The a16z Show - What It Takes to Clear a Million Crimes a Year with Flock Safety's CEO

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

In this episode, previously aired on Cheeky Pint, Garrett Langley describes how a stolen gun in his Atlanta neighborhood led him to build Flock Safety, now deployed in more than 6,000 cities and involved in clearing over a million crimes last year. He covers how the product has evolved from license plate cameras to drones, real-time 911 integration, and an AI-powered orchestration layer for city safety.   Resources: Follow Garrett Langley on X: https://twitter.com/glangley Follow John Collison on X:   https://twitter.com/collision Listen to Cheeky Pint: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcoWp8pBTM3BxiPMHCj0YJ4wvGbUOYZIG Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in. I was working with a town in Tennessee. It's a good city. Their average response time to 9-1 won't call 7.5 minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. It should look a better quality of service. You don't wind up policing where crime has happened historically.

you end up policing where crime is happening right now in real time. And that is a fairly fundamental shift in how policing works. The majority of criminals, let's call it, 99% of criminals are not evil people. They're not. Like, evil is a random act of violence,

and that is exceptionally rare. It's very rare. It's all opportunism. In 2017, someone stole a gun from a car in Garrett Langley's neighborhood. The Atlanta Police Department came, shrugged and left. No fingerprints, no investigation.

The crime would go unsolved. So Langley, an electrical engineer, built a camera to track every car entering the neighborhood. Two months later, another gun was stolen. This time, he handed police a single plate, the only car that didn't belong. Hours later, an arrest. That prototype became flock safety,

now deployed in more than 6,000 American cities. Last year, the company helped clear over a million crimes. The product has grown from license plate readers to drones, 911 integration, and an AI layer that turns city safety into a real-time operating system. In this conversation, previously aired on Cheeky Pind. Garrett Langley talks with John Collison about building hardware for law enforcement, Why crime is down, but clearance rates matter more

and what it would take to make every city a safe city. Cheers. Yes, good to see you. Likewise, thanks for having me. Okay, so maybe start by describing, how does the flock product work? Yeah. Maybe when we go, we rewind like all the way back

because it's evolved. You know, so eight years ago living in Atlanta, and there's a fun fact, is if you're in a place like Atlanta or Memphis or pick a town in the southeast, if you just pull 10 F-150 door handles, some, let's call it 3 out of 10 will be unlocked, and like one at a 10 will have a firearm in a glove box.

Which is like, regardless of the firearm, your point of view on it, it's like, you should keep firearm to safe. And you should keep it in a safe, not in a glove box. Like, that's just like really bad. But that's what people do. And so if you're, you know, a gang member and you're trying to obtain a firearm, like the easiest way is just to just like drive into a neighborhood

six kids, because there are kids, like jump out, you start pulling door ham. You don't have anything like breaking into the car. You're pulling door hamps. So this happened in my neighborhood. Someone got a gun. Someone posts on next door like, oh my gosh, I forgot my gun in my car and it's now gone.

And so the Atlanta Police Department comes. And the major was like fairly apathetic. Like, hey, sorry, good luck. Like we're not going to, so do your boss thing, they're not going to fingerprint the vehicle. Like no one's been hurt. Yeah, yeah. And for most major cities...

There's no stakeout happening for this opportunity. There's no, like, oh, we're going to go to all this resources. For most major cities, if a human is not physically hurt, the crime goes just to the bottom of the list. And I find that really frustrating. Because, like, this should be, like, really easy. Like, these people drove into our neighborhood. They stole a firearm. Like, we should go after these people.

And he was like, well, we don't have any information. It's like, okay, what do you need to say? We need a license space. Okay, great. So I was an electrical engineer. So I called a buddy of mine who studied computer science with me at Georgia Tech. And I was like, look, we're going to go build this camera. So you go just track license, but that's it.

That's what the Atlanta police permit said. Okay, great. So we built this thing. And if you ever come to Atlanta office, we still have the original camera like on, you know, pedestal that looks like garbage. I'm on a mechanical engineer. We put it up and all it did was track every car that came into our neighborhood. But as you can imagine, like after 30 days, you start to be able to know, like, that person clearly lives here. in the neighborhood twice a day, four times a day. And so about two months later, another car

gets broken into, another firearm stolen. The same major comes back. And I was like, oh, by the way, here's the only car that doesn't live in our neighborhood that was here last night. That car gets put on what we call like Ebola, like we're on the lookout for. A couple hours later, they find that vehicle. The gun's in the car. The person goes to jail. And what was really interesting is like the we were very proud of ourselves. This was not a business at the time. It was a single project. And so the 5 o'clock news would do the story.

So I'm on the 5 o'clock news. And the next morning, like I had five emails from neighborhoods. And I think I might be the, we might be the only company that strictly driven off a 5 o'clock news. That was our only growth channel. Yeah, yeah.

That actual media appearance did you drive? And every time we solved a crime, we'd be like, hey, do you want to cover the story at 5 o'clock? And they'd be like, we'd love to. We'd love talking about crime. Because this is local news. It's local news. We're not going to go to the New York Times.

No one cares about like a stolen sofa. Yeah, yeah. Or like a stolen dog. Okay, but that adds up. Did you start with that? Because I associate flock today with being plugged into the stolen car databases. Yeah. But you started without that.

Just looking out suspicious stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it in the classic, I don't know who gets credit for it, you know, there's 400,000 neighborhoods in America. and there's no consolidation of providing safety for those communities. And when I say neighborhood, that is a legally binding organization that can sign a contract. Not like you and me just put 20 bucks together and say, let's buy this thing on a street. So that felt really interesting.

And then the other kind of interesting insight that we developed, which took time, is I imagine at your house, you have a security system, you might have a gate to your house, you probably have a dog. You have all these things, right? they do two things that actually are not helpful. They tell you a crime has happened. They don't actually help you solve it. And then what about your neighbor? And so what we'd realize is that every single security system was focused on the individual.

Yes. But like I think about my life in Atlanta, there was just a crazy random act of violence a couple years ago. Like my wife wouldn't run outside for a year. And I don't have nothing to do with us. It was like a mile away. And so the whole kind of like premise became that you had to build a safety system for a community.

Yes. Because that's actually what you feel. I mean, you live in San Francisco, you get it. Like, even if you've never been the victim, if crime is up, it's really bad. So it was all neighborhoods for the first three or four years of the business. So give me the stats on flock today, just how many cameras out there, crime stopped. Because again, and maybe just describe the product as it exists today. So now it's a much more sophisticated product in that sense.

So last year we helped clear just north of a million crimes in America. What does help clear, I mean? So, I mean, we want to be clear. that, similar to probably how you feel and not like, you help businesses grow, but like, you didn't do the hard stuff. You just involved in them. You made it easy. You made it really easy for me to grow flock

by making payments simple. I don't actually have to do any of the hard work of, like, chasing bad people, putting my life at risk. Like, we write code in design circuits. Like, it's not hard work. So we like to be very careful of, like, not overstating our value. So we were involved in the arrest,

in clearance or successful arrest of over a million crimes. as well. And in a lot of those cases, we are the end, the beginning, and everything. Yes. Outside of the human, putting handcuffs on. And in some cases, we might be the tip of the spear.

And so, like, for more sophisticated investigations, like the Brown shooter and the MIT shooter, there was a tip on Reddit, but then Flock was the way they found them. Like, we weren't the tip, so I can't take full credit. So maybe I'll walk you through, like, a recent example. And I won't name the city, because the case is still going through prosecution.

But so there's a 911 call This is a major city of America Our system here is 911 calls We can tap into 911 call This is kind of wild if you think about 911 Today when you call 911 in San Francisco It's got you get about 3 million 911 calls a year A human picks up every single time

A human manually listens manually types and information Imagine if you were running stripe And every single lead you received was human routed You'd say this is crazy That's how we work in cities today So we hear the 911 call in real time What that allows us to do is then figure out what are they talking about.

Is there any interesting information in the system that could find beneficial? So in this case, we had heard that it was an attempted homicide. Someone was bleeding on the street. And all they could remember was that the suspect was wearing white converse sneakers. Now, we have a product called FlockOS that allows us to integrate all the cameras in a city, whether their flock developed or not. And so that 911 call pops up. they're kind of an operator is like,

oh my gosh, there's a 911 call right there. They can listen to the call. They're like, this is a really violent situation. There's a privately owned camera. I can tap in that. Double-click that camera. They can use one of our products called freeform. I can say, I'm looking for any individuals in the last 30 minutes that are wearing white converse sneakers.

They've then find the individuals. They can then push that video to the nearest officer. So we run on the dash of the police vehicles. And then that person gets arrested. And so if you think about the way the way used to work, that case had never would have been solved. Like it had been weeks, maybe months, and it could have gone a cold case.

And in this case, this person was from a 911 call to an arrest in about 17 minutes. So we can do that on people. We did that on vehicles. So in that same version of story, I'll give you one other story and then I'll give you a sense of it. So in a town in Colorado,

there was an armed robbery of a Levi's outlet. Got to get your jeans one way or another. This is a funny one, actually. So they call 911. So we're plugged into 911, right? the real-time crime center operator, hears its arm droppery.

They also hear two things. The person has already fled the store, and they drove away in a white van that looks like a black and blue cow. It's like mistake number one is criminal. Like, don't drive a weird car. Now, this police department also has our drone

that we build here in America. So they immediately click a button. The drone automatically flies at 400 feet to the Levi's outlet. That drone knows what to look for. It has the visual kind of nomenclature of a white van with black and blue spray van. Using that same free form, we can start to look for it.

We get another 911 call of another outlet that's having the same time. So the drone is ready in the air, zooms over. Drone has eyes on it. That video feed can now be sent straight to the nearest officer. And so in a traditional response, you're going to come in hot, blue lights flashing, someone's going to get hurt. This case, the drone's forward feet up in the air. You have no idea.

The drone's there. The guy drives home. As soon as he pulls in his driveway, two cops, pinneman, safe, tactical apprehension. So it's drones, it's some computer vision, it's cameras attract cars, it's quite a robust portfolio. And what is flock by the numbers today? So how many cameras, how many drones, how many law enforcement agencies, you know, how many individual entities? Yeah, so it's just over 6,000 cities. So it's like well north of 50% of America that's covered by flock.

By population. Yeah, by population. There's about 17,000 cities in the U.S., and we have all the big ones outside of Manhattan at this point. That's like the last one to go get. I'm not sure if that's going to happen anytime soon, the current situation there. But, yes, it's pretty well deployed,

building cameras, drones, and selling up to the government, which is like three strikes are out. That's incredible. And I feel like something non-American listeners mightn't realize is, so I grew up in Ireland, you know, a country of 5 million people, and there is just a police force, the Gardeciicana, like the national... Exactly, police force for the whole country. And that is a relatively common model in lots of places in the United States.

