And I guess there are other empirical measures like air rage incidents, road rage incidents, like all of that kind of stuff went up during COVID. Everything went up. Yeah. Like everything. People just literally lost their minds. I think we need to be outside. But okay, so how are we doing now on crime? You say it's down. Is that across all categories? Because you read Twitter and it's like everything's locked up at CVS and San Francisco.

36:52There's all these memes. Maybe do some debunking and confirming of all the memes.

36:56Garrett Langley:So every city is a little bit different. Major cities still have major crime problems. I would argue, you know, I live in Atlanta and the mayor, you know, he's made it very clear, anything greater than zero homicides is a tragedy and therefore we're on the race to zero still, like as an unacceptable level. And we're down historic lows over the last decade, but it's still pretty hard to wake up and go, you know, only 52 people died in Atlanta last year. You can't pat yourself on the back for that. I think where we're focused on is more so clearance rates. And that's actually getting better, but only better in certain cities.

37:37Garrett Langley:Now, we track it across Flock, you know, not to overly promote, like, tends to be that if you have a Flock product, your city has a much higher clearance rate. You look at San Francisco as a great example. The new chief, the prior chief, Mayor Lurie, like, they are making crime a focus. And the focus is on solving crime. Yes. And when they solve it, as I'm sure you follow on the news, they talk about it. Yeah. And they should, because, like, it's really cool. They're working very hard. and what you'll see is back to the online point I made, all these people are online. And so when San Francisco PD is dominating X, It has a deterrent effect.

38:12Garrett Langley:Oh, gosh, yeah. You don't want to get caught. Yeah. And that's like the unintuitive or the counterintuitive point on crime is that most people would intuitively say, oh, if the punishment's really, really bad, people will do less of it. But you were 16, 18 at one point. You operate on a Boolean mindset. I will get away with this. Therefore, I will do it. I'm going to sneak out of my house I'm not going to get caught. You don't care if the punishment is being grounded for a week or a month. You're going to get away with it. You're 17. It's just when I get caught or not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so when you flip...

38:41Garrett Langley:I'm not realized criminals are so online. So if you flip that... Oh, it's like... It's a subculture. You got to get there. But I mean, you'll see... Sorry, is this like Reddit, Twitter? They're everywhere. Pinterest? I probably love Pinterest. But I mean, TikTok's really big. Yeah. Instagram's really big. Snapchat's really big. And like it is... It's how they recruit though, right? Because like the whole recruitment effort is, you know, I'm going to show a lifestyle online that seems dream-worthy to recruit these people. And then they're in, and they're going to perpetuate that. And the data actually showed it's actually not a very good job.

39:14Garrett Langley:You actually don't make very much money being a criminal. It's like the medium income for your average criminal is very, very low. But they promote a lifestyle of wealth. So if you look at those cities, like, so you take San Francisco, crime's coming down, clearance rates are going up. 100 % clearance rate is like 100 % solved? Yes. And it's doable. We have it in major cities. Like which? Like Cobb County would be one, which is like the second largest county. Cobb County has 100 % period. If you commit violence in Cobb County, you will get arrested. And that's across what sample size? That's the second largest county in Georgia.

39:47Garrett Langley:So let's call it, you know, a couple million people. Almost a million people. So a decent number of violent crimes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like, but it's going down every year. Sure. So like at places like that. Because you will get caught. Yeah. Yeah, and so we have this new concept that we've developed called Safe City. And we'll go into a town and say, look, this is the platform you need to solve all the crime in your city. It's your choice. It tends to be about$20 a citizen a year. It's your choice. And what's fun to watch is we find these mayors with really strong backbones. And they're like, I want to be a safe city.

40:21Garrett Langley:There's this awesome town, Greenville, Mississippi. You've probably never heard of it. 26 ,000 people. They have our drones. They have our cameras. They have our AI. They have everything we do, and they are lighting it up. And like kudos to the mayor-in-chief, like every crime they solve, they're on the 5 o 'clock news. So these are highly effective cities. What happens to the criminals? Does it shift it to other localities? And like you need to, it's like, you know, disease eradication, you ultimately need to do kind of enough to blanket it, to snuff it out. Because if just kind of one municipality does it, it'll shift to a local municipality.

40:57Does it actually, within that municipality, people just go to something non-criminal?

41:03Garrett Langley:I'm curious, what are the effects of one municipality getting really good? There's two phases. The first phase, you're spot on. Like people that just change cities. It's like when San Francisco started adopting FLOC, Oakland crime went up. So then Oakland needed to adopt FLOC. Yes. And now like a couple of false starts, now that it's fully going, they will have the same. But like first is the shift. Yes. And then you're right. Like, this is, people don't, the majority of criminals, let's call it 99 % of criminals, are not evil people. They're not. Like, evil is a random act of violence. And that is exceptionally rare.

41:38Garrett Langley:It's very rare. It's opportunism. It's all opportunism. And like, you and I were fortunate enough to be born in a family, in a social construct that we could go build great companies. But not everyone had that chance. And some people get pushed in the wrong direction. And that's what we have to stop. It's like as a business, we don't, while we're proud of the impact, you know, making a million arrests, it's actually quite disheartening. Because that means like a million people will not have to go through the criminal justice system, which doesn't work that well. There's a million victims. Like it's bad in every single way.

42:09Garrett Langley:It's also crazy expensive as a society to jail that many people. It's like, it's a double negative bottom line where it's costly and prohibitive that they'll probably never reenter society. So we're much more focused on the preventative mechanisms of like, how do you convince someone this is not a good lifestyle? This is not a long-term plan. And eventually what you will see is like they will go get jobs. Like these are functional members of society. They can be functional members. We should push them in that direction. What kind of crime is on the increase? So I'll tell you one that's like pretty fascinating.

42:39Garrett Langley:So if you look in the enterprise community, organized resale crime in stores was really hot during COVID and right after COVID. That's why you saw CBS lock their stuff up. You saw, you know, places like In-N-Out, leave Oakland. Like, this was a huge problem. And it's still, you know, for someone like Walmart, I think they reported just shy of a billion dollars of theft last year. So, that's a lot of money. Yeah. And, like, their peers aren't doing dramatically better. Now, Flock customers are doing really well. Yeah, and Walmart aren't neophytes at this stuff. Yeah, but they'll get there. Yeah, we'll get there with Walmart.

43:13Garrett Langley:But, like, you look at some of our partners, like Lowe's, you know, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not really a problem anymore. But where the criminals have moved is to the distribution facilities. It's safer and bigger loads. And so probably the most sophisticated one that I've heard of is an Eastern European group. They went and bought a legal, well-running freight broker. They now own this asset. And they bid on all these, low bid on all these projects, show up with real paperwork, fill up a 20-foot with product, drive away, dissolve the company. $7 million in a single day.

43:56Garrett Langley:Like, that's pretty good business. Yeah. That's very sophisticated, though. That's harder to solve. That's very, that's much harder to solve. Because every car, phone, like everything will be disposable, used in this. Everything's going to leave the country as fast as possible and just show up on a street somewhere. And then the other interesting challenge is you have to unpack, this is a little bit complicated, who's liable. So as soon as the product goes into a store, that retailer is liable for the theft. It hits their bottom line. For a lot of these companies, they negotiate it such that there is insurance coverage from a different broker that owns that asset until final delivery.

