[00:00:00]
Garrett: You've got almost a 90 percent chance of getting away with stealing someone's car. And you've got like a 50 ish percent chance of getting away with it. We build technology that helps law enforcement through one way or another. Solve crime. Our goal isn't just to solve crime. Our goal is to eliminate the way you eliminate it is make it harder to do.
Logan: Welcome to the Logan Bartlett show on this episode, but you're going CEO and co founder of Ford. Flock Safety, a business most recently valued at over 4 10 percent of crimes in the United States. It's okay to be optimistic, but you do actually have to have a plan. I do generally think that in 10 years from now, Flock will have eliminated crime in America.
No, a lot of problems I got to go solve later today when we wrap up, but like it's in here, I think we're going to do great. Flock is one of the most interesting private companies that I've ever come across. Garrett is a very impressive leader. That's been building an important company for society. A really fun conversation that you'll hear now.
Logan: Garrett, thanks for doing this.
Garrett: Yeah, I'm excited to be here.
Logan: So can we bat off maybe, uh, with you describing what flock safety does?
Garrett: Yeah. Yeah. So it's a it's an interesting business because at the end of the day We view ourselves as a crime fighting Kind of
Logan: It's a noble mission.
Garrett: Uh, there are like many things in life that I think we should try to fix. Uh, Elon is working on a bunch of them, but to think we're like a small version of that, uh, trying to help the, at least the people that live on earth today.
Uh, and so for us, we're a crime fighting company. Now, the way we do that though, isn't through you know, we're not a law enforcement agency. Uh, we're not a nonprofit. No, we build technology. That helps the people who have been tasked with fighting crime, do it more effectively, more objectively, and more successfully.
Garrett: Uh, the kind of eyeopening thing for me, you know, I, I have always been an entrepreneur. I've never had like a real [00:02:00] job before. And about seven years ago, when we were trying to figure out what to do next in life, I had saw this statistic that I didn't believe was accurate, which is that roughly, You've got almost a 90 percent of getting away with stealing someone's And I was like, man, not just that can't be right. You know, like that, that, that, that doesn't seem accurate. And thankfully in some cities that isn't accurate, right. That's a national average. That's not the case for, you know, New York, New York actually has a better clearance rate, um, uh, than, than a lot of cities, but that's the kind of what we do.
We build technology that helps law enforcement through one way or another solve crime. Um, and the main reason why. Is when you look at primary research done by academics Our goal isn't just to solve crime. Our goal is to eliminate Um, and the way you eliminate it is make it harder
Logan: It's fascinating. I assume that was a fork in the road of like, do I do crime with a 90 percent chance of getting away with it? Uh, you know, that, that entrepreneurial pursuit versus do I try to solve crime? I'm glad you landed on the side you did. Uh, it sounds like. Crime itself is a fairly profitable, uh, business, at least in terms of the nonviolent, uh, stuff.
If you really have, if you have a 90 percent success rate, uh, I mean, that's, it's way, way higher than I would've guessed. And it's just kind of a troubling, uh, stat. I realize that's a national average and, uh, you know, there's a bunch of different inputs into it, but if you were to just still down, uh, the reason for that.
And I guess that's the root of what Flock actually does. Like, why is the clearance rate so low for, uh, solving nonviolent crime?
Garrett: yeah, so you you bring up a good point I was actually I was with the mayor of atlanta last night You They're a great flock customer. And obviously I live in Atlanta. So I, I care a lot about what happens in my hometown. And he, he developed one of these awesome programs. Um, he calls it the year of the youth.[00:04:00]
And what he realized is like, look, we've all been 15 Right. And in an abundance of free time, you just make not the And so what he realized is like, if we create jobs for these they'll be too busy to commit because you see most criminals are not evil. They're opportunistic, and some, to your point, are doing it from a profit But a lot of crime is also due to boredom. Um, now maybe you were setting firecrackers off for you were doing something less malicious, but a lot of the crime we see is semi organized auto theft And it's just, Oh, we're 16 and we're goofing off. There's, there's no mal intent out of, you know, Oh, we're gonna go steal this car, which is actually painful.
Um, and, and when you look at it, the reason why it's so hard to solve these is there's never any If you were, imagine you were like an SDR, imagine being told like, go book this deal. But I'm not going to give you their phone number, the name of the company, their email address, but I need you to go book this And that's the effective job of your average Hey, this car was We think it was stolen around 2am and that's all we have. And that's actually really hard, right? Like how, how, how do you go solve that? Uh, it's pretty Um, and so when you look at it, the clearance rates are linearly correlated to And I would say the lack of objective evidence Uh, but there was this one case. Um, in Tennessee, where there was a, it was a, um, was an armed robbery of a vehicle. So the person was held at and when they were held at gunpoint. They said it was a black male in a 49ers and they were in a pickup truck, like pick a truck, pulled up to them, And [00:06:00] they got two things right in that eyewitness person was wearing a They were driving a truck, but they were actually And, and look, I don't, I don't think that I'm not, you know, I bring this up not to say, Oh, that person is like bad. I wouldn't as testimony is really hard.
Imagine if you were sitting there and then all of a sudden you have a gun to your head. You're not like, Oh, am I accurately describing the scenario? You're thinking like, Oh my gosh, I want to live through this scenario. And now with flock, I meant to mention the objective piece. That officer in Tennessee was able to go in and say, Hey, show me all the pickup trucks in this area around this that leads to a license plate, then leads to a search warrant.
They 49ers hoodie. He admits to doing the crime and like, that's the type of thing that happens thousands of times a day where not only are we actually solving more crime, we're introducing a new level of objectivity because we're focusing on the vehicle and not in this case, an eyewitness
Logan: Well, so in that case, um, so, so, so the mission is obviously, uh, um, is noble and the, uh, the specific examples are, I mean, I mean, incredible. But as you, as that problem first presented itself and seven years ago, your car is gone, the pharmacy gets hit up, car gets abandoned and all of that. You, you landed on a, uh, something that I don't know, in retrospect, maybe, maybe is obvious like anything is in hindsight, but, but landed on a, a specific problem in technology.
