This Week in Startups - The future of public safety via rapid drone response with Aerodome's Rahul Sidhu | E1900

Starting point is 00:00:00 You know, shout out to folks like David and, and Catherine at Indreason. They came and did our seed round, Lickety split with 2048, Alex Iskell, out in New York. We're in the process right now, closing a pretty large Series A. And when we, when I did this A round, I had, I was, you know, getting inbounds from GPs at every tier one at firm, it felt like. And people have really, really embraced this. So I would say that what you were saying earlier in the podcast, there's a shift towards wanting to invest in defense in public safety. And thankfully, because of companies like Block, for example, and Mark 43 and some of these other

Starting point is 00:00:36 folks who have achieved some level of venture scale in public safety, people are now saying it's almost like a duty we should try to look into this. And we know that it's a possibility that these companies could get really big. This weekend startups is brought to you by Open Phone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere. Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Vanta, compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast.

Starting point is 00:01:15 Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. and Imagine AI Live is an AI conference where you'll learn how to apply AI in your business directly from the people who build and use these tools. It's taking place March 27th and 28th in Las Vegas, and Twist listeners could get 20% off tickets at ImagineaI. Live slash Twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Interesting trend I've watched here over the last decade in Silicon Valley. which is located in the Bay Area.

Starting point is 00:01:53 A lot of hippies, peace and love, and all that kind of great stuff, is a lot of the sort of Gestalt, the philosophy of the Bay Area. And, you know, five years ago, you had folks maybe not even wanting to participate in anything safety, defense-related.

Starting point is 00:02:12 In fact, famously, in 2019, Google, under pressure from their peace-knit employees, canceled the contract, cloud contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. This is Google, a company that benefits from the safety and security provided by the U.S. Department of Defense is above actually servicing them, right? And they didn't want to be in the business of war, the uncomfortable business of safety, while benefiting from it.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Couldn't think of anything more hypocritical in my mind. Well, that sentiment, thankfully, has changed here in Silicon Valley, and we've seen a lot of successful companies. Andrew comes to mind, friend of the pod, Palmer Lucky. ring, friend of the pod, Jamie Siminoff, and flock safety. Had all of them on All In or Endora this week in startups. And investing in defense and public safety, it's now actually considered a really big opportunity for startups.

Starting point is 00:03:06 This means smart people, entrepreneurs are now incented to build products that make the world safer. And today, we have a great guest. Raoul Sidu is the CEO and co-founder of a startup called Aerodome. A-E-R-O-D-O-M-E. And I saw the demo of this on X dot com, formerly known as Twitter, and I said to my producers as I'm apt to do,

Starting point is 00:03:34 get Ruhul on the program. Well, here he is, folks. Hey, Ruhl, how are you doing? I'm doing well, sir. How are you doing? All right, you heard my little intro there. And I just want you to show what you've belted the audience and maybe we can play a little video or something,

Starting point is 00:03:48 just get right to it here. What did you build? Why is it important? And how's it going? Yeah, look, I think the simplest way is to kind of show you what we've got going on here. The simplest way to think about what we're doing here, if you think about public safety air support, is usually picture helicopters going around and tracking high speed pursuits, etc. And what we built is the ability for police and fire departments to basically send a drone,

Starting point is 00:04:13 launch a drone from a central location and send it to a 911 call anywhere in the city. at an average of 98 seconds or less. Giving these agencies the ability to provide rapid air support in a way that's scalable, faster, easier, cheaper than doing it the old way, which is with helicopters. Okay, so somebody calls 911. I think there's somebody trying to break into my house.

Starting point is 00:04:35 I hear somebody at the back door. The 911 operator or the police or automated sends up a drone to the location of that phone call or the location. So it's, you know, one through three main street. There's somebody trying to break into my house. A drone goes and it gets there in under 100 seconds. That's right. Am I describing correctly what you built?

Starting point is 00:04:57 That's right. Yeah. And a lot of it is automated. I mean, these drones launch from central drone stations where their batteries are swapped with little robot arms and the drones take off and can go to the call automatically and immediately provided that coverage. And in the meantime, someone from the fire station or the police station is sitting there on a computer. We call them the chair force officer and they're flying the drone on the

Starting point is 00:05:20 computer almost like it's a video game in that sense. So that's basically how it works. Who initiates the deploying of the drone? The 911 operator, this, what did you call them? The chair force officer. The chair force officer. It's pretty funny that, you know, the person at headquarters decides they're going to send one of these drones. And are they actually flying it or are they just putting in the address and saying, go here? And it does it in a predetermined route. Well, it's a little bit of both. To answer your second question first, the drone, the 911 data comes directly into our system. So in cities which we're live, a 911 call comes up and the information for that call comes into our system. So they know, oh, there's a shoplifting happening or a burglary

Starting point is 00:06:07 in progress and it's at this address and they just have to press go. And the drone will fly to that automatically. Now, it doesn't mean that they can't, of course, when they get there, they might want to make some tactical decision. So they're going to fly the drone, like a mouse and keyboard or with a controller to be able to decide, I want to get on this side of the house and, oh, my, my guy's running down this street and can do that and chase the person. Now, to answer your first question in terms of who decides, that's an agency by agency decision. I mean, typically, it's a police officer or in some cases a firefighter that goes, oh, it's a, you know, it's a call worth sending a drunk.

