The future of public safety via rapid drone response with Aerodome's Rahul Sidhu | E1900

0:00you know shout out to folks like uh david and and and and uh katherine at at in treason they came and did our seed round lickety split with 2048 Alex is gold out in New York um. We're in the process right now of closing a pretty large Series A. And when I did this A round, I was getting inbounds from GPs at every tier one firm, it felt like. And people have really, really embraced this. So I would say that what you were saying earlier in the podcast, there's a shift towards wanting to invest in defense and public safety. And thankfully, because of companies like Block, for example, and Mark 43, and some These other folks who have achieved some level of venture scale in public safety, people are now saying it's almost like a duty.

0:44We should try to look into this. And we know that it's a possibility that these companies could get really big. This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere. Get 20 % off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And Imagine AI Live is an AI conference where you'll learn how to apply AI in your business directly from the people who build and use these tools.

1:31it's taking place march 27th and 28th in las vegas and twist listeners can get 20 off tickets at imagineai.live slash twist all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups interesting trend i've watched here over the last decade in silicon valley which is located in the bay area a lot of hippies peace and love and all that kind of great stuff is a lot of the sort of gestalt, the philosophy of the Bay Area. And, you know, five years ago, you had folks maybe not even wanting to participate in anything safety, defense related. In fact, famously, 2019, Google, under pressure from their PSNIC employees, canceled the contract, cloud contract with the U.S.

2:21Department of Defense. is google the company that benefits from the safety and security provided by the u.s department of defense is above actually servicing them right and they didn't want to be in the business of war the uncomfortable business of safety while benefiting from it couldn't think of anything more hypocritical in my mind well that sentiment thankfully has changed here in silicon valley and uh we've seen a lot of successful companies and drill comes to mind friend of the pod palmer lucky ring friend of the pod Jamie Simenoff and flock safety had all of them on all in or end or this week in startups and investing in defense and public safety it's now actually considered a really big opportunity for startups this means smart people entrepreneurs are now incented to build products that make the world safer and today we have a great guest Raul Sidhu is the CEO and co-founder of a startup called aerodome a e r o d o m e and i saw the um so the demo of this on x.com formerly known as twitter and i said to my producers as i'm apt to do get rule on the program well here he is folks hey rule how are you doing i'm doing well sir how are you doing all right you heard my little intro there um and i just want you to show what you've built the audience and maybe we could play a little video or something just get right to it here what did you build why is it important uh and and how's it going yeah look uh i think the simplest way is to kind of show you uh what we've got going on here the simplest way to think about what we're doing here if you think about public safety air support is usually picture helicopters going around and and tracking high speed pursuits etc and what we built is the ability for police and fire departments to basically send a drone launch a drone from a central location and send it to a 911 call anywhere in the city at an average of 98 seconds or less.

4:21Okay. Giving these agencies the ability to provide rapid air support in a way that's scalable, faster, easier, cheaper than doing it the old way, which is with helicopters. Okay. So somebody calls 911. I think there's somebody trying to break into my house. I hear somebody at the back door. the 911 operator or the police or automated sends up a drone to the location of that phone call or the location so it's you know one two three main street there's somebody trying to break into my house a drone goes and it gets there in under 100 seconds that's right am i describing correctly what you built that's right yeah and a lot of it is automated i mean these drones launch from central drone stations where their batteries are swapped with little robot arms and the drones take off and can uh go to the call automatically and immediately provide that coverage and in the meantime someone from the fire station or the police station is sitting there on a computer we call them the chair force officer and they're flying the drone on the computer almost like it's a video game in that sense so that's basically how it works who initiates the deploying of the drone the 911 operator this uh what did you call them uh the chair uh the chair force officer the chair force officer is pretty funny that you know the person at headquarters you know decides they're going to send one of these drones and are they actually flying it or are they just putting in the address and saying go here and it does it in a predetermined route well it's a little bit of both um you know to answer your second question first the drone the 911 data comes directly into our system so in cities in which we're live now one call comes up and the information for that call comes into our system so they know oh there's a you know a shoplifting happening or a burglary in progress and it's at this address and they just have to press go and the drone will fly to that automatically now it doesn't mean that they can't of course when they get there they might want to make some tactical decisions so they're going to fly the drone like a mouse and keyboard or the controller to be able to decide, I want to get on this side of the house and, oh, my guy's running down this street and can do that and chase the person.

