EP 99: Garret Langley (CEO, Flock Safety) - The $4B Tech Startup Solving Crime with AI

31:01And I don't particularly want to live in that society. But, you know, it's one that seems to be pretty effective in deterring crime. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there's definitely some wildernesses that we can go live in that have no rules and no laws and all of that. And so I guess, how do you think about data has become so in privacy increasingly with, you know, whatever the things around Facebook and app tracking transparency and GDPR and all these different things. We're sort of living in this world where there's a continuum and people have different perspectives around it. And so I guess, how do you think about that and where you fall and your responsibility in it?

31:48Yeah, it's a good question. And I think there's probably two sides to it. There's one, we make our own decisions as a company for what we want to build and what we want to enable. And so a good example of that is, you know, we don't do facial recognition. I don't think it's inherently evil. I think it's an effective product. We just choose not to build it, which is a decision we've made as a company. And I think the other thing that's really important is we live in a society that individuals are elected democratically to make decisions on our behalf. And that covers things like roads and sewage and parks and public safety.

32:33And we don't do anything without the support of the community. And so I look at it and go, let's talk about something that's really easy, data retention. I think it's a subjective decision. And so you go to places like Dallas, Texas, and they have a 90 day storage period. And you go to a place like Austin, Texas, and it's seven days. I don't care. If that's what Austin thinks is best for their community, that's great. That's exciting. So we believe it's our job to give communities the kind of levers to make those decisions. Because to be very clear, Austin will solve less crime than Dallas. It's just a fact.

33:17But they're making that trade-off. I'm not making that trade-off for them. The city council and the police chief, they sat down and the city manager and said, hey, we think seven days is right for us. Dallas said 90. In New Jersey, it's five years. I don't live in any of those places. So on a personal level, I don't think it matters. As a business, though, we look at it across the spectrum and say, what are the things we can do to provide our customers the ability to customize what they're doing? So it makes sense for their community. I mean, I guess police aren't elected officials, but they are those that we trust through the process of, you know, whatever, democratic elections and then the people that end up hiring them.

34:00What about on the HOA or on the private citizens side? And maybe talk a little bit about, I guess, as it relates to both HOA and police officers, the access and rights and all of those things and how you think about it. Yeah. So the cool part is the way we built the product is that most of our neighborhoods don't even have access to the cameras they buy. It goes straight to the police department. Because you and I don't have the right to arrest someone. We don't have the right to do a criminal investigation, nor would I would imagine you want to. I don't have to do that. There's a crime in my neighborhood.

34:40I don't have, I'm not, I got a family, I got a business. So the way the product's built is like, if you look at my neighborhood, the cameras go straight to the Atlanta Police Department and not a single person that lives in our community has access to the cameras. Because what would you do with it? And that's like the default. Now in an environment where either there's an off-duty police officer, a security team, or there's just an HOA that wants to have access, that's fine. They're the ones paying for it. But what we really emphasize is coming back to the name of the company, like your job is to support the community, deploy this product, it goes straight to law enforcement.

35:17They will use it when they need to, but otherwise just be on your merry way. And that I think is like a really nice kind of model because it solves a lot of the privacy concerns, I think, that exist. I'm sure you get some criticism that is not totally rooted in sensible logic. And, you know, maybe just tried and, hey, this seems bad. And I don't know, I can imagine the types of people that might claim these things. But outside of those that are maybe less within the bounds of reasonable conversation, are there particular discussions that you welcome having about these different trade-offs and where the lines of consideration exist?

36:17And I assume data retention sounds like one of them maybe and who has access is another. But are there other things that you think are actually worthwhile philosophical debates to have about like your role in society? Yeah. So I think the cool thing about Flock is whether you're blue, red or purple. You have Flock. like we we've got uh berkeley california uh and we've got southern texas right down the border like it's like as red as you can get and as blue as you can get and then we go to new york we go to maine we go to oregon washington like there is an estate that doesn't have flock at some level and i think it's because when you remove the politics of it everyone wants to be safe like i've never met someone who's like oh i would like to be less safe uh that's like it's a very odd feeling.

37:07So then to your point, it's like a question of, okay, well, how safe do we want to be? Because in some environment, I don't know if you saw the news, like I think Miami during spring break had a midnight curfew or like 11 p.m. curfew. That's safer. Bad stuff happens at 2 a.m. Like nothing good happens in the middle of the night. And so like Miami made a decision on their own accord that like, hey, during spring break, we just want to be a little bit safer. Now, I don't think Miami doesn't do that forever because it's fun to stay out late. And so you look at those kind of decisions and like we're one of those types of decisions where you say, look, you know, if we want to be safer, there's this product called Flock that will solve more crime.

37:48Do we want it as a community? And I think last year, you know, I think three out of about a thousand cities said, no, we don't want Flock. And we're OK. It's like, OK, great. No hard feelings. like you know what what call us if you change your mind um who is it saying no i guess i don't know enough governments city council so i mean and it's i think it's great like the chief of police will present an option it's his job or her job to to keep the community safe and they'll present us as an option and and and three cases i think last year a city said hey you know we just don't think it's right for us and we go that's great you know like that's no hard feelings um i hope they change their mind.

38:32To your point, a lot of the time, it is misinformation. So as an example, one of those three last year originally said no, because they thought we were doing facial recognition on the cameras. And we're like, we don't do facial recognition on the cameras. And they voted that way. Because look, it's, you know, most of these people are volunteers. It's not a full time job. You don't get paid to be on city council in a small town in a bigger city you do. And it's a you don't get paid. So these are volunteers trying to make the best decisions they can. So they did eventually come back around because we were able to educate them of like, no, we don't do facial recognition that like these are very focused on cars and that's not how technology works.

39:13So most of the time it is either the fear of the unknown or just misinformation. Like they just, they don't fully understand the technology. I do think though, to your point, there's data retention. That's an interesting one. And then the other one is data sharing. you know who do you want to share with uh most of our cities work really closely with their neighboring cities so if you're in the bay area and you're in you know atherton you work with cupertino and redwood city and foster city and like san mateo because you're solving cases together all the time anyways um but it is up to a city like we have one customer that i know of in Illinois that does not share with anyone.

40:00And that as a city, they decided they want to keep this information just to themselves. And that's fine. I think that they will solve less crime, but that's important to them. And I think that's great. And so we're always trying to figure out the same point of view would be on the overall auditing and transparency. So everything you do in the system is fully audited and stored in perpetuity. Some of our customers share that audit publicly. It's great. So in Piedmont, California, great police department there, the camera locations, the search history, it's a ton of information publicly available.

40:37We built that for them. We call it our transparency portal. It's great. Other of our customers say, it's not for us. We don't want to do that. So we're always trying to figure out how do we help our customers achieve their goal, which is solve more crime, be safe, in an framing that makes the most sense for their own community's kind of other goals. You know, I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that the job of a police officer should be a noble one in the society that we live in or in a modern and sophisticated society. But there's been some circumstances over the course of the last couple of years that have drawn attention.