Starting point is 00:06:40 I can provide air support. If it's a shoplifting call at my local CBS, I know that I can get there in enough time to be able to just follow that person as they get into a car, get the plate on the car, follow the car until a police officer can pull them over safely at a different location. That's a decision that they make, and then they can send and control the drone to do that type of air support. Got it. Okay.

Starting point is 00:07:00 I'm sure there are public safety folks who have a million complaints about this. what are the complaints you're currently hearing? And what about those complaints are valid versus invalid? You're saying like maybe complaints from the community or people who are concerned? Yeah, there's, I mean, there are privacy advocates. There are safety advocates. Oh my God, this thing, I would think the feedback you're getting. And again, it's always variable and there's squeaky wheels who get the grease.

Starting point is 00:07:30 But there are people who have privacy concerns about, for example, safety cameras. And in San Francisco, the hippie-dippy lunatics, you know, are like, we don't want cameras. Of course, they probably have a zillion cameras around their house. But they don't want that it to be a camera system. In London, there are camera systems everywhere. Now, if you're in China, there are camera systems with tracking of faces and, you know, maybe that's compromising privacy. So I guess privacy concerns is one I can think of.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Two is abuse. And how do you? And flock had this issue of, hey, is there abuse here? Could some, you know, chair force operator start trying to. tracking their spouse or, you know, stalking somebody. We always see that kind of abuse in technical systems. And then, of course, there's the classic, is this thing going to run into a helicopter, an airplane,

Starting point is 00:08:15 or fall out of the sky and kill my grandma? So those are the three I can think of. How do you address those three and have they come up? Or am I just, you know, assuming that people are still Karen's? Yeah, look, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. And I think that let me give you some context on how this started. So my backgrounds and obviously both tech and public safety. This is my first public safety company. I had another one that was acquired in 2021. But my background on the public safety side,

Starting point is 00:08:43 I've worked as a police officer, firefighter, paramedic, crew chief across different parts. I wore a lot of uniforms in the United States. And this program actually, I'm still a reserve officer in the Los Angeles area for the city Burdana Beach. And this program started in 2020, March of 2020. It was a experiment I ran when one of a friend of mine who was working at a different agency, Chula Vista, was like, hey, we're starting to maybe try to use drones for this purpose. And, you know, in COVID times, and, you know, right when it hit, we were down maybe 40% of our force on any given day. So we had to do more with less. And then, you know, we weren't as able to use traditional air support as a lot of these units were grounded. So we needed to find a way to make

Starting point is 00:09:29 something work. Now, I was, you know, the air support manager at the time, I was basically trying to put this together myself as a reserve officer that's still there. And I had to do a lot of the community meetings. I had to listen to people's concerns and I had to make assurances to the community and how this would be used. The main thing here is that we're not reinventing the wheel in terms of what is actually happening. Helicopters are going around flying and providing some level of air support to police officers or firefighters in the field. And there's case law around what they can and can do, how they can prevent themselves from operating, you know, in a way that isn't good or violating the Fourth Amendment or any of those things.

Starting point is 00:10:08 Drones are essentially a technological advantage in the sense that you can use more, they're cheaper, they're safer, they're greener, but it's still doing generally the same thing. As helicopters might, let's say. Right. Okay. And do they fall under the same operating principles as a helicopter pursuing people or going to a crime scene? You can think of it that way.

Starting point is 00:10:28 It gets a little bit more complicated, but from a legal standpoint, you know, generally, yes. That's how they're done it. They're operating. Now, the concerns that I would have and the concerns I heard from the community when we started this was, well, like you said, how are we going to make sure this is used the right way? How do we protect privacy? And then the number one thing was how is the agency going to be accountable and transparent in how they use this technology?

Starting point is 00:10:51 And the latter being, I would say, very important. The way that helicopters are going around there and flying, they're not necessarily going to be recording all of their, the footage they're gathering. Some of it might go to evidence, but a lot of it might not. Our drones are going to record. And then that video data can be susceptible to the Freedom of Information Act. So it's like a body cam that's always on in that sense. And if you're pro body cam, then you're probably pro body cam in the sky trying to catch another angle of what that makes total sense. So you have an audit trail because of this. And if you were the victim of a crime, you very much might want to have that audit trail. So if your house was,

Starting point is 00:11:31 you know, broken into, or if there was abuse, you know, somebody decides they're going to use this to track, let's just say the classic Facebook employer or Google employee, this has happened, I think, at both companies where somebody has an X and they start, you know, checking out their DMs and all that stuff. You can Google it. I think it was Facebook that had this issue. They just created audit trails and the audit trails catch the person immediately. In fact, when somebody goes and does something that's, you know, uh, inappropriate. It just, the alarms go off because there's an audit trail. It would be much simpler to go buy a used drone, fly it yourself if you want to audit somebody rather than using the police one, correct? Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, no,

Starting point is 00:12:12 100%. It'd have to be an idiot to use this inappropriately if you were on the force. You'd be like, if you wanted to, yeah, if you wanted to break the law and you were a cop, you wouldn't use a police car. Yeah. You wouldn't have your body cam on. That's, you can't turn it off. So there's nothing you can do in that sense. And look, as a company, the way we approach this is we need to do everything we can to ensure that this is used in a way that everybody wants it to be used. And then also empower agencies to be able to effortlessly be accountable and transparent. That's what my last company was about, was about police transparency and accountability.