6:26Now, to answer your first question in terms of who decides, that's an agency by agency decision. I mean, typically, it's a police officer or in some cases, a firefighter that goes, oh, it's a call worth sending a drunk. I can provide air support. If it's a shoplifting call at my local CVS, I know that I can get there in enough time to be able to just follow that person as they get into a car get the plate on the car follow the car until a police officer can pull them over safely at a different location that's a decision that they make and then they can send and control the drone to do that type of air support got it okay i'm sure there are public um safety folks who have a million complaints about this what are the complaints you're currently hearing and what about those complaints are valid versus invalid uh you're saying like maybe complaints from the community or people who are concerned yeah there's i mean there are privacy advocates uh there are safety advocates oh my god this thing i would think the feedback you're getting and again it's always variable and they're squeaky wheels who get the grease but there are people who have privacy concerns about for example safety cameras and in san francisco the the hippie dippy lunatics uh you know are like we don't want cameras um of course they probably have a zillion cameras around their house but they don't want there to be a camera system in london there are camera systems everywhere now if you're in china there are camera systems with tracking of faces and you know maybe that's compromising privacy so i guess privacy concerns is one i can think of two is abuse and how do you and flock had this issue of hey is there abuse here could some you know chair force operator start tracking their spouse or you know stalking somebody we always see that kind of abuse in technical systems and then of course there's the classic is this thing going to run into a helicopter an airplane or fall out of the sky and kill my grandma so uh those are the three i can think of how do you address those three and have they come up or am i just uh you know assuming that people are still karens yeah look i mean there's a lot to unpack there um and i think that let me give you some context on on how this started so my background is in obviously both tech and public safety uh this wasn't my first public safety company i had another one that was acquired in 2021 but my background on the public safety side i've worked as a police officer firefighter paramedic crew chief uh across different parts i wore a lot of uniforms in the united states and uh this program actually uh you know i'm still reserve officer in los angeles area uh for uh the city of verdana beach and uh this program started in uh 2020 march of 2020 it was an experiment i ran um when one of a friend of mine who was working at a different agency, Chula Vista, was like, hey, we're starting to maybe try to use drones for this purpose.

9:13And in COVID times, right when it hit, we were down maybe 40 % of our force on any given day. So we had to do more with less. And then we weren't as able to use traditional air support as a lot of these units were grounded. So we needed to find a way to make something work. Now, I was the air support manager at the time. I was basically trying to put this together myself as a reserve officer that's still there. And I had to do a lot of the community meetings. I had to listen to people's concerns and I had to make assurances to the community and how this would be used. The main thing here is that we're not reinventing the wheel in terms of what is actually happening.

9:51Helicopters are going around flying and providing some level of air support to police officers or firefighters in the field. And there's case law around that, what they can and can't do, how they can prevent themselves from operating in a way that isn't good or violating the fourth amendment or any of those things drones are essentially a technological advantage in the sense that you can use more they're cheaper they're safer they're greener but it's still doing generally the same thing as helicopters might right say right okay and do they fall under the same operating principles as a helicopter pursuing people or going to a crime scene uh you can think of it that way it gets a little bit more complicated but from a legal standpoint you know generally yes that's how they're done if they're operating um now the concerns that i would have and the concerns i heard from the community when we started this was well like you said how are we going to make sure this is used the right way how do we protect privacy and then the number one thing was how how is the agency going to be accountable and transparent in how they use this technology um and the latter being i would say very important um the the way that helicopters are going around there and flying they're not necessarily going to be recording all of their the footage they're gathering um some of it might go to evidence but a lot of it might not our drones are going to record and then that that video data can be uh susceptible to the freedom of information act so there's no it's like a body cam that's always on in that sense and if you're pro body cam then you're probably pro body cam in the sky trying to catch another angle of what that makes total sense so you have an audit trail because of this and if you were the victim of a crime you very much might want to have that audit trail uh so if your house was you know broken into or if there was abuse you know somebody decides they're going to use this to track uh let's just say the the classic facebook employer google employee this has happened i think at both companies where somebody has an x and they start you know checking out their dms and all that stuff that you can you can google it i think it was that had this issue they just created audit trails and the audit trails catch the person immediately in fact when somebody goes and does something that's you know uh inappropriate it just the alarms go off because there's an audit trail it would be much simpler to go buy a used drone fly it yourself if you wanted to audit somebody rather than using the police one correct oh yeah absolutely yeah so no 100 you'd have to be an idiot to use this inappropriately if you were on the force it'd be like if you wanted to yeah if you wanted to to break the law and you were a cop you wouldn't use a police car yeah you wouldn't have your body cam on that you can't turn it off so there's nothing you can do um in that sense and look as a company the way we approach this is we need to uh ensure do everything we can to ensure that this is used in in a way that that everybody wants it to be used and then also empower agencies to be able to effortlessly be accountable and transparent that's what my last company was about was about police transparency and accountability but this one the way we think about it is look if if the flight logs of every flight are automatically uploaded to a public facing dashboard so that i i know oh okay that drone that was flying overhead i can go to xyz police department's website and see yeah that was responding to a shoplifting yeah um and i know exactly what the call for service calls are in many jurisdictions public record correct 911 calls get released so this is just adding another data source to it and it's adding a super effective one are you still using your personal phone number for business oh my lord please stop please stop it's such a common mistake that founders make but you never have to make that mistake again thanks to open phone open phone has rethought every detail of what a modern business phone should look like they make it super easy to get your business phone number for you and your team.