It's the opposite. It's very localized and just maybe you want to talk about the average size. And I feel like what you're providing is, in some ways, scale economies and helping police forces coordinate with other agencies. There's a dynamic that people don't understand, which you're right. So Ireland, most of the EU, Australia has six police departments. So, I mean, let's call it effectively the same. It's a really big country. It's a lot of land.

Most of South America. Like, America is really the only country that operates under a model where local municipalities provide a law enforcement service. It's very rare. And the benefit, the pro is very straightforward, which is like you actually have a good chance of knowing the police officer that has your territory and has your patch of dirt. The downside is criminal.

don't really care where cities start and stop. I don't care where states start and stop, yet historically, law enforcement agencies were incapable of sharing information. To give you a sense of timeline, the cloud was only recently made legal in Florida as recently as 2022.

So if you were a law enforcement agency, you could not host your data in the cloud until 2022. Maryland was 2023. So any coordination between agencies was very manual. All phone calls. Faxing files. And so one of the big

kind of unlocks of flock was this realization that you could drive better collaboration because if you're you're kind of low-level criminal isn't maybe changing cities.

But you look at some of the most successful cases we've helped work. It's like multiple states, right? Like we did a huge human trafficking bus. Seventy-six people arrested

across four states. States, like, all organized on flock. And, like, I think it's really hard for one agency to wrap their hands around that whole thing. No, at that point, you've got, like, six different local cities, two different, sorry, three different state agencies and the U.S. Marshals, all collaborating inside of flock. Yeah. And, like, that's how it should work. Yes. Because in Ireland, that is actually the only option is you're the same police department.

It's a very unique problem that America has created. Law enforcement coordination. Yeah. Yeah. Like it shouldn't be controversial, but it's actually a very controversial topic. What's controversial about another way of this controversy? This is an interesting question of like you, your trust in government probably follows some type of, you know, logarithmic expectation or linear expectation of like the farther you are removed from those people, the least trust you have. And so most people's trust in the federal government is very low.

state, a little bit lower, local, full trust. Yeah. And so there's this interesting dynamic where, let's talk about the most recent case. My guess is that most people don't have a lot of trust for certain federal agencies. But when stuff goes really bad, like the Guthrie kidnapping,

it's the federal government that runs the investigation. Like, they are the only ones with the actual resources to work these cases. It's the FBI that's running that investigation. The Brown shooter, the FBI, the Mar-a-Lago assassination of Tim. the Secret Service. Like it goes down, but people have this big distrust.

And so we actually see it in places like California, there is state legislation that law enforcement is not allowed to collaborate with federal authorities. Because of certain topics, because there's all of the, this is different politics. And so we kind of have to sit in the middle. Yes. And when it's clearly legislated, like in California, it's actually, it's fine. That's the law.

That's actually very simple. It's in other states where it's opinion. Yes. And that's like, oh, that's really messy because we should just write laws. I mean, you operate in a regulated space. Regulation, when done properly, just defines the rules of engagement. Sometimes it's better or worse, but at least everyone knows these are the rules. Yes, yes.

As I think about where Fluck grew up and the helping with flagging stolen vehicles and kind of a very vehicle-oriented product, how does that work at a technical level? Like you guys, there was a stolen database, there was a database for stolen cars already. But that's an example of prior cross-law. Like, who maintains that database? How does it work? Yeah, so it's a good question. So there's a couple of fun engineering problems that flock kind of solved.

The first is, how do you do it which described? You know, read a license plate, track a car on solar power with a 5G backhaul. Which is the camera that you have installed like a traffic light. Yeah, exactly. But you very rarely have fiber or power where you want to put a camera. So you want a self-sufficient box that you can throw up up an intersection. Yeah. And be able to track a car going 100 miles an hour and do some level of computer vision on top of it.

And that was a pretty fun problem because if you put, you know, let's say you wanted to put a GPU in it, you can't run on a solar power then. And so then it's a great. Well, then what do you do on the edge? And you can't buy any GPUs these days. Yeah, that would have been a huge disaster for us. But so the FBI maintains a list called the NCIC, which is about quarter to half a million known vehicles with other warrants.

Could be amber, the Amber Alert System, the Silver Alert system. Like we saw, sadly, like a ton of silver alerts too. I think we did just over a thousand Amber and Silver Alerts last year that we helped clear. It's like missing adults, missing seniors and missing kids, pretty sad stuff. And so we have a direct integration with the FBI for that. And then at a local level, let's say like the Bay Area, there is a Bay Area hot list that we maintain with those agencies. Oh, wait.

So I assume that there was a single integrated, when a car is called in and stolen. Yeah. I assume that went to somewhere integrated. So this is kind of scary. So let's say your car is stolen. And you're in South San Francisco. They will immediately put it in the Bay Area,

flock hot list immediately. It will take 24 hours to make it to the FBI hot list. And that's a CSV file that gets sent around on FTP servers across the U.S. As much the economy runs. Yes, you should be used to that at the problem.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the real time happens on flock, and then there's about a day lag to make it nationwide. Okay, so local entities have some kind of local lists and those propagate to a national database which is an FBI database.

And while you guys are doing is making that real time, which obviously if a crime is unfolding in real time is a big deal. Exactly. Yeah. It's not good to wait a day. Yes. You can drive really far in 24 hours.

It turns out, yes. Yeah. And then you had some great stat before about just a fraction of, like, stolen cars are bad news. Like the fraction of crimes involved stolen cars. There's an interesting phenomenon where you don't, no one really steals a car for fun. Like, there's not much you can actually. Is that true, like all the side shows and stuff? Isn't there a little bit of stealing cars for fun?

Side shows are definitely, they look fun, never participated in it. Neither of I, but yeah, just want to make cheer here. Yeah, yeah. Dirt bikes, haven't rid the dirt bike in a side show, but have watched plenty of videos online. That's fun. You're typically not stealing a car. You typically don't drive your own car. Oh, okay.

You typically, like, while there are some people, I guess, who would steal a car and just drive it for fun, the main use case is like when my car was stolen, my car was stolen, and then they used it to go rob three CVSsss. Yeah. Did a bunch of drugs in the car and then ditched it. And that's like a normal, you steal a car to go do something bad. Yeah. Or like you still a car to go shoot someone. Because you don't want to shoot someone in your own car.

If you're thinking ahead, you want to do it in a stolen car. We've all watched Pulpiction. Yeah, this is like how you do this, right? And so we do a bunch of other interesting things. Like we have this feature called cold plating, where if we detect that the vehicle from an AI perspective, the make and model doesn't match the DMV record, that clearly the person is driving with a stolen license white,

that's another thing you can do. it's easier than stealing cars, you steal someone's tagged. So then you've got to go down to like, we've got to steal the same license plate from the same type of car. But then like if we detect an anomaly that the same cars in two places at once, we'll flag that.

It's like that's kind of weird. That's like a glitch in the matrix. It's like we have all these and we would call them more like anomaly detections where it's like, this isn't illegal yet, but it sure is kind of weird. Yes. And it's enough of, it provides enough reason

to pull someone over. Yes. And depending on the size, the city, it's enough to dispatch an officer. I think if you're a major city, like in San Francisco, you have enough going on. But if you're a foster city, you're a smaller town where thankfully you don't have violent criminals running around every day,

you're like, ooh, that's weird. We have two cars at St. Wicest's plate in different parts of the city. We should go see what's going on. Yes. It strikes me that a way you can think about what Flock is doing is not changing any of the norms around privacy, but really expanding law enforcement's bandwidth to go deal with stuff. And so I don't think anyone really has an expectation of, you know,

a right to privacy of the car they are driving, just being observed from a distance, or their license plate being readable, went out on a public road. But if a car is called in and stolen, rather than officers manually, you know, looking for that car and that license plate. Instead, you can just kind of much more quickly get it. And yet, this kind of stuff ends up super controversial from a,

I don't say super controversial, but it ends up controversial from a privacy point of view. And so, I don't know, is that take too generous? It's a re-stealman of the other side. Why is it? There is. I mean, I think you're right on the controversy. I would articulate it as like,

if you're building a business that impacts millions of people's live lives, it's going to be controversy of some degree. I'm sure people, I'm sure there's someone who hates Stripe. I don't know why they would, but I'm sure that person exists. Just like there's someone who hates Walmart. It's like they're trying to sell cheap groceries. Why do you, it's like people hate Airbnb. People hate every company.

Maybe they hate us more. I don't know. I think there's a few things that make it for the steel man argument. One is you can see it. I bet you if we pulled up your iPhone and we looked at the number of apps that you've given full-time, local location services, it would shock both of us.

And then if we looked at the number of data brokers who then leveraged that data to sell you ads, we'd be really shocked. And I think if we rewinded it 30 years ago instead, imagine these private companies tracked your location in real time and sold that to advertisers, we'd be like, that is unacceptable.

But because we can't see it, we kind of let it go. We have this perception of an nominee, anonymity, or being anonymous. Anonymity. Anonymity. Thank you. Yet, like, you're an engineer.

How many data points do you need to triangulate where someone is? How about where they sleep and where they work? And I know exactly who you are. Yep. And so, like, there is that one piece, which is because we operate in the physical world, we are held to a higher standard, which I think is a shame because personal opinion,

what I do online is way more interesting and telling about my personality and my life than what I do in the real world. Like, I go from work to home and to, like, kids' birthday parties on the weekends. That's my life. So there's that piece. I mean, the second piece is, like,

there is a appropriate debate of what level of privacy erosion are we willing to take for an increase in safety? Now, you and I both choose to live in cities that have governments, so we've already chosen to remove some of our privacy. We drive on public roads. We're constitutionally, we have no explanation to privacy, but we're using the government's roads with the government's license plate.

Like we have a driver's license in our pocket. Driver's license are a modern thing. That's not a, that hasn't been around for 200 years. It's a newer concept of a driver's license. So we've accepted all those. The articulation that I would have is like, I want my kids to be safe. And like as long as there's accountability of like how the information is used,

which we do, every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity and it's publicly available. And for us, like we really believe in this concept of a certain data retention, which kind of limits the level of abuse. It doesn't eliminate abuse. It's still going to be abuse. But it limits that, hey, if it's seven days, 14 days, 30 days of data, it's just not that interesting.

Yeah. Relative to what you see with data brokers online where they have your entire Internet history stored forever. You're interested in fresh data. That's what's useful. Yeah. There's a really fast drop-off of where have you been in the last couple days versus, like, where were you a year ago? It's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation.

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

And in particular in murder cases, it's had a huge impact. I'm curious just what are the other major trends going on from a technology point of view in how crime gets fought. Yeah, that's CDRs would be the nomenclature in the law. What's CDR? Cell phone data dump or CDR cell data record. Something like that, yeah. But it's your point.