And so maybe can you talk about like the initial, I realize you guys have a plethora of products today, but like very first thing that you landed on and decided to go after and describing like what that is and how it works.
Garrett: for sure.
Garrett: So, so when we started the company, It was just a project, right? Like I called Paige and Matt, two of my closest friends. They had worked for me at my last And I said, Hey, I think like, [00:08:00] I think crime is a really interesting problem. And I wonder why people aren't solving And I have no background in law enforcement, no background in criminal justice, never owned a gun. Then start calling these police chiefs. And I'm like, Hey, why can't you solve crime? Cause look, I think a lot of us assume there's some level of as a part of the problem. Like, you can go look, these are public salaries. You don't make a lot of money being a cop. Uh, even, you know, I think like, police chiefs are still making a hundred thousand hundred thousand dollars and that's, they're at the peak of their
Logan: Yeah, the
Garrett: no getting bigger, uh, and it's like,
Logan: my cousin's a cop in Chattanooga. So I, uh, I know it.
Garrett: it's not, you know, it's, right?
And it's not like they don't have any scrutiny day to day. And so you look at these, these men and women, you go, okay, maybe it's apathy. But then you talk to him and you go, no, it's not apathy. They're, they're no different than nurses and teachers. They just were born. With this strong desire to serve their community. then you start to go, okay, well, why is it? And you go, okay, it's evidence. Well, why don't you have enough And they're like, Oh, well it's because it's really expensive. It's like, what do you mean? Well, the evidence we need is a license plate. And I was like, that's, that seems really weird to me.
Why, why would you need a license plate? And they're like, Oh, it's the number one piece of evidence in solving a crime. 70 plus percent of crimes happen with a vehicle. Like, this is what we need. And so I'm looking into it with Paige and Matt and we're like, Oh, but there's like, there's, there's vendors that do this, right?
Like, um, a camera that can read a license plate is not a new concept, but what we noticed was that there was these two underlying and it was all central on centralized on at the time, seven years ago, the average camera fully, fully deployed was about 50, 000 per And so maybe if you're New York, like you cover your egress points because you're one of the biggest cities in America and like you can afford it. But like, what about Newark? What about Elizabeth? What about like go down to your average city? And you're like, no, that's, that's, that's so much money. And the reason why it was so expensive is [00:10:00] twofold.
One was infrastructure and one was bill of materials on the infrastructure side. Traditional systems required hardline power and hardline internet. And if you've ever built a home, construction's expensive. It's like really expensive to dig holes, really expensive to conduit power and fiber, hundreds of So you've eventually signed up for a construction project. So we said, okay, well, what if we got rid of all the infrastructure? What if it was just a cell phone on a that would then remove that And then the second thing we looked at was said, well, wait a second. Why are they using these very proprietary bespoke DSP chips?
I was an electrical engineer. And so we're breaking it down of like, they're using an infrared array with a DSP chip to do a very, very legacy approach to optical characterization or OCR. And Matt and I were like, well, why wouldn't you just use computer vision? Like it can't be that hard. They wound up being harder than we thought, but like, Phone should be able to do this.
So we literally got some old Android Um, I tore them apart, soldered together a bigger battery and a solar panel. Uh, and Matt, he's like one of the best developers I've ever met. Maybe the best phone I've ever met quickly, like put together a computer vision model, an Android app, put it up on my street.
And all of a sudden we were reading license Um, now in the middle of the summer in Atlanta. An Android phone outside is going to overheat pretty quickly. So I realized that like, okay, this isn't going to scale, built a, you know, a competitive product that had zero implementation costs and had a bill of materials that was a couple hundred bucks and that felt like really special.
And they're like Peter Thiel saying we had these two secrets that no one else knew, which was like, we could dramatically deploy more devices. At a lower cost, like a 10 X better product of the
Logan: timing of every market's obviously pretty important. And, uh, the set of circumstances that led to this opportunity, was there a window of time? that five years earlier, it wouldn't have worked, uh, [00:12:00] because of the camera technology, OCR, solar, whatever it was. And you guys happened to catch it then. Like how, how, how wide was the window that that flock could have worked, uh, for, for, for, you know, you guys, or if someone had started it before.
Garrett: Yeah.
I think we got, you know, we got very lucky with timing. I would like to think that we were like thoughtful about it, but the, the smartphone because the camera technology, you've got people like Apple and Samsung deploying billions of dollars a into smartphone technology, which is mostly low power devices with really good And that's effectively what we are. It's like, we're, we're riding the tail of that And then what you also have is this dramatic reduction in cloud Um, and it's weird probably for you and I to think about an environment where on default, but when you're talking about service servicing, you know, our average camera does 30 or 40 gigabytes of data a month.
That's a lot of data, not only to push through, push through the internet, but also to store it online. And that is still like, if you look at the camera market in general. It is still mostly on Um, and so that evolution, I think, is still happening. Like we're still actually right. Well, smartphones are quite like there's innovation still happening, but it's mostly moved to a I like we do quite a bit of of a I on our on our imaging platform.
The cloud piece is really interesting because you look at companies like ricotta to them and you look at companies like us. And if the cloud wasn't getting cheaper by the quarter by the day, we wouldn't
Logan: So as it currently stands, so that was the thesis originally, uh, and the belief around it. Where, where are you in that journey? How would you describe the product today? It seems like it's solar powered. I, I, I had heard something, there's like two different cameras. It's angled at just license plate [00:14:00] readers.