Starting point is 00:12:47 But this one, the way we think about is look, if the flight logs of every flight are automatically uploaded to a public facing dashboard so that I know, oh, okay, that drone that was flying overhead, I can go to XYZ Police Department's website and see oh, that was responding to a shoplifting. And I know exactly what the call for service number is. And calls are in many jurisdictions

Starting point is 00:13:07 public record, correct? 911 calls get released. So this is just adding another data source to it and it's adding a super effective one. Are you still using your personal phone number for business? Oh my Lord, please stop. Please stop.

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Starting point is 00:14:29 no problem, easy, peasy, lemon, squeezy, open phone will port them over at no extra cost. Head to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20% off. Thanks, open phone for making an awesome product. I'd love it. Are you deployed yet? And in how many cities are you deployed? And what's the, and how long have you been employed in those cities? Yeah. Look, our first agency went live November 1st. So it's been a few months. Great. And yeah. Where is that agency here?

Starting point is 00:14:58 That's Redonda Beach, California in Los Angeles. Okay, great. Awesome. We have two more agencies in that area that have basically set up trial versions in Los Angeles area. We've got a couple more agencies that are also live. So right now we've got three that are up and then two additional that are in trial and we're deploying another six to seven in the next few months. Is the idea that every precinct would have a drone launch, launcher, on the roof? Is that the vision eventually? Is there's drones on the roof of everyone? Or do they come out of an airport? You know, I'm sure Redondo Beach has many local airports. How do you manage

Starting point is 00:15:34 the deployment of these? And then what's the distance they can travel and how long can they stay up? Yeah. Look, it's not, you know, you can put these drone stations. It doesn't have to be just on the police department roof. I mean, they're pretty easy to use. Yeah, exactly. It can be a lot of places. But look, I think that the, the idea is generally around two things. One is, there's There are basically two types of public safety agencies out there. One is the one that can afford a traditional helicopter-based air support program, which is a hand, like,

Starting point is 00:16:03 you know, I'd say a couple hundred in the United States. Major city, major, major cities, counties, etc. And then there's the vast majority of communities that you can't afford that.

Starting point is 00:16:15 And we're trying to democratize access to the latter. So those agencies can afford to be able to provide air support. And then make sure that the former have an option to either supplement or replace what is typically a more expensive and unsafe way to do it. I mean, we have in the last 10 years, 12 fatal collisions, you know, crashes on the helicopter side for public safety. Yeah, I mean, they're incredibly dangerous. People don't realize helicopters, it's not a perfected technology by far. And drones, we can say quadcopters are massively more, we obviously know they're safer, that we know they're cheaper. How much safer are than helicopters?

Starting point is 00:16:54 best way to think about is if you looked up and you saw a helicopter coming down to crash in your car versus a drone coming down and crashing your car, which one are you most afraid of? Yeah. But I would say it's, look, it's in orders of magnitude. Obviously, there's no one in it. It's an uncrewed device. So the safety of the people inside doesn't matter. The safety of the people down below is another big thing. When you have an airplane the size of a Cessna, and I'm a manned aircraft pilot, too, so I think about this.

Starting point is 00:17:18 Or an aircraft like a helicopter crash, you're going to have a lot of collateral damage on the ground. 100%. These things are not like, you know, we're talking about 10, 15 pounds in some capacities maybe a little bit heavier. And the safety mechanisms that exist for this, you know, some drones are equipped with parachutes. A new one that we're putting out there is both has the ability to fly like an airplane and fly like a helicopter and have multiple levels of redundancy. And there's a lot of digitized, like geo-fence is built in. What we do is that we actually put an air traffic control node almost, essentially on the rooftop of the agency. that uses radar, radio frequency sensors,

Starting point is 00:17:56 a variety of other sensors to be able to cover the airspace within four nautical miles of that agency or that drone station. So that drone can basically take off and fly knowing where all the other potentially drones or more importantly manned aircraft are. And they would also, I assume, know where the tall trees are. And they could do that, you know, educate us on the latest in drone technology. What's the flight time of these drones?

Starting point is 00:18:22 today, what height do they typically fly at? And then how do they know obstacles? Is it because there are maps that are done ahead of time or are they doing that in real time with their cameras? Yeah, I mean, look, I'll start with the beginning. The most common static drones, or I'm sorry, quadcopter drones are flying anywhere between 35 to 55 minutes of flight time. The ones that we're utilizing also fly at about 52 miles per hour on the quad copter side. This year, we're putting out a different drone with one of our partners. That's, like I said, and it takes off vertically, lands vertically, but it can fly horizontally. That drone can stay up for two hours and fly upwards of 100 miles per hour.

Starting point is 00:19:06 And so the speed is 52 miles an hour, and you're flying like the crow flies. So just in terms of distance, you know, you're going to be able to get to, you know, at 10 miles away from the police station or whatever in 10 minutes. So you're getting to most calls in single digit minutes. You're obviously beating the police there typically. Yeah. 94% of our, basically the drones being on the flights, these drones are going out with a respond on calls. 94% across all over customers, they're first on scene.

Starting point is 00:19:40 And like I said, the average response times about 98 seconds. In a place like Redondo Beach, what height are they flying at? And has the FAA come up with a specification for, like they do for, you know, jets and stuff like that, they're supposed to fly certain routes, certain airspace. So what's the airspace rules now with the FAA? Because they seem to have been very pro-drone and they seem to have been very pro-licensing. I was always amazed that of all the agencies that are typically anti-technology or, you know, maybe they de-accelerate them.