41:22And I'm sure it's been going on. I mean, I know it's been going on far longer than just the last couple of years. We just happen to have technology to capture it and document it in ways that have illuminated some of the, some bad actors within police departments or unfortunate set of circumstances that have led to loss of life and just terrible circumstances, right? Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, I think just like in every industry, you know, I think there's something like, you know, a million police officers in America. You put a million people in a room, there's going to be some bad people.

42:00Yes. And I think we've, we've, we've, these are people that are entrusted to try to bring stability to society. And I think it's, it's particularly troubling when, when, when it's not accountants committing fraud, or, you know, shitty podcasters, whatever. it is. It's particularly troubling when it's the people that we trust with great power within society. But I think a lot of the rhetoric has led to a disproportionate number of resignations, early retirement, lack of enrollment into the service. Can you just talk about maybe some of the broad trends that are going on in policing today and then what role you feel like flock can play in this?

42:56Yeah. So it is a challenging time. More than 80 % of police departments are understaffed. And that's not like, oh, the police chief saying, I want more people. That's the government, the city, the local government has given them budget for X number of people and they're at Y. And in this case, Y is less than X. So the majority of police departments are understaffed. And that is a new problem. That was not a problem 10 years ago. That's a problem that's happened over the last three years. Now, COVID was particularly bad. That was not good. And then the social unrest was not good. i don't know if it's ever going to get better um i would equate it similar to probably the problem we have with teachers like i don't know how we're going to get more teachers teach for america was pretty interesting maybe one of the best ideas i've heard is like why don't we have a teach for america for policing uh like that's an interesting idea that's like one i've heard i think what what mayor bibb has done in cleveland is pretty interesting what he did was said look we've got staffing for 1 ,000 officers.

44:05We only have 800. We have no line of sight to get back to 1 ,000. I'm actually going to decrease the headcount allocation down to 800. And that extra budget, I'm just going to raise everyone's wage. That helps with enrollment. It also helps with retention. You give everyone a 20 % raise and I go, man, I will put in a couple more years. So it is a pretty big problem because there's pretty consistent data that shows a lack of a law enforcement agency just leads to unrest. And if you look at the cities and the number of cities that did this was very small, a lot of cities talked about defunding the police.

44:44Only two or three cities across the entire country actually did it. And they have had a massive spike in crime. They are in a massive hole now in terms of recruiting and running people to the academy. And it's going to take them another five or seven years to actually get out of it. and just get back to where they were. So I think most cities realize, you know, reform is always necessary. It's good, right? Like, you know, probably the best example is I've never met a cop that wants to respond to non-law enforcement related activity. They still get asked to. Like if there's an individual with a mental health issue and you send a law enforcement officer that has zero training, I don't know what we expect.

45:21I mean, to go perfect? No, they're going to like really struggle with that when they're actually people who have been trained to deal with mental health. And so you do see cities, I think, are moving in the right direction saying, hey, we've got to increase the number of first responders we have. We have fire as a first responder. We have law enforcement responder. We need a medical team. Like we actually need more types, more diversity. That's expensive, right? But like, I don't know how else to fix that. So it is a troubling problem. I would say the only thing that I think is the silver lining amongst all this is technology is becoming more available.

45:54I think one of the benefits that Flock has brought to the market is not only are we a force multiplier, like you can get more done as a police department because you're not, you know, the traditional view of policing is you drive around the neighborhoods, you know, there are problems looking for suspicious activity. One, that's incredibly wasteful. And two, it's incredibly subjective because you wind up going after the same people in our audience. It's like double that. With Flock, you talk to most of our customers and they'll say, we're too busy chasing stolen cars to do that kind of stuff anymore.

46:27So driven up productivity and driven up objectivity. From a more venture perspective, though, we have proven that you can build a venture business selling to local government. And one of the things that I love now is, God, at least once a week, I'm getting a pitch deck from an early stage company that's trying to go after local government. And I think that's awesome. It is a market that's so underserved. Now, competitive a little bit, like, all right, well, I want to build a really, really big business. So I'm always looking out for what are the more interesting ones happening. But if you go back seven years ago before Flock, we got no after no after no from investors because they would say, oh, local government is not a venture-backable market.

47:12The last IPO that serviced local government was in 2003. It was the last IPO. you know you've got one of your peers and andreason horowitz who's an investor in flock with their american dynism fund and you see more investors like y 'all saying wait a second actually like some of these more industrial markets you look at companies like samsara leading the way as well of saying like actually vertical sass can be really effective it's hard it's really hard but when it gets right like you've got incredible grr you've got bigger tams than you ever imagined because you see this evolution and we're seeing it in policing now where budget is shifting from headcount to technology.

47:52And so the first time this ever happened to us was in Katy, Texas, I think. And the police chief went to city council and said, look, I have a headcount problem and I have no plan to fix it. I do not have an answer, but I do have this thing called technology. And the fully loaded costs, when you include pension and benefits, it's about$150 ,000 a year for an entry level officer. That's the same cost of 50 cameras. Now, I can't get rid of all my police officers, and we know that'd be a horrible idea. But man, to take two officers off of headcount, which I can't even fill anyways, and go get 100 cameras, that'll impact our entire police department?

48:31Like, that's such an obvious ROI. And so I'm seeing more and more of these police chiefs and the newer command staff saying, we got to find the right balance. Got to find the right balance of sworn versus unsworn technology versus headcount. There is a balance there that we had. And I think that's really exciting to watch. So what's next for Flock? So we talked about license plate readers, which I think is still the majority of the revenue and a big component of solving crime for you all. I've seen now there's a product called Raven as well that you guys have launched around gunshot detection.

49:13Can you talk through the suite that you have today and the aspirations of where you're going to go? Yeah. So I'll start with the aspirations and come back to what we do today. Every quarter, the team looks at all the crimes that happen in America and try to draw a direct line to a product we've built to help solve them. And there's a lot of crimes we help with. So you mentioned our core product, Falcon reading license plates. That solves a lot of crimes. Entering auto, residential burglaries, a bunch of that. We never had a product that helped solve violent crime, particularly gun related. So we developed Raven, which is our gunshot detection technology, which solves gun violence every single day, which is a sad reality of our society.

50:00But it is a reality. And so we built this product to go help solve it. And there are cases, you know, whether you go to a Wichita, Kansas or an Albany, Georgia, where they're shocked at the level of gun violence they had because no one calls 911 when someone gets shot. And so that's been really interesting to watch. We have developed a new product called Flock OS 911. It's really cool. one of the things I didn't realize is that if you call 911 today, until you effectively finish the phone call, it's not entered into what's called CAD or computer-aided dispatch. And no one on the first responder side has any idea you're having a problem.