44:40Garrett Langley:And so it's not super clear who actually cares. and it's going to take Well, the insurer cares. Insurer cares eventually. Yeah. But when you talk about the scale of what's called, you know, tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of product being moved, you're like, oh, you know, we lost a couple hundred million. I see. Yeah, yeah. We'll be fine. We have insurance. Yeah, yeah. It will catch up eventually, but that's probably the most interesting type of crime we're tracking is the tacking on the distribution. So we have a lot of partners on the distribution side where we're now deploying our product to try to prevent this before becoming an epidemic.

45:15Garrett Langley:Yes. But it's much harder to solve. It's a real company. Yes, yes. I want to ask you more about this, but I'm going to give you another Guinness.

45:25This is a good segue into your corporate business because, again, people associate you with selling to municipalities, but obviously you sell a lot to corporates as well.

45:34Garrett Langley:Yeah. It's a big part of our business. Oh, sorry. You had some dregs left. That's my fault. Yeah. You want to just go full up and... You'll get more of a head that way. And it's perfectly, it's the correct. It is? You can trust it, yeah. Okay, so the corporate business. Yeah, North of 100 million, probably fastest growing segment. There's some wild stories. So, you know, we help businesses solve two problems. How do you keep your employees safe and how do you keep your assets or your stuff safe? So it's kind of funny because we have a Fortune 5 company that's a customer. And you probably don't want to talk about specifics, but we should just imagine big box stores that kind of Home Depot, Walmart, The thing is like we have this like Fortune 5 company that's a customer and they spend like $100 ,000 a year because they have like three locations in the country.

46:24Garrett Langley:That's it. They have like three really big campuses. So they're actually like we don't proxy towards necessarily like market cap or revenue. We proxy to physical locations. Like how many locations? So someone like a Dollar General is a way better prospect for us because Dollar General has 7 ,000 stores. Yeah. On Subway. Yeah, you want Subway is a good example. So we tend to focus on retail, healthcare, and logistics. They tend to have big physical footprints, a lot of employees, and a lot of challenges. And is their main challenge theft? Like that's what they're worried about, that they want to prevent stolen cars coming to steal stuff?

47:04Garrett Langley:I'd say employees is, I'd say three years ago when we started the business unit, it was assets. It was like, oh my gosh, coming out of COVID, everyone's stealing everything. It is much more shifted now to keeping employees safe. So you think about some of these businesses, they might terminate half a million people a year, quarter million people a year. It takes one angry employee to come back. And so in our system, you can have an automated, you know, with the HRS that like, when employees terminated, they're added to a localized hot list. If that employee ever comes back on campus, it's not illegal.

47:35Garrett Langley:But notify security is why people have security teams. Like, don't let them in the building. So it's about kind of moving that layer of safety farther out. The other example is like we do quite a bit of work like in executive protection. So I'll give you like a good example. I think like a Fortune 2000 CEO. Our stuff's deployed at her house. We also deploy at corporate. It's not illegal, but it's quite weird if the same vehicle on the same day goes to both locations. That is not that person. Yeah, it's not that person or their EP team. And so, like, we're, I think keeping people safe is the number one thing.

48:14Garrett Langley:And the assets is, like, it's good, but worst case, you just raise prices, which is not good. But, like, we had this crazy case with one of our healthcare partners where this group, pretty smart, actually, would show up to the hospital dressed in, like, a certain company's uniform. And be like, oh, the robotic surgical arm needs to be repaired. Can you help me grab it? And some clinical surgeon's like, oh yeah, let me show you where it is. Don't worry, John. Walk in there. This is a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. And they literally walk out with it. This happened in... Like some Thomas Crown affair kind of stuff.

48:52Garrett Langley:But it's like, I mean, you're a physician. You're not thinking like, oh, is John actually working at this company? Is the product, I think I used it yesterday. You're like, oh yeah, that sounds right. It's super expensive product. So this is an example to your conversation of where the business gets interesting is we've then connected that healthcare provider with federal authorities. This is not going to be a local authority to solve this kind of crime. It's a federal crime at this point. They were taking the product, exporting it, and selling it in a different country for clinical work. So we think that one is pretty interesting.

49:24Garrett Langley:That's an asset one where actually the healthcare system is like, this is 20-something million dollars of products stolen. That's a problem. Is your business going international? which countries is this best suited to? Like, is this a universally applicable product? Do those differences in, you know, law enforcement agency structure make it? I'm just curious. I mean, we're dabbling. But I think payments is probably like a very global, like everyone wants to process payments, I think. Yes, there's a lot of local nuance. Yeah. I think for us, maybe our ambitions aren't big enough, but when I look at the domestic opportunity, you know we should be able to get to 5, 10, 15 billion of revenue in America and like we're not there and so it's the difference of to your point on the nuance and payments it's probably comparable to the nuance of working with local government but then you overlay hardware and that just gets maybe two steps too difficult for my stomach today but there's I mean we get an inbound I saw an email this morning from an Australian police department.

50:35Garrett Langley:It's like, we'd love to do a demo. And it's like, why not just do, I mean, I agree that there's a lot of nuance. Is there some aspect of your tech, like you've put a lot of work into the cameras, vehicle recognition, stuff like that. I know, again, from painful experience that localization is never easy and never as easy as you think. Yeah, here's - But maybe it's easy. Well, so here's the argument. So we pursued one really big deal last year in Mexico. and we had support from one of our investors like we should go after Cigar and Great and they had connections to the Mexican government and so we got all the way to the finish line and it was us versus Hickvision Hickvision is a Chinese camera manufacturer arguably a subsidiary of the CCP and we were almost 10 times the price and it came down to like well is the Department of Homeland Security going to subsidize for this for the Mexican government?

51:32Garrett Langley:Because we know their list price is way more than this. It's very clear this is being subsidized for the Mexican government to make this purchase decision, of which case they will most likely be giving away real-time feeds to another government. And we didn't win that deal. And I think that if you look at, there's a great book on this topic, if you look at what China was able to do in Africa with their infrastructure deployments on connectivity. They own those countries. What's the book, Caddy Crass? Okay. I'll find the book. But the book pretty much shows that one of the maybe smartest moves that China did was going to these developing countries and saying, we will give you 5G.

52:18Garrett Langley:Really low cost. We'll bond it for like 100 years. So we're not giving away for free, but guess what now? Chinese government has access to your pipes. And maybe that's not scary for some countries. For me, I'd be a little afraid. And that was our pitch to the Mexican government is like, you don't look at just cost, look at the sovereignty of the data and who has access and look, we'll domicile this data in your country. We won't domicile it in America. And they were like, sorry, it's too expensive. And we've seen that. We've done a couple other projects like that, not just picking on Mexico, but other countries where we're not competitive with China, not because our products aren't better, they're much better, but we're not being subsidized by the federal government.

52:56But presumably, NATO countries, you know, Australia should be better, but I mean, no.

53:04Garrett Langley:I mean, I can, we should go walk around, you know, a strip mall and I could probably point out 80 % of the cameras are Chinese manufactured. And your average would-be business owner is like, yeah, I got it for 15 bucks on Amazon. Yeah. And like, I don't know if you know that story on kind of like the, you know, the vacuum cleaners. Oh, sure, yeah. That someone like hacked into. It's like, you should care about where your data is stored and who's storing it. And that kind of stuff matters to me, but not everyone. That makes sense. As we've learned from Flock Safety, fighting crime is most effective with network data on your side.

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54:15As I think about your competitive landscape in the US and companies that sell to law enforcement, I think about Axon, which people would associate with making the body cameras, but they make lots of and Tasers I think but they make lots of other stuff and then Motorola Solutions which is kind of the radios and like the get up in the cars and things like that. Are you three the main three players? Are there others I should be thinking about and how will this like presumably you guys compete more over time?