It's the broader, like, you hit these three towers, therefore you're in this general vicinity. That is like one of the best kept secrets for law enforcement of, like, how to solve crime. Which, you know, people dumbly commit crime with their cell phone in their pocket every time. It's very, I think I've heard of one case in the last 12 months where someone was smart enough to commit a homicide and left their cell phone at home by design. It was very intentional. They were very organized. A couple other ones. How do they get caught?

It's actually a flock, obviously. So they were smart enough to leave their cell phone. They were dumb enough. So they drove from L.A. up to San Francisco, general area. They had a bunch of flock cameras along the way. They didn't pick up their cell phone until they went back to L.A.X. And we have cameras all around L.A.X. And they finally made that one mistake.

It was a completely cold case until they got a hit on the car pulling into L.A.X, then got the cell phone. could do the whole thing. This is a good case. And I guess the thing you can do is you can know that a cell phone's in a car because you can... We don't talk to that, but the law enforcement can...

Sorry, law enforcement can cross-reference cell phone location would flock. So they knew that the vehicle was in a certain parking lot. They can then use... They have to have a warrant at this point. Sure. You have a warrant to pull what cell phones were in that area and then start to build the case.

But to your question, I'd say the current phenomena that is causing a ton of problem domestically is drones. And this is an example where it's asymmetric warfare that law enforcement is being put up against where criminals have no rules. So here's a good example.

In one of the counties we work with, it's an affluent-ish county in the Virginia area, South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in. They don't want a confrontation. They just want to go into stuff. He brings drones to a case houses? Yeah. Wow.

And this is where the downside is. Law enforcement has just recently the last year been allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight. These guys have been operating for years. Sure. They jerry rig, you know, an LTE modem to a cheap drone. They can fly it anywhere, however they want. And then legally, even to today,

law enforcement is not allowed to engage that drone. They can't take it down. It's FAA Airspace. It's not law enforcement airspace. Sure, yeah, yeah. And so they just sit there. So that's a problem in neighborhoods. That's our problem in prisons.

That's probably the number one problem we have in our prison system today. Well, a lot of problems in prisons. But one of the leading problems for enforcement officers is you've got these pretty incredible, actually, from engineering. Perspective drones that are carrying 10, 20, 30-pound payloads flying them over the prison walls. And, like, they're literally dangled it down to, like, the prison cell, and the person will reach out and grab it. Cell phones, drugs, guns. We had a color from zip line here. It's zip line for criminals.

And these guys have built a comparable product. And I was with a sheriff that I know really well. And he was like, if I shoot that down with a shotgun, I'm technically breaking the law. I'm breaking federal law if I shoot this down on the shotgun. And so you're shooting states now pass. Like Louisiana has a state bill. Georgia's working on a state bill that says,

sorry, F.A., we're going to do what we want. And that creates a problem is most law enforcement officers just want to follow the law. Yeah, and presumably that won't stand up from a federal preemption point of view. No, and like the other challenge is like, I think you and I would say, like, who's going to, who's going to enforce this? The FAA is not an enforcement body, but these people want to follow the law. And the law says clearly like, you can't shoot a drone down.

Yes. You can detect it. You can't mitigate. Ah, no idea. It's a totally crazy law. Yeah. What else has made, what else has gotten worse from an offense perspective? Um, I mean, this is one that's like a, you know, I don't know if I have strong feelings on

this topic, but this concept that. we appropriately hold local law enforcement to a very high standard of accountability and audibility. I think that's very good. The downside is like, we don't with criminals. And so as a citizen, you don't be the victim of a crime. You get really frustrated that they're not working hard enough.

And it's very really that. It's that they don't have the tools, they don't have the data, or they're not legally allowed to get to the data. And the warrant system is a very, very good thing. It's like a very effective tool. But like there's a debate of like should law enforcement have more ability to solve crime faster? And the example of the framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is that the severity of a crime should be commiserate with the sophistication of technology.

And I'll give you an example. Facial recognition. Hot topic. There are thousands of cities in America that have banned law enforcement from using facial recognition. John, facial recognition is not bad. That's a technology. It's not good either. It's just technology.

I think a way more effective measure would be to say, hey, look, facial rec has its pros and cons. You can't use it for shoplifting, but for homicides, crimes against children. Go to your list of things that, like, we as a society, care deeply about. Law enforcement should do everything in their power to solve those cases.

And then, yeah, the petty stuff, we should say, look, we've got to make progress there, but, you know, you stole a pack of skittles. Like, we probably shouldn't deploy. a drone to find you. Like if you kill someone, I think we should work really, really hard as a society

to hold you accountable. Yeah. But there's no, there's no nuance. That nuance does not come through. No, they're just like, facial wreck is bad. And we don't do facial recognition for that reason because it's too controversial,

but that's, it's counterintuitive to me when the technology gets better every day. Yes, yes. And obviously, another interesting thing that's happening amongst these trends is the prevalence of body cams,

which I think maybe was in some corners, promoted by law enforcement skeptics, but I think now has... It's backfired? I wouldn't have backfired, but just like it's actually, in a lot of cases,

being somewhat exonerative, right? Yeah, no, I think in many cases, police were really hesitant to get body cameras. Just like, I mean, imagine if you wore a body camera all day at work, you'd be like, I'm not sure if I love that idea. It's kind of a little bit invasive, but they did.

And I would say, in the majority of cases that I see, where foul play is called, it is almost always the inverse, where a law enforcement officer was just trying to do their job. And on the other side, there was other mental health issue. There was something gone wrong. And it actually exonerates the officer, which is kind of interesting. And I think the same thing is true.

What at least we're seeing on the camera side on the streets is, you know, historical policing, sadly, it's quite prejudiced, right? We all have our biases, whether it's conscious or unconscious. So you have bad data in. you get bad data out. And so the traditional way of policing is like you go to dangerous neighborhoods, look for suspicious people and arrest them. So it's like you're perpetuating a trend against a certain community.

And when you look at like Oakland is a good example, who's quite a big supporter flock, they're like, we need a more objective way to police. Let's just focus on stolen cars. Yep. We don't care who's inside. We will find out eventually. Yes.

That car was stolen. Yep. And then you don't end up policing where crime has happened historically. you end up policing where crime is happening right now in real time. And that is a fairly fundamental shift in how policing works. And it, for many cities we work with, changes the perception of this, the kind of community with law enforcement. Because they're no longer felt like they're being targeted.

It feels like it's wherever crime happens, we're going to go chase it. And if there's not been crime in the last couple days, then we're good. Yep, yep. Is crime up or down in the U.S.? It is down? I think it'll continue to go down. COVID was like really bad. So it surged during COVID?

Crazy surge. Okay. People lost their minds. I think we tested society of like what happens if you keep people inside for too long. And people got really violent. Yeah, so do you have an explanation? Is it that like it was a mental health issue or was it kind of a crime of opportunity that, you know, things were less well guarded and, you know, there's more opportunities for crime? But you think it was just people went a bit badly being locked up.

I think so. And resorts to crime. But I mean, I'm obviously not a, you know, clinical psychologist, funny means. But it's like you look at the data and there's no other way to articulate why, you know, homicides three to four axed and then plummeted back down, let's call it, somewhat reasonable levels. There's a very few number of cities that are left at COVID levels. Most cities had this massive spite. Yes.

And like the way to. if you look at the people who were committing that violence, they tended to be 16 to 22 male and very online. Very online? Yeah. And so, like, this is, like, this is really sad. How do you measure very online? Let me give you an example.

I was in a town of a major city not too long ago, and I was asking the chief to tell me kind of what's going on. This is a couple years ago, right, during COVID. And she was like, Garrett, these kids are just killing each other. It's like, what? It's like, yeah, they're literally getting in their car and just shooting each other. Like, why?

Like, oh, because this guy posted a picture of him with that guy's girl on Instagram. And I think in a normal situation, you might have called that person to me like, hey, bro, that's my girl. And in other cases, they're getting in a car and shooting someone. Like, that's not normal.

It's not normal behavior. And it wasn't normal before COVID. And it happened a lot during COVID. And then it's largely gone away. But it was a very specific social phenomena where the race to violence was so dramatic. It was so scary. And I don't think society has necessarily gone fully back to normal,

but, like, if you look at the data, it's hard to articulate that's the most obvious explanation to me. And I guess there are other empirical measures like air rage incidents, road rage incidents, like all of that kind of stuff went up during COVID. Everything went up. Yeah. Like everything.

People just literally lost their minds. I think we need to be outside. Yeah. But okay, so how are we doing now on crime? You say it's down. Is that across all categories? Because, you know, you read Twitter and it's like everything's locked up at CVS and, you know, San Francisco is full of all these memes, which are, maybe do some debunking and confirming of all the means. So, so every city is a little bit different.

Major cities still have major crime problems. I would argue, you know, I live in Atlanta. And the mayor, you know, he's made it very clear. anything greater than zero homicides is a tragedy and therefore we're on the race to zero still like as an unacceptable level and we're down historic lows over the last decade but

it's still pretty hard to wake up and go you know only 52 people died in Atlanta last year and you can't pat yourself on the back for that I think where we're focused on is more so clearance rates and that's actually getting better but only better

in certain cities now we track it across flock not to overly promote, it tends to be that if you have a flock product, your city has a much higher clearance rate. You look at San Francisco as a great example. The new chief, the prior chief, Mayor Lurie, like they are making crime a focus.

And the focus is on solving crime. And when they solve it, as I'm sure you fall on the news, they talk about it. And they should because, like, it's really cool. They're working very hard. And what you'll see is back to the online point I made,

all people are online. And so when San Francisco PDD is dominating X, it has a deterrent effect. Oh, gosh, yeah. You don't want to get caught. Yeah. And that's like the unintuitive or the counterintuitive point on crime is that most people would intuitively say,

oh, if the punishment's really, really bad, people will do less of it. But you were 16, 18 at one point. You operate on a Boolean mindset. I will get away with this, therefore I will do. I'm a sneak out of my house because I'm not going to get caught. You don't care if the punishment is being grounded for a week or a month. You're going to get away with it. You're 17.

It's just like I caught or not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so we flip- as criminals are so online. So if you flip that, oh, it's like, it's a subculture,

you've got to get there. But I mean, you'll see. Is this like Reddit, Twitter? They're everywhere. Pinterest. I probably less pictures, but I mean, TikTok's really big.