50:40You could have an officer like a block away from you. You've got a two to five minute lag before them even being notified. And so FlockOS 911 allows us to co-listen, kind of like dial into a bridge of the 911 call, and send that directly to the nearest officer. So now if you called 911, we find the nearest officer. And if they're within a relative distance, right? So if it's Manhattan, that might be like a block, two blocks, because traffic is really bad. If you're in a more suburban town, that might be a mile or three miles. But if you're in that radius, we will ping the nearest officer and say, hey, there's an active 911 call happening right now.

51:16Click play. They can click play. They can listen to the call. They can make a judgment call of like, is this appropriate for me to start to dispatch? And if it is, what we're seeing is that response times are going down dramatically, often beating the call from hanging up. And that's like the Dream State. Dream State said, if you call 911 before you even hang up, an officer is on site. I think that would dramatically change how officers dispatch. And to our earlier conversation on human capital, when we're in and we're in a shortage of humans, this is a way to actually increase their effectiveness.

51:49We can get them going before things get started. So we have a whole slew of products like that where we're looking for these kind of pinpointed problems of what's happening in this town, what's happening in that town. How do we help them solve more of their crimes? And one of the favorite things that I get to do is I travel the country and I'll sit down with a mayor and a police chief and say, hey, tell me about a crime that didn't get solved. Pull up one of your cold cases. Let's work through that. And that kind of becomes our roadmap for what products to go build. And so today, the suites that you sell, like the incremental things?

52:23Yeah. So we've got a camera focused on cars. Yep. We have a camera that's focused on intersections, kind of like live view, live view cameras. So if you take someone like Fresno, they bought almost our entire suite. It's pretty awesome. They have our LPRs, so you can track cars. License player reader. Yep, license player reader. They have our product called Condor, which is for situational awareness. So they deploy those at intersections. So they want to know what's happening in an intersection and click play and pull it right up. They have Raven, which is gunshot detection technology. And then they have Flock OS, which is really our kind of situational awareness platform.

53:04And that allows them to go into the community and say, hey, if you're a business owner, a homeowner, you can subscribe and we can now have access to your cameras. and what that means is in a single pane of glass fresno can pull up and say hey there's a there's a 911 call happening right now and this local community this local business owner whether it's a strip mall or a gas station they've allowed us to integrate with their cameras we can now pull that up um and it's like this dramatic increase of productivity and deeper engagement with the community so we got that product um and then a whole bunch of stuff coming down the line too That's cool.

53:45If you're painting a utopian version of the future for flock and the impact on society, what would be the most concrete kind of utopian vision for where you want to go in the coming decade? Yeah. So my kids are in starting kindergarten. So I got like 10 years until they're in high school. I'd say my goal is that by the time they're in high school, crime is largely not a problem anymore in America. We're not going to be able to get rid of evil people, right? Let me clarify. There's still going to be evil people. But if you talk about, you know, will I feel good that my 15 or 16 year old daughter is driving in Atlanta?

54:31Will I feel like she's safe all the time? And I think if we solve that problem, like that's what we're out to do. And I think we'll do it. Like the cool thing is that it is happening in small pockets of the country. And it's just a question of, I guess it's the, is it Mark Andreessen who said, you know, the future is ready here. It's just unevenly distributed. I think that's the case for us too, where we see these pockets where crime is largely a theme of the past. And I imagine that world where you just don't talk about crime anymore. and I know it's quite hard for people to imagine but I guess I would equate it to you know the idea of having like one drink and driving used to be pretty normal right like taxis were kind of complicated you know black cars were way too expensive so you have like one drink at dinner then drive home now it's like why would you do that ride sharing has completely changed the way we move around cities and Uber is not even that old of a company and like fundamentally changes, change transportation.

55:33And I look at public safety and like that just hasn't happened. And I think we're the ones who are going to be able to do it. That's exciting. I want to transition a little bit to operating and some of the beliefs you have around running a business. So there's always a balance between a market and a team in starting a company. And it sounds like you've much more gravitated. While your market opportunity is as compelling as it is, you've gravitated more to the people side of things. Can you talk about how you think about the trade-off between those two and idea and market centric versus people and that side?

56:11Yeah, I am a staunch believer in that people trumps product, trumps market. I think great teams build great products and find great markets. I don't know any other way to do it. But I don't know. It's kind of hard to imagine how you start otherwise. And so I've just always believed if you have a great team, that the rest comes with that. In the absence of a great team, I think it's really hard. And I look at Flock as a great example. If you look at the original kind of pitch, our seed and our Series A, there was nothing about local government. We were 100 % focused on neighborhoods. And we've now realized that local government's a really good market.

56:53but it's because we had a great team. The team found that market. For me at least, I've had the same team three companies in a row and Flock is by multiple orders of magnitude the biggest business we've built and I think we have a really good team that works really well together. We've built three really good businesses together. This is the biggest because we happen to get the best market but absent that team, I don't know. I think it's so hard to get the team right. I think also So this might be maybe a Southern perspective. I just think one of the best parts about being an entrepreneur is you get to pick who you work with.

57:30If I didn't want to have to get to pick who I work with, I'd go work at someone else's company. And so why would you not focus on a team when that's one of the only things you actually can control? And I would go sell water to the ocean with the right people. I don't know. I just find the market and the product to be less interesting than who I spend my life with. Yeah, interesting. One of the things we talked about before we hopped on is you all have a unique approach to hiring and the onboarding process where there's kind of a two-way pip or there's expectations set up around a job spec and what the job to be done is.

58:09Can you talk through that method of how you make that work? Yeah. I will go on the record saying I hate the idea of job descriptions. I think they're really dumb because they're creating this artificial layer between what we're going to ask you to go do. It's like you need seven years of product marketing experience. It's like, why? Why is that relevant? Why is that relevant at all? And it's like, oh, you will own this bland. It's like such fluff. when the fact of the matter is, at Flock at least, we only open a role if the person's going to make an immediate, measurable impact to the business within their 90 days.

58:52And if they're not going to do that, then it's not a job. You're just adding a body to a problem, potentially. I just believe very deeply, there's a saying, Michael Siebel at YC said this during our batch, the fastest your company will ever run is during this batch. so set the velocity as high as possible and hold on to dear life that you can maintain it and i think people are the same and so like i have this strong belief that if you come out of the gate slow you will never speed up i've never met an individual that like picks up pace at like oh their third year of being a flock they're now operating at max capacity i'm like no like their first week is going to tell me exactly how they're going to operate and so what we tend to do is put together a very, very actionable 90 day plan for every new employee was during the interview process.