54:43Garrett Langley:Yeah. So I remember in 2020 trying to raise our Series B and every investor came to the same conclusion like three strikes you're out. Like strike one you're based in Atlanta. Now, like, post-COVID, that's become my class of a problem. But, you know, strike one, you're in Atlanta. Strike two, you're doing hardware. But that's really bad. Hardware is, like, really expensive. Now it's the only business with terminal value. I would argue that, like, AI is not going to, like, replace cameras or dig holes. Yes, yes. It's like, I mean, a third of our employees dig holes for a living. Like, that's just AI's long ways away from, I think, replacing that.

55:18Garrett Langley:Sorry, what are they digging the holes for? Because, like, most of the time, you want a camera where you don't have any infrastructure. I see. It's like a free-showing post or something. We dig the hole, we trench it, we pour concrete, put our pole up. Okay, so it's on your own pole. I seem to just mount it on an existing pole. I should pull this data. I would not be surprised if I'm the largest general contractor in America. We pulled 77 permits a day last year. And if you've ever built a house, you know how difficult it is to permit something. 77 permits a day. Like crazy scale. Yes. AI's not going to replace that.

55:49Garrett Langley:It's like a very safe asset. But so yeah, So when we were trying to raise that Series B, the third strike was, second strike was hardware, third strike was, and you're trying to sell to the government? The last company to go public was Axon. They went public in 2005, which would have been 15 years prior. And in the VC speak, it's like, well, if you can't get big enough to go public, you're not worth investing in. It's like, well, crap. So luckily, Gary Tan shared my beliefs of like, safety should be a public right. It shouldn't be a privilege. It should be a right if you live in America. So he did our Series B, which is, I think, the only Series B he's ever done.

56:25Garrett Langley:That's awesome. And he was right. And I was right. So it's the three of us now. It's Motorola who's the biggest. They're about a$90 billion market cap. 120 years old. Invented the radio. Still are the, I think they have 80 % market share globally of landmass radio. Just like crazy scale. It's funny how durable some of these businesses, Garmin and other, like you just start doing GPS, you start doing radio and you stay doing radio. Own it. You own it. And to like Motorola's credit, like they've driven a ton of innovation on the radio itself. Similar to Garmin, which you'd thought Garmin would have been crushed.

56:55They've been so creative in creating verticals, aviation and all this stuff. And they built an awesome product.

57:00Garrett Langley:And no one would debate whether Motorola's radios work really well. And when you need them, which would be like a natural disaster, they work especially well. And that's pretty compelling when your job is to respond to natural disasters. So you have Motorola. Every single thing we do, we compete with Motorola. So that's fun. They're big. second one would be Axon you know like I said public in 2005 about a $40 billion market cap where did they come out of like I understand where Motorola came out yeah so Rick Smith's the founder graduated Harvard took a fund from that he plays it off he's a very smart guy graduated Harvard found this Taser company it wasn't called Taser at the time okay so they started with Tasers yeah found that found those kind of the IP the product and then tried to commercialize it And if you love a good founding story, it's a good one where, you know, almost went out of business.

57:55Garrett Langley:His, like, dad mortgaged the house. He mortgaged the house. Went public because they couldn't finance it. I think they went out at, like, a$50 million market cap. This is, like, when people went public, you know, much earlier. And just has done a really good job of growing the business in the public markets. And Taser is a brand. It's like Keenex. They own, so they started as Taser. started at Taser and rebranded to Axon in 2012 or 2015. Yeah. And got into body cams via acquisition. So they bought a company that had just won the contract in the New York, for the New York Police Department to do body cams.

58:30Garrett Langley:So bought that. They have a dash camera and they'd recently launched a competitive product with me. So now we compete. Everything we do, we compete with Axon too. It's fun. So it's just a Mexican standoff. Ironically. Every single city. Every single city. And there was interesting because your question was also in the future, there's this really interesting phenomena happening now where because Flock's been somewhat successful, VCs have like poured in. And when I used to call a police department seven years ago. Now you have a bunch of competitors. No one would know. You could literally just walk into a police department and be like, I'm going to meet the chief.

59:06Garrett Langley:That's great. Now chiefs are like, great, 17 different people calling me for the exact same partner. They don't compete with us, thankfully. But like you think about, Take like, trying to deploy AI to monitor body cam footage. There's seven different companies with VC backing doing that. There's not, it's not a big enough market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think, you know, your annual report was great, by the way. Y 'all are at what, 1 % of GDP or something probably? Okay. I'm in, I'm in 60 to 70 % of the cities that matter. Yes, yes. There's just not enough space for seven competitors. It won't, the market's not big enough and we're not creating new cities.

59:42Garrett Langley:There's new businesses created every single day. I think you tend to see structurally in these smaller I mean it's a large market in total but where there's a finite universe of buyers the distributional advantages are very powerful and I think so and so I think what we'll see is you know I see a new VC backed company every day and I'm like there's just all these things are going to be a business so they're just going to be consolidation and so you see you know I think Motorola has done 40 acquisitions in the last two years Axon did five last year. We did one last year. I just think you're going to see a ton of consolidation.

1:00:18Garrett Langley:Because once someone builds a good product, you go, great, I already have a Salesforce, I have the customer base. We'll just pick you up. So I had no idea about the, you know, you're talking about where the tech goes. I had no idea about two things, actually, I learned here. One is that you're doing real-time analysis of 911 calls. And so is that, I mean, is that being fed to an LLM, basically? Or like 911 calls now scored by an LLM? So the way I think about it is we are trying to build an orchestration layer for a city's safety. The majority of police departments are understaffed. I think the worst I've heard recently, I was at a higher ed, so a college campus, a large college campus, you know, a football school.

1:01:00Garrett Langley:They're at 40 % of staffing. Could you imagine if like tomorrow you woke up and Stripe had 40 % staffed? Yeah, it'd be tough. You would like figure it out. Yeah. But a lot of things that you would deem core today would just stop. Yes, yes. And so that's how most of our customers operate, which is not sustainable. Yes. And so we view our job as like being that force multiplier, or I like to think about this orchestration layer where every manual thing that's done by a human should be automated. Now, the difference in public safety versus maybe payments is like, I think you want humans at the start and finish still.

1:01:34It's like if I call 911, still kind of want a person to pick up.

1:01:38Garrett Langley:And those dispatchers are incredibly well-trained. They're very well-trained. They're very calm. Now, where I think it gets valuable is like, but let's say there's a mass event. AI is way better because if you have a surge of demand and you go from only one call a minute to 10 calls a minute, AI is better than a busy tone. And that makes sense. And then I think about, for us, we call it amplified intelligence. When that 911 call comes in, LLM is able to pick up the call, is able to determine, what are the characteristics? Can I go sort of build an investigation? Can I go pull this up so that if you're a detective, whereas historically you walk in, you're like, all right, I'm going to go get the call transcript.

1:02:12Garrett Langley:I'm going to go look up my record system. I'm going to go do a bunch of analysis. It's the equivalent of having, you know, whether you use something like a Glean or another product that's like, you're going to do a lot of the hard work so that as a sales rep, you show up and you're like, got it. Yeah. And so we do that for investigators so they show up to they get delivered a case and a lot of the busy work has been done for them so they can use the human part of their job I'm getting all the data that needs this all the different data like let's go do this like we solved one of the cooler cases we've solved was a armored you know like armored trucks like brinks they move money around was one of the best it's called like a jugging case it's very popular in Texas where you like you follow these armored trucks and you typically have like a shooter on a nearby building and when the person walks out, the shooter shoots him, the other guy runs in, grabs all the money and runs away.