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14:06And open phone allows us to do that. And we want to be like first ring pickup. You ever get that you call down to the front desk, they pick up on the first ring. That's what I want to do at my company. And that's what open phone allows us to do. Open phone is already affordable, starting at just 13 bucks a user per month. Oh my god, what a deal. But twist listeners can get another 20 % off any plan for the first six months at open phone.com slash twist. And if you got existing numbers with another service no problem easy peasy lemon squeezy open phone will port them over at no extra cost head to openphone.com twist to start your free trial and get 20 off thanks open phone for making an awesome product i'd love it are you deployed yet and in how many cities are you deployed and what's the uh and how long have you been employed in those cities uh yeah look our first agency went live uh november 1st so it's been a few months um great and yeah and where is that agency here that's uh redonda beach california in los angeles okay great awesome uh we have two more agencies in that area that have uh basically set up trial versions in los angeles area we've got a couple more agencies that are also live so right now uh we've got three that are up and then two additional that are in trial and we're deploying another six to seven in the next few months is the idea that every precinct would have a drone launch launcher on the roof is that is that the vision eventually is there's drones on the roof of everyone or do they come out of an airport you know i'm sure redondo beach has many local airports how do you manage the deployment of these and then what's the distance they can travel and how long can they stay up yeah look it's not um you know you can put these drone stations it doesn't have to be just on the police department roof i mean they're pretty easy to uh yeah exactly it can be in a lot of places um but look i think that the the idea is generally around two things one is there are basically two types of public safety agencies out there.

15:57One is the one that can afford a traditional helicopter-based air support program, which is, you know, I'd say a couple hundred in the United States. Major city. Major cities, counties, etc. And then there's the vast majority of communities that you can't afford that. And we're trying to democratize access to the latter so those agencies can afford to be able to provide air support, and then make sure that the former have an option to either supplement or replace what is typically a more expensive and unsafe way to do it. I mean, we have in the last 10 years, 12 fatal collisions, you know, crashes on the helicopter side for public safety.

16:37Yeah, I mean, they're incredibly dangerous. People don't realize helicopters, it's not a perfected technology by far. And drones, we can say quadcopters are massively more, we obviously know they're safer, we know they're cheaper. How much safer are they than helicopters? Best way to think about it is if you looked up and you saw a helicopter coming down and crashing your car versus a drone coming down and crashing your car, which one are you most afraid of? But I would say it's in orders of magnitude. Obviously, there's no one in it. It's an uncrewed device. So the safety of the people inside doesn't matter.

17:11The safety of the people down below is another big thing. When you have an airplane the size of a Cessna, and I'm a manned aircraft pilot too, so I think about this, or an aircraft like a helicopter crash, you're going to have a lot of collateral damage on the ground. 100 these things are not like you know we're talking about 10 15 pounds and some capacities maybe a little bit heavier um and the safety mechanisms that exist for this uh you know some drones are equipped with parachutes the a new one that we're putting out there is both has the ability to fly like an airplane and fly like a helicopter and have multiple levels of redundancy and there's a lot of digitized uh like geofences built in what we do is that we actually put an air traffic control node almost essentially on the rooftop of the agency that uses radar radio frequency sensors you know a variety of other sensors to be able to cover the airspace within four nautical miles of that agency or that drone station so that drone can basically take off and fly knowing where all the other potentially drones or more importantly manned aircraft are and they would also i assume know where the tall trees are and they could do that you know educate us on the latest in drone technology um what what's the what's the flight time of these drones today what height do they typically fly at and then how do they know obstacles is it because there are maps that are done ahead of time or are they doing that in real time with their cameras yeah i mean look i'll start with the beginning uh the the the most common static drones uh or i'm sorry quadcopter drones are flying anywhere between 35 to 55 minutes of flight time um the the ones that we're utilizing also fly at about 52 miles per hour on the quadcopter side this year we're putting out a different drone with one of our partners that's like i said and it takes off uh you know vertically lands vertically but it can fly horizontally that drone uh can stay up for two hours and fly upwards of 100 miles per hour do any and so the the speed is 52 miles an hour uh and you're flying uh like the crow flies so just in terms of distance uh you know you're going to be able to get to you know uh you know at 10 miles away from the police station or whatever in 10 minutes and so you're getting to most calls in single digit minutes you're obviously beating the police there typically yeah 94 of our uh uh basically the drones being on uh the flights these drones are going out with the responding allen calls 94 across all our customers they're first on scene and like i said the average response time about 98 seconds in a place like redondo beach what what height are they flying at and has the faa come up with a specification for like they do for you know uh jets and stuff like that they're supposed to fly certain routes certain airspace so what's the airspace rules now at the faa because they they seem to have been very pro drone and they seem to have been very pro licensing i i was always amazed that of all the agencies that are typically anti-technology or you know maybe they de-accelerate them am i correct that the faa has been uh an accelerant for for getting these things in the air and making sure they're safe safe i would say um the recent faa for sure you know you're you've probably seen companies that have come across your deal desk it like zipline and folks who have been waiting years and years and years for waivers they just got in the last several months uh the fa has become very uh open to it i would say but in a very safe and measured way I don't think that they're operating at a speed that isn't even close to reckless, or I would say close to what the private sector would potentially do in terms of risk mitigation.