Yeah. Instagram's really big. Snapchat's really big. And like it is, it's how they recruit though. Right? Because like the whole, the whole recruitment effort is,

you know, I'm going to show a lifestyle online that seems dream worthy. to recruit these people and then they're in and they're going to perpetrate that and the data actually it's actually not a very good job

you don't make very much money being a criminal it's like the medium income for your average criminal is like it's very, very low but they promote a lifestyle of wealth so if you look at those cities

like, so you take San Francisco crimes coming down clearance rates are going up 100% clearance rate is like 100% solved yes and it's doable we haven't in major cities and like like Cop County would be one

which is like the second- county has 100% If you commit violence in Cobb County Yes You will get arrested And that's a cross-spot sample size That's the second largest county in Georgia

So let's call it you know, a couple million people almost a million people So a decent number of violent crimes Oh yeah Yeah yeah And like but it's going down every year Sure

So like in places like that Because you will get caught Yeah and so like we have this new concept that we've developed called like Safe City and we'll go into a town and say look this is the platform you need to solve all the crime in your city.

It's your choice. It tends to be like about 20 bucks a citizen a year. Yeah. It's like it's your choice. And like what's fun to watch is we find these mayors with really strong backbones. And they're like, I want to be a safe city. There's just like this awesome town, Greenville, Mississippi. You've probably never heard of it.

26,000 people. They have our drones. They have our cameras. They have our AI. They have everything we do. And they are lighting it up. And like, kudos to the mayor in chief. like every crime I solve, they're on the 5 o'clock news.

So these are highly effective cities. What effect, does it, what happens to the criminals? Does it shift it to other localities? And like you need to, it's like, you know, disease eradication, you ultimately need to do kind of enough to blanket it, to snuff it out. Because if just kind of one municipality does it, it'll shift to a local municipality.

Does it actually, within that municipality, people just go to something non-criminal? I'm curious, what are the effects? of one municipality getting really good. There's two phases. The first phase you're spot on, like people that just change cities. It's like when San Francisco started adopting flock,

Oakland crime went up. So then Oakland needed to adopt flock. And now like a couple of false starts now that that's fully going, they will have the same. But like first is the shift. Yes. And then you're right.

Like this is people don't, the majority of criminals, let's call it 99% of criminals are not evil people. They're not. Like evil is a random act of violence, and that is exceptionally rare. It's very rare.

It's all opportunism. And like you and I were fortunate enough to be born in a family and a social construct that we could go build great companies, but not everyone had that chance. And some people get pushed in the wrong direction, and that's what we have to stop. So like as a business, we don't,

while we're proud of the impact, you know, making a million arrests, it's actually quite disheartening, but that means like a million people will not have to go through the criminal justice system, which doesn't work that well. There's a million victims. Like, it's bad in every single way.

It's also crazy expensive as a society to jail that many people. It's like, it's a double negative bottom line where it's costly and prohibitive that they'll probably never reenter society. So we're much more focused on the preventative mechanisms of like, how do you convince someone this is not a good lifestyle? This is not a long-term plan. And eventually what you will see is like they will go get jobs. Like these are functional members of society.

They can be functional members. we should push them in that direction. What kind of crime is on the increase? So I'll tell you one that's pretty fascinating. So if you look in the enterprise community, organized resale crime in stores was really hot during COVID and right after COVID. That's why you saw CBS lock their stuff up.

You saw, you know, places like in and out, leave Oakland. Like this was a huge problem. And it's still, you know, for someone like Walmart, I think they reported just shy of a billion dollars of theft last year. So there's a lot of money. Yeah. And, like, their peers aren't doing dramatically better. Now, flock customers are doing really well.

Yeah, and Walmart on Neophytes of this stuff. Yeah, they have a loss of intervention program. Yeah, we'll get there with Walmart. But, like, you look at some of our partners like Aloz, you know, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not really a problem anymore. Yeah. But where the criminals have moved is to the distribution facilities.

It's safer and bigger loads. And so probably the most sophisticated one that I've heard of is it's an Eastern European group. They went and bought a legal, like, well-running freight broker. They now own this asset, and they bid on all these, low bid on all these projects,

show up with real paperwork, fill up a 20-foot with product, drive away, dissolve the company, $7 million in a single day. Like, that's pretty good business. Yeah. That's pretty good. That's very sophisticated, though.

that's harder to solve. That's very much harder to solve. Because every car phone, like everything will be disposable used in this. Everything's going to leave the country as fast as possible and just show up on a street somewhere. And then the other interesting challenge is you have to unpack,

this is like a little bit complicated, who's liable. So as soon as the product goes into a store, that retailer is liable for the theft. Like it hits their bottom line. for a lot of these companies, they negotiated such that, you know,

there is insurance coverage from a different broker that owns that asset until final delivery. And so it's not super clear, like, who actually cares? And it's going to take... Insurer cares eventually.

Yeah. But when you talk about the scale of what's called, you know, tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of product being moved, you're like, oh, you know, we lost a couple hundred million.

I see. Yeah, yeah. We'll be fine. We have insurance. It will catch up eventually, but that's probably the most interesting type of crime we're tracking is the tacking on the distribution. So we have a lot of partners on the distribution side

where we're now deploying our product to try to prevent this becoming an epidemic. Yes. But it's much harder to solve. It's a real company. Yes, yes. I want to ask you more about this, but I want to get another goodness. This is a good segue into your corporate business,

because again, people associate you with selling to municipalities, but obviously you sell a lot to. corporates as well. Yeah. It's a big part of our business. Oh, sorry, you had some drags left. That's my fault. Yeah. It's like a real one. You want to just go full up end. Yeah. You'll get more of a head that way. And it's perfectly, it's the correct. Oh, it is? You can trust it. Yeah. Okay. So the corporate business. Yeah, north of $100 million are probably fastest growing segment. Um, there's some like wild, there's some wild stories. So, you know, we, we help businesses solve two problems. Um, how do you keep your employees safe and

how do you keep your assets or your stuff safe? Yeah. So it's kind of funny because we have a Fortune 5 company as a customer. And you probably don't want to talk about specifics. But we should just imagine big box stores that kind of home people Walmart. Is it the only the same thing? It's like we have this like Fortune 5 company that's a customer. And they spend like $100,000 a year because they have like three locations in the country.

That's it. They have like three really big campuses. So they're actually like we don't proxy towards necessarily like market cap or revenue. We proxy to physical locations. How many look at it? So someone like a dollar general is a way better prospect for us, but this dollar general has 7,000 stores. Yeah.

You want Subway. Yeah, you want Subway is a good example. So we tend to focus on retail, healthcare, and logistics. They tend to have big physical footprints, a lot of employees, and a lot of challenges. And is there a main challenge theft? Like, that's what they're worried about, that they want to prevent stolen cars coming to steal stuff? I'd say employees is, I'd say three years ago when we started the business unit, it was assets. It was like, oh my gosh, coming out of COVID, everyone's stealing everything.

It is much more shift now to keeping employees safe. So you think about some of these businesses, they might terminate half a million people a year, quarter million people a year. It takes one angry employee to come back. And so in our system, you can have it automated, you know, with the HRS that like when employees terminated, they're added to a, localized hotlist, that employee ever comes back on campus. It's not illegal. Yeah. But notify security is why people have security teams. Like, don't let them in the building. Yep. So it's about kind of moving that layer of safety farther out. Yes. The other example is, like we do quite a bit of work like in executive protection. So I'll give you like a good example.

It's like a Fortune 2000 CEO. Yep. Our stuff's deployed at her house. We also deploy at corporate. It's not illegal, but it's quite weird if the same vehicle in the same day, goes to both locations. That is not that person. Yeah, it's not that person or their EP team. And so, like, we're, I think keeping people safe is the number one thing. And then the assets is like, it's good, but worst case, you just raise prices, which is not good. But, like, we had this crazy case with one of our healthcare partners where this group, pretty smart, actually, would show up to the hospital, dressed in, like, a certain company's uniform.

and be like, oh, the robotic surgical arm is, it needs to be repaired. Can you help me grab it? And some clinical surgeons like, oh, yeah, let me show you where it is. Don't worry, no worries, John. Walk in there. This is a, you know, multi-million dollar piece of equipment, and they literally walk out with it. This happened in... Like some Thomas Crown Affair kind of stuff.

But it's like, I mean, you're a physician. You're not thinking like, oh, is John actually working at this company? Is the product, I think I used to yesterday? You're like, oh, yeah, we get bad. That sounds right. It's super expensive product. So this is an example to your conversation of where the business gets interesting is we've then connected that health care provider with federal authorities.

So this is not a low, this is going to be a local authority. It's all this kind of crime. It's a federal crime at this point. They were taking the product, exporting it, and selling it in a different country for kind of, you know, clinical work. So we think that one is pretty interesting. That's an asset one where actually the health care system is like, this is like 20-something million dollars of product stolen. Yes.

That's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Are, is your business going international? Which countries is this best suited to, like, is this a universally applicable product? Do those differences in, you know, law enforcement agency structure? I'm just curious. I mean, we're, we're dabbling.

But I think payments is probably like a very global, like everyone wants to process payments, I think. Yes, there's a lot of local nuance. Yeah. I think for us, maybe. our ambitions aren't big enough, but when I look at the domestic opportunity, you know, we should be able to get to $5, $10, $15 billion of revenue in America. And, like, we're not there. Yes.

And so it's the difference of, to your point of the nuance and payments, it's probably comparable to the nuance of working with local government, but then you overlay hardware and that just gets maybe two steps too difficult for my stomach today. Got it. Today. Yeah. But there's, I mean, we get an inbound. I saw an email this morning from an Australian police department.

It's like, we'd love to do a demo. And it's like, why not just do, I mean, I agree with a lot of nuance. Is there some aspect of your tech? Like, you've put a lot of work into the cameras, vehicle recognition and stuff like that. I know, again, from painful experience, that localization is never easy and never as easy as you think. Yeah. But maybe it's easy. Well, so here's the argument.

So we pursued one really big. deal last year in Mexico. We had support from one of our investors, like, we should go after cigar grade, and they had connections to the Mexican government. So we got all the way to the finish line, and it was us versus Hick Vision.

Hick Vision is a Chinese camera manufacturer, arguably a subsidiary of the CCP. And we were almost 10 times the price. And it came down to, like, well, is the Department of Homeland security going to subsidize for this for the Mexican government? Because we know their list price

is way more than this. It's very clear this is being subsidized for the Mexican government to make this purchase decision, of which case they will most likely be giving away real-time feeds to another government. And we didn't win that deal. And I think that if you look at, there's a great book on this topic, if you look at what China was able to do in Africa with their infrastructure deployment, on connectivity. They own those countries. What's the book? How do you guys?

I'll find it for you. Okay. Well, we'll find the book. But the book pretty much shows that like one of the maybe smartest moves that China did was going to these developing countries and saying, we will give you 5G. Really low cost. We'll bond it for like 100 years. So we're not giving away for free, but guess what now?

Chinese government has access to your pipes. And maybe that's not scary for some countries. for me, I'd be a little afraid. And that was our pitch to the Mexican government. It's like, you don't look at just cost. Look at the sovereignty of the data and who has access. And look, we'll domicile this data in your country. We won't domicile it in America.

