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

Summary

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The a16z Show

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

Date: March 11, 2026
Guests: Garrett Langley (CEO, Flock Safety), John Collison
Host: Andreessen Horowitz

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the evolution, impact, controversies, and future of Flock Safety—a technology provider whose real-time camera and AI-driven solutions now help clear over a million crimes annually across the US. CEO Garrett Langley recounts the company’s origins, its role in transforming policing from reactive to real-time, balancing safety and privacy, technical and operational hardware challenges, and why the ultimate goal isn’t just catching more criminals, but building safer, healthier communities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Birth of Flock Safety and Its Evolution

• Origins Story:

  • Langley, frustrated by the lack of follow-through on a neighborhood gun theft, built a camera to track every car entering his Atlanta neighborhood. When a second gun was stolen, he was able to provide the only suspicious license plate to police, leading to a swift arrest.
  • "Atlanta Police department comes, shrugs, and leaves—no fingerprints, no investigation. So I built a camera to track every car entering the neighborhood." – Garrett Langley [03:23]

• Initial Growth:

  • Word of mouth from local news stories spurred organic adoption.
  • "We might be the only company strictly driven off of five o'clock news. That was our only growth channel." – Garrett Langley [05:13]

• Evolution:

  • From basic license plate readers to AI-powered citywide camera networks, drone integration, 911 call analysis, and anomaly detection.

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2. Flock’s Impact by the Numbers

• Scale Today:
  • Over 6,000 cities deployed, covering north of 50% of the US by population.
    "We have all the big ones outside of Manhattan at this point." – Garrett Langley [11:45]
  • Helped clear over 1 million crimes last year.
    "We want to be clear...we were involved in the arrest, in clearance or successful arrest of over a million crimes." – Garrett Langley [07:17]

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3. Real-Time Technology Transforming Policing

• New Approach:

  • Immediate detection and response:
    "You don’t wind up policing where crime has happened historically. You wind up policing where crime is happening right now in real time. That is a fundamental shift in how policing works." – Garrett Langley [00:00, 33:44]
  • Example: 911 call leads to AI searching for suspects with white sneakers across all city cameras, resulting in a 17-minute arrest [07:17 - 10:43].

• Drones in Policing:

  • Drones now respond to 911 calls and can be deployed in under 70 seconds vs. average 7+ minute human response times [00:00, 64:40].
  • Typical uses: Vehicle pursuits, 911 response, search & rescue [65:20].

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4. The Complexity and Fragmentation of US Law Enforcement

• Decentralization:
  • Unlike national models (e.g., Ireland), US law enforcement is locally run, causing info-sharing headaches.
    "Criminals don't care where cities start and stop. Yet historically, law enforcement agencies were incapable of sharing information." – Garrett Langley [13:03]
  • Flock's cloud and integrated tools created cross-agency collaboration for complex, multi-state crimes [13:41 - 14:32].

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5. Privacy, Controversy, and Social Tradeoffs

• Controversy Context:

  • "Expanding bandwidth but not changing privacy norms.”
    "As long as there's accountability…every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity and it's publicly available." – Garrett Langley [25:08]
  • Debate on privacy vs. safety:
    "There is an appropriate debate of what level of privacy erosion are we willing to take for an increase in safety." – Garrett Langley [23:33]

• Data Handling:

  • Short retention windows (e.g. 7–30 days), strong audit trails.

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6. Criminal Innovation: Offense vs. Defense

• Use of Drones by Criminals:

  • Cartels using night-vision drones to case neighborhoods in the US; drones used to deliver contraband into prisons, with law enforcement legally barred from shooting them down [27:26 - 29:47].
  • "Drones that are carrying 10, 20, 30 pound payloads, flying them over the prison walls and like, they're literally dangling down to like the prison cell." – Garrett Langley [29:16]

• Lawful Tech Gaps:

  • Criminals adopt tech faster due to fewer rules; law enforcement constrained by regulation and resourcing.

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7. Technical & Business Challenges

• Hardware at Scale:

  • Building self-sufficient devices for adverse environments (solar-powered cameras, durable IR cut filters, drones) and managing complex supply chains.
  • "Every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimalist and often tens of millions of dollars. In hardware, everything's a one way door." – Garrett Langley [73:09]

• Operations:

  • Significant field service effort:
    "A third of the company digs holes, drives bucket trucks, keeps track of all the kind of inventory." [80:34]
  • Predictive maintenance, large-scale permitting, robust installation.

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8. The Real Crime Trends and ‘Safe Cities’

• Is Crime Up or Down?

  • Large COVID-era surge; now returning to or surpassing historic lows in many cities.
    "Covid was really bad…now, it's historically low over the last decade." – Garrett Langley [34:14]

• Clearance Rate vs. Crime Rate:

  • Focus is shifting to solving more crimes, not just reducing their occurrence. Some places now reach 100% clearance rates for violent crime (e.g., Cobb County, GA) [39:38].
  • Safe City concept: Bundled platform offering to mayors (“about $20/citizen/year”) enables every crime to be solved, and mayors campaign on safety [39:56].

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9. Corporate & International Business

• Corporates:

  • Rapidly growing segment—retailers, healthcare, logistics.
  • Employee protection now at least as important as asset protection.
  • Example: Automated alerts for terminated employees returning to campus or executives’ residences [47:24].

• Limits to International Expansion:

  • Competes with heavily subsidized hardware from Chinese competitors (e.g., Hikvision), data sovereignty issues, and national tender dynamics [50:53 - 53:37].

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10. The Competitive Landscape

• Main Players:
  • Motorola (legacy, radios), Axon (body cams, tasers), and Flock.
  • Wave of VC-backed niche startups entering, consolidation expected [54:43 - 60:23].

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11. Drone & AI/Automation Innovations

• AI Orchestration Layer for City Safety:

  • Automates manual police jobs (911 routing, search, data correlation).
  • "Amplified Intelligence" lets detectives focus on high-value work [61:19].
  • LLMs increasingly used to process and triage 911 calls, cross-camera/person detection, generate investigative leads [60:41].

• Drone Use Cases Recap:

  • Pursuit replacement, 911 rapid assessment, search & rescue, and support for all first responders [65:20 - 68:44].

• Cost and Scalability:

  • One drone covers ~30 square miles; 12 drones can cover San Francisco [99:01].

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12. Social and Legislative Guardrails

• Balancing Act:
  • More (but strictly monitored) cameras preferred over fewer with weak controls.
  • "Abundance of cameras and incredibly restrictive controls of how and when they're used." – Garrett Langley [82:07]
  • Advocates clear, enforceable legislation and public audit requirements (Virginia called out as model) [84:17].

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13. Future Vision: Prevention Over Prosecution

• Beyond Crime Solving—Aiming for Prevention:
  • Capital programs to fund job opportunities for at-risk youth in ‘Safe Cities’.
  • Rethinking rehabilitation rather than just prosecution, especially for non-violent and juvenile offenders.
  • "Prison can't be the answer. It just doesn't work." – Garrett Langley [104:51]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Segments

• On Policing Transformation:

  • "You don’t wind up policing where crime has happened historically. You wind up policing where crime is happening right now in real time." – [00:00; 33:44]

• On Innovation and Accountability:

  • "As long as there's accountability…every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity and it's publicly available." – [25:08]

• On the Downside of Increased Arrests:

  • "While we're proud…making a million arrests, it's actually quite disheartening because that means a million people 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…We're much more focused on the preventative mechanisms." – [41:40]

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Timestamps for Important Moments

• Langley origin story: [03:23]
• Early growth via 5 o’clock news: [05:13]
• Today’s scale and clearance rate numbers: [07:05, 11:37]
• Drones cut 911 response from 7.5min to 68sec: [00:00, 64:40]
• Privacy & auditability stance: [25:08]
• Cartels’ use of illegal drones, prison contraband: [27:26–29:47]
• Safe City pitch; cost per citizen: [39:56]
• AI/LLM orchestration & 911 triage: [60:41–62:34]
• Supply chain challenges, scale economics: [73:09–78:28]
• Hardware maintenance—IR cut filter: [79:43–80:21]
• Real-time/future city safety vision: [102:32–105:35]

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Tone and Style

The conversation is candid, fast-paced, and technically detailed. Collison’s curiosity draws out nuanced, honest commentary from Langley, who maintains a pragmatic optimism about technology’s ability to make cities safer—while recognizing the operational, ethical, and legislative challenges.

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In Summary

This episode offers a richly detailed exploration of how Flock Safety is reshaping urban safety with technology—making law enforcement more real-time, collaborative, and effective. But it also highlights the unresolved debates over privacy, ethics, and the need for both technological and social solutions to make communities not just safer, but healthier.

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Transcript

[Garrett Langley]

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 911 calls is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. Just like a better quality of service, you don't wind up policing where crime has happened historically. You wind 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.