Can you give like the, the, you know, jumping forward to 2024 and where you are with that? Um,
Garrett: yeah. So, uh, if we go back all the way that um, I remember during YC, uh, we had a slide and we only had one slide in our pitch and it was a mug shot. And we said, we built a product that actually solves We don't know who we're going to sell to. We don't know how we're going to We don't know how we're going to charge, but I fundamentally believe that if you pass that toothbrush test, everyone wants to live in a crime less And we built a product that does that. That is largely still the same case. Now I think we have figured out who we sell to. We've like, we've done a pretty good job figuring that out and got a pretty good job building on a business.
But if you go to a place like San Francisco, who's recently coming online with flock, you know, they've got about 400 devices now in, in the downtown area that as a car drives by a few Uh, the first is we, within a few seconds, read the license and then we have a direct integration with the FBI and we can check, is that car stolen?
Is that car on an amber alert? Is it on a silver alert? Uh, does it have an outstanding felony warrant, but there's a, there's a list of objective things that makes that car illegal to be on the road or legal to be on the road. And if it's illegal on the road, let's say it's got an amber alert or a felony warrant, we immediately notify the nearest officer in their vehicle.
So now within, let's call it 5 to 10 seconds from a car driving by, the nearest officer is notified, Hey, uh, this. This Kia, this white Kia, uh, that's stolen is at this location. Um, we don't know who's inside. We don't care who's inside. We show that Um, and that, that leads to about 2000 arrests Like that, that The second thing that happens is when that car does drive by, we also do what's called capture its vehicle fingerprints. Um, that's a list of about 26 different unique attributes of a vehicle that with our computer [00:16:00] vision model, we say, okay, it is white. It's a white car. Uh, it's a Honda.
Uh, it's an Accord. Uh, it's got a Nevada license plate. It's got a roof rack. It's got bumper stickers. Anything a human would notice on the vehicle. We also tag. And so from a retrospective, So let's say that a crime happened and you didn't know the car was stolen already and detectives can then go in and say, Hey, I'm looking for any white Honda with a Nevada license here yesterday at two Show me all the And that tends to be the beginning of a We're never the end all be all in a criminal investigation. We're typically the first step of a process that gets the detective on their
Logan: And you're actually removing the subjectivity of a lot of the inputs, right? Uh, where there's not the same bias. You're not actually even capturing who the driver of the car is purposefully, right? Uh, and so it's really just focused on the vehicle itself.
Garrett: Yeah, I mean, I was shocked at just how important the vehicle could be in a criminal investigation. still kind of confuses me to this day as someone who's been in it for a long time now. Um, it is the beginning of the case and who's inside is kind of irrelevant until you get a human involved until detective takes over the case.
And then, yeah, you gotta go drive an investigation because you can't arrest a vehicle. Um, but to my earlier point on kind of the eyewitness story, A lot of subjectivity in policing by design. It's game. We're trying to put a little bit more
Logan: we talk about, um, the nature of, of crime and. I, I feel like you, you have some interesting perspectives on nonviolent versus violent crime and what serves as deterrence, uh, of, uh, different types of crime in a modern society and how incentives and, and, and punishments actually kind of play a role or lack [00:18:00] thereof in different circumstances.
Garrett: Yeah. I mean, I think as a we've unfortunately made a decision historically that crime is okay. And there are some people who live in this country that are generally fine with crime. They think crime is just a cost of doing business. Crime is a crime. Yeah. Is a mandated requirement of living in a in a modern society.
And I just, I just deeply disagree with that sentiment. Um, that's like almost saying that like poverty is a requirement. I don't think so. Actually, I think the quality of life has gone up decade over decade and we'll continue to go up hopefully. And like some of these big issues we face as a country, I think are actually quite solvable.
Now, I think, it's unlikely that a technology company alone can solve these things. And that's kind of our point of view. Our point of view is that it's a combination of people, policy and technology. Like I mentioned the story earlier of what Mayor Dickens is doing on the youth That's policy, right?
Like he's trying to stop kids from even thinking about becoming giving them jobs. awesome. a policy thing. That's a people thing. And then where technology comes in is that if you look at the underlying reason why people do commit crime, it's a boolean decision, right? Your average criminal is a 16 to 22 22 year old And there's a reason why they won't let you rent a car until you're over 22. because your brain isn't fully developed. You tend to make boolean decisions as an adult. Now you and I make a calculus decision. We think about the probability of something happening that weighs our decision framework, and then we make a yes or no decision eventually.
As a, as a adolescent, And if you believe you can get away with something, And so what we believe is that in cities that have deployed flock, they are starting to change that calculus to say, Hey, actually clearance rates have gone from 13 percent to 30 percent 50 percent to 80%.
And we've got some cities that are at a hundred percent clearance rate. Which means if you live in that city, you know, if I commit [00:20:00] this crime, I will get held guess what? Time goes down. It's like a, it's a very, very simple concept. But it actually is working. Whereas clearance rates go up, crime rates goes down because the majority of crime, right?
You move, remove the 0. 001 percent of people that are just which we're not trying to get rid of. We're not trying to fix that. We're trying to fix the 99. 99 percent of crime that is simply opportunistic that can be solved by driving clearance
Logan: In the punishment side of things, like, Hey, if I, uh, break into a car, I get 10 years in prison versus 10 months versus probation. I guess there's, there's been different studies that I'm not, uh, appropriately educated on, but I'm sure you've seen some of the, the data that the, the, the nature of the.
Punitiveness of the, uh, of the crime actually doesn't serve as much as a deterrent versus the just simply getting caught.
Garrett: There's zero academic proven any correlation severity of And the impact on crime. Now my guess
Logan: Boolean point, it's not a, it's not a
Garrett: it's not you're just like i'm not gonna get I mean you think about it, right? Like you probably took statistics in college If you know the average is a 13 chance like everyone you assume you're above average Right.