Starting point is 00:20:11 Am I correct that the FAA has been an accelerant for getting these things in the air and making sure they're safe? I would say the recent FAA for sure. You know, you're, you've probably seen companies that have come across your deal desk at like zip line and folks who have been waiting years and years and years for waivers they just got in the last several months. The FAA has become very open to it, I would say, but in a very safe and measured way. I don't think that they're operating in a speed that isn't even close to reckless or I would say close to what the private sector would potentially do in terms of risk mitigation.

Starting point is 00:20:46 But they're being, they're willing, it feels like they're taking a rational approach to this, which is all anybody can ask for in this space. There are rules that have already been set that, like, for example, our pilots have to follow of not flying above 400 feet without any type of special waiver. And there's also rules around flying beyond visual line of sight that the FAA is starting to allow people to use technology like ours potentially to be able to fly without a visual observer, meaning even if the drone is so far that I can't see it with my naked eye, I have technology like the sensors I just mentioned or other sensors that can tell you where that drone is in relation. to other aircraft and then allow for you to more safely be able to fly that distance. Got it. So they're traveling 50 miles an hour. They're traveling typically 2, 3, 400 feet, which would be 20, 30, 40 stories in the air.

Starting point is 00:21:35 So a place like Redondo Beach, you don't even have 20-story buildings. And the market you're going after is not downtown L.A. or Manhattan. So you're not going into areas with 50-story skyscrapers. You're going into areas with two or three-story buildings, yeah? typically. Yeah, I'd say like that's that's 99.999% of the country, right? So that's definitely true. Now, it doesn't mean that we haven't sat there and talked to maybe some folks at NYPD

Starting point is 00:22:02 about what this would look like in Manhattan versus other places. And, you know, you add a level of complication because one of the questions you asked earlier was how do you prevent it from hitting a static object? Is it mapping this? And where is the drone technology? Yeah, what's the latest on that technology? Because I remember, you know, there were geo fences, geo heights. Like I know I was a friend was using one of these by an airport and they were doing it also by public parks and like you weren't allowed to have it go into the Presidio or, you know, other federal land.

Starting point is 00:22:31 You weren't allowed to go over certain height because there was an airport in that area. So yeah, Philistine on how do they avoid a tree or, you know, some, let's say somebody put up a, you know, I don't know, somebody put up a banner. I'm making up a crazy situation here. Sure. Somebody put up some crazy banner. LA, you know, they put up those blow-up dolls that have the arms that flail outside of a car dealerships. You know, things might be 20 stories and some media puts it on the roof. How does it know that that's there? Does it have avoidance now or is it done with maps? How is

Starting point is 00:23:06 avoidance done in quad-copter land these days? Well, look, we can talk about it from a software standpoint to Harvard standpoint. The usage and practical software thing is that you just build a geofense for where the drone can and can't fly. And if you build a minimum altitude where it has to take off and hit minimum altitude, and the drone can fly in this area, and that area is above the tallest static object measured in the city. Okay, you're done. You're done.

Starting point is 00:23:29 I mean, look, there's a possibility that something goes up and you have to kind of pay attention out, of course. And you can ingest data in real time for that purpose. But the dynamic geofencing is the more complicated problem that we've focused on solving, which is more around aircraft, which is, if I know with my combination of radar, and radio frequency and ADSB sensors that there's a helicopter flying east to west at this altitude and this location, I can basically software can put a bubble around that helicopter, a half a mile bubble that prevents the drone from getting vertically or horizontally too close

Starting point is 00:24:02 to that aircraft. And that's happening not because of the onboard sensors on the drone, but because of the sensors on the ground. But the most important thing about thinking about the hardware side of this, there are companies that have done a good job in terms of autonomy, you're putting a pack in a bunch of sensors on these drones and building onboard compute for this. And I think that's important when you're doing things like inspections where you're going to fly really close to a wall and you don't want to hit the wall. Companies like Skydeo are, they do a great job with this. My take on this, though, is that when you're doing a combination of static and dynamic geo-fencing in the way that I just described, you don't need to waste weight on this aircraft to put a bunch of sensors to prevent it from hitting something. if you're flying 100 miles per hour and you hit something,

Starting point is 00:24:44 if you're trying to not hit an aircraft, you're already too close. If you're trying to not hit a wall, you blew the jail. Something's wrong on the software side. So we think about taking as the cost of compute comes to zero, as we're able to process more of this or efficiently on the cloud, and our latency is low enough. We think about how much can we do off the drone and maintain the drone to be as lightweight as possible

Starting point is 00:25:06 and simplify the drone manufacturing so that you can actually achieve the speeds you want, for as long as you want and treat it simply like a physics problem for an aircraft. Does that make sense? Totally. And any of these things, they don't weigh as much as, and they don't cost as much as a helicopter. Helicopters, three, four thousand dollars an hour, I think is the average cost, yeah? Yes.