[John Collison]

It's most opportunism.

[Garrett Langley]

It's all opportunitudism. 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 6,000American cities. Last year, the 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 Pint, 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.

[John Collison]

Cheers.

[Garrett Langley]

Good to see you. Likewise, thanks for having me.

[John Collison]

Okay, so maybe start by describing how does the flak product work?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, maybe we go, we rewind like all the way back. Because it's evolved. 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 ten F150 door handles, some, let's call it, three out of ten will be unlocked. And like one out of ten will have a firearm in the glove box, which is like regardless of the firearm, your point of view on it, it's like you should keep firearm in a safe and you should keep it in a safe, not in a glove box. That's just really bad. But that's what people do. And so if you're a Gang member, and you're trying to obtain a firearm. The easiest way is just to just drive into a neighborhood. Six kids. These are kids jump out. You start pulling door handles. You don't have anything breaking into the car. You're pulling door handles. 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 gonna. So to your Bosch thing. They're not gonna. They're not gonna fingerprint the vehicle, like, no one's been hurt.

[John Collison]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And for most major cities, there's no

[John Collison]

stakeout happening for this.

[Garrett Langley]

There's no stakeout. There's no. Like, oh, we're gon all these resources. For most major cities, if a human is not physically hurt, the crime goes just to the bottom of the list. And I found that really frustrating. So I was like, this should be really easy. These people drove into our neighborhood. They stole a firearm. We should go after these people. And he was like, well, we don't have any information. Okay, what do you need? We need a license. 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, well, we're going to go build this camera, like, track license plates. That's it. That's what the police department said. Okay, great. So we built this thing, and if you ever come to Atlanta office, we still have the original camera, like, on a pedestal that looks like garbage. Not 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, after 30 days, you start to be able to know that person clearly lives here. They're 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 would be called, like, Ebola, like, be on the lookout for a couple hours later, they find that vehicle, the gun's in the car, Person goes to jail. And what was really interesting, it's like the. We were, like, very proud of ourselves. This was not a business at the time. Single project. And so the 5 o' clock news would, like, do the story. So I'm on The five o' clock news. And the next morning, like, I had five emails from neighborhoods. And I think we might be the only company that strictly driven off of five o' clock news. That was our only growth channel.

[John Collison]

But that actual media appearance did strike.

[Garrett Langley]

And every time we solved a crime, we'd be like, hey, do you want to cover the story at 5:00'? Clock? And they'd be like, we'd love to. We love talking about crime because this is local news.

[John Collison]

I mean, that's local news.

[Garrett Langley]

We're not going to go to the New York Times. No one cares about, like, a stolen sofa or like a stolen dog. Okay, but that's interesting.

[John Collison]

Did you start with. Because I associate Flock today with being plugged into the stolen car databases. But you started without that. Just looking up suspicious stuff.

[Garrett Langley]

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 the 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.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

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 like, it had nothing to do with us. It was like, it was like a mile away. And so the whole community 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. 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.

[John Collison]

So give me the stats on Flock today. Just how many cameras out there, crime stopped. Because again, maybe just describe the product

[Garrett Langley]

as it exists, as it is today now. 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.

[John Collison]

What does help clear mean?

[Garrett Langley]

So, I mean, we want to be clear that similar to probably how you feel and that like you help businesses grow, but like, you didn't do the hard stuff. Like, you just, you made, you made it easy. You made it really easy for me to grow flock by making payments. Simple. Yeah, 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. And in a lot of those cases, we are the end, the beginning and everything outside of the human putting handcuffs on. And in some cases, we might be at the tip of the spear. And so for more sophisticated investigations like the Brown shooter and the MIT shooter, there was a tip on Reddit, but then Flock, there was a way to found them. We weren't the tip. Sure can't take full credit. So maybe I'll walk you through a recent example. And I won't name the city because the case is still going through prosecution, but. So there was a 911 call. This is a major city of America. Our system hears 911 calls. We could tap into 911 call. This is kind of wild if you think about 911 today, when you call 911 in San Francisco, in sky, you get about 3 million 911 calls a year. A human picks up every single time. A human manually listens, manually types in 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 that 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 Flock OS that allows us to integrate all the cameras in a city, whether they're Flock developed or not. And so that 911 call pops up. The 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, make it 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 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 it used to work, that case never would have been solved. Like, it would have been weeks, maybe months. And you 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 do that on vehicles. So in that same version of the 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 a 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 nine one, one. So we're plugged into 911, right? The real time crime center operator hears it's a, it's an armed robbery. 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. 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 400ft 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 paint that using that same Freeform, it can start to look for it. We get another 911 call of another outlet that's having the same time. So the drone is already 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 four 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 pin him in safe tactical apprehension. So it's drones. It's some computer vision. It's cameras that track cars. It's quite a robust portfolio.

[John Collison]

And what is flock by the numbers today. So how many cameras, how many drones, how many law enforcement agencies, how many individual entities?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, so it's just over 6,000 cities. So it's like well north of 50% of America. That's covered by flock.

[John Collison]

By population?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, by population. There's about 17,000 cities in the US and we have all the big ones outside of Manhattan at this point. That's like the last, the last one to go get.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

I'm not sure if that's gonna happen anytime soon, the current situation there. But yes, it's pretty well deployed. Building cameras, drones and selling them to the government, which is like three strikes are out.

[John Collison]

That's incredible. And I feel like something non American listeners mightn't realize is. So I grew up in Ireland, country of 5 million people, and there is just a police force, the gardishi khana, like the national.

[Garrett Langley]

For the whole country.

[John Collison]

Exactly, police force for the whole country. And that is a relatively common model in lots of places in the United

[Garrett Langley]

States it's the opposite.

[John Collison]

It's very localized and just maybe on talk about the average size of it and I feel like what you're providing is in some ways scale economies and helping police forces coordinate with other agencies.

[Garrett Langley]

There's a dynamic that people don't understand, which you're right. So Ireland, most of the euro, 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.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

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, has your, your patch of dirt. The downside is criminals don't really care where cities start and stop. They 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.

[John Collison]

So like, so any coordination between agencies was very manual.

[Garrett Langley]

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 like if your kind of low level criminal isn't maybe changing cities, but you look at some of the most like successful cases we've helped work, it's like multiple states, right. Like we did a huge human trafficking bust. There's 70, 76 people arrested across four states all organized on flock and like.

[John Collison]

And it's really hard for one agency to wrap their hands around that whole thing.

[Garrett Langley]

No, at that point you've got like six different local cities, two different. Sorry, three different state agencies, and the US Marshals all collaborating inside a flock and like that's, that's how it should work.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

Because in Ireland that is actually the only option because you're the same police department. It's a very unique problem that America has created.

[John Collison]

Law enforcement coordination.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, yeah. Like it should be. It shouldn't be controversial. Yes, but it's actually a very controversial topic.

[John Collison]

What's controversial about another part of this controversy?

[Garrett Langley]

This is an interesting question of like you. Your trust in government probably follows some type of logarithmic expectation or linear expectation of the farther you are removed from those people, the least trust you have. And so most people's trust of the federal government is very low. State a little bit lower. Local, full trust. And so there's this interesting dynamic where. Let's talk about 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 the federal authorities because of all the certain topics, because of all of the. There's just different politics and so we kind of have to sit in the middle. 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.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

And that's like, oh, that's really messy because we should just write laws. I mean we operate in a regulated space. Regulation, when done properly just defines the rules of engagement. And sometimes it's better or worse. But like at least everyone knows these are the rules.

[John Collison]

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?

[Garrett Langley]

How does it work? Yeah, so it's a good question. So there's, you think about, there's a couple of fun engineering problems that flock how to solve. The first is how do you do what we just described? You know, read a license plate, track a car on solar power with a 5G backhaul and which is the camera

[John Collison]

that you have in camera. Traffic light.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, exactly. But you very rarely have fiber or power where you want to put a camera.

[John Collison]

So you want a self sufficient box that you can totally infrastructure free at an intersection.

[Garrett Langley]

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 like that was a pretty fun problem because if you put, you know, let's say you wanted to put a GPU in it, you're going to, you can't run on a solar power then. And so then it's like, all right, well then what do you do on the edge? What are you doing?

[John Collison]

And you can't buy any GPUs these days.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, 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. We saw sadly, a ton of Silver alerts too. I think we did just over 1,000amber and silver alerts last year that we helped clear. It's like missing adults, missing seniors and missing kids, which is 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.

[John Collison]

Oh, wait. So I assume that there was a single integrated. When a car is called in and stolen, I assume that went somewhere integrated.

[Garrett Langley]

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

[John Collison]

US as much as the economy runs,

[Garrett Langley]

you should be used to that at some point.

[John Collison]

Yeah, exactly.