Because why would I be below average in anything I do? And as a 16 year old, you definitely thought you were above average at everything you did invincible. So like, well, I might, I'm not gonna call it. He might get but I won't Uh, and you're not thinking about punishment because you don't assume you're going to get caught now.
I am sure. There is a, trailing point where it's like, well, if there's no punishment, well then clearly that's probably not enough. But the difference between a month, six months, a year in jail just doesn't matter. Um, what matters is people believe that we have created a society that upholds the rules we've all agreed [00:22:00] Cause like one of the interesting dynamics, and this is actually a beautiful part about our country we live in. The rules are not evenly And I actually think that's like quite good, uh, because the rules in Georgia, the rules in Atlanta, even though we have the similar federal laws and our state laws are a little bit different.
We as a society, as a community choose what's socially
Logan: So flock goes into a city. I realized there's, there's a split between selling to homeowners associations and so kind of private citizens and increasingly you're selling into. Uh, state, local governments as well, but can you, uh, I guess a commercial for, for, for the efficacy of what you're doing, can you give some stats around like the delta and clearance rate of, uh, maybe some city that you went in and how many cameras were installed and what that did to, to, you know, the efficacy of solving crime?
Garrett: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, literally when we roll out they don't make an arrest within their first hour of deployment, something's wrong. We either haven't properly trained them. The cameras are somehow in like the wrong place or not working. Like I don't know of a single customer we brought out that When you look longer term, you know, I think about a place like Cobb County, which was one of our first And you go to the chief there and he will tell you that they have back to back years with a hundred percent clearance rate on And if it wasn't for flock, that wouldn't be the And then you'd go on public record and say this. And I think it's true. And I think. You know, obviously, just like with a lot of things, it is hard to drive very, very hard, hard science on efficacy. I think what we look for is You know, what percentage of crimes are being solved using the product? We're at about 10 percent nationally, but the impact [00:24:00] demonstrable overnight.
Logan: Can you speak to a specific example? And I know there's there's tons of them, but just to really make it concrete of a situation. That it may be how it played out. Uh, and, and case study maybe sounds, uh, to, to, uh, to business oriented, uh, but, but, but, uh, uh, a situation that, that really makes this, uh, tangible of X person did Y thing and, uh, you flock was able to solve it.
Just one that sort of stayed with you as, you know, something you're particularly proud of.
Garrett: yeah, I mean, I think so.
Garrett: There's probably two moments if you'll give me the chance to share two of
Logan: Yeah, we've got time.
Garrett: The, the first and this is like the company might've been months Um, and we had deployed the cameras in my neighborhood, uh, in this single woman's home was broken into and all of her stuff was she wasn't at home. And if you talk to this, this woman, you know, the stuff is, it's a bummer to lose your stuff. Right. But she has a job, she has insurance. The issue was sense of violation, like her safety had been violated, her, it's a deep fear now, and within about an hour of her calling the because she did have a camera at her house, and so she had the vehicle description, they were able to plug that into they then had to make a model on a license and then pretty quickly they were able to then find that vehicle and make an arrest.
And it was, it was important for two reasons. One from personal level, one from business level, from personal level, you, talked to this woman and there was just a glimmer of hope, right? And maybe one of the worst days in her life, we were able to provide just a little bit of peace of mind, a little bit of like, no, [00:26:00] society is just, the world is just You're, you're going to be And that's like, I get goosebumps to this day thinking about like, that's still happening all the time. I'm not as aware of it because I talk to all of our, our, our, customers are in customers, but like that was, I remember a page saying like, man, I could spend the rest of my life Like, if this is the impact we make on people's lives every day, like, and we're going to get paid to do this and get paid well, like this is crazy. So that one was like one of the first times. The business level was also the first time we realized that every day at five o'clock, the news is going to want to talk about crime.
They're going to talk about politics, sports, they're talking about crime. And it was the first time we were ever on TV. And it's kind of realizing what was one of the first going to go to market hacks. We realized was that PR could be a really big growth channel. I've yet to meet another company that leveraged PR like we did.
Uh, most people talk about like, Oh, PR is a great strategy. No, no, PR was our only growth three years of the business. Because what we realize is that every single time a crime happens, news wants to cover it. Uh, and so like I went on TV, and it was this really experience, uh, being on like local news.
Uh, so that, that was the first one. I'd say the most one is I'm a father of two young kids, and anytime we help parents with their kids, it's particularly tough. I just know most of our employees. I think our average age of employees is in their mid forties. And so most of us have families with kids, you know, whether it's elementary school or junior high, and thankfully most child abductions.
Are not Like if you look at the, we work really closely with the national center of endangered and missing children. It's one of our strongest partnerships. Most abductions are an estranged And so it's scary, but it's very solvable. Like you can solve it within a day. Stranger to stranger abductions are not only really rare, [00:28:00] they're really hard to And there was, there's a town that we work with and it's predominantly an immigrant kind large percentage of the population is immigrants. And due to that, they tend to be targeted for crime, because the assumption is like, if you steal from these people, they won't call the Which is like, really like, multiple levels of ickiness, because like, not only are you committing a crime against someone, you're doing it against a community that you believe, like, is less And so this woman is walking her child, car pulls up, Jumps out, steal the two year old boy out Total stranger. Mom is panicking. She calls nine one one. She, all she has is that it's a white Now this community is one of our, was one of our better customers at the time, still a great customer. They plug it in the system. Now, one of the cool things about flock is that it is a network, right? So when you think about the, the why we called it flock, it's because we believe that as a community, if we work together, we're safer.