59:40So literally, the beginning of our quarter, when we do budgeting, my co-founder Paige and I review every single 90 day plan. And that's how we decide what roles actually get open. I trust my CFO, James, to keep us honest on budget. But Paige and I look like, are people actually going to make an impact? Is the plan actionable? And what that does is it drives this deep level of alignment between a new employee and their manager. Because you're effectively telling them this is how I'm going to keep score as your manager. And like so few jobs actually give that to you. most jobs are like, oh, I mean, maybe in your line of work, it's quite easy, which is like invest in good companies.

1:00:13You still have like a five year delay on whether or not you made a good decision. It's actually quite hard because there's so many different people that do it very differently. There's no like pattern matching that you can do of how to practice the craft. No. And so like for us, we just say, look, we're a very unique culture. We expect people to come they get very fast. They set people to make an impact within their first 30 days. And at the end of 90 days, if you're not like super happy and want to still be here, you should just leave because this will never show up on your resume. No one will look down upon it.

1:00:48And like you're in and out. There's like very little loss. And as a hiring manager, you're also going like, you can't make an impact at this company within your first 90 days. There's zero reason to believe you ever will. And that's okay. Like, let's do this now. Let's not wait. And so I view it as a two-way thing. I think there are a lot of great companies. We run ours very specifically. It's not for everyone. That's okay. We found it to be really effective. It's an awesome tool. We've now noticed, as we've got employees getting to their third, fourth, fifth year at the company, that we use that same tool pretty often.

1:01:24Now, it's like, if you have a new manager, you have to have a 90-day plan. If you have a new responsibility in the company, you get a new 90-day plan. If you just feel like you're lacking alignment with your manager. As an employee, you can tell your manager, I want a 90-day plan. I want to know how you're tracking my success. And we see our best people tend to ask for it the most because those people want to be on the steepest career trajectory. And the easiest way to get more responsibilities is like, tell me how you're keeping score because I want to go one step above it. If that's what you think success is, then great.

1:01:55I'm going to add four more bullets and go do these too. And it's been a really, really impactful tool. Your mission is such that I assume it draws people that are in particular feel motivated and empowered to help solve crime and believe in what you guys are doing. I think one of the tensions that ultimately exists when you have a very mission driven company is that people are going to be on different lines of the spectrum when it comes to different considerations and debates and things like that. And it's not always going to be consistent. And people are going to view it as something more than just a job.

1:02:44Uh, it's, it's, it's viewed as, you know, some, some level of total fulfillment because they're there for something beyond just the ability to make money. Um, I guess one, you, do you agree with that? And two, when those situations present themselves, like how do you lead to resolution, uh, when a lot of these things, maybe you're opaque or there's, there's often two sides of the coin, uh, that, that both could be true, but you need to ultimately come up with one side. Yeah, so we do this thing, Paige and I do this thing every Friday for new employees. We've got our cultural norms. We walk through in more detail how you're expected to behave.

1:03:27And one of the topics is mission versus profit. Because a lot of our employees, I'd say the majority of them, would work for free at Flock. Maybe not forever, but as long as they could. Because they didn't necessarily have the desire to carry a gun and a badge, but they had a desire to impact their community. And most of our employees are, a lot of our employees at least are at a career point where they've had a lot of success. They've kind of hit a point and they're now looking for more. They want more than just compensation. They want fulfillment in their career. And we give that to people. But it creates this challenge, right?

1:04:01Because we're not a nonprofit. To be very clear, every one of our employees has equity in the business. They're owners and businesses generally are measured by some discounted cash flow. So we've got to make money. and what we try to remind people what I try to remind people is like if you look at the history of companies the biggest companies actually tend to be the ones that have the biggest impact on the world and you look at someone like Apple and it was a good company but it has reached trillion dollar status because of the iPhone which makes sense the iPhone has like changed the world you look at Google and it's like literally as a verb like it should be a massive company It's changed the way we access information.

1:04:42And so the point I try to make to the team is like, the worst thing we could actually do is go out of business. If we don't charge our customers, if we don't make money, we will go out of business. And that could be, that is the worst thing. So we try to find that balance of like, you know, the best thing we can do is succeed, solve crime, make money, build a big business. But I do think that business model aside, let's assume we fast forward 10 years from now and crime is largely gone. and it's because of us, it's like hard to imagine a world where we're not a hundred plus billion dollar company.

1:05:17That's at least my belief. I hope that comes true, but I just think those two are actually like pretty correlated and you don't have to give one without the other. You're a self-professed micromanager or I don't know if that's the term you would use, but very in the details of things. How do you think about that as part of your job versus the other thing of, I don't know, autonomy, empowerment, whatever the other side of that coin would be in your responsibility as CEO? Yeah, I do think, and this might be a Southern thing or a Georgia thing, everyone at the company eventually reports to me. and so this like this this newer concept that i shouldn't care about every detail of what you do is really weird to me because like it is my job to care about what you're doing it is my job to give you direction it's my my job to sweat the details and it's like it it just is weird to me that not every ceo and every employee or person like gets that um because like we're not a democracy at flock there's it's a pyramid like uh i sit at the top which means i'm also ultimately responsible like every quarter my board sits around the table and says is garrett still the best ceo to run this company they sit above me uh and at some point they might decide i'm not and then i'm out um and i guess the way i look at it is i think about my job in in three functions some days I'm my direct reports manager and I'm deep in their stuff and I want to get into every single detail and it makes makes people very uncomfortable but people assume falsely that it is a trust issue like I don't trust you so I want to micromanage you and say no I actually I actually want to help you be successful and in an environment that at least I'm in now and a company that's about a thousand people fully distributed.

1:07:21I don't know how else to make good decisions without access to the primary raw data. And that looks like micromanagement, but it's really like, I don't know how else to make good decisions. Second part of my job is to be a peer, right? So it's like, how are we making decisions together? And then the third job I actually view is like, how do I work for you? And so if you think about like my, our CRO, I'm on the road every single week visiting with customers on our biggest deals. I'm working for him to help him hit his number. Now, when I'm also there, I'm assessing what's the quality of our demos?

1:07:53What's the quality of the relationships we have with these prospects? How are we progressing this deal? And so I guess for me, I expect my team to do the exact same thing. And I just don't believe that the right management approach is to hire smart people and let them run. I think that's crazy. It's like, how will they know where to run? It's your job as a manager to force that alignment and i think uh one of my board members once described it as uh it often feels like you have the eye of sauron you know from like the lord of the rings uh but it seems like wherever we put our energy behind things get better and at least that's what i've noticed is the places i tend to direct my energy tend to get better a lot faster and so you know on a quarterly basis monthly basis that energy tends to shift and people get a little bit uncomfortable but people come out of the other end of it quite happy because they got the force of the company behind them because if it's truly a problem it's unlikely a performance issue it's most likely a lack of resourcing like a logo is we have this one prominent company today and it's like it's kind of on the side wasn't a big deal started seeing customer data come back that the people our customers really frustrated and i dig in and i'm like, this is just a staffing issue.