[Garrett Langley]

So the real time happens on Flock and then there's about a day lag to make it nationwide.

[John Collison]

Okay. So local entities have some kind of local lists and those propagate to a national database, which is an FBI database. And what you guys are doing is making that Real time. Which obviously, if a crime is unfolding in real time, is a big deal.

[Garrett Langley]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's not good to wait a day.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

You can drive really far in 24

[John Collison]

hours, it turns out. Yes. And then you had some great stat before about just the fraction of, like, stolen cars are bad news. Like the fraction of crimes that involve stolen cars.

[Garrett Langley]

There's an interesting phenomena where you don't. No one really steals a car for fun. Like, there's not much you can actually do is.

[John Collison]

It's true. Like all the sideshows and stuff. Like, isn't there a little bit of stealing cars?

[Garrett Langley]

Well, sideshows are definitely. They look fun. Never participated in it.

[John Collison]

Neither have I. But. Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

I just wanna make clear here. Yeah, yeah.

[John Collison]

That's my official statement on the moment.

[Garrett Langley]

Dirt bikes. Haven't ridden a dirt bike in a sideshow, but have watched plenty of videos online. That's fun. You're typically not stealing a car. You're typically driving your own car in those. You typically. 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 3cvss, 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 steal 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.

[John Collison]

We've all watched Pulp Fiction.

[Garrett Langley]

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

[John Collison]

It's.

[Garrett Langley]

That's kind of weird. That's like a glitch in the Matrix. 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.

[John Collison]

Yes. And it's enough of it provides enough reason to pull someone over.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes. And depending on the size of 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 with the same license plate in different parts of the city. We should go see what's going on.

[John Collison]

Yes. It strikes me that. A way you can think about what Vlock 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 a right to privacy of the car they are driving just being observed from a distance or their license plate being readable when out on a public road. But if a car is called in and stolen, rather than officers manually 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 wanna say super controversial, but it ends up controversial from a privacy point of view. And so I don't know, is, is that take too generous? Is there a Steelman of the other side?

[Garrett Langley]

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 lives, it's gonna be controversy of some degree. Like I, I'm sure people, I'm sure there's someone who hates stripe. I don't know why they would, but I'm sure that person exists. Just like there's someone who hates Walmart, it's like they're trying to sell cheap groceries. Why do you hate. It's like people hate Airbnb. People hate every company. Maybe they hate a more. I don't know. I think there's a few things that make it for the Steelman argument. One is you can see it's I bet you if we pulled up your iPhone and we looked at the number of apps that you've given full time local location services, it would shock both of us. And then if we looked at the number of data brokers who then leverage that data to sell you ads, we'd be really shocked. And I think if we rewinded 30 years ago and said, imagine these private companies tracked your location in real time and sold that to avatars, we'd be like, that is unacceptable. But because we can't see it, we kind of let it go. We have this perception of anonymity. Anonymity or being anonymous?

[John Collison]

Anonymity.

[Garrett Langley]

Anonymity. Thank you. Yet 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. And so 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 think 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 extension of privacy because we're using the government's roads with the government's license plate. Like, we have a driver's license in our pocket. Driver's license are a modern thing 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 as long as there's accountability of 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, we really believe in this concept of a certain data retention, which kind of limits the level of abuse. It doesn't eliminate abuse. There's still gonna be abuse, but it limits that. Hey, if it's 7 days, 14 days, 30 days of data, it's just not that interesting.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Relative to what you see with data brokers online, where they have your entire Internet history stored forever.

[John Collison]

You're interested in fresh data. That's what's.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, but criminals, yeah, there's a really fast drop off of, where have you been in the last couple days versus, like, where were you a year ago? It's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation.

[John Collison]

Yes, yes.

[Garrett Langley]

Or it's protected behind a warrant, which is fine.

[John Collison]

Right. You talked about cell phone locations, and you know your cell Phone having your GPS location. And I'm reminded of the phenomenon where it feels like the balance of power and the offense defense mix within crime fighting tends to change over the years as new technologies are invented and you know, criminals get why is 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?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, that's CDRs would be the, you know, the nomenclature in the law. CDR cell phone data dump or CDR cell phone 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 people dumbly commit crime with their cell phone in their pocket every time. It's very rare. 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 a very intentional. They were very organized in the area. A couple other ones.

[John Collison]

How did they get.

[Garrett Langley]

Cause it's actually Flock, obviously. So they were smart enough to leave their cell phone, they were dumb enough so they drove from LA up to San Francisco general area. They had a bunch of flat cameras along the way. They didn't pick up their cell phone until they went back to lax. And we have cameras all around lax. And they've finally made that one mistake. It was a completely cold case until they got a hit on the car pulling into lax, then got the cell phone, could do the whole thing.

[John Collison]

And I guess the thing you can do is you can know that a cell phone's in a car because you can.

[Garrett Langley]

We don't touch that. But the law enforcement, sorry, law can

[John Collison]

cross reference cell phone location with flock.

[Garrett Langley]

So they knew that the vehicle was in a certain parking lot they can then use. They have to have a warrant at this point, 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 most 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 roles using drones. So here's a good example in One of the counties we work with, 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.

[John Collison]

They just want to get very drones to case.

[Garrett Langley]

Just go out. Yep.

[John Collison]

Wow.

[Garrett Langley]

And this is where the downside is. Law enforcement has just recently in the last year, been allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight. These guys have been operating for years.

[John Collison]

Sure.

[Garrett Langley]

Just they jerry rig, you know, an LTE modem to a cheap drone. They can fly it anywhere however they want. And then legally, even 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.

[John Collison]

Sure, yeah, yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And so they just sit there. And so that's a problem in neighborhoods, also a problem in prisons. It's probably the number one problem we have in our prison system today. Well, a lot of in prisons, but one of the leading problems for enforcement officers is you've got these pretty incredible actually, from an engineering perspective. Drones that are carrying 10, 20, 30 pound payloads, flying them over the prison walls and like, they're literally dangling down to like the prison cell. And the person will reach out and grab it.

[John Collison]

Cell phones, drugs, guns, color, from zipline here it's zipline for criminals.

[Garrett Langley]

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 am technically breaking the law. I'm breaking federal law if I shoot this down with a shotgun. And so you're seeing states now pass, like Louisiana has a state bill, Georgia's working on a state bill that says, sorry, faa, we're gonna do what we want. And that creates a problem is most law enforcement officers just wanna follow the law.

[John Collison]

Yeah. And presumably that wouldn't stand up from a federal preemption point of view.

[Garrett Langley]

No. And the other challenge is I think you and I were like, who's gonna 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. You can't mitigate.

[John Collison]

I have no idea.

[Garrett Langley]

It's a totally crazy law.

[John Collison]

Yeah. What else has made. What else has gotten worse from an offense perspective?

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, this is one that's like, you know, I don't know if I have strong feelings on this, on this Topic. But this concept that we appropriately hold local law enforcement to a very high standard of accountability and audibility, and I think that's very good. The downside is, like, we don't with criminals. And so as a citizen, you won't be the victim of a crime. You get really frustrated that they're not working hard enough. And very early, 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, 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 as 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 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 gotta 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.

[John Collison]

That nuance does not come through.

[Garrett Langley]

No, they're just like, facial rec is bad. And we don't do facial recognition for that reason because it's too controversial.

[John Collison]

But that's.

[Garrett Langley]

It's counterintuitive to me when the technology gets better every day.

[John Collison]

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.

[Garrett Langley]

It's backfired.

[John Collison]

I wouldn't say backfired, but just like, it's actually in a lot of cases been somewhat exonerative. Right?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, No, I think in many cases, police were really hesitant to get body cameras. Just like, I mean, imagine if you wore a body Camera all day at work. You'd be like, ah, 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 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 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 as a good example, who's quite a big supporter of Flock, they're like, we need a more objective way to police. Let's just focus on stolen cars.

[John Collison]

Yep.

[Garrett Langley]

We don't care who's inside. We will find out eventually that car was stolen.

[John Collison]

Yep.

[Garrett Langley]

And then 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. 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.

[John Collison]

Yep. Yep. Is crime up or down in the

[Garrett Langley]

US it is down. I think it'll continue to go down. Covid was like really bad.

[John Collison]

During COVID crazy surge. Okay.

[Garrett Langley]

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?

[John Collison]

Yeah. So do you have an explanation? Is it that, like it was a mental health issue or was it kind of a crime of opportunity that, you know, things were less well guarded and, you know, there's more opportunities for crime. But you think it was just people went a bit batty being locked up?

[Garrett Langley]

I think so. I'm reserved to crime, but I mean, I mean, I'm obviously not a clinical psychologist by any means, but it's like you look at the data and there's no other way to articulate why homicides 3 to 4 xed and then plummeted back down to. 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 spike. And 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. This is. Like, this is really sad.