And that extends not only out of my neighborhood, out of my city, but the cities around me, because criminals don't, tend to care where like cities start and stop. Um, so like, you don't, I doubt you even think about it as like a normal person of like, Oh, am I in New York right now? Or am I in a different And so they plug it into flock, they find the license And they realized the car has now gone on the highway. huge, this is like really bad now, because once you get on the highway, it's very hard to know where you're going. They then plug it into flock and that creates a statewide hotlist looking for this We get a hit about 45 miles that notifies the nearest that notifies like that police department. And notifies the GBI, which is like our, our California and they safely returned the And this is like all in three uh, there's like half a dozen police departments involved.[00:30:00]
And kid's I guess like five or six now. And we, we, we met up, one of our employees met up with the family recently and like the mom is still so thankful. And sadly, like that kind of stuff does happen every single day. Thankfully, not every single day your town. But like you look at those kinds of stories and I often just reflect like, I don't know if I'll ever get to work on a
Logan: I mean, it's hugely, uh, impactful and I'm sure super gratifying to, um, to, to, to have even, uh, one situation like that, that, that you had a role in solving, let alone the, the, the, the thousands a day or whatever it is that you guys contribute to. Um, I guess to, uh, To, to, uh, to talk about the, the trait, like anything in, uh, any decision we make, there's, there's two sides of a coin and trade offs around this.
Logan: I, I think I'd be remiss not to ask about the, the, the access or the spectrum of safety and privacy. And, uh, like. Implicitly, we're, we're making, uh, decisions on a daily basis that, uh, are, are on one end of the spectrum over the other. And there's, there's countries like, uh, China that, that, uh, you know, we, we're giving up a lot of, uh, privacy in exchange for, for safety.
And I, I don't particularly want to live in that society, but you know, it's, it's one that seems to be pretty effective in deterring crime. Um, then on the other end of the spectrum, there's, uh, There's definitely some, uh, wildernesses that we can go live in that have no rules and no laws and, and all of that.
And so I guess, how do you think about, um, data has become so, uh, in privacy increasingly with, uh, you know, whatever the things around Facebook and, and app trash tracking transparency and GDPR and, and all these [00:32:00] different things we're sort of living in this, uh, world where there's a, there's a continuum and people have different perspectives around it.
And so I guess, how do you think about that and where you fall and your responsibility in it?
Garrett: yeah, it's a good question. And I think there's probably two sides to it. There's one. We make our own decisions as a company for what we want to build and so a good example of that is, you know, we don't do facial recognition. I don't think it's inherently evil. I think it's an effective product.
We just choose not to a decision we've made as a And then I think the other thing that's really important is we live in a society that individuals are elected democratically to make decisions on our behalf. And that covers things like roads sewage and parks and public safety.
And we don't do anything without the And so. I look at it and go, let's talk about something that's really easy. Data retention. I think it's a, it's a subjective decision. And so you go to places like, uh, Dallas, Texas, and they have a 90 day storage and you go to a place like Austin, Texas, and it's seven I, I don't care if that's what Austin thinks is best for their community. That's great. That's like, that's exciting. So we believe it's our job to give communities. The kind of levers to make that to make those decisions. Because to be very clear, Austin will solve less crime in It's like it's a it's just a fact.
But they're making that trade off. I'm not making the city council, the police chief, they sat down in the city manager and said, Hey, we think seven days is said 90. In New Jersey, it's five years. I [00:34:00] don't live in any of those places. So on a personal level, I don't think it matters as a business, though.
We look at it across the spectrum and say, what are the things we can do to provide our customers the ability to customize what they're doing? So it makes sense for their
Logan: I mean, I guess police aren't elected officials, but they are those, uh, that we trust, uh, through the process of, of, you know, whatever democratic elections and then the people that, uh, you know, end up. What about on the, the HOA or on the private citizens side and, uh, maybe talk a little bit about like, I guess, as it relates both HOA and, and, uh, police officers, the, the access and rights and, and all of those things, uh, um, and how you think about
Garrett: So the cool part is the way we built the product is that most of our neighborhoods don't even have access to the cameras they It goes straight to the police because you and I don't have the right to have the right to do a criminal investigation, nor would I would imagine you want to, I don't have the time
Logan: Yeah.
Garrett: that.
Like there's a crime in my neighborhood. I don't have, I'm not, I got a family, I got a business. So the way the product's built is like, if you look at my neighborhood, the cameras go straight to the Atlanta police department and not a single person that lives in our community has access to the cameras because what would you do with it?
Uh, and that's like the default now in an environment where either there's an off duty police officer, a security team, or there's just a An HOA that, that, that wants to have access. That's fine. They're the ones paying But what we really emphasize is coming back to the name of the company. Like your job support the deploy this product.
It goes straight to law enforcement. They will use it when they need to, but otherwise just be on your merry way. And that I think is like a really nice of model, because it solves a lot of the privacy kind of concerns I think
Logan: I'm sure you get, um, some, uh, uh, [00:36:00] criticism that is not totally rooted in sensible, uh, logic. And, uh, you know, maybe just Freud and, and, hey, this seems bad. And, uh, Yeah, I don't know. I can, I can imagine the types of people that might blame these things, but outside of outside of those that are maybe less within the bounds of reasonable
Garrett: Yeah.
Logan: are there?
Particular discussions that you welcome, um, having about these different trade offs and like where the lines of consideration exists. And I assume data retention sounds like one of them maybe. And who has access is another. But are there other things that you think are actually Worthwhile philosophical debates to have about like your role in society.
Garrett: Yeah. So I think the, the cool thing about flock is whether you're blue, red or you have flock. Like we, we've got, uh, Berkeley, California, uh, and we've got Southern Texas right down on the border. Like it's like as red as you can get and as blue as you And then we go to New York, we go to Maine, we go to Oregon, Washington.
Like there is an estate that doesn't have flock at some level. And I think it's because when you remove the politics of it, Everyone wants to be safe. Like I've never met someone who's like, Oh, I would like to be less safe. Uh, that's like, it's a very odd feeling. Uh, so then to your point, it's like a question of, okay, well, well, how safe do we want to be?