And they were like, sorry, it's too expensive. And we've seen that. We've done a couple other projects like that, not just picking on Mexico. I mean, other countries where we're not competitive with China, not because our products aren't better, and much better, but we're not being subsidized by the federal government.

But presumably NATO countries, you know, know, Australia should be better, but I mean, no. I mean, I can, we should go walk around, you know, a strip mall, and I could probably point out 80% of the cameras are Chinese manufactured. And your average would-be business owner is like, yeah, I got it for 15 bucks on Amazon. Yeah. And I don't know if you know that story on kind of like the, you know, vacuum cleaners.

Oh, sure, yeah. It's like, you should care about. You should care about where your data is stored and who's storing it. That kind of stuff matters to me, but not everyone. That makes sense. As we've learned from flock safety, fighting crime is most effective with network data on your side. The same is true for payment fraud. Most businesses only see their own transactions,

which makes it very hard to spot patterns and prevent future attacks. But Stripe Radar tackles fraud using the power of the Stripe Network. Our machine learning models train on hundreds of billions of data points across the $2 trillion of payments we see on the Stripe Network each year. When new fraud patterns emerge, our models can quickly learn and start blocking similar attacks immediately.

So if you want to fight fraud, like Flux Safety, Frights Crime, check out Stripe Radar. As I think about your competitive landscape in the US and companies that sell to law enforcement, I think about Axon, which people would associate with making the body cameras,

but they make lots of others, and tasers, I think, but they make lots of other stuff. then Motorola Solutions, which was kind of the radios and like the get up in the cars and things like that. Are you three, the main three players? Are there others I should be thinking about? And how will it survive? Like, presumably you guys compete more over time. Yeah. So I remember in 2020, trying to raise our Series B. And every investor came to the same conclusion. Three strikes you're out. Like strike one, you're based in Atlanta. And I like post-COVID,

that's become like less of a problem, but, you know, strike one, you're in Atlanta. Strike one, you're doing hardware. But that's really bad. Hardware is, like, really expensive. Now, now it's the only business of a terminal value. I would argue that, like, no, AI is not going to, like, replace cameras or dig holes. And it's like, we mean, a third of our employees dig holes for living. Like, that's just AI's a long ways away from, I think, replacing that. Sorry, what are they doing the holes for?

It was like most of the time you want a camera where you don't have any infrastructure. I see it. We actually show up. We dig the hole. We stretch it. We pour concrete. Put our poll up. I mean, I might...

Okay, so it's on your own poll. I seem to just mounted on an existing pool. I think I should pull this data. I would not be surprised if I'm the largest general contractor in America. We pulled 77 permits a day last year. And if you ever built a house, you know how difficult it is to permit something. 77 permits a day. Like crazy scale.

Yes. AI's not going to replace that. It's like a very safe asset. But so, yeah, so when we were trying to raise that series B, the third strike was... Second strike was hardware. Third Strike was, and you're trying to sell to the government, the last company to go public was Axon.

They went public in 2005, which we'd have been 15 years prior. And in the VC speak, it's like, well, if you can't get big enough to go public, you're not worth investing in. It's like, well, crap. So luckily, Gary Tan shared my beliefs of, like, safety should be a public right. It shouldn't be a privilege. It should be a right if you live in America. So he did our Series B, which is, I think, to say, only Series B is ever done.

That's awesome. And he was right. And I was right. So it's the three of us now. It's Motorola, who's the biggest, they're about a $90 billion market cap, 120 years old, invented the radio,

still are the, I think they have 80% of market share globally of land mass radio, just like crazy scale. It's funny how durable some of these businesses, Garmin and other, like, you just start doing GPS,

you start doing radio and you just stay doing radio. Own it. Yeah. Own it. And to, like, Motorola's credit, like, they've driven a ton of innovation on the radio itself.

Similar to Garmin, which, like, you'd thought Garmin would have been crushed. And it's like, they've been so creative in creating verticals, and they built an awesome products. And no one would debate whether Motorola's radios work really well.

And when you need them, which would be like a natural disaster, they work especially well. And that's like pretty compelling when your job is to respond to natural disasters. So you have Motorola. Every single thing we do, we compete with Motorola. So that's fun. They're big. Second one would be Axon.

You know, like I said, public in 2005, about a $40 billion market cap. Where did they come out of? Like, I understand where Motorola came out. Yeah, so Rick Smith, the founder, graduated Harvard. It took a fun from that. He plays it off. He's a very smart guy. Graduate Harvard found this taser company.

It wasn't called Taser at the time. Okay, so they started with Tazers. Yeah, found those kind of the IP, the product, and then tried to commercialize it. And it's if you're, you love a good founding story, it's a good one where, you know, almost went out of business. his like dad mortgaged the house, he mortgaged the house. Went public because they couldn't finance it. I think they went out at like a $50 million dollar market cap. This is like when people would public, you know, much earlier.

And just has done a really good job of growing the business in the public markets. And Taser is a brand. It's like Kinex. They own. They started as Taser. They started Taser and rebranded to Axon in 2012 or 2015. Yeah. And got into body cams via acquisition.

So they bought a company that had just won the contract in the New York for the New York Police Department to do body cam. So bought that. They have a dash camera, and they'd recently launched a competitive product with me. So now we compete. Everything we do, we compete with Axel too. It's fun.

So it's just a Mexican standoff, ironically. Every single city. Everything little city. And there was interesting, because your question was also in the future, there's just really interesting phenomena happening now where because flock's been somewhat successful, VCs have like poured in

and when I used to call a police department seven years ago now you have a bunch of competitors from below as well no one would no like you could literally just walk into police fireman back coming with the chiefs like that's great

now chiefs are like great 17 different people calling me for the exact same part they don't compete with us thankfully but like you think about take like trying to deploy AI to monitor body camp footage there's seven different companies

with VC backing doing that there's not not a big enough market. Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, your annual report was great, by the way. You all are at, what, 1% of GDP or something probably? Okay, I'm in 60% to 70% of the cities that matter. Yes, yes. There's just not enough space for seven competitive.

It won't, the market's not big enough. And we're not creating new cities. There's a new business that's created every single day. I think you tend to see structurally in these smaller, I mean, it's a large market in total, where there's a finite universe of buyers, the distribution of advantages are very powerful. I think that's what you're saying.

And I think so. And so I think what we'll see is, you know, I see a new VC-backed company every day. And I'm like, there's just, all these things are going to out of business so they're just going to be consolidation. And so you see, you know, I think Motorola has done 40 acquisitions in the last two years.

Axon did five last year. We did one last year. I just think you're going to see. Everyone in the space comes a ton of consolidation. Because like once someone builds a good product, you go great. I already have a Salesforce. I have the customer base.

we'll just pick you up. Yeah, yeah. So I had no idea about the, you know, you're talking about where the tech goes. I'd know an idea about two things, actually, I learned here. One is that you're doing real-time analysis of 911 calls. Yeah. And so is that, I mean, is that being fed to an LLM basically?

Or like 911 calls now scored by an LLM? So the way I think about it is we are trying to build an orchestration layer for a city's safety. The majority of police departments are under. staffed. I think the worst I've heard recently, I was at a higher ed, so a college campus, a large college campus, you know, a football school, there are 40% of staffing. Could you imagine if, like, Tamara you woke up and Stripe had 40% staffed? Yeah, it would be tough. You would like figure it out, but a lot of things that you would deem core today would just stop. Yes, yes.

And so that's how most of our customers operate, which is not sustainable. Yes. And so we view our job as being that force multiplier, or I like to think about this orchestration layer where every manual thing that's done by a human should be automated. Now, the difference in public safety versus maybe payments is like, I think you want humans at the start and finish still.

It's like, if I call 911, still kind of want a person to pick up. And those dispatchers are incredibly well trained. They're very well trained. They're very calm. Now, where I think it gets valuable is like, but let's say there's a mass event. AI is way better.

Because if you have a surge of demand and you go from only one call a minute to 10 calls a minute. AI is better than a busy tone. And that makes sense. And then I think about for us, we call it amplified intelligence, when that 911 call comes in, LLM is able to pick up the call,

is able to determine what are the characteristics, can I go sort of build an investigation, can I go pull this up so that if you're the detective, whereas historically you walk in your car, I'm going to go get the call transcript, I'm going to go look up my record system, I'm going to go do a bunch of analysis. It's the equivalent of having,

you know, whether you use something like a glean or another product that's like, you're going to do a lot of the hard work so that as a sales rep, you show up and you're like, got it. Yeah, yep. And so we do that for investigators. So they show up to, they get delivered a case and a lot of the busy work has been done for them

so they can use the human part of their job. I'm creating all the data that needs this. All different data, like let's go do this. Like we solved, one of the cooler cases we've solved was armored, you know, armored trucks, like, like, brinks, they move money around. It's one of the best, it's called like a jugging case. It's very popular in Texas.

where you follow these armored trucks, and you typically have, like, a shooter on a nearby building. And when the person walks out, the shooter shoots them, other guy runs in, grabs all the money, and runs away. It's like a very, it's obviously sad, but it's a very, very profitable thing. So we built an agent that tracks armored cars. And so in all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's an armored truck.

If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically. Now, it's not illegal. Yeah, yeah, sure. Right? But it is enough that if you're a city like Houston, who has a jugging problem, you want to get a subscription to like, you let me know whenever you see someone doing that because I want to know. Yeah.

I want to get a step ahead. Yes. So there's all these types of crimes that you can start to say, okay, this is helping officers not do something new. It is just doing things that when you're at 50%, 40% staffing, sure, 100% you would have been doing this yourself. You'd be chucking the cars, you'd be in flock, you'd be running the searches, but you can't do that anymore.

Yeah, what you're describing is, again, having this data to be able to do anomaly detection just allows for a new kind of police work that otherwise just wouldn't have gotten done. No, it's like people's lives, you know? And then the other thing I had to realize you guys were doing is the drone assistance where, again, this sounds to me like, you know, obviously already it's the case that, you know, many police departments have a helicopter and then for very serious crimes, you know, they will task it, but that's expensive, very limited resource.

And so I think what you're doing is allowing for some manner of air support to just be much more cost effective and available to more officers. That's right, yeah. I mean, I think it's another example where there's just a lot of tasks we ask law enforcement officers to conduct that a drone could do faster, more effectively and cheaper. Yes. And so if it's, you know, calling out a hit and run, great, send the drone. I was working with a town in Tennessee.

It's a pretty good city. Their average response time to 9-1-1-1 call it seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. It's just like a better quality of service. Like in the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer. It's just, it's really nice when you see technology deliver both like a Tinnix, better product, at a dramatically lower cost. Yeah. That sounds like that's not supposed to work.

And it's working for them. Where are the drone, what kind of task or intervention are the drones best suited? Yeah. I mean, the two most, there's three primary use cases. The first would be vehicular pursuits. It's like one of the most dangerous things cities conduct is high-speed pursuits. Sure. Typically, it's not the suspect that dies.