[John Collison]

That's. How do you measure very online?

[Garrett Langley]

Let me give you an example. I was in a town, a major city, not too long ago, and I was asking the chief to tell me kind of what's going on. This is a couple years ago, right during COVID and she was like, garrett, these kids are just killing each other. I was like, what? She's like, yeah, they're literally getting in their car and just shooting each other. I'm like, why? I'm like, oh, because this guy posted a picture of him with that guy's girl on Instagram. And I think in a normal situation, you might have called that person and been like, hey, bro, that's my girl. And in other cases, they're getting in a car, 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 if you look at the data, it's hard to articulate. That's the most obvious explanation to me.

[John Collison]

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?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, like, everything. People just literally lost their minds. I think we, like, need to be outside.

[John Collison]

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 San Francisco is full of, you know, like, there's all these memes which are maybe do some debunking and confirming

[Garrett Langley]

of all the memes. 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, it's an unacceptable level and we're down historic lows over the last decade, but it's still pretty hard to wake up and go, you know, only 52 people died in Atlanta last year. You can't pat yourself on the back for that. I think where we're focused on is more so clearance rates, and that's actually getting better, but only better in certain cities. Now we track it across Flock, you know, not to overly promote. Like, tends to be that if you have a flock product, your city has a much higher clearance rate. You look at San Francisco as a great example, the new chief, the prior chief, Mayor Lurie. Like, they are making crime a focus. And the focus is on solving crime.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

And when they solve it, as I'm sure you follow on the news, they talk about it, and they should, because it's really cool. They're working very hard. And what you'll see is back to the online point I made. All these people are online. And so when San Francisco PD is dominating X, it has a deterrent effect. Oh, gosh. Yeah. You don't want to get caught.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And I think the unintuitive or the counterintuitive point on crime is that most people would intuitively say, oh, if the punishment's really, really bad, people will do less of it. But you were 16, 18 at one point. You operate on a Boolean mindset. I will get away with this, therefore, I will do it. I'm gonna sneak out of my house. Cause I'm not gonna get caught. You don't care if the punishment is being grounded for a week or a month. You're gonna get away with it. You're 17.

[John Collison]

But I got caught in us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And so when you realize criminals are so online. So if you, if you flip that. Oh, it's like, it's. It's a subculture. You gotta get there. But I mean, you'll see is this

[John Collison]

like Reddit, Twitter, they're everywhere.

[Garrett Langley]

Pinterest, probably less Pinterest, But I mean, TikTok's really big.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

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 perpetuate that. And the data actually showed it's actually not a very good job. You actually 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, crime's coming down, clearance rates are going up.

[John Collison]

100% is like 100% solved.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes. And it's doable. We have it in major cities. And like, like cop county would be one, which is like the second.

[John Collison]

Cobb county has 100%.

[Garrett Langley]

Yep. If you commit violence in cop County.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

You will get arrested.

[John Collison]

And that's across spot sample size.

[Garrett Langley]

That's the second largest county in Georgia. So let's call it, you know, cuff million people. Almost a million people.

[John Collison]

So a decent number of violent crimes.

[Garrett Langley]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, but it's going down every year.

[John Collison]

Sure.

[Garrett Langley]

So you look at places like that. 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 probably never heard of it. 26,000 people. They have our drones, they have our cameras, they have our AI. They have everything we do and they are lighting it up. And like, kudos to the mayor in chief. Like, every crime they solve, they're on the five o' clock news.

[John Collison]

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

[Garrett Langley]

There's two phases. The first phase, you're spot on. Like people, they just change cities. So 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.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

It's most opportunism.

[Garrett Langley]

It's all opportunitudism. And like you and I were fortunate enough to be born in a family, in a social construct that we could go build great companies, but not everyone had that chance. And some people get pushed in the wrong direction and that's what we have to stop. It's like as a business, we don't. While we're proud of the impact making a million arrests, it's actually quite disheartening because that means a million people want to 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.

[John Collison]

What kind of crime is on the increase?

[Garrett Langley]

So I'll tell you one that's like 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 CVS lock their stuff up. You saw, you know, places like In N Out leave Oakland. Like this was, this was a huge problem. And it's still, you know, for someone like Walmart, I think they reported just shy of a billion dollars of theft last year. So that's a lot of money. And their peers aren't doing dramatically better. Now Flock customers are doing really well

[John Collison]

and Walmart are neophytes of this stuff.

[Garrett Langley]

They'll get there. Yeah, we'll get there with Walmart. But you look at some of our partners like a Lowe's, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not really a problem anymore. But where the criminals have moved is to the distribution facilities. It's safer and bigger loads. And so probably the most sophisticated one that I've heard of is an Eastern European group. They went and bought a legal, well running freight broker. They now own this asset and they bid on all these low bid on all these projects, show up with real paperwork, fill up a 20 foot with product, drive away, dissolve the company. $7 million in a single day. Like that's pretty good business. Yeah, that's very sophisticated though. That's harder to solve. That's much harder to solve because every

[John Collison]

car phone, like everything will be disposable, used to invest.

[Garrett Langley]

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. Insurer cares eventually. But when you talk about the scale of, let's call it, 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.

[John Collison]

I see.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

Yes, yes. I want to ask you more about this, but I'm going 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.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, it's a big part of our business.

[John Collison]

Oh, sorry, you had some drags left.

[Garrett Langley]

Okay, that's my fault.

[John Collison]

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.

[Garrett Langley]

It is.

[John Collison]

You can trust it. Yeah. Okay. So the corporate business.

[Garrett Langley]

Corporate business, yeah. North 100 million, probably fastest growing segment. There's some like wild. There's some wild stories. So, you know, we help businesses solve two problems. How do you keep your employees safe and how do you keep your assets or your stuff safe? So it's kind of funny because we have a Fortune 5 company that's a

[John Collison]

customer and you probably don't want to talk about specifics, but we should just imagine big box stores.

[Garrett Langley]

That kind of thing is like, we have this 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. Like, how many locations? So someone like a. A Dollar General is a way better prospect for us because dollar general has 7,000 stores on subway. Yeah, you want Subway is a good example. So we tend to focus on retail, healthcare, and logistics. They tend to have big physical footprints. A lot of employees and a lot of challenges.

[John Collison]

And is their main challenge theft? Like, that's what they're worried about. Thus, they want to prevent stolen cars coming to steal stuff.

[Garrett Langley]

Um, I'd say employees is. I'd say three years ago, when we started the business unit, it was assets. It was like, oh, my gosh, coming out of COVID everyone's stealing everything. It is much more shifted now to keeping employees safe. So you think about some of these businesses. They might terminate half a million people a year. Quarter million people a year. Takes one angry employee.

[John Collison]

Ah, okay.

[Garrett Langley]

To come back. And so in our system, you can have it automated, you know, with your hrs, that like, when employee is terminated, they're added to a localized hot list. That employee ever comes back on campus, it's not illegal. But notify security is why people have security teams. Don't let them in the building. So it's about kind of moving that layer of safety farther out. The other example is we do quite a bit of work in executive protection. So I'll give you a good example. Like a Fortune 2000 CEO. Our stuff's deployed at her house. We also deploy at corporate. It's not illegal, but it's quite weird if the same vehicle on the same day goes to both locations. And so for 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 needs to be repaired. Can you help me grab it? And some clinical surgeons like, oh, yeah, let me show you where it is. No worries. No worries. John, walk in there, this is a multi million dollar piece of equipment and they literally walk out with it.

[John Collison]

This happened in some Thomas Crown affair kind of stuff.

[Garrett Langley]

But it's like, I mean you're a physician, you're not thinking like, oh, is John actually working at this company? Is the product. I think I used it yesterday. You're like, oh yeah, we get that sounds right. It's super expensive product. So this is an example to your conversation of like where the business gets interesting is we've been connected that healthcare provider with federal authorities. So this is not a low, this isn't going to be a local authority. This, all this kind of crime is 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. There's like, that's an asset one where actually the healthcare system is like, this is like 20 something million dollars of products stolen. Like that's a problem. Yeah, yeah.

[John Collison]

Is your business going international? Which countries is this best suited to? Like, is this a universally applicable product? Do those differences in, you know, law enforcement agency structure make it. I'm just curious.

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, we're dabbling, but I think payments is probably a very global. Everyone wants to process payments.

[John Collison]

I think, yes, there's a lot of local nuance.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. I think for us, maybe our ambitions aren't big enough, but when I look at the domestic opportunity, we should be able to get to 5, 10, 15 billion of revenue in America. And like we're not. Yeah, we're not there.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

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

[John Collison]

And it's like, why not just do. I mean, I agree there's a lot of nuance. Is there some aspect of your tech, like you've put a lot of work into the cameras, vehicle recognition, stuff like that. Because I know again from painful experience that localization is never easy and never as easy as you think.