Garrett: Uh, because in, in, in, in some environment, I don't know if you saw the news, like I think Miami, uh, during spring break had a midnight curfew or like 11 PM curfew that's safer. It like bad stuff happens at 2 AM. Like nothing good happens in the middle of the night. Miami made a decision on their own accord that like, Hey, during spring break, we just want to be a little bit [00:38:00] Now I don't think Miami isn't do that forever fun to stay out late. And so you look at this kind of decisions. I'm like, we're one of those types of decisions where you can say, look, you know, if we want to be safer, there's this product called flock that will solve more crime. Do we want it as a community?
And I think last year, you know, I think three out of about a thousand cities said, we don't want and we're okay. It's like, okay, great. No more feelings. Like, you know, call us if you change your mind.
Logan: And who is it saying, no, I guess I don't know
Garrett: It's city council.
Logan: city, city council.
Garrett: So, I mean, and it's, I think it's great.
Like the chief police will present an option. It's his job or her job to, to keep the community safe and they'll present us as an option. And in three cases, I think last year, a city said, Hey, you know, we just don't think it's right for us. And we go, that's great. You know, like that's no hard feelings. Um, I hope they changed their mind.
Um, to your point, a lot of the time.
Garrett: It is misinformation. Um, so as an example, one of those three, uh, last year, uh, originally said no, because they thought we were doing facial recognition on And we were like, we don't do facial recognition on the cameras. And they voted that way because look, it's, you know, most of these people are volunteers, it's not a full time job, you don't get paid to be on city council in a small town and a bigger city you do, and it's a little bit manageable, but in a small town.
You don't, you don't get paid. So these are volunteers trying to make the best decisions they can. So they, they did eventually come back around because we were able to educate them of like, no, we don't do facial these are very focused on cars So most of the time it is.
Either the fear of the unknown, um, or just misinformation. Like they're just, they don't fully understand the technology. Um, I do think though, to your point, there's, there's data retention. That's an interesting one. And then the other one is data sharing.
Garrett: You know, who, who do you want to [00:40:00] share with? Uh, most of our cities, Work really closely with their neighboring cities.
So if you're in the Bay area and you're in, you know, Atherton, you work with Cupertino and Redwood city and foster city and like San Mateo, because you're solving cases together all the time Um, but it is up to a city. Like we have one customer that I know of in Illinois, uh, that does not share with anyone.
And that, that as a city, they decided they want to keep this information just to themselves. And that's fine. I think that they will solve less crime. Um, but that's important to them, and I think that's great. And so we're always trying to figure out the same point of view would be on the overall auditing and transparency.
So everything you do in the system is fully audited and stored in perpetuity. Some of our customers share that audit It's great. So in, uh, in Piedmont, California, great police department there, the camera locations, the search history, took a ton of information publicly We built, we built that for us.
We call it our transparency portal. It's great. Other of our customers say, eh, it's not for us. We don't want to do that. So we're always trying to figure out like, how do we help our achieve their goal? Which is. more crime, be safe in, in a framing that makes the most sense for their own communities, kind of OO other goals.
Logan: You know, I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that the job of a, uh, police officer should be a noble one in the society that we live in or in a modern and sophisticated society. Uh, but, um, there's been some circumstances over the course of the last couple of years that have drawn attention and I'm sure it's been going on.
Uh, I mean, I know it's been going on far longer than just the last couple of years. We just happen to have technology to capture it and document it in [00:42:00] ways that have illuminated some of the, uh, Some bad actors within, um, police departments or, or unfortunate set of circumstances that have led to loss of life and just, you know, terrible circumstances.
Right?
Garrett: yeah. I mean, you're, you're, you're right. I mean, I just like in every you know, I think there's something know, a million police officers put a million people in a room, there's gonna be some bad
Logan: Yes. And I think we've, we've, we've, these are people that are entrusted to try to, um, bring stability to society. And I think it's, uh, it's particularly troubling when, um, Um, when, when it's not accountants committing fraud or, you know, shitty podcasters, whatever it is, like it's particularly troubling, uh, when it's, when it's the people that we trust with, with great power within society.
I think, um, it's a lot of the rhetoric has led to a, uh, a disproportionate number of resignations, early retirement, lack of enrollment into, uh, the service. Can you just talk about maybe some of the broad trends that are going on in policing policing, uh, today, and then what role you feel like. Flock
Garrett: Yeah.
Logan: in this.
Garrett: Yeah.
Garrett: So it is a challenging time. Um, more than 80 percent of police departments and that's not like, Oh, the police chief saying I want more people that's. The government, the city, the local government has given them budget for X number of people and they're at Y. this case, Y is less than X.
So the majority of police departments are And that is a new problem. That was not a problem 10 years ago. That's a problem that's happened over the last Now COVID was particularly bad. Um, like that was not good. And then the social unrest [00:44:00] was not I don't know if it's ever going to get better.
Um, I would equate it similar to probably the problem we have with teachers. Like, I don't know how we're going to get more teachers teach for America was pretty interesting. What, maybe, maybe one of the best ideas I've heard is like, why don't we have a teach for America for policing? Uh, like that's an interesting idea.
That's like one I've heard. I think what, what mayor Bibb has done in Cleveland is pretty What he did was said, look, you know, we've got staffing for a thousand officers. We only have 800. We have no line of sight to get back to a thousand. I'm actually going to decrease the headcount allocation down to 800 and that extra budget, I'm just going to raise everyone's That helps with enrollment, you know, like it also helps with You give everyone a 20 percent raise and I go, man, you know, I will put it in a So it is a pretty big problem because there there's pretty consistent data that shows a lack of a law enforcement agency just leads to unrest. And if you look at the cities and the number of cities that did this was very a lot of cities talked about defunding the police. Only two or three cities across the entire country actually did it. And they have had a massive spike in crime. They're in a massive hole now in terms of recruiting and running people through academy.