It's some random person. A restaurant or something, yeah. So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they end pursuits. They don't pursue anymore. Oh, wow. Just send the drone. Yeah, yeah. It's way better.

Yeah, yeah. It's way safer. So you don't have a police car running at 80 miles in Arizona residential streets. No, you just have a drone four her feet up in the air, quietly, safely, waiting for the car to pull into a gas station,

pulled into their home, pull in somewhere safe, get to a red light. And then meanwhile, that video feeds being broadcasted to the entire police department. It's like, great, John's over here.

Yeah. Block them in. It's, you know, every pursuit goes to GTA level five immediately. Yes, yeah, if you're smart. So that's a big one. The second is 911 calls. So what's been interesting is that, you know, we'll send the drone first.

It takes someone like Elk Grove up in North California. They've got a bunch of our drones, flying the 911 calls. So where is Elk Grove? Elk Grove? It's a suburb of Sacramento. Oh, okay. But maybe 75,000 people. So I say suburb, it's like a pretty big town.

But so, like, they'll dispatch for 911. Majority of the calls actually never need a human to show up. And the example I'd give you is like, you see a fist fight, so you call 911, and then what happens is historically like, seven minutes later, someone shows up, guess what, they're no longer fighting, but now we've dispatched this officer, he's like, well, I'm in the area,

maybe I'll grab a Gatorade, walk around, check it out. 30 minutes later, like, we've wasted a bunch of time. You send the drone, in best case, you see the guy's fighting, and you're like, great, I'm going to keep an eye on them and allow the officer to do a job, or if there's never, there's not a fight anymore, you dismiss the call. And so you actually increase,

decrease the response time for situations you really do need to go to by removing the junk in the system. So it's the second one and the third one is search and rescues. Not every city has a helicopter. The cities I do, it's a very expensive proposition. And so sadly, people go missing all the time. And you can pop up the drone, throw on thermals. Actually, it's a night, you know, and you find the person.

Actually, I haven't thought of that, but drone plus thermal camera is very transatlantic. transformative for us there. No, yeah. We had an interesting case in a cold state right now. He's flying our drone. There was a, sorry, a lot of my cases involve homicides. I've got to find a better topic than homicides at some point. I have a better topic soon as I can. Okay, great. So, so there's this 911, car on the side of the street, launched the drone, throwing thermals. actually see where the person went. Like sensitive enough to see, like, the heat pattern.

There's like in the snow. I want to find the guy, find himself on everything. But it's interesting. Like, to your point, I think we're still very early on in the use case exploration. And I think it's this type of technology

that until it's fully proliferated, which give it two or three more years, I think we'll continue to find more ways to augment how we respond. Because I think the last example I'll give you is we typically launch the drone for all first responders. so it's not just law enforcement, it's fire, it's EMS,

like the whole community gets advantage of it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, my fun example, because I agree. A lot of the, you know, crimes are quite heavy topics. Yeah. So I feel like one of the most satisfying genres of YouTube video to watch is people who laser aircraft, but they are mistakenly lasering a police helicopter.

So this is an insane crime that happens. Wait, why do they do that? Okay, so there's this insane crime that happens. Isn't that bad? It's like very dangerous. It's very bad. It's very dangerous, yeah. But, like, bored people, to your point of just maybe people going mad during COVID and being cooped up, people just for fun, laser aircraft, it's very dangerous.

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

but occasionally what happens is they're laser-ring an aircraft, but it turns out that aircraft is the police helicopter. They're just like, gotcha. And they got the thermal, and they're just like, and so you get to watch the whole thing unfolds. A bunch of these on YouTube, we'd like see the squad cars coming up and it's, yeah. I'll check that out.

But it's such an odd crime, and yeah, it's very satisfying to get them caught in real time. Yes. That's a really weird. The other interesting two percent, I know you like aviation stuff. Yeah, we're having to see, we're seeing more and more police helicopters. have to turn off ADSB as well.

Because, like, criminals have the same data that you have. Yeah, yeah, sure. And so most of the police helicopters actually fly without ADSB, no. Which is like a whole challenge. Yeah, sure, from a separation part of view. Yeah. Okay, I have so many more things to go into it kind of jumping around, but I like this. How does the business evolved?

So you're now, you said, around 500 million error selling to both law enforcement agencies and corporates. Just have there been interesting changes in how you monetize is it just a question of scaling up? Yeah, I mean,

I'd say the biggest challenge is two, three years ago we were single product, single customer. We had our neighborhood business. It was growing 20, 30% year over year, but it was kind of operating.

And law enforcement was going really fast. We had one product. And then maybe made a mistake. I know RJ from Rivian was here. and something's really like probably we built too many products for too many customers really quickly

and in hardware that's really expensive and hardware tends to follow this J curve of like huge KAPX investment up front to get the thing going and then you monetize and it actually winds up being And there's very significant scale economies as very high orders of maintenance

yes and so you know we went from one camera that tracks cars to a camera that's focused for people a drone this trailer multiple customer segments. And that's really hard. So looking back to it, you think you went too broad too quickly?

Yeah. I would have better... So did you discontinue products and stuff? No, we just muscled through it. Still muslin through it. But you slow down the race of adding products. We were like, we cannot do any new hardware products this year. Like we need to take a year or two off of hardware products.

We can debate software products because there's no incremental burn or going to cash outlay for it. But we know what the J-Cerve looks like. Like we saw it in the core business. And like the core business now is profitable, which is great. Like, we'll generate free cash flow, hundreds of millions of dollars of operating cash flow this year. But like those new businesses are effectively like flock five years ago. Yeah, yeah.

And we know how painful that is, but we were just like, oh, it'll be great, it'll be fine. And so I think that's been challenging for us is how do you balance from a product roadmap, servicing two customers for just very different use cases? Like, your average Amazon distribution facility is, you know, 30 acres, 50 acres. That's like a neighborhood block. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you've got like in San Francisco that's got hundreds of square miles. So the problems are different.

So that is probably like the hardest thing that we're still trying to muscle through that. And like, how do you organize your company to service these two different customers without having redundancies? Have it figured that out? What have you learned other than don't make too many products? what have you learned by building hardware? Or what have you learned about building hardware? Yeah, I think the, I mean, there's a couple things that I would jump to.

The first would be, I don't know how you guys think about forecasting demand. It's a full-time profession at flock. Sure. And it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out. Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where they fail.

Yeah. No, we ended up with it. I mean, our hardware business is very small, part of our overall business, but we wildly overproduced at one point just sitting in a warehouse, like, there's all my money. Exactly. Sitting in a warehouse. Sitting around. Now, luckily, it's not, you know, it's not going to go

bad. It's not like bananas. It's like, oh gosh, we have like a week to move this product. Yes. But it kind of goes bad. But it does go bad at some point. And I think like, you know, I remember during YC many, many years ago, talking to Eric at Pebble of how it's like the irony that in the best year

ever of the company in terms of revenues the year they went out of business. And like, that's crazy. Yes. But they just, they overproduced in Q4, even though it was still a record quarter, it just wasn't enough. So I think, like, that has been amplified by also our distribution process, like, which we're full first party.

So we not only design the stuff, build the stuff, we install the stuff. And so I have to have forecasting. Maintain it as well. So I have to have forecasting not just at the product level, but at the geographic level. byproduct with some level of, you know, discrepancy. I don't need to know this city for that city, but at least the general area.

So I think forecasting, it has been pretty hard. And the second is, every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimal and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of like, everything's a two-way door.

Yeah. Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door. Yeah. You want to pick that part? Yeah, yeah. One-way door. We're going to live with it for the next,

five, 10 years. Yeah, and like, I don't know, you probably don't track this as much, but probably the dumbest financial mistake I've made in the last year is our supply chain team came to us like six months ago, and they were like, salt state memory is getting really expensive. And like, we had this one part, and it was in our cameras, and the price had gone up 4X in near time, which indicates that typically one much, much larger company placed a massive order.

Yeah. And so we've seen this time and time again where an Apple, or a Sony or some consumer or Samsung will pick apart for a new product that's coming out in 12 months and the supply globally disappears. Okay, so you're feeling the AI data center build out in your supply chain?

Yes, and so our supply chain leader was like, this is getting crazy and I was like, well, who do we use it? I'm like, oh, I'm looking at their stock and I'm like, should we be buying like sandis? I was talking to my CFOs, like, should we be buying Santa stock? I was like, if their prices are going up to react to the products. Now, of course, the stock's up like 12%

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

We should have bought, and we did, we bought a ton of memory so that we didn't run out because we can't. But I would have thought, you know, often these supply chain crunches come on the leading edge where, you know, everyone's fighting over TSM, you know, three nanometer node production capability.

But, you know, the auto chips as, you know, much larger gate sizes are not, or larger nodes. are not as contended. And I would have thought that you guys are not using tippity, top-end cameras and lenses and memories and things like that. But that's not a panacea. It's like capacitors.

And the point I give you is like, let's say we ship, you know, 100,000 units. That's tiny. And so all it takes is, you know, if we need this capacitor from Texas Instruments, all it takes is to Apple saying, well, the iPhone 27 is how that kind of. capacitor and Apple's like, cool, we'll buy everything for the next three years. And then we go, oh, crap, we've got to completely change the capacity. But I'm just surprised you're competing with Apple for components. Like, I would have thought there are capacitors and your capacity. Everything. I mean, well, capacitor is a capacitor. But so it's actually no the capacity you want.

You have to have a supply chain to buy it. You have to have enough inventory with enough leave time. Like, it is not. And so what you wind up doing is like early on, your designs are very simple. You buy everything from, you know, out of fruit or whatever. You buy everything like from easy places where you can buy 50 at a time. And when you move to like tens of thousands at a time, you start having to have designs that have four different derivatives for every part so that your supply chain doesn't have to call engineering being like, this part's out.

They know these parts are all sub-ins. You're describing the scale disc economies of manufacturing where it's easier to buy three of something than it is to buy $30,000. 100%. And I never would have thought we would need like a team of people who all they do is spend money for a living. Just buy stuff. What's hard about operating the hardware?

Like how do you keep the lenses clean on the camera? and just how do you? I don't know what the other... It's like a... On the one hand, you know, we're some of the best weather forecasters, you know? It's like we keep track of every major storm. Yes. It's like storm, like we need to be back up.

So we do, like we have a pretty cool, we call it our flight team, and there are technicians that only fly. It's like that big storm in New York and Boston, like they were flying in to the storm. Like we had surge demand to fix stuff. To be on site to when they get a call. that something is down, go repair it. Yeah, well, so everything is, everything, we have really good telemetry on the equipment. So, like, if a customer calls, something's gone.