Starting point is 00:25:27 I mean, in some cases, even more because for police helicopters, you're tying these things down with two thousand, two million dollar cameras and all kinds of stuff that have their own variable costs. Ah, okay. So, yeah, it can be five, six, seven thousand. What do you, what does it cost, police department and how do you charge you charge by mile flown by minute flown you charge a flat rate and they can use it unlimited how do you charge for a product like this because it's really

Starting point is 00:25:50 hard to sell into municipalities obviously it's you know flock had this issue really hard to sell in and then how do you price something yeah yeah look i mean it flocks a great um great example uh shout out to garrett i was just talking to him a few days ago the flock model did really really well um you selling small things, like, you know, I'd say sub 70 days sales cycles and small amounts of money and trying to get like, let's go land and expand and they've done an extremely, they've done a great job. And now they have a lot of logos and a lot of distribution. Our approach is a little bit different in the sense that our ACVs are 622,000 on average last time I checked. What we sell is the complete solution. So we are building the software,

Starting point is 00:26:36 obviously the software comes with it. The hardware we partner with hardware companies to have exclusive relationships to sell into our sector. And the services we provide to just get them the FAA waivers and do training basic services, nothing complicated. We give all that under one contract with one subscription fee. So you've essentially turned air support into almost like a SaaS model in that sense. Obviously, it's more complicated and the cogs aren't going to be the same. But that's the way that we've approached this because it's a lesson I learned from my last

Starting point is 00:27:03 company when I was selling the police departments and our ACBs were 40K and our sales cycles were 9 to 12 months. But now we have the same cell cycle with the ACB, it's 14, 15 times that amount. And we're able to actually achieve the level of growth that we want, get a venture outcome and get bigger, faster. Working in public safety for the last eight to nine years on the venture side of this too and just trying to figure out what companies do a good job, it has to be either like it feels like the flock model or our model of being able to do one of the two.

Starting point is 00:27:36 Yeah. So you're just going to, you charge some municipalities. to have this complete solution, thinking it's hundreds of thousands of dollars to low millions for the average customer per year? Yeah. So the cheapest, like one station is going to be in the, you know, that's like closer to about $300,000 a year for everything. But that's, you know, obviously the way that a city looks at is like I need X amount of

Starting point is 00:28:00 radars, like air traffic nodes to put in the city. I need X amount of drones and drone stations. And that price can layer over time, but it's still a yearly price. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt. And you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC2. What is SOC2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC2 compliant.

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Starting point is 00:29:10 And it just automatically does it. That I'll say right now that's something that we have not yet deployed that's still in testing. So it would be disingenuous to me to say that that's live. But object tracking as a component has been largely, again, hardware and hasn't been super effective. So we've been kind of rebuilding it as a predictive object tracking model that's software base and can you can plug and play anybody's drone and it can still do it that way.

Starting point is 00:29:34 But that's actually, Jason, brings up a good point. Because when we think about what this looks like, you want to add more and more ability to be autonomous. Now, we're not autonomous today. And we're not going to be autonomous when you do this. And all of a sudden, we're full self-driving cars. There's an autopilot, an enhanced autopilot, than a full self-driving beta, and it's piece by piece. And the way that we look at this is you start with predictive object tracking.

Starting point is 00:29:59 Hey, follow this car. A human being does that. Then you can object classification where you go, okay, the hit and run vehicle was a blue BAM. And as the pilots flying, it's boxing the blue Bdemev's and showing you where to go. Then you get into something a little bit more along lines of like, you know, NLPLM, like, what if it can read the notes and now and call and eventually get into some level of autonomous agency where it's being able to know what to do. And that's going to take several years to do.

Starting point is 00:30:24 And the most important thing is to do it in a way that's not, like the things we're going to stay away from. I want nothing to do with facial recognition. I don't want to be able to identify a person. That's not what helicopter is here. Yeah, your privacy, your date as my liability became like a little bit of a rallying cry here in Silicon Valley at one point because it was like, I don't even want to keep that information on you. And that's why Apple's like, you know what, just going to encrypt your phone. We don't need to know what's on there. And so, yeah, that's a smart move on your part, unless there's 10 people who are on the most wanted list and it finds one of the top 10 while it's flying.

Starting point is 00:30:59 That could seem to be a pretty valid use. So you may wind up getting that if some. somebody knows, hey, or even an Amber alert, hey, this child is missing. And, you know, have you, have you talked to Ms. Palis about the Amber Alert sort of situation? Hey, we know it's a Toyota and it's a blue Toyota. And we know it's like this age. And here's the picture, here's five pictures of the person. Yeah. Seems to me to be a valid use of facial recognition.

Starting point is 00:31:24 Well, look, the facial recognition debate is, I would say, pretty different. I would not bet my, like, the company's success and maintaining a positive Overton window. shift simply on the use case or the practicality of like, if you were to tell me, hey, can you go back in time and put facial recognition on this thing and find bin Laden in 2007, I would still not want to do it. Just because I think the risk is very, very high. And I do buy to a certain extent the slippery slope argument on that. What I will say is that that doesn't mean you can't combine technology that already exists.

Starting point is 00:31:58 So like, I'm going to bring flock back to this. There's plenty of companies, but flock does a great job with automated license plate reading where they have those cameras that can go, oh, that car is a stolen car or, like you said, that's an Amber Alert vehicle. And if we can, if those triggers happen and the drone stations nearby and takes off and goes up cool and tracks the car automatically, that's going to save a lot of kids. And the impact you can possibly have on stolen vehicles is massive. And if what we what we know is that stolen vehicles by themselves, it's not about the nuisance

Starting point is 00:32:29 of getting a car stolen. It's that when someone steals your car, they're going to use it for the next three days. to go around and commit crimes. They're a vessel for crime. Here we come. Yeah. So imagine if a city can essentially ensure that every car that gets pulled, you know, into their city gets pulled over, the amount of deterrence that's going to cause on property

Starting point is 00:32:47 crime generally in that city. That's amazing. For people who don't know, flock, you know, neighborhoods can deploy flock license plate readers. And there's also an open source license plate reading software out there that some folks made. It's totally illegal to read license plate on a camera. in a public place, obviously. This does it in an automatic fashion, and you could do interesting things. Hey, this license plate has never been in this neighborhood.