And it's going to take them another five or seven years to actually get out of it and just get back to where they were. So I think most cities realized, you know, reform is always necessary. It's good, right? Like, probably the best example is, I've never met a cop that wants to respond to non law enforcement related activity.
They still get asked to. Like, if there's an individual with a mental health issue, and you send a law enforcement officer that has zero training, I don't know what we perfect? No. They're gonna, like, really struggle with that, when they're actually people who have been trained to deal with mental health.
And so you do see cities, I think, moving in the right direction, saying, hey, we've gotta, we've gotta increase the number of first [00:46:00] Uh, we have fire as a first funder, we have law enforcement, we need a medical team. Like we actually need more types, more diversity. That's expensive, right?
But like, I don't know how to fix So it is a troubling problem. I'd say the only thing that I think is the silver lining amongst is technology is becoming more available. I think one of the benefits that Flock has brought to the market Is not only are we a force multiplier, like you can get more done as a police department because you're not, you know, the traditional view of policing is you drive around the neighborhoods.
You know, there are problems One that's incredibly wasteful. And two is incredibly subjective because you wind up going after the It's like double that with flock. You talk to most of our customers and they'll say we're too busy chasing stolen cars.
To do that kind of stuff anymore. So driven up productivity and driven of from a more venture perspective, though, we have proven that you can build a venture business selling to And like, one of the things that I love now is God, at least once a week, I'm getting a pitch deck from an early stage company that's trying to go after local, I think that's awesome. Like it is a market that's so underserved now competitive a little bit like, all right, well, I want to build, I want to build a really, really big business. So I. You know, I'm always looking out for like, what are the, what are the more interesting ones happening? But if you, if you go back seven years ago before flock, we got no, after no, after no from investors, because they would say like, Oh, local government is not a venture backable market.
The last IPO that serviced local government was in 2003. It the last IPO. You know, you've, you've got one of your peers and Andreessen Horowitz, who's an investor in flock with their American dynamism fund. And you see more investors like y'all saying, wait a second, actually, like some of these more industrial markets, you [00:48:00] look at companies like Samsara leading the way as well of saying like actually vertical SAS.
Can be really effective. It's hard. It's really hard. But when he gets right, like you've got incredible GRR, you've got bigger TAMs than you ever imagined because you see this evolution and we're seeing it in policing now where budget is shifting from headcount to And so the first time it's ever happened to us was in Katy, Texas, I And the police chief went to city council and said, look, I have a, I have a headcount problem and I have no plan to fix it. I do not have an answer, but I do have this thing called technology and the fully loaded costs when you include pension and benefits. It's about $150,000 a year for an entry level officer.
That's the same cost of 50 cameras. Now, I can't get rid of all of my police officers, and we know that'd be a horrible idea, but man, to take two officers off of, of, of headcount, which I can't even fill anyways and go get a hundred cameras, that'll impact our entire police department. Like that's such an obvious ROI and so I, I'm seeing more and more of these police chiefs.
And the newer command staff saying we got to find the right balance. Got to find the right balance of sworn versus unsworn technology versus head count. Uh, there, there is, there's a balance there think that's a really, really exciting to
Logan: So, so what's next for, uh, for flock. So we talked about license plate readers, which, uh, I think is still the majority of the revenue and, uh, you know, a big component of solving crime for you all. I've seen now. There's, there's a product called Raven as well that you guys have launched around gunshot detection.
Can you talk through like the, the suite that you have today and the aspirations of where you're going to go?
Garrett: Yeah. So I'll start with the aspirations and come back to what we do today. Uh, every quarter, the, the team looks at all the crimes that happen in and try to draw a direct line to a product we've built to help [00:50:00] And there's a lot of crimes we you, you mentioned, uh, our core product Falcon reading license plates.
That solves a lot of crimes entering, uh, entering auto residential burglaries. A bunch of that. We never had a product that helped solve violent particularly gun related. So we developed Raven, which is our gunshot detection technology, which solves gun violence every single day, which is a sad reality of our society, but it is a reality.
And so we built this product to go help solve it. And there are cases, you know, whether you go to a Wichita, Kansas, or an Albany, Georgia, where they're shocked. At the level of gun violence they had because no one calls 9 1 When someone gets shot and so that's been really interesting to We have developed a new product called flock os 9 it's really cool.
One of the things I didn't realize Is that if you call 9 1 1 until you effectively finish the phone call, it's not entered into what's called CAD or computer aided dispatch and no one on the first responder side has any idea you're having a You could have an officer like a block away from you.
You've got a 2 to 5 minute lag before them even being And so if lockout is 9 1 1. Allows us to co listen, kind of like dial into a bridge of the 911 call and send that directly to the nearest officer. So now if you called 911, we find the nearest officer. And if, if they're within a relative distance, right?
So if it's Manhattan, that might be like a block, two blocks. This traffic is really bad. If you're in a more suburban town, that might be a mile or three miles. But if you're in that radius, We will ping the nearest officer and say, Hey, there's an active 911 call happening right now. Click play. They can click play.
They can listen to the call. They can make a judgment call of like, is this appropriate for me to start to dispatch? And if it is, what we're seeing is that response are going down dramatically, often beating the call from hanging up. And that's like the dream state or dream state. So if you call 911 [00:52:00] before you even hang up an officer's on uh, I think that would dramatically change how officers dispatch.
And to our earlier conversation on, on human capital, when we're in an, and we're in a shortage of this is a way to actually We can get them going before things So we have like a whole slew of products like that, where we're looking for these kinds of.
pinpointed problems of what's happening in this town, what's happening in that town. How do we help them solve more of their crimes? And like, one of the favorite things that I get to do is I travel the country and I'll sit down with a mayor and a police chief and say, Hey, tell me about a crime that didn't get Pull up one of your cold cases. Let's like work through that. And that, that, that kind of becomes our roadmap for what products to go build.