Yeah, like, we've really screwed up. You know before the customer knows. We know before the customer knows. And most of the maintenance at this point is fairly predictive. Like, we know this mechanical part malfunctions after between 100 and 200,000 uses. So, like, if you're in the area, it's ironic that the largest cost structure in replacing equipment is the driving. Yeah, yeah.

It's driving. And so, like, if we think apart we need a replacement in six months, when we're nearby. It's cheaper just to replace it, refurb it, and get it back in the field. So that part's been like, we had to build a software company, a hardware company,

and a field services business. Do you have parts that wear out? I would have thought the whole thing is fairly solid space. Most of it's, well, drones obviously fly. Sure, different kind of fish. But on the camera side, there's one part,

which is the IR cut filter. So when we operate at night, we operate on infrared, and you need a different filter so that you don't have pink images during the day. So that literally changes twice a day. Oh, like something mechanically... Put a lens over it. I see.

And after a couple hundred thousand uses... The one moving part. And it is the only part that breaks. Why not just have two lenses? With two different images, which is two? Yeah. Bomb. Okay.

No good, like no good reason. Okay. Other than it would just be more expensive. Yeah. But yeah, that part's like... I think a third of the company, like I said, digs holes, drives bucket trucks.

Yeah, sure. Keeps track of all the kind of inventory. But if you look at it, you know, I didn't want to build that business. Yes. But early on in the company, there was this horrific case in Atlanta where a woman was just running

and, you know, our version of like Mission Dolores or pick your like nice park in the city. Random act of violence. There's cameras everywhere in the park. Yep. None of them were working. And the city got blasted appropriately for it. And they're like, well, but also like, do you really want our police department being in charge of, like, camera uptime?

Yeah, yeah. That's like, that's a dumb idea. Yeah. We should just, like, pay a company, I flock in this case. So just, like, make sure the stuff always works. Yes. So it's not the, you know, my favorite part of the business in that sense of, like, it's just a lot of stress. It's very operationally intense, but I think it's valuable to our customers.

Yeah. How do you think about the rights in check about cameras in the park? You know, many movies. center on this idea of universal surveillance, you know, in the Borgnet entity or something, you know, they have cameras on absolutely everything, or I guess the, or in supremacy, I think is more the Waterloo Station scene, and same with lots of other things. Just how do you create the right guardrails once you move off roads and into parks and public spaces and kind of creating access controls around that?

Yeah. The cop-out answer is like, I don't want to be in charge of this. deciding that. Thankfully, we have elected officials who we vote to make that decision. Or what do you think is sensible place for them to land is? I think it's way higher than we have now. I think that, for me, at least, for every crime that occurs that doesn't get solved means we didn't have enough cameras.

That's to me the easiest rubric. Now, I think to your question, though, it's a question of where they are. who has access to them. And I think it's one of the few cases where, you know, the disparity between maybe my knowledge and your knowledge of how the technology works and how on the artificial work, is like it's pretty big. And like their dreams of how it might work

versus actually how it works. Like it's much less sophisticated than they think or dream up. It's just a camera. So for me, at least, we should have an abundance of cameras and have an incredibly restrictive controls of how and when they're used. And the example I'd give you is like today, everything in flock just you can generally do.

There's data retention where we protect, you know, how long something is stored. So for live video, it's typically seven days. For LPR data, it's typically 30 days. You can go longer or shorter if a democratically elected body votes on it. But like I would challenge why not do more cameras and have a warrant restriction.

Like why not do 30 days of LPR data, But if you have warrant, you have a year. Yeah. You mean, less cameras. And so I do think there are some nuanced ways to do it. And, you know, thankfully, we have a really good government affairs team that is lobbying for that kind of legislation to say, like, there's a way for us to both be safe and maintain civil liberties. And it needs to be legislated, though. Yes.

Like, I can't. Those ideas are not in line with what my customers want. And my law enforcement customers. So they just want to go catch bad guys. They want to follow the Constitution. Yeah. Catch back guys. But that nuance in the middle of like,

but what is societally acceptable today really belongs in your elected officials to make that decision, so as it can change. And so we push them to be like, let's legislate this now before it becomes a problem. Where do you think has passed sensible rules?

Sensible. I think Virginia's bill last year was pretty good. It defined, it did a few things. things well, and one thing I don't agree with, what it did well is it defined a modest data retention period of 21 days. I think it's fine. I like 30, but tomato tomato is fine. It wasn't, I think the ACLU was lobbying for three minutes. It's a little tough. It's a card to swallow. I think, you know, 7, 14, 20-something days is like enough. There's a trade-off there.

They mandated formal auditing, which I think is great. Not enough of our customers audit themselves on a regular basis. We can build software to make that easier, but we need to be pushed to do that. It's like customers don't want it. They need to be told to do it. So I think that was good. It also validated that this could only be used

for criminal investigations, I think it's really good. While that's obvious, it's helpful to write it in law. I think the only thing that I disagree with is they did say, you know, effectively, there's no participation with the federal government. I think that's just, it's their choice. I think it's their choice. And that's the beauty of the country

is like Virginia should do what feels right for Virginia. But I worry about the types of cases that you don't want to read about on the news that tend to get solved by the U.S. Marshals, the DEA, the ATF, the FBI. And like, they can't use our technology in Virginia. Which is, like I said, I live in Georgia, so thankfully it doesn't really impact me.

But as a business, I'm like, I don't know if that's right. But I'm more than anything just happy they passed somewhat. Yeah. New Mexico passed a similar bill this year. California has a similar-ish bill. I think a couple other states have, I think the worst type of bill is actually not, you know, whether it's 14 days or 30 days of the intertension. To me, the worst bill is an unenforceable bill. So you can imagine a bill that's like, this product cannot be used for possession of marijuana. Like, who's going to enforce it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, you might, you might believe that. Yeah.

And that's great. But someone has to enforce this. And actually, what's going to happen is no one's going to enforce it now. And that's, I think, like really bad law in this case. Yeah. I'm curious what your view is on police department procurement. What do they do? What do they buy?

Yeah. Not enough of. What do they buy too much of? I don't, they don't feel like they're swimming in, you know, procurement dollars. But, yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, I mean, the thing they buy too much of is, and not to pick on Motorola, things that only matter in the 0.001% case. So it's like, guys, why don't you just use like cell phones? Like, well, international what is that?

And it's like, got it, okay. Like, how often, so you look at like a landmass radio contract and it's in a cost of like San Francisco County, you know, $200 million. Like, I mean, like, it's like. You're not about that kind of money? On a on a on a TV basis, oh yeah. Wow. I mean, I mean, I think Murdo's a really good company. Sure.

Yeah. Let's have. Yeah. You don't get there. And you go, why get it? Like, if there's an earthquake and every single cell tower goes down, law enforcement definitely needs a way to communicate. Man, is that really the only way?

Yeah. Like, could you guys just like have your own tower? There's got to be something. But you look into it. Is this a, your margin is my opportunity situation for you guys with radio? Maybe because law enforcement's unique in this case in which they really also like that they own the infrastructure. Like they own that bandwidth.

And so they can do whatever they want with it. I don't think they do anything interesting with it, but they can. Versus if they're riding on Verizon or AT&T, they have no control over that. Why don't you guys that just have the exact same products? And have a good show. Radio in the spectrum. We probably should.

But we got a lot of things. Like a VC and a board meeting. Yeah, it's like you guys should do this. You should talk about an $80 billion company that's been in business for 130 years. I mean, I guess you did it in payments, and it worked out pretty well. But yeah, so I think like that part, I think is really kind of crazy. At least like in the business board, I feel like I buy for my majority case. Yes, yes.

And I deal with the ramifications of the edge case or build around it, and they do that. I think procurement is exceptionally slow and exceptionally laborious. Everything goes to RFP. Yeah. But the RFP is written for one vendor. So all it does is wanting, went up taking an extra year, six months. I get why RFPs exist, but they're not actually RFPs.

I've never seen an RFP that's not written for one vendor. I'm sure it exists somewhere. Yeah, yeah. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. But what I think they do well is like one of the things that I think the government did figure out is maybe you need to have an RFP for a $200 million contract.

We're about a 10,000-over country. Great. So they do have spin levels where, you know, if you're a police chiefs, you can go spend $25,000 or $5,000 and, like, not have to go through the entire contract. hard process. But no, it's tough. Like, it's, I would not wish upon anyone selling to local government. It's more negatives and positives in all the ways. Yeah, and again, that's procurement process has evolved for a reason, you know, and to protect against certain other failure modes. But yeah,

well, I mean, you think about it in business and like, I know you, we use Stripe. I'm sure you have like six competitors. I don't know. But like, I know you. Some shouldn't like buy Stripe. And then the business world is considered very normal. in the government world, that is called illegal. Yeah. Which is, really, it's really interesting. Yeah. But again, it's involved for a reason.

The rules are written in blood. Well, no, and you have plenty of cases where it's, you know, it's gone sideways. But it is just interesting dynamic. For so many things that we take for granted as normal business practice are definitively illegal when procuring with government. How do you guys use private? I mean, a lot of our customers, a lot of our private sector customers pay either via credit card or check. with a lot of checks. Okay, so for the

public sector stuff, that'll generally be by torturous, you know, RFP process and PO and something like that, but for your private sector. But even, I mean, we don't want to be in the check deposit business. Sure.

You guys. So you strike for the check functionality because no one knows about our check functionality that Stripe can accept checks for you. Am I allowed to talk about it? No, no one knows because we're bad at marketing. Oh, I was just like, oh. Not because it's a secret.

No, yeah. Yeah, no, it's like we don't want to be in that business. Yes. So it's a remote deposit box or what's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, yeah, yeah. We can give you an address that you can give to your customers and they can mail checks to it and we will turn it into digital money.

And the fact that a bunch of atoms and, you know, an envelope going through the postal system were involved, you can be, you can forget about those details. Not a single customer of ours pays via ACH to either check or credit card. And we do a lot of checks. I'd probably say 80%, 90% are checks, maybe higher. You're one of the few tech companies. to mostly use stripe for checks. It's, you know, trying to buck the trend every day in the week. Yeah, that's really funny.

I love that. You were talking about police departments maybe being over-fixated on kind of the 0.1% cases. Does that apply to, you know, a common critique that you hear of police department procurement is the sort of militarization of police departments. And, you know, what we really need is a bear cat, you know, for this town of 20,000 people. which is like an armored personnel carrier light. It's like a $3 million vehicle and it's like, why couldn't we just like get an F-150?

So do you think that applies also to kind of the shiny stuff? Oh yeah. I mean, you look at like early on when we were building the company, we get the question of like, well, can it track, can your license plate reader work on a car going 175 miles an hour? I was like, probably not. I've never driven that fast. I'd have to rent a runway to go like test this.

They're like, it's really important. I'm like, really? Like, how often does it happen? They're like, in a high-speed pursuit, people drive very fast. In high-speed, you know who they are. Like, we were criticized and had to build a product.