Starting point is 00:33:12 Okay, that's a yellow. Oh, this license plate is involved in, you know, whatever, a crime or it's been reported. So, hey, that's a red. We're going to send a drone up. Oh, my Lord. I mean, this could really save a lot of lives. Yeah. You know, forget about property damage.

Starting point is 00:33:27 I mean, it's really about, like you're saying, what's the next crime? What's the next crime? my brother was on the job and my cousins and my uncle and you know there was this concept of um stop ask and frisk or broken broken window like you know hey somebody breaks a window next day there's going to be two broken windows and all the sense of free for all putting aside to how people feel about those emotionally somebody hops a turnstile you know the chances of them having a gun go up massively just statistically when cops would find guns on the street and this happened in open here recently at the Fruitvale station in the Bay Area, somebody hopped the turnstile.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Somebody, you know, cop comes up. Hey, you hop the turnstile. Can I talk to you for a second? Uh, your handcuff. Oh, yeah, they've gotten a gun on them and illegal gun. So this is absolutely fantastic. I think what you're doing is incredible. Um, and in terms of funding, I was given my little preamble there. Has the venture community embraced what you're doing or do you have to look elsewhere for, uh, investment? Uh, yeah. No, and I want to answer to that, but one thing I to mention with based on something you just said, I agree with what you're saying in terms of how that you can solve for crime in the way that you're doing it. I think it varies neighborhood, neighborhood, and every community gets to decide how they want to be police. One thing I will

Starting point is 00:34:46 say is that I'm a big believer in our system being used in response to crime. I think when you start using a system like ours to be proactive, it's a little bit of a different conversation. and that's up to the communities to decide. And there's a difference between, hey, stolen car, respond to that because that would generate a 911 call today versus go look for stolen cars. That's a whole different argument. And we're very big on the former and not very big on the ladder. So I'll say that. Back to your question about the venture funding.

Starting point is 00:35:16 Yes. In fact, it took, you know, fundraising for my last company from 2015 up until we were acquired in 2021 was a slog. We were selling to public safety. I heard a lot of, ooh, don't like GovTech. I don't really understand this. What I got a lot of attention in a good way because there was founder market fit. Okay, here's a tech guy that's also a cop that kind of gets this that helped and we were able to raise a little bit of money. But we raised less than $4 million for that last company overall.

Starting point is 00:35:42 So we had a decent outcome because we didn't have a lot to clear. But this company, you know, shout out to folks like David and and Catherine at Indreason. You know, like they came and did our seed round. Lickety split with 2048, Alex Iskold. in New York. We're in the process right now of closing a pretty large series A. And when we, when I did this A round, I was, you know, getting inbounds from GPs at every tier one at firm, it felt like. And people have really, really embraced it. So I would say that what you were saying earlier in the podcast, there's a shift towards wanting to invest in defense and public

Starting point is 00:36:19 safety. And thankfully, because of companies like Block, for example, and Mark 43 and some of these that are folks who have done, you know, have achieved some level of venture scale, uh, in public safety. People are now saying it's, you know, almost like a duty. We should try to look into this. And we know that it's a possibility that these companies could get, you know, really big. Yeah. Alex is, uh, Alex from is cold. Is that, uh, Alex is cold. Yeah. Yeah. I remember him from New York. He, he ran tech stars in New York for a bit. Yeah, I was in his, I was in his cohort in 2015, the first company. He's been my first check for two companies in our own. And that's a real,

Starting point is 00:36:54 super like charming when that happens when you get to have that relationship 2048 venture shout out to him yeah really was a great entrepreneur he did a glue if you remember that it was like a social network around TV and what was this company before that or maybe I just known from glue

Starting point is 00:37:12 anyway he was a developer and yeah he built some really interesting companies and he was always like a good writer I remember and then he wound up doing the tech star stuff and then yeah he'd be became a managing partner of 2048 Ventures. That's right.

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Starting point is 00:38:50 So I'm always like a good all-in story. So let's hear it. has got an all-in story. I'm not going to ask you your favorite best. I won't put you on the spot, but yeah, go ahead. Give us your best. All-in story. Look, I think All-in has had a pretty big impact for me.

Starting point is 00:39:07 It's 2020. I was working stills reserve officer. I had a failed acquisition that occurred for my last company. Right at COVID, they just tried to trade the deal at the last second. and I had to raise emergency funding and get ourselves out of it and try to flip that company. We ended up making it profitable, so we were able to get out of that situation. Then COVID hit, and I remember I had like, I was going through a breakup at the time. It's now the first week of June, last week of May, as you can remember, there were a lot of, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:40 that's when the George Floyd thing happened. Yeah. I was, yeah, and I was actually, I got called up as a reserve officer. So I was deployed days and days at a time to protest and some riots and, and, and, and, And I'm also fundraising at the same time. So I'm jumping into the police car and like getting on a call to try and, you know, pitch the company while I'm still like I got to jump out and then get back in the mix.