20:45But they're willing. It feels like they're taking a rational approach to this, which is all anybody can ask for in this space. There are rules that have already been set that, for example, our pilots have to follow of not flying above 400 feet without any type of special waiver. and there's also rules around flying beyond visual line of sight that the fa is starting to use allow people to use technology like ours potentially to um to be able to fly without a visual observer meaning even if the drone is so far that i can't see it with my my naked eye i have technology like the sensors i just mentioned or other sensors that can tell you where that drone is in relation to other aircraft and then allow for you to more safely be able to fly that distance got it so they're traveling 50 miles an hour they're traveling typically two three 400 feet which would be 20 30 40 stories in the air so a place like redondo beach you don't even have 20 story buildings like in a and that market you're going after is not downtown la or manhattan so you're not going into areas with 50 story skyscrapers you're going into areas with two or three story buildings yeah typically like that's that's 99.999 percent of the country right so uh that's definitely true now it doesn't mean that we haven't sat there and talked to maybe some folks at uh nypd about what this would look like in manhattan versus other places um and you know you add a level of complication because one of the questions you asked earlier was how do you prevent it from hitting a static object is it mapping this and where's the yeah what's the latest on that technology is i remember you know there were geofences geo heights like i i know um i was a friend was using one of these by an airport and they were doing it also by public parks and like you weren't allowed to have it go into the presidio or you know other federal land you weren't allowed to go over certain height because there was an airport in that area so yeah fill us in on how do they avoid a tree or you know some let's say somebody put up a you know i don't know uh somebody put up a banner i'm making up a crazy situation here but somebody put up some crazy banner actually in la you know they put up those blow-up dolls that have the arms that flail outside of uh yeah outside of uh car dealerships you know things might be 20 stories and some idiot puts it on the roof how does it know that that's there is it does it have uh avoidance now or is it done with maps how is avoidance done in quadcopter land these days well look we can talk about it from a software standpoint to hardware standpoint this the the usage and practical software thing is that you just build a geofence for where the drone can and can't fly.

23:19And if you build a minimum altitude where it has to take off and hit minimum altitude and the drone can fly in this area and that area is above the tallest static object measured in the city. Okay, you're done. You're done. I mean, look, there's a possibility that something goes up and you have to kind of pay attention to that, of course. And you can ingest data in real time for that purpose. But the dynamic geofencing is the more complicated problem that we've focused on solving, which is more around aircraft, which is if I know with my combination of radar and radio frequency and ADS-B sensors that there's a helicopter flying east to west at this altitude in this location, I can basically, software can put a bubble around that helicopter, a half a mile bubble that prevents the drone from getting vertically or horizontally too close to that aircraft.

24:03And that's happening not because of the onboard sensors on the drone, but because of the sensors on the ground. But the most important thing about thinking about the hardware side of this, there are companies that have done a good job in terms of autonomy of putting back in a bunch of sensors on these drones and building onboard compute for this. And I think that's important when you're doing things like inspections, where you're going to fly really close to a wall and you don't want to hit the wall. Companies like Skydio, they do a great job with this. My take on this, though, is that when you're doing a combination of static and dynamic geofencing in the way that I just described, you don't need to waste weight on this aircraft to put a bunch of sensors to prevent it from hitting something.

24:41if you're flying 100 miles per hour and you hit something, if you're trying to not hit an aircraft, you're already too close. If you're trying to not hit a wall, you blew the geo... Like something's wrong on the software side. So we think about taking, as the cost of compute comes to zero, as we're able to process more of this more efficiently on the cloud and our latency is low enough, we think about how much can we do off the drone and maintain the drone to be as lightweight as possible and simplify the drone manufacturing so that you can actually achieve the speeds you want for as long as you want and treat it simply like a physics problem for an aircraft does that make sense totally uh and any of these things they don't weigh as much as and they don't cost as much as a helicopter helicopters three four thousand dollars an hour uh i think is the average cost yeah yes i mean it's in in some cases even more because you're for police helicopters you're tying these things down with two thousand two million dollar cameras and all kinds of stuff that have their own variable cost ah okay so yeah it can be of a five six seven thousand what do you what does it cost a police department and how do you charge you charge by mile flown by minute flown do you charge a flat rate and they can use it unlimited how do you charge for a product like this because it's really hard to sell into municipalities obviously it's you know flock had this issue really hard to sell in and then how do you price something yeah yeah look i mean it flocks a great um great example uh shout out to I was just talking to him a few days ago.