1:03:00Garrett Langley:It's like a very, it's obviously sad, but it's a very, very profitable thing. So we built an agent that tracks armored cars. And so at all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's an armored truck. If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically. Now, it's not illegal. Yeah, yeah, sure. Right? But it is enough that if you're a city like Houston who has a jugging problem, you want to get a subscription to like, you let me know whenever you see someone doing that because I want to know. Yeah. I want to get a step ahead. Yes. So there's always types of like crimes that you can sort of say, okay, this is helping officers not do something new.

1:03:36Garrett Langley:It is just doing things that when you're at 50%, 40 % staffing, sure, 100 % you'd have been doing this yourself. You'd be checking the cars, you'd be in flock, you'd be running searches, but you can't do that anymore. Yeah, what you're describing is again, having this data to be able to do anomaly detection just allows for a new kind of police work that otherwise just wouldn't have gotten done. No, it's like people's lives, you know? And then the other thing I hadn't realized you guys were doing is the drone assistance where, again, this sounds to me like, you know, obviously already it's the case that, you know, many police departments have a helicopter and then for very serious crimes, you know, they will task it.

1:04:17But that's expensive, very limited resource. And so I think what you're doing is allowing for some manner of air support to just be much more cost effective and available to more officers.

1:04:28Garrett Langley:That's right, yeah. I mean, I think it's another example where there's just a lot of tasks we ask law enforcement officers to conduct that a drone could do faster, more effectively, and cheaper. Yes. And so if it's, you know, calling out a hit and run, great, send the drone. I was working with a town in Tennessee. It's a pretty good city. Their average response time to 911 calls seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. Which is like a better quality of service. Like in the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer. Like it's just, it's really nice when you see technology deliver both, like a 10X better product at a dramatically lower cost.

1:05:11Yeah.

1:05:12Garrett Langley:That's how it's supposed to work and it's working for them. What kind of task or intervention are the drones best suited for? I mean, the two most, there's three primary use cases. The first would be vehicular pursuits. So one of the most dangerous things cities conduct is high-speed pursuits. Typically, it's not the suspect that dies. It's some random person. So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they end pursuits. They don't pursue anymore. Send the drone. Oh, wow. Just send the drone. Yeah, yeah. Way better. Yeah, yeah. It's way safer. So you don't have like a police car running at 80 miles an hour down a residential street.

1:05:49Garrett Langley:No, you just have a drone four feet up in the air, quietly, safely, waiting for the car to pull into a gas station, pulled into their home, pull in somewhere safe, get to a red light. And then meanwhile, that video feed's being broadcasted to the entire police department. It's like, great, John's over here. Block him in. It's, you know, every pursuit goes to GTA level five immediately. Yeah, if you're smart. So that's a big one. The second is 911 calls. And so what's been interesting is that, you know, we'll send the drone first. Take someone like Elk Grove up in Northern California. They've got a bunch of our drones flying the 911 calls.

1:06:25Garrett Langley:So where's Elk Grove? Elk Grove? It's a suburb of Sacramento. Oh, okay. But maybe 75 ,000 people. So I say suburb, it's like a pretty big town. But so like they'll dispatch for 911. Majority of the calls actually never need a human to show up. and the example I'd give you is like you see a fist fight so you call 911 and then what happens is historically like seven minutes later someone shows up guess what? They're no longer fighting but now we've dispatched this officer he's like well I'm in the area maybe I'll grab a Gatorade walk around check it out 30 minutes later like we've wasted a bunch of time you send the drone in best case you see the guys fighting and you're like great I'm going to keep an eye on them and like and allow the officer to do his job or if there's never there's not a fight anymore you dismiss the call And so you actually decrease the response time for situations you really do need to go to by removing the junk in the system.

1:07:18Garrett Langley:So there's the second one. And the third one is search and rescues. Not every city has a helicopter. Cities that do is a very expensive proposition. And so sadly, people go missing all the time. And you can pop up the drone, throw in thermals, usually it's at night, and you find the person. Actually, I hadn't thought of that, but drone plus thermal camera is very transformative for us here. We had an interesting case in a cold state right now. He's flying our drone. There was a... Sorry, a lot of my cases involve homicides. I'm going to find a better topic than homicides at some point. I have a better topic in a second.

1:08:00Okay, great.

1:08:01Garrett Langley:So there's this 911 car on the side of the street. launch the drone, throw in thermals, actually see where the person went. Like sensitive enough to see like the heat pattern, like there's like there's snow. Want to find the guy, want to find himself and everything. But it's interesting, like to your point, I think we're still very early on in the use case exploration. Yeah. And I think it's this type of technology that until it's fully proliferated, which give it two or three more years, I think we'll continue to find more like ways to augment how we respond. Because I think I guess the last example I'll give you is we typically launch the drone for all first responders.

1:08:40Garrett Langley:It's not just law enforcement. It's fire. It's EMS. Like the whole community gets advantage of it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. My fun example, because I agree a lot of the, you know, crimes are quite heavy topics. Yeah. So I feel like one of the most satisfying genres of YouTube video to watch is people who laser aircraft, but they are mistakenly lasering a police helicopter. So this is insane crime that happens. Wait, why do they do that? Okay. So there's this insane crime that happens. Isn't that bad? It's like very dangerous. It's very bad. It's very dangerous. Yeah. But like bored people, to your point of just maybe people going mad during COVID and being cooped up, people just for fun, laser aircraft.

1:09:17It's very dangerous. Like it's dangerous for anyone's eyes shining a laser into them. But like a pilot who is flying a plane full of people at that moment, it's especially bad. But it's a real problem that happened. You listen to like ATC recordings all the time, like airliner going into LAX, you know, getting lasered by someone on the ground. And so people buy these lasers on Amazon. Yeah. They're like, they're like very powerful lasers. Exactly. They're very powerful. and they're just lasering the cockpits of aircraft. But occasionally what happens is they're lasering an aircraft, but it turns out that aircraft is the police helicopter.

1:09:43They're just like, gotcha. And they got the thermal and they're just like, and so you get to watch the whole thing unfold. There's a bunch of these on YouTube where you'd like see the squad cars coming up. I'll check that out. But it's such an odd crime. And yeah, it's very satisfying to see them caught in real time.

1:09:59Garrett Langley:Yes. That's a really weird thing. The other thing too, because I know you like aviation stuff. we're seeing more and more police helicopters have to turn off ADS-B as well. Because criminals have the same data that you have. Most of the police helicopters actually fly without ADS-B now. Which is like a whole challenge. Sure, from a separation point of view. Okay, I have so many more things to go into. I'm kind of jumping around, but I like this. How has the business evolved? So you're now, you said, around 500 million and ARR selling to both law enforcement agencies and corporates. Just have there been interesting changes in how you monetize?

1:10:41Is it just a question of scaling up? Yeah, I mean, I'd say the biggest challenge is,

1:10:48Garrett Langley:you know, two, three years ago, we were single product, single customer. Like we had our neighborhood business. It was growing 20, 30 % year over year, but it was kind of operating. And law enforcement was going really, really fast. We had one product. and then maybe made a mistake. I know RJ from Rivian was here. Someone told me, probably built too many products for too many customers really quickly. And in hardware, that's really expensive. Hardware tends to follow this J-curve of like huge CapEx investment up front to get the thing going and then you monetize and it actually winds up being...