1:09:13Like, I think we're literally understaffed by 3X. Like, we just didn't design this right. And then was able to immediately open up budget to go triple the team. And so that person, the person was like really uncomfortable for about a month because she was like, man, Garrett's like really digging into this topic and like, I'm not used to this level of scrutiny. But then you walk out of it and it's like, no, I think you're doing a great job. She don't think you have enough people. Let's go hire, like, let's go hire 12 more people. Like now, now she's super excited. So I don't know, I guess for me, I've just always been a person that just loves to be in the details and loves to see raw progress and work in progress.

1:09:49And I hate, hate this idea that as a CEO, I only get delivered polished goods. It's just like, that's boring. I don't know. Like, I don't want to just sit here and get presentations all day of like, how good we're doing and all the things that are going well. But it's like, I don't know. I don't work at a company that's 100 years old that's generating lots of cash flow. I work at a company that's growing like a weed where we have only problems. I just want to go solve those problems. Speaking of growing like a weed, you said you're roughly 1 ,000 people today? Is that right? Yeah, about 1 ,000 people, yeah.

1:10:25What were you, I don't know, two years ago or three years ago? Probably 300 or 400. We doubled headcount year over year for a while And I think we grew headcount by about 40 % last year. So doubling headcount year over year means that you're counting some attrition. Then that means that usually when you look around a room, half or more than half of the people have been there for less than 12 months, right? So how do you think about the balance or how have you been able to balance scaling a team as fast as you have while making sure people are aligned and keeping a culture that is consistent across an organization when so many of the bodies are new at any given time?

1:11:18Yeah. I don't know if we do it well. I think we're definitely trying. A few things that have worked well, though, I mentioned this briefly, but I'll come back to it. Every new employee gets two touch points with Paige and myself in their first month. And the first one is just like a wide open, just like, let's just have a coffee chat. You know, it's on Zoom, which is not ideal. And like, that's really helpful. The more helpful one though, is about four years ago when the business was really starting to scale, I got this advice from Ben Horowitz that like, if you don't write your culture down, it is inherently weak.

1:11:58in the absence of like a written culture it you will your culture will just fade away and in a remote environment even harder right because like you don't see these people you don't interact with these people and so page and i looked around the room and said who are best people and why do we think they're the best and what do they do like how are they making decisions so we started this document and it evolves right it's continued to evolve but we We call it our cultural norms. And it is like, it is a representation of the best people on their best days. And no one's perfect. Like I fail all the time on this document.

1:12:30But like when I'm having my best day, I'm hitting all of these. And it is not the soft and fluffy, like, you know, be nice. You know, like it's like actual actionable things. Like one being, you know, responsiveness. Like our best people are really, really responsive. I think that's common across a lot of companies, but like it's important to us. And so when we have our new employees, Paige and I sit down and we read this document together out loud and share stories. And every employee has to go through this. And every employee exits saying, you've all read this. You're all signing up that you will hold each other accountable to this.

1:13:07And I think it works because I can't be everywhere. Paige can't be everywhere. Matt can't be everywhere. And we all then have this single kind of testaments of what it means to work at Flock and how we're going to live these values. And being responsive is one, being mission oriented is one. You can kind of go down this list of like things that are very uniquely flock. The other thing that I think has worked well is I'm just on the road nonstop. And when I'm on the road, I'm not only there to visit customers, I'm there to visit employees. And so that gives me a chance to see our people kind of like in real life, not just like, oh, let's grab dinner.

1:13:44But like, let's go visit a customer. Let's go do an install. all. Let's go do whatever it may be. And I just, I think that even in a hybrid company, you cannot remove the human element of it. And so we have an expectation that every employee will get at least two in-person touch points a year, one with their team and one with the whole company. And so I guess I'd say like, we tend to be very designed about when are those touch points. I think the general rule of thumb is like, you've got about 90 to 180 days before where those touch points fade and they lose the impact, that kind of emotion and excitement.

1:14:20So I guess we try to be pretty thoughtful about how we do that. One of the things that often happens, and I've talked to different folks on the podcast before about this, but sometimes you run into the issue that your senior leaders or people in the organization are better at managing up and communicating than they are doing real substantive work. And I think it's true of any organization. One of your board members told me that you had maybe some interesting thoughts or frameworks about how you go about assessing if people are full of shit and all talk are actually substantive in the work that they're doing.

1:15:04Yeah, I think the natural tendency for companies is to spend more time talking about work than actually working, which is kind of weird, but it starts to happen. It's a very natural thing that I've noticed is even happening at Flock. And I think some of it is, well, if you have enough people, you just have to talk more, which is not desirable, but it happens. For us, the thing that I always look at is, so like a lot of companies, we do some variant of OKRs. But what's different is for us is at the end of that process, we do it once a quarter. We look at, okay, across the executive team, what's the distribution of ownership?

1:15:44And like generally for us, anyone below a director should never own an OKR because it's intended to be a team. It's going to be an output that the company cares about. So if it's like a, it's an IC that's now like a performance review and that's not the goal. So it should be a director. And I expect anyone pretty much VP and above to own at least one, if not two OKRs every quarter. And when I say own, I expect them actually putting pen to paper. like not like oh yeah i'll manage the team and i'll set the goals it's like no no no like real actual work and and one of the ways we're able to do that is like every two weeks when we do uh like a check-in whoever is the owner is actually one writing the update and it goes to the entire executive team and it is very very easy to smell bullshit because you notice that their updates aren't very detailed their updates don't have any actual action that was done and And it's like, oh, here's the update on the metric.

1:16:35I say, yeah, but what did you do? What did you get done in the last two weeks as an individual? And when that accountability is coming across their peers versus just me, it sets the bar pretty high. Because now whether it's the general counsel or it's this VP of sales or this VP of Inge, that is really, really, I think, better. We used to do it in a way that I was the one driving this. and now this kind of a peer accountability has leveled the expectations that no one, we're not a big enough company for peer people managers. No one is allowed to just manage people, myself included. I carry a bag and figure out what are the five or 10 deals I can help move across the finish line.

1:17:16What is the one or two products that I can help push to production? And so for us, it's just like, it's a critical part of who we are. One of the things I've heard you talk about is being a macro optimist, but micro pessimist within your business. Can you speak to that? What does that mean? How do you internalize it? How do you go about actionableizing it?

1:17:40Yeah, I like the sayings. I think it does describe how we act. What it looks like though, is it means we never as a business talk about success. Like if it's working, why are we talking about it? Just let it go, let it keep running. And so as an executive team, it can be depressing at times because we only talk about problems. we only talk about the things that are failing. But on a local level, on a small time scale, all we should be doing is being worried about the things that are going wrong. And the job, I think, as an executive is to hold two truths that can be opposite, which is I can be incredibly depressed and frustrated and focused on these things that are broken.