26:05The Flock model did really, really well, selling sub-70-day sales cycles and small amounts of money and trying to get like, let's go land and expand. And they've done a great job. And now they have a lot of logos and a lot of distribution. Our approach is a little bit different in the sense that our ACVs are 622 ,000 on average, last time I checked. What we sell is the complete solution. So we are building the software. Obviously, the software comes with it. The hardware, we partner with hardware companies that have exclusive relationships to sell into our sector. And the services we provide to just get them the FA waivers and do training basic services, nothing complicated.

26:48We give all that under one contract with one subscription fee. So you've essentially turned air support into almost like a SaaS model in that sense. Obviously, it's more complicated and the cogs aren't going to be the same. But that's the way that we've approached this because it's a lesson I learned from my last company when I was selling to police departments. And our ACBs were 40K and our sales cycles were 9 to 12 months. But now we have the same sales cycle where the ACB is 14, 15 times that amount. And we're able to actually achieve the level of growth that we want, get a venture outcome and get bigger faster.

27:22working in public safety for the last eight to nine years on the venture side of this too and just trying to figure out what companies do a good job it has to be either like it feels like the flock model or our model of being able to do one of the two yeah so you just gonna you charge a municipality to have this complete solution thinking it's hundreds of thousands of dollars to low millions for the for the average customer per year yeah so the the cheapest like one station is going to be in the, you know, that's like closer to about$300 ,000 a year for everything. But that's, you know, obviously the way that a city looks at it is like, I need X amount of radars, you know, like air traffic nodes to put in the city.

28:02I need X amount of drones and drone stations. And that price can layer over time, but it's still a yearly price. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2. What is SOC 2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC 2 compliant. If you don't have your SOC 2 tight, your sales team can't close major deals. It's that simple. But thankfully, Vanta makes it really easy to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks.

28:37Without Vanta, it takes three to five months. Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 % on compliance costs. And Vanta does more than just SOC 2. They also automate up to 90 % compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. And you can obviously tag somebody. So when it sees somebody, this is a perp, the chair force person can just highlight them and say, follow that person, follow that car, yeah. And it just automatically does it?

29:13I'll say right now that's something that we have not yet deployed that's still in testing. So it'd be disingenuous of me to say that that's live. But object tracking as a component has been largely, again, hardware and hasn't been super effective. So we've been kind of rebuilding it as a predictive object tracking model that's software based and you can plug and play anybody's drone and it can still do it that way. but that's actually Jason brings up a good point because when we think about what this looks like you want to add more and more ability to be autonomous now we're not autonomous today and we're not going to be autonomous when you do this and all of a sudden we're full self-driving cars.

29:50There's an autopilot and an enhanced autopilot and a full self-driving beta and it's piece by piece and the way that we look at this is you start with predictive object tracking. Hey, follow this car a human being does that. Then you can object classification where you go, okay, the hit and run vehicle was a blue BMW. And as the pilot's flying, it's boxing the blue BMWs and showing you where to go. Then you get into something a little bit more along the lines of like, you know, NLPLM, like what if it can read the notes now and call and eventually get into some level of autonomous agency where it's being able to know what to do.