1:11:22And there's very significant scale economies

1:11:23Garrett Langley:as very high orders of magnitude. Yes. And so, you know, we went from one camera that tracks cars to a camera that's focused for people, a drone, this trailer, multiple customer segments. And that's really hard. So looking back on it, you think you went too broad too quickly. Yeah. I would have better... So did you discontinue products and stuff? No, we just muscled through it. Still muscling through it. But you slowed down the race of adding products. We were like, we cannot do any new hardware products this year. Like we need to take a year or two off of hardware products. We can debate software products because there's no incremental burn or cash outlay for it.

1:12:06Garrett Langley:But we know what the J-curve looks like. Like we saw it in the core business. And like the core business now is profitable, which is great. Like we'll generate free cash flow, hundreds of millions of dollars of operating cash flow this year. But like those new businesses are effectively like flocked five years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we know how painful that is, but we were just like, oh, it'll be great, it'll be fine. And so I think that's been challenging for us is how do you balance from a product roadmap servicing two customers with just very different use cases. Like your average Amazon distribution facility is, you know, 30 acres, 50 acres.

1:12:41Garrett Langley:That's like a neighborhood block. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you've got like a San Francisco that's got hundreds of square miles. It's the problems are different. So that is probably like the hardest thing that we're still trying to muscle through that. And like, how do you organize your company to service these two different customers without having redundancies? Haven't figured that out. What have you learned? Other than don't make too many products, what have you learned by building hardware? Or what have you learned about building hardware? Yeah, I think the, I mean, there's a couple of things that I would jump to.

1:13:15Garrett Langley:The first would be, I don't know how you guys think about forecasting demand. It's a full-time profession at Flock. Sure. And it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out. Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the like hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where they fail. Yeah. No, we ended up with it. I mean, our hardware business is a very small part of our overall business, but we wildly overproduced at one point. And just sitting in a warehouse like there's all my money. Exactly. Sitting in a warehouse. Sitting around. Now, luckily, it's not, you know, it's not going to go bad. It's not like bananas.

1:13:45Garrett Langley:It's like, oh gosh, we have like a week to move this product. Yes. But it kind of goes bad. But it does go bad at some point. And I think like, you know, I remember during YC many, many, many years ago talking to Eric, at Pebble of how it was like the irony that in the best year ever of the company in terms of revenue is the year they went out of business. And like, that's crazy. But they just, they overproduced in Q4 even though it was still a record quarter it just still wasn't enough. So I think like that has been amplified by also our distribution process like which we're full first party.

1:14:23Garrett Langley:So we not only design the stuff, build the stuff, we install the stuff. And so I have to have forecasting. Maintain us, presumably. Maintain it as well. So I have to have forecasting not just at the product level, but at the geographic level byproduct with some level of discrepancy. I don't need to know this city for that city, but at least the general area. So I think forecasting, that's been pretty hard. And the second is, every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimal and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of like, everything's a two-way door.

1:14:57Garrett Langley:Yeah. Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door. Yeah. You want to pick that part? Yeah, yeah. One-way door. We're going to live with it for the next five, ten years. Yeah, and like, I don't know, you probably don't track this as much, but probably the dumbest financial mistake I've made in the last year is our supply chain team came to us like six months ago and they were like, solid state memory is getting really expensive. And like, we had this one part that was in our cameras and the price had gone up 4x in near time, which indicates that typically one much, much larger company placed a massive order.

1:15:31Garrett Langley:And so we've seen this time and time again where an Apple or a Sony or some consumer or Samsung will pick a part for a new product that's coming out in 12 months and the supply globally disappears. Okay, so you're feeling the AI data center build out in your supply chain. Yes, and so our supply chain leader was like, this is getting crazy. And I was like, well, who do we use? And I go, use Santisk. And so I'm looking at their stock and I'm like, oh, should we be buying Santisk? I was talking to my CFO, I was like, should we be buying Santisk stock? I was like, their prices are going, When we're up 3x, it means that a lot of people are buying a lot of products.

1:15:58Garrett Langley:Now, of course, the stock's up like 1 ,200%. And I feel like an idiot for not following that conviction. But no, yeah, I mean, our bomb, now luckily it's a small part of our bomb. But we have a full team of people who all they do is mitigate global supply chain risk. Because parts just disappear. Okay, so just getting the products into the hands of customers as already specced is non-trivial. So what we wind up doing, which I think a lot of companies do, I'm not sure if we're special, but it's just like, you don't think about this, is, you know, when we look at a bomb of a product, we'll risk purchase, not necessarily the whole thing, but the cheapest, highest risk things.

1:16:35Garrett Langley:Like, we should have bought, and we did, we bought a ton of memory so that we didn't run out because we can't. But I would have thought, you know, often these supply chain crunches come on the leading edge where, you know, everyone's fighting over TSMC, you know, three nanometer node production capability, but the auto chips as much larger gate sizes are not, or larger nodes are not as contended. And I would have thought that you guys are not using tippity top end cameras and lenses and memories and things like that. But that's not a panacea? It's like capacitors. And the point I give you is let's say we ship 100 ,000 units.

1:17:22Garrett Langley:That's tiny. And so all it takes is, you know, if we need this capacitor from Texas Instruments, all it takes is Apple saying, well, the iPhone 27 is going to have that capacitor. And Apple's like, cool, we'll buy everything for the next three years. And then we go, oh, crap, we've got to completely change that capacitor. But I'm just surprised you're competing with Apple for components. Like, I would have thought their capacitors and your capacitors. Everything, I mean, well, capacitor is a capacitor. But so to actually know the capacitor you want, you have to have a supply chain to buy it, you have to have enough inventory with enough leave time, And so what you wind up doing is early on, your designs are very simple.

1:17:58Garrett Langley:You buy everything from out of fruit. You buy everything from easy places where you can buy 50 at a time. And when you move to tens of thousands at a time, you start having to have designs that have four different derivatives for every part so that your supply chain doesn't have to call engineering being like, this part's out. They know these parts are all sub-ins. You're describing the scale of dis-economies of manufacturing where it's easier to buy three of something than it is to buy 30 ,000 of us. 100%. And I never would have thought we would need like a team of people who all they do is spend money for a living.

1:18:27Just buy stuff. What's hard about operating the hardware? Like how do you keep the lenses clean on the cameras? And just how do you, I don't know.

1:18:34Garrett Langley:It's like on the one hand, you know, we're some of the best weather forecasters. You know, it's like we keep track of every major storm. Yes. It's like a storm, like we need to be back up. So we do, like we have a pretty cool, we call it our flight team. And there are technicians that only fly. It's like that big storm in New York and Boston. They were flying in to the storm. We had surge demand to fix stuff. To be on site when they get a call that something is down, go repair it. Yeah, so everything's, we have really good telemetry on the equipment. So if a customer calls, something's gone. Like we've really screwed up.

1:19:10Garrett Langley:Yeah, you know before the customer knows. We know before the customer knows. And most of the maintenance at this point is fairly predictive. Like we know this mechanical part malfunctions after between 100 ,000 and 200 ,000 uses. So like if you're in the area, it's ironic that the largest cost structure in replacing equipment is the driving. Yeah, yeah. It's driving. And so like if we think a part that needs a replacement in six months and we're nearby, it's cheaper just to replace it, refurb it, and get it back in the field. So that part's been like, like we had to build a software company, a hardware company, and a field services business.