1:18:18Well, at the same time, like I just said, I do generally think that in 10 years from now, Flock will have eliminated crime in America. A lot of problems I got to go solve to later today when we wrap up. But like in 10 years, I think we're going to do great. And like, that's because I generally am optimistic for that long-term perspective. But I think that what founders in particular and executives have a problem of doing is when you only present that optimistic perspective, you lose the confidence of your team because they're living in the shit every single day of all the problems that are happening.

1:18:50Like they're living in this reality that like, well, this customer's mad and this new product is delayed and when you go on stage and in all hands and say like we're a great company they're like well maybe but my world is a mess and so we kind of find that balance of saying like you can be happy and optimistic while saying we have a lot of problems and like here's the plan and so our internal kind of cultural value is optimism but with a plan it's okay to be optimistic but you do actually have to have a plan like because most of the things we are working on are a problem and you can smile about it.

1:19:29But what we have seen people go off track on, I think I've worked with a lot of founders as well, where it's like they're optimistic so much so that they lack the plan. And I'm like, like excited that you think you're going to 10X your business in revenue this year. Do you actually have the pipeline to do that? Do you actually have the headcount, the quota to do that? Like, it's cool that you think you can do it. So it works out well. I'd say the downside to it is we tend to never celebrate milestones. Like we got to a hundred million in ARR in just under four years from starting the company. And it was like, I sent a text to our CRO and I was like, nice, good job.

1:20:05And he's like, thanks. And then we had like a slide out in all hands. And like, then we just went back to work. Yeah. It's working. And it's like, that's kind of a bummer because I think that I, I think we could do a better job recognizing that like we're, we're working hard. It's generally working. It's a good company. but also like I think our success is somewhat from the fact that we don't weigh on our success and we feel that are broken. Yeah and also I think to hear you talk about it and I assume for a lot of your employees the financial metrics are validating of the mission but they're not the goal in and of themselves as a standalone.

1:20:51I think the last time we checked, the majority, super majority, of our employees, this is the first ever venture-backed company they've worked out before. So the finances don't even... They almost don't even believe it. When we tell them, oh, the company's worth X billions of dollars, they're like, I don't even know what that means. that's an irrelevant that's like irrelevant to me like we have to spend a lot of effort reminding people that this could be financially like very very very lucrative for them it just doesn't it doesn't matter they could go get better jobs that pay more today yeah it's fascinating i um one of the one of the employees that you've had and i guess you've worked with uh for for a while, um, is actually your mother.

1:21:41And, uh, and she is, uh, I guess, I don't know what her official title is right now. She, is she your executive assistant? That is her, that is her title. That's her title. Executive assistant to you. How, uh, one, how did that come to be? Uh, what was that interview process like? And what is it like, uh, working with, I've heard a lot of, brother-sister combos. I guess father-son is a lot. I don't know if I know any examples where the mother is working for the son in that way. So definitely a guy's first. I've actually yet to meet anyone else that's in this dynamic. I'll leave it as people should try it maybe more often.

1:22:27So I first started working with my mother when I I was 14. I had started a business. I say business is a gross exaggeration. I started fixing people's computers and getting paid to do it. And one of the challenges is that when I started doing that, I'd make people bring me their computer. And then I'd work on it at my house and then call them and say, hey, you know, your computer is now fixed. Not a lot of people want to drive their computer to you. That's pretty annoying. And so my mom was actually like, hey, you know, I could just drive you. to these people's houses and just wait for you and i was like well you know like yeah but you know you have a job um this would be taking away from hours you work like i should just pay you then uh and it's really weird we're like yeah i guess like logically this all makes sense so she became my driver and she would drive me to people's houses and small businesses and she'd wait for wait in the car and i would do my thing and then just you know a piece of the revenue just went straight to her uh this is like i'm 14 i'm in fifth grade um sorry not fifth grade i'm in six six or seventh grade uh it's really strange in hindsight like i don't we obviously have a very unique relationship and then um she was working at another company when i started flock and at the point that i felt like flock was no longer like a high risk of dying um it's like around our series b series c when it's about this thing was like really working uh i called her and i was like We should get the band back together.

1:24:00Like, I want this to be the last place you work.

1:24:07And if you have young kids, and maybe I'm unique here, the biggest stress I have in life is not my job. It's my family. When my kids are sick, when something goes wrong at school, that's the deepest level of anxiety exhibit. And so while she's a great admin, managing my calendar is not complicated she doesn't touch my email she barely manages my manage some calendar but like the biggest thing that it provides is i now have a third parent in the equation um and i said before i travel a lot i'm gone almost every week i have a third parent around that actually not only just loves my kids but my kids love her and so at least for me you know it's this more holistic approach of for me to be the best version of myself to the company removing some of the stress from a personal life is actually the biggest gap she's able to do that and make a traditional model that wouldn't work uh but as my mother it's like yeah so she's at my house every day she works from my house and my kids get to see her and it's i think it's a it's a better quality of life for everyone so it's pretty unique but i think more people should try it more people should try it yes i uh uh i wonder my mom's listening right now if she's going to have a request for a job at this point, but it's an interesting dynamic to have that set up.

1:25:26Performance review season is always a little tricky, but yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine. I, yeah, I don't know how that would play out for me, but it's a, I've got, it's, listen, having, especially when the line blends between EA and PA and, you know, grandmother and, you know, all of that stuff. So I, yeah, it's a interesting setup, I'm sure. But Hey guys, I'm Jacob Efron, a partner of Logan's at Redpoint. Wanted to take a quick break from the episode to let you know that Redpoint's AI podcast, Unsupervised Learning, now has its own YouTube channel. We have an incredible set of guests really at the forefront of the AI revolution.

1:26:02So if you're interested in what's happening in AI, what it means for businesses in the world, definitely subscribe. Now back to the show. Hey, one of the things I heard you mention was that there's kind of this ethos in Silicon Valley of like the 19-year-old or 20-year-old or 22, whatever it is, going and starting a company right away. And I think a lot of it's rooted in you have the level of scrappiness and you're less, income can be kind of sticky and quality of life can be sticky. And so as you get used to more of the trappings of some level of wealth, your ability to go back in time, I think can be difficult.

1:26:41I had heard you mention that one of the best experiences you had was actually not starting a company right out of the gates, but instead joining a company in the very early days, but learning from people that had been there, done that. Can you talk about that Silicon Valley ethos of the Zuckerbergs and the Collisons and whoever it is that have been the canonical examples of young entrepreneurs versus gaining a little bit of experience and how that benefited you? Yeah. So I think there's two problems, I think, starting a company when you're 18 or 21. I think, one, you just haven't had a lot of life.