30:22And that's going to take several years to do. And the most important thing is to do it in a way that's not, like the things we're going to stay away from. I want nothing to do with facial recognition. I don't want to be able to identify a person. that's not no that's a liability yeah your your privacy your your date is my liability became like a little bit of a rallying cry here in silicon valley at one point because it was like i don't even want to keep that information on you and that's why apple's like you know i'm just gonna encrypt your phone we don't need to know what's on there and so yeah that's a smart move on your part unless there's 10 people who are on the most wanted list and it finds one of the top 10 while it's flying that that could seem to be a pretty valid use so you may wind up getting that if somebody knows hey or or even an amber alert hey this child is missing and you know have you have you talked to to miss palace about the amber alert sort of situation hey we know it's a toyota and it's a blue toyota and we know it's like this age and here's the picture here's five pictures of the person yeah seems to me to be a valid use of facial recognition well look the facial recognition debate is is i would say pretty different i i would not bet my like the company's success and maintaining a positive overton window shift simply on the use case or the practicality of like if you were to tell me hey can you go back in time and put facial recognition on this thing and find bin laden in 2007 i would still not want to do it despite just because i think the risk is very very high and i do buy to a certain extent the slippery slope argument on there what i will say is that that doesn't mean you can't combine technology that already exists so like i'm gonna bring flock back to this there's plenty of companies but flock does a great job with automated license plate reading where they have those cameras that can go oh that car is a stolen car or like you said that's an amber alert vehicle and if we can if those triggers happen and the drone station's nearby and takes off and goes up cool and tracks the car automatically that's going to save a lot of kids and that's amazing you possibly have on stolen vehicles is is massive and if what we what we know is that stolen vehicles by themselves it's not about the nuisance of getting your car stolen it's that when someone steals your car they're going to use it for the next three days to go around and commit crimes they're a vessel auto here we come yeah so so imagine if if a city can essentially ensure that every car that gets pulled you know into their city gets pulled over the amount of uh deterrence that's going to cause on property crime generally in that city that's amazing for people who don't know flock um you know neighborhoods can deploy flock uh license plate readers and there's also an open source license plate reading software out there that some folks made it's totally illegal to read license plate on a camera in a public place obviously this does it in an automatic fashion and you could do interesting things hey this license plate has never been in this neighborhood okay that's a yellow oh this license plate is involved in you know whatever a crime or it's been reported so hey that's a red we're going to send a drone up oh my lord i mean this could really save a lot of lives um yeah you know forget about property damage i mean it's really about your like you're saying what's the next crime what's the next crime my brother was on the job uh and my cousins my uncle and you know there was this concept of um stop asking frisk or broken glass broken window syndrome like you know hey somebody breaks a window next day there's gonna be two broken windows and all of a sudden it's a free-for-all putting aside how people feel about those emotionally somebody hops a turnstile you know the chances of them having a gun go up massively just statistically when cops would find guns on the street and this happened in oakland here recently at the fruitvale station in the bay area somebody hopped the turnstile somebody you know cop comes up hey you hopped the turnstile can i talk to you for a second uh handcuff oh yeah they've got a gun on them an illegal gun so this is absolutely fantastic i think what you're doing is incredible um and in terms of funding i was giving my little preamble there has the venture community embraced what you're doing or do you have to look elsewhere for uh investment uh yeah no and i want to answer that but one thing i wanted to mention was based on something you just said um i i agree with what you're saying in terms of how that you can solve for crime in the way that you're doing it.

34:41I think it varies neighborhood neighborhood and every community gets to decide how they want to be policed. One thing I will say is that I'm a big believer in our system being used in response to crime. I think when you start using a system like ours to be proactive, it's a little bit of a different conversation. And that's up to the communities to decide. And there's a difference between, hey, stolen car, respond to that because that would generate a 911 call today versus go look for stolen cars. That's a whole different argument. And we're very big on the former and not very big on the latter.

35:13So I'll say that. Back to your question about the venture funding. Yes. In fact, fundraising for my last company from 2015 up until we were acquired in 2021 was a slog. We were selling to public safety. I heard a lot of, ooh, don't like GovTech. Okay. I don't really understand this. What I got a lot of attention in a good way because there was founder market fit. Okay. Here's a tech guy that's also a cop that kind of gets this that helped and we were able to raise a little bit of money but we raised less than four million bucks for that last company over overall so we you know we had a decent outcome because we didn't have a lot to clear but um this company you know shout out to folks like uh david and and uh katherine at indrescent you know like they they came and did our seed round lickety split with 2048 alex isco out in new york um we're in the process right now, closing a pretty large Series A.

36:02And when I did this A round, I was getting inbounds from GPs at every tier one firm, it felt like, and people have really, really embraced it. So I would say that what you were saying earlier in the podcast, there's a shift towards wanting to invest in defense and public safety. And thankfully, because of companies like Block, for example, and Mark 43, and some of these other folks who have achieved some level of venture scale uh in public safety people are now saying it's you know almost like a duty we should try to look into this and we know that it's a possibility that these companies could get you know really big yeah alex is uh alex from is cold is that uh alex is cold yeah yeah i remember him from new york he ran tech stars in new york for a bit yeah i was in his i was in his cohort in 2015 for the first company he's been my first check for two companies in a row now and that's a really it's super like uh charming when that happens uh you know when you get to have that relationship 2048 venture shout out to him um yeah really he was a great entrepreneur he did um glue if you remember that it was like a social network around uh tv and what was his company before that or maybe i just know him from glue anyway he was a developer and um yeah he built some really interesting companies and he was always like a good writer i remember and then he wound up doing the tech star stuff and then um yeah he became a managing partner of 2048 ventures 2048 vc are you using ai tools every single day if not you're falling behind you know that in 2024 ai is all about adoption but here's the hard part how do you separate the signal from the noise there are tons of ai tools out there we all know that but some are just parlor tricks And here's one way you can start to get an edge.