1:19:43Do you have parts that wear out? I would have thought the whole thing is fairly solid state. We, most of it's,

1:19:48Garrett Langley:well, drones obviously buy. Sure, different kettle of fish. But on the camera side, there's one part, which is the IR cut filter. So when we operate at night, we operate on infrared. And you need a different filter so that you don't have pink images during the day. So that literally changes twice a day. Oh, like something mechanically... Put a lens over it. I see. And after a couple of thousand uses... That is the one moving part. And it is the only part that breaks. Why not just have two lenses? With two different image sensors too? Yeah. Bomb. Okay. No good, like, no good reason. Okay. Other than it would just be more expensive.

1:20:26Yeah.

1:20:27Garrett Langley:But yeah, that part's like, I think a third of the company, like I said, digs holes, drives bucket trucks. Yeah, sure. Keeps track of all the kind of inventory. But if you look at it, you know, I didn't want to build that business. Yes. But early on in the company, there was this horrific case in Atlanta where a woman was just running in our version of Mission Dolores or pick your nice park in the city, random act of violence. There's cameras everywhere in the park. Yep. None of them are working. And the city got blasted appropriately for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're like, but also, do you really want our police department being in charge of camera uptime?

1:21:05Garrett Langley:Yeah, yeah. That's a dumb idea. Yeah. We should pay a company, i.e. flock in this case, to just make sure the stuff always works. Yes. So it's not my favorite part of the business in that sense of it's a lot of stress It's very operationally intense, but I think it's valuable to our customers. Yeah. How do you think about the right, in terms of cameras in the park, you know, many movies center on this idea of universal surveillance, you know, in the Borne Entity or something. You know, they have cameras on absolutely everything, or I guess the, or in supremacy, I think is more the Waterloo station scene.

1:21:41and same with lots of other things. Just how do you create the right guardrails once you move off roads and into parks and public spaces and kind of creating access controls around that?

1:21:54Garrett Langley:Yeah. The cop-out answer is like, I don't want to be in charge of deciding that. Thankfully, we have elected officials who we vote to make that decision. But what do you think a sensible place for them to land is? I think it's way higher than we have now. I think that for me at least for every crime that occurs that doesn't get solved means we didn't have enough cameras that's to me the easiest rubric now I think to your question though it's a question of where they are who has access to them and I think it's one of the few cases where the disparity between maybe my knowledge and your knowledge of how the technology works and how a lot of official works, it's pretty big.

1:22:42Garrett Langley:And like their dreams of how it might work versus actually how it works. Like it's much less sophisticated than they think or dream up. It's just a camera. So for me, at least, we should have an abundance of cameras and have an incredibly restrictive controls of how and when they're used. And the example I'd give you is like today, everything in Flock you can generally do. There's data retention where we protect how long something is stored. So for live video, it's typically seven days. For LPR data, it's typically 30 days. You can go longer or shorter if a democratically elected body votes on it.

1:23:15But like,

1:23:16Garrett Langley:I would challenge why not do more cameras and have a warrant restriction? Like, why not do 30 days of LPR data but if you have a warrant, you have a year. You need less cameras. And so, I do think there are some nuanced ways to do it and, you know, thankfully, we have a really good government affairs team that is lobbying for that kind of legislation to say like, there's a way for us to both be safe and maintain civil liberties and it needs to be legislated though. Yes. Like, I can't, those ideas are not in line with what my customers want. Mm-hmm. They want law enforcement customers. They just want to go catch bad guys.

1:23:56Garrett Langley:They want to follow the Constitution. Yeah. Catch bad guys. But that nuance in the middle of like, but what is societally acceptable today really belongs in your elected officials to make that decision so that it can change. And so we pushed them to be like, let's legislate this now before it becomes a problem. Where do you think has passed sensible rules? Sensible. I think Virginia's bill last year was pretty good. It defined, it did a few things well. And one thing I don't agree with. What it did well is it defined a modest data retention period of 21 days. I think that's fine. I like 30, but tomato, tomato, it's fine.

1:24:37Garrett Langley:It wasn't, I think the ACLU was lobbying for three minutes. It's a little tough. It's hard to swallow. I think, you know, seven, 14, 20 something days is like enough. There's a trade-off there. They mandated formal auditing, which I think is great. Not enough of our customers audit themselves on a regular basis. We can build software to make that easier, but we need to be pushed to do that. It was like, customers don't want it. They need to be told to do it. So I think that was good. It also validated that this could only be used for criminal investigations, which I think is really good. While that's obvious, it's helpful to write it in law.

1:25:13Garrett Langley:I think the only thing that I disagree with is they did say, you know, effectively, there's no participation with the federal government. I think that's just, it's their choice. I think it's their choice. And that's the beauty of the country, is like Virginia should do what feels right for Virginia. but I worry about the types of cases that you don't want to read about on the news that tend to get solved by the U.S. Marshals the DEA the ATF the FBI and like they can't use our technology in Virginia which is like I said I live in Georgia so thankfully it doesn't really impact me but as a business I'm like I don't know if that's right but I'm more than anything just happy they passed some legislation New Mexico passed a similar bill this year California has a similar-ish bill I think a couple other states have, I think the worst type of bill is actually not, you know, whether it's 14 days or 30 days of intervention.

1:26:08To me, the worst bill is an unenforceable bill.

1:26:13Garrett Langley:So you can imagine a bill that's like, this product cannot be used for possession of marijuana. Like, who's going to enforce it? It's like, you might believe that. And that's great. But someone has to enforce this. And actually what's going to happen is no one's going to enforce it now. And that's, I think, like really bad law in those cases. Yeah. That makes sense. I'm curious what your view is on police department procurement. What do they do? What do they buy not enough of? What do they buy too much of? They don't feel like they're swimming in, you know, procurement dollars. But yeah, I'm curious.

1:26:57Yeah.

1:26:57Garrett Langley:I mean, the thing they buy too much of is, and not to pick on Motorola, things that only matter in the 0.001 % case. So it's like, guys, why don't you just use like cell phones? Like, well, in Nashville, what is that? And it's like, got it, okay. Like how often, so you look at like a landmass radio contract and it's going to cost someone like San Francisco County, you know,$200 million. I mean, like, it's like. You're talking about that kind of money? On a TCV basis, oh, yeah. Wow. I mean, I think Murdoch's a really big company. Sure. Yeah. That's how. Yeah, you don't get there. And you go, well, I get it.

1:27:38Garrett Langley:Like, if there's an earthquake and every single cell tower goes down, law enforcement definitely needs a way to communicate. Man, is that really the only way? Yeah. Like, could you guys just, like, have your own tower? There's got to be something. But you look into it. Is this a your margin is my opportunity situation for you guys at radio? Maybe because law enforcement's unique in this case in which they really also like that they own the infrastructure. They own that bandwidth. And so they can do whatever they want with it. I don't think they do anything interesting with it, but they can. Versus if they're riding on Verizon or AT &T, they have no control over that.

1:28:13Garrett Langley:But why don't you guys just have the exact same products? And have a good show. Radio in the spectrum. We probably should. But we got a lot of things. That's my, you know, like a VC in the board meeting. Yeah, it's like, hey, you should go to an$80 billion company that's been in business for 130 years. I mean, I guess you did it in payments and it worked out pretty well. But yeah, so I think like that part I think is really kind of crazy. At least like in the business world, I feel like I buy for my majority case and I deal with the ramifications of the edge case or build around it and they do that.

1:28:42Garrett Langley:I think procurement is exceptionally slow and exceptionally laborious. Everything goes to RFP. But the RFP is written for one vendor. So all it does is wind up taking an extra year, six months. That's like, that's, I get why RFPs exist. Yeah. But they're not actually RFPs. I've never seen an RFP that's not written for one vendor. I'm sure it exists somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. But what I think they do well is like one of the things that I think the government did figure out is maybe you need to have an RFP for a$200 million contract. What about a$10 ,000 contract?