[Garrett Langley]

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. Great. And they had connections to the Mexican government. And so we got all the way to the finish line and it was US versus hikvision. Hikvision is a Chinese camera manufacturer, arguably a subsidiary of the ccp. And we were almost ten 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 deployments on connectivity, they own those countries.

[John Collison]

What's the boat cut across here?

[Garrett Langley]

Okay, well, I'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. Maybe that's not scary for some countries. For me I'd be a little afraid. And that was our, that was our pitch to the Mexican government is like, don't look at just cost, look at the sovereignty of the data and who has access. And look, we'll domicile this data in your country, we won't domicile it in America. And they were like, sorry, it's too expensive. And we've seen that, we've done a couple other projects like that. Not just picking on Mexico, but other countries where we're not competitive with China. Not because our products aren't better. I think they're much better. But we're not being subsidized by the

[John Collison]

federal government, but presumably NATO countries. You know, Australia

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And like, I don't know if you know, that's that story on kind of like the, you know, vacuum cleaners that someone like hacked into.

[John Collison]

It's like the robot vacuums.

[Garrett Langley]

You should care about where your data is stored and who's storing it. And that kind of stuff matters to me. But not everyone that makes sense.

[John Collison]

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,

[Garrett Langley]

which makes it very hard to spot

[John Collison]

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 Flock Safety fights crime, check out Stripe Radar. As I think about your competitive landscape in the U.S. yeah. And companies that sell to law enforcement, I think about Axon, which people would associate with making the body cameras, but they make lots of. And tasers, I think, but they make lots of other stuff. And then Motorola solutions, which has kind of the radios and like the get up in the cars and things like that. Are you three, the main three players? Are there others I should be thinking about? And how will this like presumably you guys compete more over time?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. So I remember in 2020 trying to raise our series B and every investor came the same conclusion. Three strikes are out. Like, strike one, you're based in Atlanta now. Like post Covid, that's become like less of a problem. But you know, strike one, you're in Atlanta. Strike two, you're doing hardware. But that's really bad. Hardware is like really expensive now.

[John Collison]

Now it's the only business with terminal value.

[Garrett Langley]

I would argue that like AI is not going to like replace cameras or dig holes. And it's like, we mean, and a third of our employees dig holes for a living. Like that's just AI is a long ways away from, I think, replacing that.

[John Collison]

Sorry, what are they digging the holes for?

[Garrett Langley]

But most of the time you want a camera where you don't have any infrastructure.

[John Collison]

Idea is free show in post or something.

[Garrett Langley]

We dig the hole, we trench it, we pour concrete, put our pole up. I mean, I might be.

[John Collison]

Okay, so it's on your own pole. I assume you just mounted on an existing pole.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

AI is 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 would have been 15 years prior to. 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's ever done.

[John Collison]

That's awesome.

[Garrett Langley]

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 Landmass Radio. Just, like, crazy scale.

[John Collison]

It's funny how durable some of these businesses. Garmin, another, like, you just start doing gps, you start doing radio, and you stay doing radio.

[Garrett Langley]

And to like, Motoro's credit, like, they've. They've driven a ton of innovation on the radio itself, similar to Garmin, which, like, you'd thought Garmin would have been crushed.

[John Collison]

And it's like, they've been so creative in creating verticals, you know, aviation, all this stuff.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

Totally. Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

Where'd they come out of? Like, I understand where Motorola came out of.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. So Rick Smith's the founder, graduated Harvard, took a fun fact. He plays it off. He's a very smart guy, graduated Harvard, found this Taser company. It wasn't called Taser at the time.

[John Collison]

Okay. So they started with Tasers.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. Found that. Found those kind of the ip, the product, and then tried to commercialize it. And it's. If 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. You know, market cap is like when people went public, you know, much earlier and just has done a really good job of, of, of growing the business in the public markets.

[John Collison]

And Taser is a brand. It's like they own.

[Garrett Langley]

So they started, they started a 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 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 Axon too, which is fun.

[John Collison]

So it's just a Mexican standoff.

[Garrett Langley]

Ironically. Every single city. Every single city. And then what's interesting, because your question was also in the future, there's this really interesting phenomenon 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

[John Collison]

have a bunch of competitors from.

[Garrett Langley]

No one would, no one would know. Like, you could literally just walk into police department, meet the chief. That's great. Now chiefs are like great. 17 different people calling me for the exact same partner. They don't compete with us, thankfully. But like you think about take like trying to deploy AI to monitor body cam footage. There's seven different companies with VC backing doing that. There's not, it's not a big enough market. Yeah. I think your annual report was great, by the way. Y' all are at what, 1% of GDP or something?

[John Collison]

Probably.

[Garrett Langley]

Okay. I'm in 60 to 70% of the cities that matter.

[John Collison]

Yes, yes.

[Garrett Langley]

There's just not enough space for seven competitors. It won't. The market's not big enough. And we're not creating new cities. There's new businesses create every single day.

[John Collison]

I think you tend to see structurally in these smaller. I mean, it's a large market in total, but where there's a finite universe of buyers, the distributional advantages are very powerful.

[Garrett Langley]

I think that's what you're saying. Yeah, I think so. And so I think what we'll see is I see a new VC backed company every day and I'm like, there's just all these things are going out of business, so there's just going to be consolidation. And so you see, 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 this space a ton of consolidation. Because once someone builds a good product, you go, great. I already have a salesforce, I have the customer base. We'll just pick you up.

[John Collison]

Yeah, yeah. So I had no idea about the, you know, you're talking about where the tech goes. I had no idea about two things actually, I learned here. One is that you're doing real time analysis of 911 calls. And so is that, I mean, is that being fed to an LLM basically, or like 911 calls now scored by an LLM?

[Garrett Langley]

So the, the way I think about it is we are trying to build an orchestration layer for a city's safety. The majority of police departments are understaffed. I think the worst I've heard recently I was at a, at a higher ed. So college campus, a large college campus. You know, in a football school, they're 40% of staffing. Could you imagine if like Tamara, you woke up and stripe had.

[John Collison]

Was 40% staff?

[Garrett Langley]

40% staff.

[John Collison]

Yeah, it'd be tough.

[Garrett Langley]

You would like figure it out. But a lot of things that you would deem core today would just stop.

[John Collison]

Yes, yes.

[Garrett Langley]

And so that's how most of our customers operate, which is not sustainable.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

And so we view our job as like being that force multiplier or I like to think about this orchestration layer where every manual thing that's done by a human should be automated. Now the difference in public safety versus maybe payments is like, I think you want humans at the start and finish still. It's like If I call 911, still kind of want a person to pick up.

[John Collison]

And those dispatchers are incredibly well trained.

[Garrett Langley]

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 normally 1 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, you're like, all right, let me 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, whether you use something like a glean or another product, that's like going to do a lot of the hard work so that as a sales rep, you show up and you're like, got it. 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.

[John Collison]

They're getting all the data that needs this.

[Garrett Langley]

All different data. Let's go do this. We solved a. One of the cooler cases we've solved was armored trucks like Brinks, they move money around. It's one of the best. It's called a jugging case. It's very popular in Texas where you follow these armored trucks, and you typically have 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 a very. It's obviously sad, but it's a very, very profitable thing. So we built an agent that tracks armored cars. And so at all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's an armored truck. If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically. Now, it's not illegal. Yeah, yeah, sure, right. But it is enough that if you're a city like Houston who has a jugging problem, you want to get a subscription to, like, you let me know whenever you see someone doing that, because I want to know. Yeah, I want to get a step ahead.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

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

[John Collison]

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.

[Garrett Langley]

No, it's breaking. It's. And it's like people's lives, you know?

[John Collison]

And then the other thing I hadn't realized you guys were doing is the drone assistance, where again, this sounds to me like, you know, obviously already it's the case that, you know, many police departments have a helicopter, and then for very serious crimes, you know, they will task it. 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.

[Garrett Langley]

That's right, yeah. I mean, I think it's another example where there's just a lot of tasks we ask law enforcement officers to conduct that a drone could do faster, more effectively, and cheaper.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

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. It's a good city. Their average response time to nine one call is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. Just like a better quality of service and the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer. It's really nice when you see technology deliver both a 10x better product at a dramatically lower cost. That's how it's supposed to work, and it's working for them.

[John Collison]

What kind of task or intervention are the drones best suited for?

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, the two most. There's three primary use cases. The first would be vehicular pursuits. So one of the most dangerous things cities conduct is high speed pursuits. Typically it's not the suspect that dies, it's some random person or something.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they, in pursuits, they don't pursue anymore, send the drone.

[John Collison]

Oh, wow.

[Garrett Langley]

Just send the drone. Way better. Yeah, yeah, it's way safer.