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So Twist listeners can get 20 % off at imagineai.live slash twist. that's imagineai.live slash twist to get 20 % off your tickets listen this is amazing you told me uh we told the producers you had a good all-in story so i'm always i'm always like a good all-in story so let's hear it everybody's got an all-in story uh i'm not gonna ask you your favorite best i won't put you on the spot but yeah go ahead give us your best all-in story uh look i think um um all it has had a pretty big impact for me uh it's 2020 i was uh i was working stills reserve officer i was i had a failed acquisition that occurred for my last company right at covid they just tried to trade the deal at the last second uh and i had to raise emergency funding and get ourselves out of it uh and try to flip that company we ended up making it profitable so we able to get out of that situation um then covet hit and i remember i had like i was going through a breakup at the time it's it's now the first week of june last week of may as you can remember there were a lot of uh you know that's when the the george floyd thing happened and yeah i was um yeah and i was actually i got called up as a reserve officer so i was deployed days and days at a time um to protest in some riots and and and i'm also fundraising at the same time so i'm jumping into the police car and like getting on a call to try and you know pitch the company while i'm still like i gotta jump out and then get back into the mix so i was it was a pretty exhausting time and i remember like i'm a brown guy for those of you who uh who are listening with uh without their eyes um and i had an identity crisis being a person of color who's also a police officer and i had i'll be like very candid i had a lot of like white people come and try to explain racism to me and it was a frustrating time for me um i ended up losing friends that i didn't you know i like i thought were friends not because i was outspoken of a political opinion i was i'm like you know generally when it comes to police officers i'd say i'm generally a fairly progressive guy yeah uh but just because i was a cop just because like hey we've liked you you're great but you must be a bastard because you're a police officer and i went through this and i felt like man the world is like losing their mind a little bit and i just wanted to be a moderate rational thinker who just try to solve problems and there are plenty in policing that i i agreed with people and um but i someone turned me on to all in and right around that time period and it finally felt like okay content that feels like it's these guys are reasonable and they're trying to solve these problems and i've been listening to it ever since yeah it's just good to hear i mean we one of the things i've i've tried to do you know and i'm in the position of the moderator um because nobody else wants to do it and you're the world's best right well yeah i mean people don't know about that world's best thing that it's a joke what happened was we have a friend phil hellmuth um who you know everybody knows phil hellmuth they just type phil hellmuth blow up into youtube and you'll see all the clips um but he's a very effervescent poker player um his original nickname was the poker brat but he had this thing where he wanted to be the world's best poker player so he like started making his twitter handles or his emails like being the greatest and all this stuff and you know we all poked fun at him for it because it's deranged and strange and whatever but i thought it was quite um a great affirmation technique to say hey i'm trying to be the greatest i want to be the greatest um and so just as a joke at the poker table i was like yeah you're the world's greatest poker player i'm the world's greatest moderator yeah you're manifesting yeah i'm manifesting but it was like what does it even mean to be the world's best moderator like who cares so it's kind of a joke but what i have tried to do is keep everybody intellectually honest and you know sometimes a little uncomfortable but you want to point out like hey on behalf of the audience is what you're saying you know here's something that maybe the audience and people listening might not you know might be incongruous so when i challenge somebody like you know i might challenge freeberg on like hey is what tucker's saying about climate change correct or not right because i know the audience is thinking like yeah freeberg should challenge you know uh him on this or you know hey is there global warming is or not you know and and what does somebody of science like freeberg think or hey is you know if sax is super passionate about you know this war with the ukraine as he obviously is okay i just want to be clear here you're not rooting for putin right buddy yeah no i'm not rooting for putin i want to be clear about that and putin should not have invaded ukraine but i do think the u.s it's very hard to have that nuanced discussion because everybody just wants to pick a side you know like you said about being a cop you know everybody's like oh all cops are bad all cops you know are putting their knees on the neck of a perp in cuffs like no that's one cop and i can tell you right like no cop wants to do that no cop wants to murder somebody like this is like the sociopathy of you know a very small number of individuals in the world and you just you know we and it's fantastic every cop wants to be cameras no no what cop wants to turn their their body cams off you want cameras you want protection you know from those kind of situations so i'm glad that you know it struck you and it just has something to do with the mainstream media like when the mainstream media got all biased and everybody had to pick a side and if you said hey i'm wondering you know hey if we're talking about you know black lives mattering well you know this cop got shot right um when they were pulling somebody over what do we think about that you know and even me saying that right now somebody could clip it and say oh jake how's making an equivalency between systematic racism and a cop being shot nope i'm not i'm just saying you know being a cop's a hard job you know that's a hard job and it's scary and you you know the operating principle of being a cop get home alive i'm not on the front line but yeah i can't imagine what it feels like to you with the target on your back well even on the front line like at that moment when uh when we when we were at protests or in some cases riots um i can tell you right now that feeling that people talked about you know as cops was like this derrick shawbin mother like we were so pissed everyone hated this guy he's the reason that i'm like getting bottles thrown at me here's the he's the reason that like more hot cops are going to die and everyone thought like who's the derek chauvin in our agency and there's been this transformation and necessary transformation in policing where now it's like like that that there's there's a there is a positive side effect to the absolutely going up a little bit because sometimes you need the heat to go up a little bit and you get rid of uh the folks that that shouldn't be there and you kind of clean out some liability but there's a downside like we're dealing right now with also the fact that one of the reasons our system is selling is because an agency that should be it's budgeted to hire 100 cops can only afford 90 cops uh and it's not a problem of i'm sorry they can afford 100 they can only hire 90 cops it's not a problem of their budget don't want the job people don't want to be be cops so when our drones are out there being able to make the patrol officers more efficient where they can do effectively lessen the need for maybe two of those cops uh or four of those cops and then be a fraction of that cost uh so you can go and say hey these drones can basically reduce our 100 100 person budget to 96 and we only have to pay for two of them uh and then we can we can there's a reason that makes sense yeah but yeah you know one thing i wanted to key in on uh because it really comes to a bigger point and it's actually something we i pulled from from all in was you mentioned intellectual honesty.