Starting point is 00:40:00 So it was a pretty exhausting time. And I remember like I'm a brown guy for those of you who, who are listening without their eyes. And I had an identity crisis being a person of color who's also a police officer. And I had, I'll be like very candidat. A lot of like white people come and try to explain racism to me. And it was a frustrating time for me. I ended up losing friends that I didn't, you know, like I thought were friends,

Starting point is 00:40:27 not because I was outspoken of a political opinion. I was, I'm like, you know, generally when it comes to police officers, I'd say I'd generally a fairly progressive guy. Yeah. But just because I was a cop, just because like, hey, we've liked you, you're even great, but you must be a bastard because you're a police officer. And I went through this. And I felt like, man, the world is like losing their mind a little bit.

Starting point is 00:40:46 And I just wanted to be a moderate, rational thinker who just try to solve problems. And there are plenty in policing that I agreed with people. But someone turned me on to All In right around that time period. And it finally felt like, okay, content that feels like it's, these guys are reasonable and they're trying to solve these problems. And I've been listening to it ever since. Yeah. It's just good to hear. I mean, one of the things I've tried to do, you know, and I'm in the position of the moderator, because nobody else wants to do.

Starting point is 00:41:18 And you're the world's best, right? Yeah, I mean, people don't know about that world's best thing that it's a joke. What happened was we have a friend Phil Helmuth, who, you know, everybody knows Phil Helmuth. They just type Phil Helmuth blow up into YouTube and you'll see all the clips. But he's a very effervescent poker player. His original nickname was the poker brat. But he had this thing where he wanted to be the world's best poker player. So he like started making his Twitter handles or his emails, like being the greatest and all this stuff.

Starting point is 00:41:47 And, you know, we all poached fun at them for it because it's, deranged and strange and whatever. But I thought it was quite a great affirmation technique to say, hey, I'm trying to be the greatest. I want to be the greatest. And so just as a joke at the poker table, I was like, yeah, you're the world greatest poker player. I'm the world's greatest moderator.

Starting point is 00:42:08 Yeah, you're manifesting. Yeah, I'm manifesting. But it was like, what does it even mean to be the world's best moderator? Like, who cares? It was kind of a joke. But what I have tried to do is keep everybody intellectually honest. and, you know, sometimes a little uncomfortable. But you want to point out, like, hey, on behalf of the audience, is what you're saying,

Starting point is 00:42:27 you know, here's something that may be the audience and people listening might not, you know, might be incongruous. So when I challenge somebody like, you know, I might challenge Freeberg on, like, hey, is what Tucker saying about climate change correct or not, right? Because I know the audience is thinking like, yeah, Freeberg should challenge, you know, him on this or, you know, hey, is there global warming is or not? You know, and what does somebody have science like Freiburg think? Or, hey, is, you know, if Saks is super passionate about, you know, this war with the Ukraine as he obviously is, okay, I just want to be clear here.

Starting point is 00:43:01 You're not rooting for Putin, right, buddy? Yeah, no, I'm not rooting for Putin. I want to be clear about that. And Putin should not have invaded Ukraine, but I do think the U.S. It's very hard to have that nuanced discussion because everybody just wants to pick a sign. You know, like you said about being a cop, you know, everybody's like, oh, all cops are bad. All cops, you know, are putting their knees on the neck of a perp in cuffs. Like, no, that's one cop. And I can tell you, like, no cop wants to do that. No cop wants to murder somebody.

Starting point is 00:43:30 Like, this is like the sociopathie of, you know, a very small number of individuals in the world. And you just, you know, we, and it's fantastic. Every cop wants to be cameras. No, no. What cop wants to turn? their body cams off. You want cameras. You want protection, you know, from those kind of situations. So I'm glad that, you know, it struck you. And it just has something to do with the mainstream media. Like when the mainstream media got all biased and everybody had to pick aside and

Starting point is 00:43:56 if you said, hey, I'm wondering, you know, hey, if we're talking about, you know, black lives mattering, well, you know, this cop got shot, right, when they were pulling somebody over. What do we think about that? You know, and even me saying not right now, somebody could clip it and say, oh, Jake How's making an equivalency between systematic racism and a cop being shot. Nope, I'm not. I'm just saying, you know, being a cop's a hard job, you know? That's a hard job. And it's scary.

Starting point is 00:44:21 And you know the operating principle of being a cop. Get home alive. I'm not on the front line. But yeah, I can't imagine what it feels like to you with the target on your back. Well, even on the front line, like at that moment when we were at protests or in some cases, riots, I can tell you right now, that feeling that people talked about. you know, as cops was like, this Derek Shobbin mother-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h he's the reason that I'm, like, getting bottles thrown to me. He's the, he's the reason that, like, more cops are going to die.

Starting point is 00:44:54 And everyone thought, like, who's the Derek Chauvin in our agency? And there's been this transformation and necessary transformation in policing, where now it's like, like, that, there's a, there is a positive side effect to the of the heat going up a little bit. Because sometimes you need the heat to go up little bit and you get rid of the folks that shouldn't be there and you kind of clean out some liability. But there's a downside. Like we're dealing right now with also the fact that one of the reasons our system is selling is because an agency that should be, it's budgeted to hire 100

Starting point is 00:45:23 cops can only afford 90 cops. And it's not a problem of, I'm sorry, they can afford 100. They can only hire 90 cops. It's not a problem of their budget. People don't want the job. People don't want to be cops. So when our drones are out there being able to make the patrol officers more efficient where they can do effectively lessen the need for maybe two of those cops or four of those cops and then be a fraction of that cost. So you can go and say, hey, these drones can basically reduce our 100 person budget to 96 and we only have to pay for two of them. And then we can, there's a reason that makes sense.