1:27:22And so I think you tend to make pretty bad decisions. and I think there are some people clearly that muscle through it and are just incredibly smart, incredibly good operators. When you think about someone like Zuckerberg's easy example, it's like he just built a great team. He built a great product. He figured it out fast enough. I think he is one in a billion and I think there is a lot to learn from great leaders, great people and you just wind up being, I think, a better CEO or a better founder when you just have more life experience. I think the second challenge too is you tend to pick pretty dumb ideas when you're that age.

1:28:04You just haven't seen as much business. You haven't seen as much of the world. And so I think about one of my closest friends actually is a pretty young CEO. He fits that bucket. And he's now running a very successful company and it's awesome. but like he went through four years of working on totally the wrong idea to then do a massive pivot to a much better idea. And I think it worked out well for him, but I think that if he was four years wiser, seven years wiser, he never would have gone after the dumb idea because it would have been clear to him that like, this is not that actually that interesting of a business to go start.

1:28:41And so I do feel maybe inappropriately strongly about it because it's my own personal experience where I got the benefit of working with some incredible people watching them build a company I was the first employee this company we then went on to co-found a company together um after that one so learned even more and by the time you know Flock came around it was the third company I co-founded and I was like I I feel really comfortable I'm still a little bit uncomfortable running a company this size but like beginnings I'm like I know what we're working on is a big problem. I know that if this is successful, it could be a really, really big business.

1:29:18And that to me, I don't know, you don't, life isn't endless. Like you only get so many shots on goal. And I just would, I would hate to waste, because if it's successful, right? You're going to go spend seven to 10 years working on something like, God, I would hate to waste any moment on an idea that actually not, isn't big enough for at least what I want to do. Obviously people might have different goals, but like I have always wanted to build a company that mattered, that like really mattered. And it's hard to do that if you're 18 or 21 or 22. How old were you when you started Flock? 29, 30?

1:29:5729, 29. 30, you had had a couple exits, right? I think two$200 million exits. And it sounds like you took some time off and maybe got your handicap down from a golf game standpoint. Like what, um, what, uh, that period of time, it's a weird thing, I think, to have success early and especially to have been through the, the mission of the company, right. You know, the business had sold and you had, uh, you, you had been through a lot of, uh, of that, maybe that moment in time. And, um, I don't know, quarter life crisis or existential consideration. Did you, was that a, a moment of sort of reckoning, uh, of like, Hey, what, what am I going to do from here?

1:30:42I've accomplished what I maybe dreamed of far earlier than I expected. What was that moment in time like? It was definitely uncomfortable in hindsight. Because to your point, my wife and I had kind of accomplished the financial things we really wanted to do. And professionally, I'd accomplished at least partially the things I wanted to do. And to your early question on people versus team versus market, the first business was in what would now be called FinTech. Second business was in live events in sports, built another business in automotive. And what I had noticed is it was always with people that I liked working with.

1:31:25And I guess what I kind of came down to the conclusion is like, there's only one thing I can actually control, which is who I spend time with. And I want to go spend time with people that I like working with. And the easiest way to do that is to go build a company. So it forces us to work together. And I think what I'd also come to a conclusion of was selling companies is great, but you do lose control of your company. And I get the question all the time from our employees. It's like, oh, would you ever sell Flock? And it's like, yeah, I mean, I have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, which is all of our employees, myself, our investors.

1:32:03But man, it's really fun to run this company. Yeah. like and like what would I do then just go start another company yeah like I like the people I work with like I have built a really good team I love my co-founders I love our customers like well what would I do next like I don't know I've got too many things that are unsolved here and so I guess for me like it's been fun because at least in the last two companies we sold them because we actually kind of achieved the mission like we built the product we got market share they were small in terms of revenue but it wasn't as if we had 10 years of roadmap waiting to be built whereas at flock man i have so many things i want to go do and we're farther ahead in revenue where then i would say our impact you know like i i think there's so much left undone and so for me what i'm now realizing uh in hindsight is like this was a calling for me and i have the right kind of DNA or makeup to do all the political stuff that has to be done to deal with local and state government and federal government and enough engineering prowess to like build the original product and like kind of Goldilocks type situation.

1:33:20And also the skin these days that's thick enough to weather the hit pieces day after day after day, knowing that we're doing better for the world. So yeah, it was a weird time and really like appreciative. I had a very supportive wife who pushed me in this direction. I'm eventually like, hey, get off your butt, stop playing golf, and go build something again. You're a builder, go build. Yeah, sounds like a good critic and also a good nudge along the way. I think that we're all appreciative of her service to doing that. One of the things I think that I had heard and we had discussed a little bit before we started recording was that you specifically didn't want to start.

1:34:11I think dopey was the term that you used and maybe your uncle was the motivator behind doing that. So in your mind, what does it actually mean, not starting a dopey company? And how did that help influence you after Flock? Yeah, my uncle was my closest mentor. and he was always very good with words. And he coined the term for me of like, don't go build another dopey business, calling the last three companies I had started quite dopey, which was, you know, okay. Now his point was, you know, he had built a black box trading company. And while he loved the team and they had an incredible team, loved the people, the business was moving bits around making money but like zero incremental value to the world zero maybe negative and i think that weighed on him um and his advice to me was like you should go build something that you're really really proud of not proud of just the team because of course you'll build a great team that's kind of like a requirement but like one that if you left and the team left you'd be like man that mattered and that was our only filter for page and matt and i of like all the ideas we were thinking about building it had to be one that wasn't dopey and we've shared a few stories together some of the success block has had on the impact side like those are not dopey um and every day we see those stories and not every company gets that um you know you think about a company i like to pick on Salesforce because they're wildly successful.

1:35:51If Salesforce disappeared tomorrow, who cares? No one would care. We'd all switch to HubSpot. We'd switch to whatever the next CRM winds up being, but it's just a CRM. That's it. It's just a piece of software. And it's very hard, I think, once you've tasted something like Flock to go back to that. I think it's really hard because you realize that your skills as a technologist, whether you're an engineer or a marketer or in sales, or someone like yourself who deploys capital, God, it is way more fun to be involved in a business that really changes people's lives. Like really does it. Not the like hand waving.

1:36:30That's one of the reasons why I think we've been successful fundraising. So at the end of the day, you're a human too. You're a dad, you're a husband, you're a partner. You've got grandparents and parents and friends. And when you explain this crazy AI product that doesn't actually really do anything, but it's going to be a great investment, you're excited because that's your job. you do have to go return capital to LPs, but you're so much more proud and excited when the company you're partnering with or working with is actually easy to explain and makes an impact. And that's one of the things that we hold very dearly.

1:37:02It sounds like you all had a fairly serendipitous journey on fundraising, going to YC, and you had good investors from the start. I think Bedrock initialized, Matrix, a bunch of people initially. But there was this point that I think almost every company goes through. Stripe is maybe the exception, but almost every company has a shitty fundraising round that they really struggle to get done, I guess. Can you talk through the circumstances around being three months away from running out of capital and the business doing well, but for the first time, it may be coming a little more difficult to fundraise?