Until we got to like 120, 150, it was a major blocker to sales. Really? Huh. I mean, it's like, we built a camera that. I mean, we tested it on roads that we drove on. So, like, we'd get up to like 80 or 90,

and it worked fine, but we had to eventually, we rented a, like, you know, an amateur racing track. And just drove around in circles at 120 miles. We emailed the employee base and we were like, who owns a car that goes really fast? That's actually kind of funny.

There's a lot of people were like... That's what cars are some like... There's some fast cars. Putting it at Tesla's, Rivians, some other nicer cars, drive really fast. And like that was like a fun day. It's like with the cameras up and like...

And did the cameras work out of the box? Or did you have to tune the model performance? Yeah. Okay, so it just worked. They're the only place where we had to make one modification, which is kind of interesting. We deploy our radar. So on really busy roads where our angle of incident is particularly tight,

like we can't shoot super far down with to shoot a sharp angle, we have a radar attachment that we tilt backwards to notify like the cars on the way, like get ready, which helps. But that's like a very like far edge case. But the camera doesn't actually... You prime the camera essentially? Yes, to get ready for a car coming. Huh. I'm sorry.

Because the camera is offline. Oh. Unless there's a vehicle. I see so you booted it up. And that's a power saving measure? Yeah. The most expensive thing we do is take a picture. The second most expensive thing we do is send stuff to the cloud.

Third is just like being a computer turned on. And so it's similar to your iPhone, you know, turning your screen off. Okay. So we added the button, you know, to take a photo right away. The continuously running radar is very low power? It's negligible. I see. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, that was a fun one. We were talking about how hardware previously, but what's building your own drones being like? A lot of fun. Sounds fun. No, it's fun, but it's like, you know, I've kids, I know you've a kid. It's like really fun to build a product that your kids understand.

It's like we drive around Atlanta and my son will count the cameras from like home to school. You know, or we're going like the airport or we'll go like to the park. And, like, I love that he can actually, like, understand what dad does. Yes. I'm not sure if he's taught your son, like, how to use the console. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, yeah, we process the world's payments.

And so when you show him a drone, he's like, oh, this is so cool. And he has, like, a little miniature drone. Also, you don't only do drones, but you do drones to catch bad guys. Yeah, yeah, it's like very cabalic. Very early age. Yeah, you like, yeah, to be clear, like, he'll watch Paw Patrol and be like, that's what Dad builds. Like, that's the, that's the helicopter.

Mike, well, we don't put any people in it. But I think what's been fun is we made a hypothesis that if you studied planes, I think the most interesting plane military-wise is the warhog. Whereas traditionally, you built a plane.

What kind of missiles can be at? And they were like, what do we what kind of missiles can be at? And they were like, let's design the best missile. It's very precise, very big. And then we'll figure out how to fly it. And so our thesis was well, we're really good at cameras. A drone is really just a camera that flies. let's build the best payload, and then figure out how to fly it.

It's like, if I showed you, I could show you the payload the next time you're in Atlanta, or we could fly one out here. It's like the coolest camera ever. It's huge. It's like this big. And it's got four different, four different image sensors, maybe six, different optical lenses. Like we can zoom, we can read a license plate almost a mile away.

Like crazy specs, great thermal. Then we're quick to get to fly. So, like, I don't know, I was an electrical engineer. One of my co-founder was mechanical engineer. It's fun to build things that fly. So it's like, right, we have payload. We have this airframes. We have aeronautical engineers now.

Like, it's been fun to grow the engineering team. Yes. An imaging team, you think about the dock that it lives in, it's effectively a commercial-grade H-FAC system. Like, the drone lands. It needs to be cold. It needs to be hot. It needs to be hot.

Lithium doesn't like to be too hot or too cold. So you've got to keep that well-conditioned. It's a huge compressor. It's this massive thing that opens and closes. And if it's snowing, if it's frozen, like all of these engineering problems. Yes. And that's the fun part of this stuff.

Everything else is selling is good, but building stuff is fun. How many drones do you have out there in the world? But we don't, we don't disfews that have one. But decent number. Yeah, yeah, no, it's hundreds of cities that are flying. Are flying drones? Yeah. It's funny, when you talk about the A10 Warthog, you're reminding me of the Boyd book

by Robert Corum, which I only read recently, but it's like one of this kind of Silicon Valley canon. And everyone talks about it. And never talks about him in the context of his Uda loop, you know, orient, something, decide, act. Yeah. But that's actually kind of overrated. And actually, the main reason Boyd is interesting is helping the Pentagon procure better planes.

I'm just reminded of that with the warthog and also, you know, your description of running at 170 miles an hour, because basically he came into a Pentagon that had a bunch of bad planes because all the generals were just obsessed with specs. and they wanted a high top speed and they really judged planes on specs and actually the fighter pilot joke is that there are only two throttle settings in a dog fight

maximum full military power or throttle's idle like those the only two energy states that you're in and what matters is maneuverability and the ability to add energy or lose energy quickly so anyway he was involved in basically all of the good planes that were produced including the A10 Warthog because he got them

out of the mindset of just kind of speeds and feeds. Well, and that's like for us, the spec we track is like time on scene. Yeah. And so one of the reasons why we care so much the payload is like, if you have a payload that can see really far away,

you don't have to fly there. So actually you get there faster virtually. Yep, yep. Which is what, like if this was a drone that was carrying a payload like a zip line or something else, like actually physically in there matters. But for us, it's just about time on virtual scene. Yes.

So that's what we measure ourselves too. So that's why we fly high because, like, physics allows you to see farther. So we have this huge payload So you don't have to actually fly there And then you don't have to fly as fast Which means you can conserve a battery life Which means you're in the air longer

Like all these designs were around Yes That use case versus like You know I'm sure Zerpline went through In a whole separate use case Of like what's the max payload And all that kind of stuff

So how many drones does a city The size of San Francisco need? 12 Okay So it's not a lot Very small number No it's mean Our average drone can cover a 30 square mile

radius And get there within under a minute And thankfully you know knock on wood like there actually aren't that many 911 calls that merit of response. So we look at it both ways. We look at it in terms of geography

and then 911 density. So in more rural parts, you need less drones, but there's a call for service. And then in more dense urban areas, you need more drones, mostly from a volume of service. But even in our most dense customers,

like it's pretty rare that they fly two drones at once. It happens, but it's like, I think our busiest drone is being flown, you know, 90 hours a week. That's a lot of flight time. Sorry, do you dispatch the drone when it's needed from its charging dock, or is the idea that it's out there flying already in New Jersey Tasquez? Yeah, there's like, it lives in the dock.

Yeah. There is some, there's debate of whether a drone should be in the air at all times. Does that actually save you meaningful time? Being in the air, I would save a lot of time. Oh, really? Yeah, but like you look at the Carpenter case in Baltimore, and they had a airplane with a very powerful camera, 24 hours a day

and that was deemed like a unwarranted search and so it got killed and so we're very conscious like we have a other part of our business that is interesting now

at scale it's like we have a full team of constitutional attorneys and I'm sure you have like a regulatory team that when you want to build something they're like let's check it before we ship

we have a constitutional team it's like cool idea let's actually make sure this doesn't violate the Constitution look up the Fourth Amendment here real quick yeah let's just like double check this thing and so when you look

Like the drone, like we believe, and there hasn't been tested in court, but these are smart people. They're like, look, we just, it's unclear how that would end in court. Yeah. But if you call 911, there is a reason to fly the drone. Ah. If there is a gunshot, if there is a gunshot detection, if there is a stolen car, like that is a reason to dispatch versus just like flying around looking for stuff. It's not, it's not unconstitutional, but we would not push that as a use case. Sorry, like a lot of this precedent, you know, as new technologies come along,

you know, people reason by analogy of, like, you know, cars, some plot like your house, but somewhat different, you know, whatever. Like, isn't a drone flying around just like a police cruiser on its patrol? So the, and I'm not an attorney. Neither am I. Never stop me, yes. The other analogy that would be the butterfly effect, which is like when things are much, much cheaper and much easier, historical precedent gets thrown away.

And so take the helicopter example. You could say, oh, well, helicopters fly sometimes. But, yeah, but helicopters are so expensive. It's not practical to have 24-7 aerial coverage. The drone, it's not impractical. It's the same reason why, like, when we launch our drone, we want to go from, like, the launch location to the end location, the cameras point the horizon the whole time.

We don't want to look in your backyard. That's like, I feel really strong. And that's not a law. That's just like our point of view of where the law should be. Yes, yes. So we'll build a product for that. And then if the operator wants to tilt down, That's their control, but as a default, we're fine.

That's very interesting. Last question, you know, so you guys have grown with cameras out there in cities, now getting into drones, building the software OS to help law enforcement agencies and others kind of synthesize all the information they have. Just what comes next? What future product ideas are your thing with where you want to go? So I think about it, when we talked about this earlier, failure for flock

is prison population goes up essentially like really bad and we look at the products today are very much focused in the middle of a crime a crime has already happened and therefore we should solve it and that's really good

and I think we're definitely not done but we've got a lot of work in that category I get pretty interested in expanding that in going well what about what can we be doing from a product perspective to prevent crime from happening and that actually doesn't necessarily look like software. It's like one of the interesting things that we started last year

is what we call our thriving cities fund. It's probably an analogy similar to your strike press, which is like it's never going to be the core of your business, but you feel really good that it's a part of your business. And so when we go in places like Greenville, Mississippi, we also commit to deploy capital as growth partners to those businesses. Because if we want to convince that 16-year-old to not be a criminal, there does need to be jobs.

jobs that like a 16-year-old can get. And so we deploy capital in, you know, restaurants, nail salons, like pick your business that you can be 16 and work out easily. And, like, we want more of those to exist. In the cities that also choose to be safe. I don't want to go to a place that doesn't want to be safe. Yes. So I'm like, I want to do more there.

And then I think to our conversation on the other half, you know, the majority of the crime we solve is not violent. It's non-violent. And today, the, the discharacterial. discrepancy for a juvenile, non-juvenile, you still wind up in some type of penitentiary or prison system? I think that's crazy. Like all the data shows, as soon as you wind up in prison, you're going to get violent and you're going to come back. And so I would articulate there as an opportunity, don't know yet what it is, to say, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. If this was an

opportunistic criminal, is there a product with a capital P? Because it might not be software. It might be hardware or software, I don't know, that allows that person to have a second chance. And in a way that is not going to increase their likelihood of doing it again, like, that's bad. But like, prison can't be the answer. Like, it just doesn't work. And the whole concept of prison will never work. And there are some incredibly well-run prisons with really well-intentioned wardens doing the best of their ability, but the concept of putting a bunch of violent people together is, like, by default, flaw.

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

Thank you. Thank you. It's fun. It was awesome. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.com.

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