Starting point is 00:45:57 Yeah. But, you know, one thing I wanted to key in on, because it really comes to a bigger point. And it's actually something we, I pulled from all in was this, you mentioned intellectual honesty. And that's a really, really important thing to me. It's actually something I did occasionally as a new CEO, I did a bad job doing sometimes. I'd have rose-tinted, you know, goggles, whatever the term is, glasses. And I would want to, I'd have confirmation bias. And this event in 2020 and then spending time listening to content you guys made and other people made that showed the value of intellectual honesty made it so it's one of the most important

Starting point is 00:46:30 things that are a company. In fact, there are three things that I think we pulled from, from this part of it being all in that are measures of intellectual honesty. One of them, you know, is the steel man. If I have somebody, you guys do this on the podcast all the time, all time. If I have another executive or someone else at the company, including myself, if someone, if I have an opinion, first thing is, okay, what's your level of conviction? So that's her first thing. And be honest. If you'd say everything's high conviction, you're going to sound like an asshole, no one's going to believe you. And if you have a high enough level of conviction, the second thing is, okay, get ready. Stealman yourself and or get ready to be, you know, someone runs the opposing on that.

Starting point is 00:47:05 I think those two things end up being critically important as you establish some level of intellectual honesty. You have to be okay with falling in love with the problem and not necessary the solution and being wrong if you're wrong. It's a super important part of being a great leader, founder, and working at a startup is, yes, there is a problem in the world. And there could be 10 solutions. So let's see what the market, which solution the market wants right now, which solution

Starting point is 00:47:35 we can build. And yeah, I might think it's, you know, number four out of 10. And I can be wrong. You know, it's these, you know, devices aren't ready yet. At some point, it's going to be great when these drones can, you know, drop a net on somebody, right? Not today. But at some point, if there's a, you know, an emotionally disturbed patient when I was on an ambulance, it was an EDPs, I guess they called them.

Starting point is 00:48:03 I don't know what they call them now. what do they call an emotionally disturbed person now on the radio? It's state by state. It's state by state. New York was EDP, yeah. Yeah, and like California might be 5150 in Pennsylvania. It was like a 902 or something. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:18 But anyway, get emotionally discerpation. Like, nobody knows what to do. Like, it would be great to have countermeasures for that, you know? Because if you're a cop, it's like, I got a baton, I got a taser, I got a gun. You know, like these, I'm always surprised that we don't have other, neutralizing, you know, tools. And this is, you know, like, there are alternative bullets. And so there are people, I don't know if, you know, like, there's sandbags, I guess, you can get.

Starting point is 00:48:43 I don't know how many people have those or how often they get used. But it'd be nice. There's so many emotionally disturbed people right now and people who go through these acute events, it'd be so great to just have a drone come and this person's acting out and they got a, you know, a katana sword and, you know, somebody's going to get hurt and just drop a net on them, you know? I've seen those net guns. I think those things have potential.

Starting point is 00:49:04 Yeah. So what I'll say is, you know, I want to be careful about this in the sense that I, we don't have any plans nor do I think it makes any sense for the company to get into any, like, intervention coming from the drone. I think that's, again, that's another one of those slippery slopes that feels like it might not be, you know, the right move for us. But I do agree with the fact that we, I, you know, from a public safety standpoint, I want to increase the opportunity or the options for non-lethal intervention the more we can.

Starting point is 00:49:31 And before that, though, is. And we talk about the new age of policing that parts of this really need to occur is the process of de-escalation. And there are little things that you learn as a cop that veterans definitely know. And I'd be one of you veterans, I mean veteran cops where they'll be like, okay, when you approach somebody, like, you don't need to be this hard charging asshole. You can just go up and be like, hey, man, what's up? How's it going? And smile. And like, you know, my name's your name.

Starting point is 00:49:59 If you do that, verbal judo is what we call it. If you're good at verbal judo, you might not ever have to hit one of these non-lethal, you know, approaches. But of course, it's not always the case. And you want to have options. I've tried all of them in the field. I've tased. I've, you know, been tased. I've been pepper sprayed.

Starting point is 00:50:15 I've done the beam bag guns and like the what they call the rubber bullets and all that stuff. And some of it works, but none of it works 100%. And you give you guys the best options they can have and hope for the best and train them. Yeah. Best weapons up here. Best weapons up there. Yeah. All right.

Starting point is 00:50:31 We wish you a great success with your company. I think you're hiring. So where can people learn more about careers working with you on this very important platform? Yeah, look, go to our website, AeroDome A-E-O-D-O-M-E.com. Check out the careers page there. Check us out on Twitter. Check me out on Twitter. I'm always talking about public safety.

Starting point is 00:50:52 At Rahul-S-S-D-U. They'll put the link in there, I'm sure. Yeah. S-I-H-U, I think. H-U, but on Twitter I do S-D-O-O. so I'm kinetic with it. You know what I mean? Awesome.

Starting point is 00:51:03 I will continue success and we'll see you next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.

This Week in Startups - The future of public safety via rapid drone response with Aerodome's Rahul Sidhu | E1900

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