46:06And that's a really, really important thing to me. It's actually something I did occasionally as a new CEO, I did a bad job doing sometimes. I'd have rose-tinted goggles, whatever the term is, glasses, and I would want to... I'd have confirmation bias. And this event in 2020, and then spending time listening to content you guys made and other people made that showed the value of intellectual honesty, made it so it's one of the most important things in our company. In fact, there are three things that I think we pulled from this part of it being all in that are measures of intellectual honesty.

46:39One of them, you know, is the steel man. If I have somebody, you guys do this on the podcast all the time. If I have another executive or someone else at the company, including myself, if I have an opinion, first thing is, okay, what's your level of conviction? So that's your first thing. And be honest. If you say everything's high conviction, you're going to sound like an asshole. No one's going to believe you. And if you have a high enough level of conviction, the second thing is, okay, get ready. Steel man yourself and or get ready to be, you know someone runs the opposing on that i think those two things end up being um you know critically important as you as you establish some level of intellectual honesty you have to be okay with falling in love with the problem and not necessarily the solution and being wrong if you're wrong it's a super uh important part of being a great leader founder and working at a startup is yes there is a problem in the world and there could be 10 solutions so let's see what the market which solution the market wants right now which solution we can build and yeah i might think it's you know number four out of ten and i could be wrong you know it's these you know uh devices aren't ready yet at some point it's going to be great when these drones can you know drop a um a net on somebody right not today but at some point if there's a you know uh uh an emotionally disturbed patient when i was on an ambulance it was an edp's i guess they called them i don't know what they call them now what do they call an emotionally disturbed person now on the radio it's state by state it's state by state new york was edp yeah yeah and like california might be 51 50 in pennsylvania it was like a 902 or something yeah but anyway get emotionally disturbed patient like nobody knows what to do like it would be great to have countermeasures for that you know uh because if you're a cop it's like i got a baton i got a taser i got a gun you know like these i'm always surprised that we don't have other neutralizing you know tools and this is you know like there are alternative bullets and so there are people i don't know you know like there's sandbags i guess you can get i don't know how many people have those or how often they get used but it'd be nice there's so many emotionally disturbed people right now and people who go through these acute events it'd be so great to just have a drone come and this person's acting out and they got a you know a you know a katana sword and you know somebody's gonna get hurt and just drop a net on them you know i've seen those net guns i just think those things have potential yeah so what i'll say is uh you know i want to be careful about this in the sense that i we don't have any plans nor do i think it makes any sense for the company to get into any like intervention coming from the drone i think that's again that's another one of those slippery slopes that that feels like it might not be you know the right move for us but i do agree with the fact that we i you know from a public safety standpoint i want to increase the opportunity or the options for non-lethal intervention the more we can and before that though is we talk about like the new age of policing that you know parts of this really need to occur is the process of de-escalation and and there are little things that you learn as a cop uh that veterans definitely know and i mean when i mean veterans i mean veteran cops where where they're they'll be like okay when you approach somebody like you don't need to be this hard charging asshole you can just go up and be like hey man what's up how's it going and smile and and like hey my name's wrong what's your name if you do that verbal judo is what we call it if you're good at verbal judo you might not ever have to hit one of these uh non-lethal uh you know approaches but of course it's not always the case and you want to have options i've tried all of them in the field i've tased i've you know been tased i've been pepper sprayed i've i've done the the beanbag guns and like the what they call the rubber bullets and and all that stuff and some of it works but none of it works 100 and you give your guys the best options they can have and hope for the best and train them yeah best weapons up here yeah all right listen we wish you a great success with your company uh i think you're hiring uh so where can people learn more about careers uh working with you on this very important platform yeah look i go to our website uh aerodome aero dome.com check out the careers page there check us out on twitter check me out on twitter i'm always talking about public safety uh at rahul sadhu that they'll put the link in there i'm sure yeah s-i-d-h-u i think h-u but on on twitter i do s-i-d-o-o so i'm oh okay yeah awesome all right we'll continue success and we'll see you next time on this week in startups bye bye Thank you.