[John Collison]

So you don't have like a police car running at 80 miles an hour down a residential street.

[Garrett Langley]

No, you just have a drone 400ft up in the air quietly, safely, waiting for the car to pull into a gas station, pull into their home, pull in somewhere safe, get to a red light, and then meanwhile, that video feed's being broadcasted to the entire police department. It's like, great, you know, John's over here.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Block him in.

[John Collison]

It's, you know, every pursuit goes to GTA level five immediately.

[Garrett Langley]

Basically, yeah. If you're, 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 Northern California. They've got a bunch of our drones flying the 911 calls.

[John Collison]

Where is Elk Grove?

[Garrett Langley]

Elk Grove, it's a suburb of Sacramento.

[John Collison]

Okay.

[Garrett Langley]

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. Thirty minutes later, like, we've wasted a bunch of time. You send the drone in best case, you see the guys fighting and you're like, great, I'm going to keep an eye on them and like, and allow the officer to do his job. Or if there's ever there's not a fight anymore, you dismiss the call. And so you actually increase. Sorry, decrease the response time for situations you really do need to go to by removing the junk in the system. So that's the second one. And the third one is search and rescues. Not every city has a helicopter. Cities that do is a very expensive proposition. And so sadly, people go missing all the time. And you can pop up the drone, throw on thermals at night and you find the person.

[John Collison]

Actually, I hadn't thought of that post. Drone plus thermal camera is very transformative for sar.

[Garrett Langley]

No. Yeah, we had an interesting case in a cold state right now. Who's flying our drone? There was a. Sorry, a lot of my cases involve homicides. I gotta find a better topic than homicides at some point.

[John Collison]

I have a better topic for you in a second.

[Garrett Langley]

Okay, great. So there's this 911 car on the side of the street. Launch the drone, throw in thermals, actually see where the person went. Like sensitive enough to see the heat pattern. There's like dip in there in snow. Want to find the guy, want to find himself on everything. But it's interesting 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, three more years. I think we'll continue to find more ways to augment how we respond because I think, I guess the last example I'll give you is we typically launch the drone for all first responders. It's not just law enforcement, it's fire, it's ems. The whole community gets advantage of it.

[John Collison]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. My fun example because I agree a lot of the crimes are quite heavy topics. So I feel like one of the most satisfying genres of YouTube video to watch is people who Laser aircraft. But they are mistakenly lasering a police helicopter. So this is insane crime that happens.

[Garrett Langley]

Wait, why do they do that?

[John Collison]

Okay, so there's this insane crime that happens.

[Garrett Langley]

Isn't that bad? It's like very dangerous.

[John Collison]

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. 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, getting a laser by someone on the ground. And so people buy these lasers on Amazon.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, they're like. They're very powerful lasers.

[John Collison]

Exactly. They're very powerful. And they're just lasering the cockpits of aircraft. But occasionally what happens is they're lasering an aircraft, but it turns out that aircraft is the police helicopter.

[Garrett Langley]

They're just like, gotcha.

[John Collison]

And they got the thermal and they're just like. And so you get to watch the whole thing unfold. There's a bunch of these on YouTube where you'd like see the squad cars coming up and it's.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, let's check that out.

[John Collison]

But it's such an odd crime. And yeah, it's. It's very satisfying to see them caught in real time.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes. That's a really weird. The other interesting too, because I know you like aviation stuff. Yeah, we're having to see. We're seeing more and more police helicopters. Have to turn off ads B as well because like criminals have the same data that you have.

[John Collison]

Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Garrett Langley]

And so most of the police helicopters actually fly without ads B now, which is like a whole challenge.

[John Collison]

Yep, sure.

[Garrett Langley]

From a separation point of view. Yeah.

[John Collison]

Okay. I have so many more things to. To go into her kind of jumping around, but I like this. How's the business evolved? So you're now, you said around 500 million in ARR. 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?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. I mean, I'd say the biggest challenge is two, three years ago we were single product, single customer. Like we had our neighborhood business. It was growing 20, 30% year over year, but it was kind of operating and law enforcement was going really, really fast. We had one product and then maybe made a Mistake. I know RJ from Rivian was here. Some story like probably built too many products for too many customers really quickly. And in hardware that's really expensive, hardware tends to follow this J curve of like huge capex investment up front to get the thing going and then you monetize and it actually winds up being.

[John Collison]

And there's very significant scale economies at very high orders of maintenance.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

So looking back at it, you think you went too broad too quickly?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, I would have better.

[John Collison]

So did you discontinue products and stuff?

[Garrett Langley]

No, we just stuck with them through it still must be.

[John Collison]

Will you slow down the race of adding products?

[Garrett Langley]

We were like, we cannot do any new hardware products this year. We need to take a year or two off of hardware products. We can debate software products because there's no incremental burn or cash outlay for it. But we know what the J curve looks like. We saw it in the core business and 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 with just very different use cases. Like your average Amazon distribution facility is, you know, 30 acres, 50 acres. That's. That's like a neighborhood block.

[John Collison]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And then you got like in San Francisco that's got hundreds of square miles. It's. The problems are different. So that, that is probably like the hardest thing that we're. We're still.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

Trying to muscle through that. And like how do you organize your company to service these two different customers without having redundancies? Haven't figured that out.

[John Collison]

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.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, I think the 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 and it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out.

[John Collison]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

And if you look at the like hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where they fail.

[John Collison]

Yeah, no, we ended up with, I mean our hardware business is a very small part of our overall business, but we wildly overproduced at one point and

[Garrett Langley]

just sitting in a warehouse like there's all my money.

[John Collison]

Exactly. Sitting in a warehouse, sitting around.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

But it kind of goes bad.

[Garrett Langley]

But it does go bad at some point. And I think like, you know, I remember during YC 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 revenue is the year they went out of business. And like that's crazy.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

Um, but they, they just, they over, over overproduced in Q4. Even though it was still a record quarter, it just still wasn't enough. Um, 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, presumably maintain it as well. So I have to have forecasting not just at the product level, but at the geographic level by product with some level of discrepancy, like I don't need to know the city versatility, but at least the general area. So I think forecasting that's been pretty hard. And the second is every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimalist and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of like, yeah, everything's a two way door. Yeah, bullshit hardware, everything's a one way door. Yeah, you want to pick that part?

[John Collison]

Yeah, yeah, great. We're going to live with it for the next five, ten years.

[Garrett Langley]

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

[John Collison]

Okay, so you're feeling the AI data center build out in your supply chain.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes. And so our supply chain leader was. This is getting crazy. And I was like, well who are we using? I go use sandisk. And so I'm looking at their stock and I'm like oh, should we be buying like sand? I was Talking to my CFO, I was like, should we be buying SanDisk stock? I was like, Their prices are going up 3x. It means that like a lot of people are buying a lot of products. Now of course the Stock's up like 1,200% 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 time, full team of people who all they do is mitigate global supply chain risk because parts just disappear.

[John Collison]

Okay. So just getting the products into the hands of customers as already specced is non trivial.

[Garrett Langley]

So what we wind up doing, which I think a lot of companies do, I'm not sure if we're special but it's just like you don't think about this is you know, when we look at a bom of a product, we'll risk purchase, not necessarily the whole thing, but the cheapest, highest risk things like we should have bought. And we did, we bought a ton of memory so that we didn't run out because we can't.

[John Collison]

But I would have thought often these supply chain crunches come on the leading edge where everyone's fighting over TSMC 3 nanometer node production capability. But the auto chips at much larger gate sizes, 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.

[Garrett Langley]

But that's not, that'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 Apple saying, well the iPhone 27 is going to have that capacitor. And Apple's like cool, we'll buy everything for the next three years and then we go oh crap, we gotta completely.

[John Collison]

But I'm just surprised you're competing with Apple for components like I would've thought their capacitors and your capacitors.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, I mean well, capacitor is a capacitor but so it's actually know the capacitor you want. You have to have a supply chain to buy it. You have to have enough inventory with enough lead time. Like it is.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Not. And so what you wind up doing is like early on, your. Your designs are very simple. You buy everything from, you know, Adafruit 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, like these parts are all sub ins.

[John Collison]

You're describing the scale diseconomies of manufacturing, where it's easier to buy three of something than it is to buy 30,000.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

What's hard about operating the hardware? Like, how do you keep the lenses clean on the cameras? And just how do you. I don't know what the other.

[Garrett Langley]

It's like, on the one hand, we're some of the best weather forecasters. You know, it's like we keep track of every major storm. 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

[John Collison]

stuff to be on site to when they get a call that something is down, go repair it.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, well, so everything's everything. We have really good telemetry on the equipment. So if a customer calls, something's gone. Like we've really screwed. Yeah.

[John Collison]

You know, before the customer knows.