1:37:44What were the circumstances around that? And are there lessons that can be extrapolated for the entrepreneur listening? Yeah. I always felt like I had a pretty good pulse on the investor market and how people perceived the business. I think what I got wrong is there are certain points in time where the investor class changes. And with that perspective on a business changes. And I think series B and probably let's call it like pre-IPO slash IPO or those two trigger points where like a series B investment, I'm now learning this in hindsight, it's not just the story anymore. Like the metrics really matter because in a seed or series A investment, it's like pretty easy to underwrite to a 10 to 100 X return.

1:38:35Like everything about in my pitch to Gary and Alexis at Initialize, they're like do you think this thing can get to 100 million in ARR I was like yeah let me show you why and it's like on a napkin you can say well there's 400 ,000 neighborhoods in America I think they all probably like want to be safe the average neighborhood spends ten thousand dollars with us so like yeah I think I can get to 100 million dollars in ARR and they're like cool then this is an easy then like we we love the story this is we can underwrite this really easily. And I think even at series A, they're just looking for a little bit more traction, but it's the same pitch, which is like, can this thing get to a hundred, 200 million in ARR and therefore like, this is a good investment.

1:39:17What I noticed at least in series B is like, that wasn't enough anymore. Because now you're talking about a price point on the business that you got to believe pretty significant revenue growth is still ahead of it. Pretty significant like moats in the business that like you can block out competitors because if you're seeing success, someone's going to come behind you. And so the most memorable thing was we never really had a data room. We were very much emotional, triggered, and investing. People were really excited about the product, the concept, and the traction of the business, and not a lot of data.

1:39:54And we were laughed out of the room by these later stage investors who were like, your data is trash. You have nothing. Like, where's your NRR waterfall? And I was like, what's an NRR waterfall? It's like, we're growing fast. That's all I know. We went from a million to six million in ARR in a year. And we went from six million to 17 million this year. Give me money. Like, I'm not worried about the details. Like, I just think we have a lot of space. And what I didn't realize is that my job was becoming the storyteller of how our TAM is growing, how our penetration in the markets that we're in is defensible.

1:40:34My job had changed and I hadn't realized it. And I didn't pivot fast enough. And so to your point, we were down to about two or three months of runway and only two of us in the company knew. Sky John and I, he was running finance at the time. And it was scary. Because no one had any idea that we were at pretty big risk of not hitting payroll. uh the investor community had given up on the business um or you know it i don't look fondly back on that period of time uh we wound up having to do a kind of a mini riff layoff type thing we had to like go all the way down to bare bottoms to extend runway and i had to call gary back at initialize and say like hey i you know i need i need 20 million dollars and he was like i've got seven.

1:41:24I was like, well, that's less than half of 20, Gary. He was like, yeah, but we're a seed stage investor. This is already a bit of a stretch for us. And to his credit, he believed when a lot of other people didn't. And he got a great price because I had no negotiating leverage at that point. So I think he did. We were at about 16 million in ARR and he invested at$100 million valuation. And we had tripled the business the prior year and we wound up tripling the business again, which we said we were going to do. And everyone said, that's impossible. You're selling hardware. This company is going to flatten out.

1:42:05You don't know what you're doing. And we wound up proving everyone wrong. And I don't really even understand. We put up another quarter of good results. And what was different is I then told John, who's in charge of our finance time, I was like, dude, we're going to run out of money. So I chose, even though Gary only gave me seven, I pretended like he gave me 20. I spent it like he gave me 20. And so I knew we were only going to have probably like three to six months of runway. Again, like where we would need to fundraise, like we're going to have to go back out to market. And I took the feedback from the investors like seriously which was like your data room doesn't match the story your data the data you're giving us does not match what we're seeing on the top line and so we spent a bunch of time like redoing that and the business continued to put up good numbers the business was scaling and it felt like we were an entirely different company in every round i mean since then as as i uh unfortunately well know, has been very competitive and, you know, you've had more interest than need for capital.

1:43:22And was it really just the, I mean, there were some inflection point clearly you hit from a scale standpoint that was probably some whatever threshold, but Was it really just the storytelling and the presentation of all of it? You just got crisper in that. And therefore, I mean, the venture community can be sheep in a lot of ways, sort of falling in line around stuff. But is there anything else around that? Well, I think there's a few things, right? I think this is relevant to a lot of entrepreneurs if they're trying to serve a vertical that has not been attacked by venture successfully. although I had prior success like in terms of the growth of the business we got zero credit for future goals and the reason why I think it's fair because like they're saying like well who who do you peer against who should I look to as an investor to see what's possible and every other company we were competing with you know like Axon was bootstrapped and it took Axon you know 17 years to go public and it's a 30 something year old company now.

1:44:32It's a beautiful business but man, it took almost 40 years to get there. That's not venture. It's a great business but it's not venture. You look at Motorola, our other biggest competitor, and that's a 100 plus year old company. As an investor, you're going like, I can't really underwrite to your future goals because you're saying that but who do I look to? I do think, to your point, at a certain point, people just started to believe me. because I said, hey, look, we're going to go from from 16, 17 million to 50 million in ARR. People are like, you're out of your freaking mind. And I was like, I think that's the plan.

1:45:10I think we're going to hit this plan. And you put up a quarter or two on that trajectory and everyone's like, he might be right. This actually might work. And his numbers do seem pretty high, but he seems to be hitting numbers. The company seems to be tracking. And so I think there was an inflection point where the investor community stopped disagreeing with us and said, maybe these guys just actually deeply understand this market better than we do. It's bigger than we ever expected. And they've clearly figured out a way to attack it. And so every single fundraise, every single quarter, I think as a business, it took six years to have our first ever quarter that wasn't net larger in ARR growth, if that makes sense.

1:45:51Like we never had that. Not a down quarter on ARR, like a down quarter on the velocity of bookings. yeah um so i think that was just the big that was the other one is like the lack of a pattern to follow or like a proxy to look to and even today as a as a larger company when we get the question of like oh who do you view as as public comps it's kind of we don't samsara i guess but like they serve a totally different vertical we have a lot of commonalities in terms of our our metrics And so I do think that that is hard to overcome until you hit some scale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Garrett, thank you for doing this.

1:46:29This was a really fun conversation. And it's an incredible business you're building. I would not categorize it as dopey. I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. Your uncle can be proud that he motivated you in a good direction here. I think so, too. So what I appreciate is great to spend some time together. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Garrett Langley, co-founder and CEO of Flock Safety, a really impressive individual building a really important company. If you enjoyed this discussion with Garrett, please do share with anyone else that you think might find it interesting. And please subscribe on whatever platform that you're listening on.

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