1:29:17Great.

1:29:18Garrett Langley:So they do have spend levels where, you know, if you're like a police chief, you can go spend$25 ,000 or$50 ,000 and like not have to go through the entire process. But, you know, it's tough. Like, it's, I would not wish upon anyone selling to local government. It's more negative than positive, in a lot of ways. Yeah, and again, that procurement process has evolved for a reason, you know, and to protect against certain other failure modes. But yeah. Well, I mean, you think about it in business and like, I know you. We use Stripe. I'm sure you have like six competitors. I don't know. But like, I know you.

1:29:51Garrett Langley:Someone shouldn't like buy Stripe. None of the business world is considered very normal. Yeah. In the government world, that is called illegal. Yeah. Which is really, it's really interesting. Yeah. But again, it's evolved for a reason. The rules are written in blood. Well, no, and then like, you have plenty of cases where it's, you know, it's gone sideways. Yeah. But it is just interesting to be dynamic. Like for so many things that we take for granted as normal business practice are definitively illegal when procuring with government. How do you guys use Strap? I mean, a lot of our customers, a lot of our private sector customers pay others via credit card or check.

1:30:25Garrett Langley:Ah, okay. With a lot of checks. Okay, so for the public sector stuff, that'll generally be via a torturous, you know, RFP process and PO and something like that. But if you're a private sector... And then, but even, I mean, we don't want to be in the check deposit business. Sure. And you guys... So you Stripe for the check functionality because no one knows about our check functionality that Stripe can accept checks for you. Am I allowed to talk about it? No, no, no. Like, I'm sorry. No one knows because we're bad at marketing. Oh, I was just like, oh. Not because it's a secret. No, yeah, no. It's like, we don't want to be in that business.

1:30:56Garrett Langley:Yes. It's because it's a remote deposit box, whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's great. We can give you an address that you can give to your customers and they can mail checks to it and we will turn it into digital money. And the fact that a bunch of atoms and an envelope going through the postal system were involved, you can forget about those details. Not a single customer of ours pays via ACH to either check or credit card. And we do a lot of checks. I'd probably say 80%, 90 % of checks, maybe higher. You're one of the few tech companies to mostly use Stripe for checks. It's, you know, trying to buck the trend every day of the week.

1:31:30Yeah, that's really funny. I love that. You were talking about police departments maybe being over-fixated on kind of the 0.1 % cases. Does that apply to, you know, a common critique that you hear of police department procurement is the sort of militarization of police departments and what we really need is a bear cast for this town of 20 ,000 people, which is like an armored personnel carrier. Oh, yeah, and it's like a$3 million vehicle

1:31:57Garrett Langley:and it's like, why couldn't we just get an F-150? So do you think that applies also to the shiny stuff? Oh, yeah. I mean, you look at early on when we were building the company, we'd get the question of like, can your license plate reader work on a car going 175 miles an hour? And I was like, probably not. I've never driven that fast. I'd have to rent a runway to go test this. they're like it's really important I'm like really? like how often does it happen? they're like in a high speed pursuit people drive very fast and I'm like in a high speed pursuit you know who they are like we were criticized and had to build a product until we got to like 120, 150 it was a major blocker to sales really?

1:32:38huh

1:32:39Garrett Langley:I mean it's like we built a camera that I mean we tested it on roads that we drove on so we'd get up to like 80 or 90 and it worked fine but we had to eventually we rented an amateur racing track and just drove around in circles at 120 miles. We emailed the employees and were like, who owns a car that goes really fast? And that was actually kind of funny because a lot of people were like, what cars do you use to test this? There's some fast cars. Put it in Teslas, Rivians, some other nicer cars. They drive really fast. And that was a fun day because we put the cameras up and do it. And did the cameras work out of the box or did you have to tune the performance?

1:33:15Okay, so it just worked.

1:33:16Garrett Langley:They're the only place where we had to make one modification which is kind of interesting we deploy our radar so on really busy roads where our angle of incident is particularly tight I like we can't shoot super far down we can't shoot at a sharp angle we have a radar attachment that we tilt backwards to notify like the cars on the way like get ready which helps but that's like a very like far edge case because the camera doesn't actually prime the camera essentially yes to get ready for a car coming huh I'm sorry because the camera is offline. Oh. Unless there's a vehicle. I see. So you booted up.

1:33:51And that's a power saving measure?

1:33:54Garrett Langley:Yeah. Okay. The most expensive thing we do is like take a picture. Yeah. The second most expensive thing we do is send stuff to the cloud. Third is just like being a computer turned on. Yeah. And so it's similar to your iPhone, you know, turning your screen off. Ah, okay. So we added the button, you know, to take a photo right away. The continuously running radar is very low power? It's negligible. I see. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that was a fun one. We were talking about hardware previously, but what's building your own drones been like? A lot of fun. Sounds fun. No, it's fun, but it's like, you know, I have kids.

1:34:30Garrett Langley:I know you have a kid. It's like really fun to build a product that your kids understand. It's like we drive around Atlanta and my son will count the cameras from like home to school, you know, or we're going to like the airport or we'll go like to the park. And like, I love that he can actually like understand what dad does. Yes. I'm not sure if you've taught your son like how to use a console. I'm screwed on this actually. Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, I got, yeah. We process the world's payments. And so when you show him a drone, he's like, oh, this is so cool. He has like a little miniature drone.

1:35:04Garrett Langley:Also, you don't only do drones, but you do drones to catch bad guys. Yeah, yeah. It's like very compelling. From a very early age. Yeah, to be clear, he'll watch Paw Patrol and be like, that's what dad builds. Like, that's the helicopter. We don't put any people in it. But I think what's been fun is we made a hypothesis that, you know, if you studied planes, I think the most interesting plane, military-wise, is the Warthog. Whereas traditionally, you built a plane. You built one thing. Yeah, like, what kind of missiles can we add? And they were like, no, no, let's design the best missile. It's very precise, very big.

1:35:38Garrett Langley:And then we'll figure out how to fly it. And so our thesis was, well, we're really good at cameras. A drone is really just a camera that flies. let's build the best payload and then figure out how to fly it. And so if I showed you, I could show you the payload the next time you're in Atlanta or we could fly one out here. It's like the coolest camera ever. It's huge. It's like this big. And it's got four different, four different image sensors, maybe six different optical lenses. Like we can zoom, we can read a license plate almost a mile away. Like crazy specs, great thermal. Then we're going to get it to fly.

1:36:12Garrett Langley:So like, I don't know, I was an electrical engineer. One of my co-founders was a mechanical engineer. It's fun to build things that fly. So it's like, we have a payload, we have this airframes, we have aeronautical engineers now. Like it's been fun to grow the engineering team. An imaging team, you think about the dock that it lives in, it's effectively a commercial grade HVAC system. Like the drone lands, it needs to be cold, it needs to be hot. It has to charge. If you know anything about lithium ion, lithium ion doesn't like to be too hot or too cold. So you got to keep that well conditioned.

1:36:38Garrett Langley:It's like a huge compressor. It's this massive thing that opens and closes. And if it's snowing, if it's frozen, like all of these engineering problems. and that's like that's the fun part of this stuff everything else is you know selling is good but like building stuff's fun how many drones do you have out there in the world? we don't we don't but decent number yeah it's hundreds of cities that are flying are flying drones it's funny when you talk about the A-10 Warthog you're reminding me of the the Boyd book which by Robert Coram which I only read recently but it's like one of those kind of Silicon Valley canon and everyone talks about and everyone talks about him in the context of his OODA loop, you know, orient something, decide, act.