[Garrett Langley]

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

[John Collison]

Do you have parts that wear out?

[Garrett Langley]

I would have thought the whole thing

[John Collison]

is fairly solid state.

[Garrett Langley]

Most of it's well, drones, obviously.

[John Collison]

Sure. Different kind of fish.

[Garrett Langley]

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.

[John Collison]

Oh, like something mechanically put a lens over it. I see.

[Garrett Langley]

And after a couple hundred thousand uses the one moving part and it is the only part that breaks.

[John Collison]

Why not just have two lenses with

[Garrett Langley]

two different image sensors too?

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Bomb.

[John Collison]

Okay.

[Garrett Langley]

No good. Like, no. No good reason 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.

[John Collison]

Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Garrett Langley]

Keeps track of all the kind of inventory. But if you look at it, you know, I didn't want to build that business. But early on in the company, there was this horrific case in Atlanta where a woman was just running in our version of Mission Dolores. Or pick your nice park in the city. Random act of violence. Cameras everywhere in the park. None of them were working. And the city got blasted appropriately for it. And they're like, well, but also, do you really want our police department being in charge of camera uptime? That's a dumb idea. We should pay a company, I. E. Flock in this case, to just make sure the stuff always works. So it's not my favorite part of the business in that sense of. It's a lot of stress. It's very operationally intense, but I think it's valuable to our customers.

[John Collison]

Yeah. How do you think about the right. You talk about cameras in the park. Many movies center on this idea of universal surveillance. In the Bourne Identity or something, they have cameras on absolutely everything. Or I guess the Born 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?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. The cop out answer is like, I don't want to be in charge of deciding that. Thankfully, we have elected officials who we vote to make that decision.

[John Collison]

But what do you think is sensible place for them to land is?

[Garrett Langley]

I think it's way higher than we have now. I think that for me at least, for every crime that occurs that doesn't get solved means we didn't have enough cameras. That's to me, the easiest rubric. Now, I think to your question, though, it's a question of where they are, who has access to them, and I think it's one of the few cases where the disparity between maybe my knowledge and your knowledge of how the technology works and how an electrical 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 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 I would challenge why not do more cameras and have a warrant restriction? Why not do 30 days of LPR data? But if you have a warrant, you have a year. You need less cameras. So I do think there are some nuanced ways to do it. And thankfully we have a really good government affairs team that is lobbying for that kind of legislation to say there's a way for us to both be safe and maintain civil liberties. And it needs to be legislated, though those ideas are not in line with what my customers want. And my law enforcement customers, they just want to go catch bad guys. They want to follow the Constitution, catch bad guys. But that nuance in the middle of 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.

[John Collison]

Where do you think has passed sensible rules?

[Garrett Langley]

Sensible. I think Virginia's bill last year was pretty good. It defined, it did a few things well. And one thing I don't agree with what it did well is it defined a modest data retention period of 21 days and that's fine. I like 30, but tomato, tomato is fine. I think the ACLU was lobbying for three minutes. It's a little tough, it's hard to swallow. I think 7, 14, 20 something days is 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. Customers don't want it, they need to be told to do it. So I think that was good. It also validated that this can only be used for criminal investigations, which I think is 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 they can't use our technology in Virginia, which is, like I said, I live in Georgia. So thankfully it doesn't really impact me. But as a business, I'm like, I don't know if that's right, but I'm more than anything just happy they passed some legislation. New Mexico passed a similar bill this year. California has a similar ish bill. I think a couple other states have. I think the worst type of bill is actually not whether it's 14 days or 30 days of intervention. 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's like, you might.

[John Collison]

It's not noble, you might believe that,

[Garrett Langley]

and that's great, but someone has to enforce this. And actually what's going to happen is no one's going to enforce it now. And that's, I think, like really bad law in those cases.

[John Collison]

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm curious what your view is on police department procurement. What do they do? What do they buy? Not enough of. What do they buy too much of. They don't feel like they're swimming in procurement dollars. But yeah, I'm curious.

[Garrett Langley]

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. And it's like, got it. Okay. Like how often. So you look at like a land mass radio contract and it's going to cost someone like San Francisco county, you know, $200 million. I mean, like, you're talking about that kind of money on a TCV basis. Oh, yeah.

[John Collison]

Wow.

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, I mean, I think murder's a really big company.

[John Collison]

Sure. Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

That's how.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

He says you don't get there and you go, well, I 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?

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Like, could you guys just, like, have your own tower? There's gotta be something. But you look into it.

[John Collison]

Is this your margin as my opportunity situation for you guys with radios?

[Garrett Langley]

Maybe. Because law enforcement's unique in this case in which, like, 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 it.

[John Collison]

But why don't you guys just have the exact same products and have a radio in the spectrum?

[Garrett Langley]

We probably should, but we got.

[John Collison]

That's my. Like, a VC in the board.

[Garrett Langley]

$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, but. Yeah. So I think, like, that part, I think is really, really kind of crazy. At least, like, in the business world. I feel like I buy for my majority case.

[John Collison]

Yes, yes.

[Garrett Langley]

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, but the RFP is written for one vendor, so all it does is wind up taking an extra year, six months. That's like, that's. I get why RFPs exist, 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.

[John Collison]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

I haven't seen it. But what I think they do well is, like, one of the things that I think the government did figure out is maybe you need to have an rfp for a $200 million contract. What about a $10,000 contract? Great. So they do have spin levels where if you're like a police chief, you can go spend $25,000 or $50,000 and not have to go through the entire process. But it's tough. I would not wish upon anyone selling to local government. It's more negatives than positives in a lot of ways.

[John Collison]

Yeah. And again, thus, procurement process has evolved for a reason and to protect against certain other failure modes. But. Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

Well, I mean, if 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 I know you. I'm just trying to buy stripe. That in the business world is considered very normal. In the government world, that is called illegal, which is really interesting.

[John Collison]

But again, it's evolved for a reason. The rules are written in blood.

[Garrett Langley]

Well, no. And then you have plenty of cases where 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.

[John Collison]

How do you guys use feb?

[Garrett Langley]

We. A lot of our customers, A lot of our private sector customers pay either via credit card or check.

[John Collison]

Ah, okay.

[Garrett Langley]

We have a lot of checks.

[John Collison]

Okay. So for the public sector stuff, that'll generally be via a torturous, you know, RFP process and PO and something like that. But for your private sector and then.

[Garrett Langley]

But even. I mean, when we don't want to be in the check deposit business and you guys.

[John Collison]

So you stripe for the check functionality because no one knows about our check functionality, that stripe can accept checks for you.

[Garrett Langley]

Am I allowed to talk about it?

[John Collison]

Sorry, no one knows because we're bad at marketing.

[Garrett Langley]

I was just like, oh, not because it's a secret. No. Yeah, no, it's like we don't want to be in that business. Yes. It's a remote deposit box or whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah.

[John Collison]

But yeah, yeah, we can give you an address that you can give to your customers and they can mail checks to us 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.

[Garrett Langley]

Not a single customer of ours pays via ACHE or credit card. We do a lot of checks. I'd probably say 80%, 90% are checks, maybe higher.

[John Collison]

You're one of the few tech companies to mostly use stripe for checks.

[Garrett Langley]

It's, you know, trying to buck the trend every day of the week.

[John Collison]

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 bearcat for this town of 20,000 people, which is like an armored

[Garrett Langley]

personnel carrier, like $3 million vehicle. And it's like, why couldn't we just get an F150?

[John Collison]

So do you think that applies also to kind of the shiny stuff?

[Garrett Langley]

Oh, yeah. I Mean, you look at, like, early on when we were building the company, we'd get the question of like, well, 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. And I'm like, in high speed pursuit. You know who they are? Like, we were criticized and had to build a product until we got to like, 120, 150. It was a major blocker to sales. Really?

[John Collison]

Huh.

[Garrett Langley]

I mean, it's like we built a camera that. I mean, we tested it on roads that we drove on. So we'd get up to like 80 or 90, and it worked fine. But we had to. Eventually we rented a, like, you know, an amateur racing track.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

And just drove around in circles at 120 miles. We emailed the employee base and we're like, who owns a car that goes really fast? And that was actually kind of funny because a lot of people were like,

[John Collison]

what car do you use to test this?

[Garrett Langley]

There's some fast cars putting it. Teslas, Rivians. Some other nicer cars drive really fast. And that was a fun day because we put the cameras up and do it. But did the cameras work out of

[John Collison]

the box or did you have to tune the performance? Yeah. Okay. So it just worked.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. The only place where we had to make one modification, which is kind of interesting, we deploy a radar. So on really busy roads where our angle of incident is particularly tight, I. E. Like, we can't shoot super far down. We have to shoot at a sharp angle. We have a radar attachment that we tilt backwards to notify the car's on the way, like, get ready. Which helps. But that's like a very far edge case because the camera doesn't actually.