1:37:22But I think that's actually kind of overrated. And actually, the main reason Boyd is interesting is helping the Pentagon procure better planes. I'm just reminded of that with the Warthog and also, you know, your description of needing to run at 170 miles an hour, because basically he came into a Pentagon that had a bunch of bad planes because all the generals were just obsessed with specs. and they wanted, you know, a high top speed and like they really judged planes on specs. And actually, you know, the fighter pilot joke is that there are only two throttle settings in a dogfight, you know, maximum full military power or throttles idle.

1:37:59Like those are the only two energy states that you're in. And what matters is maneuverability and the ability to add energy or lose energy quickly. So anyway, he was involved in basically all of the good planes that were produced, including the A-10 Warthog, because he got them out of the mindset of just kind of speeds and feeds.

1:38:15Garrett Langley:Well, and that's like for us, the spec we track is like time on scene. Yeah. And so one of the reasons why we care so much about the payload is like if you have a payload that can see really far away, you don't have to fly there. So actually you get there faster virtually. Yeah, yeah. Which is what like, if this was a drone that was carrying a payload like a zip line or something else, like actually physically in there matters. But for us, it's just about time on virtual scene. Yes. So that's what we measure ourselves to. So that's why we fly high because like physics allows you to see farther.

1:38:42Garrett Langley:That's why we have this huge payload so you don't have to actually fly there and then you don't have to fly as fast which means you can conserve battery life which means you're in the air longer. Like all these designs were around that use case versus like, you know, I'm sure ZipLine went through a whole separate use case of like what's the max payload and all that kind of stuff. How many drones does a city the size of San Francisco need? Twelve. Okay. So it's a very small number. No, our average drone can cover a 30 square mile radius and get there within under a minute. and thankfully you know knock on wood like there actually aren't that many 911 calls that merit a response so we look at it both ways we look at it in terms of geography and then 911 density so in you know more rural parts you need less drones because there's less call for service and then in more dense urban areas you need more drones mostly from a volume of service but even in our most dense customers like it's pretty rare that they fly two drones at once it happens but it's like I think our busiest drone is being flown, you know, 90 hours a week.

1:39:42Garrett Langley:That's a lot of flight time. And sorry, do you dispatch the drone when it's needed from its charging dock? Or is the idea that it's out there flying already and you just task it? Yeah, there's like, it lives in the dock. There is some, there's debate of whether a drone should be in the air at all times. Does that actually save you meaningful time? Being in the air? Yeah. I would save a lot of time. Oh, really? Yeah, but like you look at the Carpenter case in Baltimore and they had a airplane with a very powerful camera 24 hours a day and that was deemed like a unwarranted search. And so it got killed.

1:40:17Garrett Langley:And so we're very conscious. Like we have a other part of our business that is interesting now at scale. It's like we have a full team of constitutional attorneys. And I'm sure you have like a regulatory team that when you want to build something, they're like, let's check it before we ship. Yes. We have a constitutional team. It's like, cool idea. Let's actually make sure this doesn't violate the Constitution. Let's just look up the Fourth Amendment here real quick. Yeah, let's just like double check this thing. and so when you look at the drone like we believe and this hasn't been tested in court but these are smart people they're like look we just it's unclear how that would end in court but if you call 911 there is a reason to fly the drone if there is a gunshot if there is a gunshot detection if there is a stolen car like that is a reason to dispatch versus just like flying around looking for stuff it's not it's not unconstitutional but we would not push that as a use case I'm sorry like a lot of this precedent, you know, as new technologies come along, you know, people reason by analogy of like, you know, cars, somewhat like your house, but somewhat different, you know, whatever.

1:41:16Like, isn't a drone flying around just like a police cruiser on its patrol?

1:41:22Garrett Langley:So the, and I'm not an attorney. Neither am I. Never stopped me yet. The other analogy would be the butterfly effect, which is like, when things are much, much cheaper and much, much easier, historical precedent gets thrown away. And so, take the helicopter example. You could say, oh, well, helicopters fly sometimes. Yeah, but helicopters are so expensive. It's not practical to have 24-7, you know, aerial coverage. With a drone, it's not impractical. It's the same reason why, like, when we launch our drone, we want to go from, like, the launch location to the end location. The cameras point at the horizon the whole time.

1:41:57Garrett Langley:We don't want to look in your backyard. That's like, we feel really strong. And that's not a law. That's just, like, our point of view of where the law should be. Yes, yes. So we'll build a product for that. Got it. And then look, if the operator wants to tilt down, that's their control. But as a default, we're fine. That's very interesting. Last question, you know, so you guys have grown with cameras out there in cities, now getting into drones, building the software OS to help law enforcement agencies and others kind of synthesize all the information they have. Just what comes next? What future product ideas are you playing with?

1:42:31Where do you want to go?

1:42:32Garrett Langley:So if I think about it, we talked about this earlier failure for flock is prison population goes up it's actually like really bad and we look at the products today are very much focused in the middle of a crime, a crime has already happened and therefore we should solve it and that's really good and I think we're definitely not done but we've done a lot of work in that category I get pretty interested in expanding that and going well what about what can we be doing from a product perspective to prevent crime from happening? And that actually doesn't necessarily look like software. It's like one of the interesting things that we started last year.

1:43:11Garrett Langley:So we call our Thriving Cities Fund. It's probably an analogy similar to your Stripe Press, which is like, it's never going to be the core of your business, but you feel really good that it's a part of your business. And so when we go in places like Greenville, Mississippi, we also commit to deploy capital as growth partners to those businesses. Because if we want to convince that 16-year-old to not be a criminal, there does need to be jobs. Jobs that like a 16-year-old can get. And so we deploy capital in, you know, restaurants, nail salons, like pick your business that you can be 16 and work at easily.

1:43:44Garrett Langley:And like, we want more of those to exist in the cities that also choose to be safe. I don't want to go to deploy capital in a place that doesn't want to be safe. So I'm like, I want to do more there. And then I think to our conversation on the other half, you know, the majority of the crime we solve is not violent. It's nonviolent. And today, the discrepancy for a juvenile, non-juvenile, you still wind up in some type of penitentiary or prison system. I think that's crazy. Like all the data shows, as soon as you wind up in prison, you're going to get violent and you're going to come back. And so I would articulate there as an opportunity, don't know yet what it is, to say, well, hold on, hold on, hold on.

1:44:26Garrett Langley:If this was an opportunistic criminal, is there a product with a capital P because it might not be software it might be hardware software I don't know that allows that person to have a second chance and in a way that is not going to increase their likelihood of doing it again like that's bad but like prison can't be the answer like it just doesn't work and the whole concept of prison will never work like and there are some incredibly well run prisons with really well intentioned wardens doing the best of their ability, but the concept of putting a bunch of violent people together is like by default flawed.

1:45:04Garrett Langley:And so I question like, what could Flock be doing to say, I'm going to prevent kids from becoming criminals. And if you do wind up on that path, how do I get you back on track as fast as possible? And we're a for-profit business, so I'm not looking to be a nonprofit, but I think there is something there. I mean, talking about millions and millions of people who really need, like it's actually as a society in our best interest to get them back in and productive. And I want to do both of those. So fewer crimes, fewer people in prisons. Yeah, the same goal. Thank you. Thank you, it was fun. It was awesome.

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