[John Collison]

You prime the camera, essentially.

[Garrett Langley]

Yes. To get ready for a car coming. Huh.

[John Collison]

And sorry.

[Garrett Langley]

Because either the camera is offline unless there's a vehicle.

[John Collison]

I see. So you boot it up. And that's a power saving measure.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah.

[John Collison]

Okay.

[Garrett Langley]

The most expensive thing we do is, like, take a picture. Second most amazing 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.

[John Collison]

Okay.

[Garrett Langley]

So we added the button, you know, to take a photo right away.

[John Collison]

The continuously running radar Is very low power.

[Garrett Langley]

It's negligible.

[John Collison]

I see.

[Garrett Langley]

Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that was a fun one.

[John Collison]

We were talking about hardware previously, but what's building your own drones been, like,

[Garrett Langley]

a lot of fun?

[John Collison]

Sounds fun.

[Garrett Langley]

No, it's fun, but it's like, I have kids and you have a kid. It's like, really fun to build a product that your kids understand. It's like we drive around Atlanta and my son will count the cameras from home to school, or we're going to the airport, or we'll go to the park. And I love that he can actually, like, understand what dad does.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

I'm not sure if you've taught your son, like, how I'm screwed on those assets. 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.

[John Collison]

Well, also, you not only do drones, but you do drones to catch bad guys.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, yeah. It's like, very compelling.

[John Collison]

Very early age.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. To be clear, like, he'll watch Paw Patrol and be like, that's what dad builds. Like, that's the helicopter. 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 thing. Yeah. What kind of missiles can we add? And they were like, no, no, no, 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. And so if I showed you, I could show you the payload the next time you're in Atlanta. Or we could fly one out here. It's like the coolest camera ever. It's huge. It's like this big. And it's got four different. Four different image sensors, maybe six different optical lenses. We can read a license plate almost a mile away. Like, crazy specs, great thermal. Then we're quite good to fly. So, like, I don't know. I was an electrical engineer. One of my co founders was a mechanical engineer. It's fun to build things that fly. So it's like, all right, we have a payload. We have this airframes. We have aeronautical engineers now. Like, it's been fun to grow the engineering team.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

An imaging team. You think about the dock that it lives in. It's effectively a commercial grade H vac system. Like, the drone lands, it needs to be cold, it needs to be hot, it has to charge. If you know anything about lithium ion, lithium ion doesn't like to be too hot or too cold. So you got to keep that well conditioned. Like this 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.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

And that's like, that's the fun part of this stuff. Everything else is, you know, selling is good, but, like, building stuff's fun.

[John Collison]

How many drones do you have out there in the world?

[Garrett Langley]

Oh, we don't. We don't discuss that one. But.

[John Collison]

But decent number.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's hundreds of cities that are flying.

[John Collison]

Are flying drones. Let's go. It's funny, when you talk about the A10 warthog, you're reminding me of the. The Boyd book by Robert Coram, which I only read recently, but is like one of this kind of Silicon Valley canon. And everyone talks about. And everyone talks about him in the context of his OODA loop, you know, orient something, decide, act. But I think that's actually kind of overrated. And actually the main reason Boyd is interesting is helping the Pentagon procure better planes. I'm just reminded of that with the Warthog. And also, you know, your description of needing to run at 170 miles an hour because basically, 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 dogfight. Maximum full military power or throttle's idle. Those are the only two that actually matter 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

[Garrett Langley]

just kind of speeds and feeds well. And that's like, for us, the spec we track is like time on scene.

[John Collison]

Yeah.

[Garrett Langley]

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. Which is what? Like if this was a drone that was carrying a payload, like a zipline or something. Else, like actually physically in their matters, but for us, it's just about time. On virtual scene.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

So that's what we measure ourselves to. So that's why we fly high, because, like, physics allows you to see farther. That's why we have this huge payload. So you don't have to actually fly there and then you don't have to fly as fast, which means you can conserve battery life, which means you're in the air longer. Like, all of these designs were around that use case versus, like, you know, I'm sure Zipline went through a whole separate use case of like, what's the max payload and all that kind of stuff.

[John Collison]

So how many drones does a city the size of San Francisco need?

[Garrett Langley]

12.

[John Collison]

Okay, so it's a very small number.

[Garrett Langley]

No, I mean our average drone can cover a 30 square mile radius and get there within under a minute. And thankfully, in a 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 because there's less call for service. And then in more dense urban areas, you need more drones mostly from volume of service. But even in our most dense customers, 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 90 hours a week. That's a lot of flight time.

[John Collison]

And sorry, do you dispatch the drone when it's needed from its charging dock or is the idea that it's out there flying already and you just task it?

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, there's like, it lives in the dock. There is some. There's debate of whether a drone should be in the air at all times.

[John Collison]

Does that actually save you meaningful time

[Garrett Langley]

being in the air? Yeah, I would save a lot of time.

[John Collison]

Oh, really?

[Garrett Langley]

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. 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 is like we have a full team of constitutional attorneys and I'm sure you have like a regulatory team that when you want to build something, they're like, let's check it before we ship. Yes, we have a constitutional team. It's like, cool idea. Let's actually make sure this doesn't violate the Constitution.

[John Collison]

Look up the fourth Amendment here real quick.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, let's just, like, double check this thing. And so when you look at the drone, like, we believe. And this hasn't been tested in court, but these are smart people. They're like, look, we just. It's unclear how that would end in court, but if you call 911, there is a reason to fly the drill. If there is a gunshot, if there is gunshot detection, if there is a stolen car, that is a reason to dispatch versus just flying around looking for stuff. It's not unconstitutional, but we would not push that as a use case.

[John Collison]

A lot of this precedent, as new technologies come along, people reason by analogy of cars somewhat like your house, but somewhat different, whatever. Isn't a drone flying around just like a police cruiser on its patrol.

[Garrett Langley]

So the. And I'm not an attorney, neither am I.

[John Collison]

Never stopping. Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

The other analogy there would be the butterfly effect, which is like, when things are much, much cheaper and much, much easier, historical precedent gets thrown away. And so take the helicopter example. You could say, oh, well, helicopters fly sometimes. Yeah, but helicopters are so expensive. It's not practical to have 24, seven, you know, aerial coverage with the drone. It's not impractical. It's the same reason why, when we launch our drone, we want to go from the launch location to the in location. The camera's point at the horizon the whole time. We don't want to look in your backyard. That's like, we feel really strong. And that's not a law. That's just like, our point of view of where the law should be.

[John Collison]

Yes.

[Garrett Langley]

So we'll build the product for that.

[John Collison]

Got it.

[Garrett Langley]

And then look, if the operator wants to tilt down, that's their control, but as a default. So we're flying straight up.

[John Collison]

That's very interesting. Last question. You know, so you guys have grown with cameras out there in cities now, getting into drones, building the software OS to help law enforcement agencies and others kind of synthesize all the information they have, just what comes next. What future product ideas are you playing with? We're doing now?

[Garrett Langley]

So if you think about it, we talked about this earlier. Failure for Flock is prison population goes up essentially, like, really bad. And we look at, you know, 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 not done, but we've. We've gone a lot of work in that category. I get pretty interested in expanding that and going well, what about what can we be doing from a product perspective to prevent crime from happening? And that actually doesn't necessarily look like software. It's like one of the interesting things that we started last year is what we call our thriving cities fund. It's probably an analogy similar to your stripe press, which is like it's never going to be the core of your business but you feel really good that it's a part of your business. And so when we go in places like Greenville, Mississippi, we also commit to deploy capital as growth partners to those businesses. Because if we want to convince that 16 year old to not be a criminal, there does need to be jobs, jobs that like a 16 year old can get. And so we deploy capital in restaurants, nail salons. Pick your business that you can be 16 and work at easily. And we want more of those to exist in the cities that also choose to be safe. I don't want to go deploy capital in a place that doesn't want to be safe, but for that. So I'm like, I want to do more there. And then I think to our conversation on the other half, you know, the majority of the crime we solve is not violent, it's nonviolent. And today the discrepancy for a juvenile, non juvenile, you still wind up in some type of penitentiary or prison system. I think that's crazy. Like all the data shows as soon as you wind up in prison, you're going to get violent and you're going to come back. And so I would articulate, there is an opportunity, don't know yet what it is to say, oh, 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. That's bad. But prison can't be the answer. 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 flawed. 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 non profit profit. 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.

[John Collison]

So fewer crimes, fewer people in prisons.

[Garrett Langley]

Yeah, the same goal.

[John Collison]

Thank you.

[Garrett Langley]

Thank you. It was fun.

[John Collison]

Awesome.

[Garrett Langley]

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked 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 Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on x16z and subscribe to our [e-mail] thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy. Sam.