Logan: And so, so today this, the, the, the, the suites that you sell, like the incremental things, what, what are the,
Garrett: So we've got, yeah, so we've got a camera focused on cars. Um, we have a, uh, camera that's focused on intersections, kind of like live view, uh, live view camera. So if you take someone like, uh, Fresno, um, they bought almost our entire suite. It's pretty awesome. They have our LPRs, so you can track cars. They have, yep, license plate reader. Uh, they have our product called Condor, which is for situational awareness. So they deploy those at intersections, right? So they want it, they want to know what's happening in an intersection and click play and pull it right up. They have Raven, which is a gunship detection technology.
Um, and then they have FlockOS, which is really our, our situational awareness platform. Uh, and that allows them to go into the community and say, Hey, if you're a business owner, a homeowner, you can subscribe and we can now have access to your cameras. Um, and what that means is In a single pane of glass, Fresno can pull up and say, Hey, there's a, there's a 911 call happening right now.
And this local community, this local business owner, whether it's a strip mall or a gas station, they've allowed us to integrate with our cameras. We can now pull [00:54:00] that up. Um, and it's like this dramatic increase, uh, productivity and deeper engagement with the community. So we got that product, um, and then a whole bunch of stuff coming down the line too.
Logan: That's cool. What, um, if you're, if you're painting a utopian version of the future for flock and the impact on, uh, society, is there any, um, what, what would be the, the most concrete kind of utopian vision for, for where you, uh, where you want to go in the coming decade?
Garrett: Yeah. So my kids are in starting kindergarten, so I got like until they're in high school, but I'd say my goal is that by the time they're in high school, crime is largely not a We're not going to get rid of evil people. Right. Let me clarify. All right. Well, there's still going to be evil people, but if you talk about. well, I feel good that my 15 or 16 year old daughter is driving in Atlanta. Well, I feel like she's safe all I think if we solve that problem, that's what we're out to do. And I think we'll do it. Like the cool thing is that it is happening in small pockets Um, and it's just a question of, I guess it's the, is it Mark Andreessen who said, you know, the, the future is ready here.
It's just unevenly distributed. I think that's the case for us too, where we see these pockets. Where crime is largely a thing of the past. And I, I imagined that world where just don't talk about crime anymore. and I know it's probably hard for people to imagine, but I guess I would equate it to, you the idea of having like one drink and driving used to be pretty normal, right?
Like taxis were kind of complicated. You know, black cars were way too expensive. So you have like one drink at dinner, then drive Now it's like, why would you Like ride sharing has completely changed the way we move around And Uber's not even that old of a company. And like, fundamentally changes, [00:56:00] And I look at public safety and like, that just hasn't happened. And I think we're the ones who are gonna be able to do
Logan: it's exciting.
Logan: I want to transition a little bit to operating and some of the beliefs you have around around running a business. Um, so there's always a balance between a market and a team in starting a company. Uh, and it sounds like you've much more gravitated while your market opportunity is as compelling as it is.
You've gravitated more to the business. Yeah. To the people side of things. Can you talk about how you think about, uh, the, the trade off between those two and an idea and market centric versus people and, uh, you know, that, that, that side,
Garrett: Yeah, I am a staunch believer in that people product trumps market. I think great teams build great products and find great markets. Uh, I just, I don't, I don't know any other way to do it. Uh, I don't know. It's kind of hard to imagine how you'd start otherwise. And so I've just always believed If you have a great team, the rest comes with that in the absence of great team, I think it's really hard.
And I look at flock as a great example. If you look at that, the original kind of pitch or our seed and our series a, there was nothing about local government. We were a hundred percent And we've now realized that local good market. It's because we had a great team, like the, the team found that
Logan: Hmm.
Garrett: Uh, and so like, for me, at least I've had the three companies in a row. And flock is by multiple orders of magnitude, the business, biggest, biggest business we've built. And I think it's just, we have a really good team that works really well together. We've built three really good businesses together.
This is the biggest, because we happen to get the best market, but like absent that team, I just, I don't know. I think it's so hard to get the team, right. Um, and I think also this might be a, maybe a Southern I just think like one of the best parts about being an entrepreneur is you get to pick who you work with.
If I didn't want to have to get to pick who I work with, I'd go work at someone [00:58:00] else's And so like, why would you not when that's one of the only things you actually can control? And I would go sell, know, water to the ocean with the right people. Like, I don't know, I just, I just find the market and the product to be less interesting than like, I spend my
Logan: Yeah. Um, one of the things we talked about before we hopped on is, uh, you all have a unique approach to hiring and the onboarding process where there's, there's kind of a two way pip or there's, there's expectations set up around a job. spec and what the job to be done is. Can you, can you talk through that method of, of how you make that work?
Garrett: Yeah. I, uh, we'll go on the record saying I hate the idea of job descriptions. I think there's they're really dumb because they're creating, they're creating an art, they're creating this like artificial layer between what we're going to ask you to go do, it's like, you need seven years of product marketing like, why, why, why is that relevant? Why is that relevant at all? And it's like, oh, you will own. this like bland? It's like such fluff when the fact of the matter is like at flock, at we only open a role if the person's going to make an immediate measurable impact to the business within 90 And if they're not going to do that, then it's not a job. You're just adding a body to a problem. It's like, I just believe very deeply. There's a, there's a saying, uh, Michael Siebel at YC said this during our batch, the fastest your company will ever run is during this batch. So set the velocity as high as possible and hold on to dear life that you And I think people are the same. And so like, I have this strong belief that if you come out of the gate slow, you will never speed I've never met an individual that like picks up pace. And like, oh, their third year of being a flock. They're now operating at max capacity. Like, no, like their first week is gonna tell me exactly how they're gonna [01:00:00] And so what we tend to do is put together a very, very actionable 90 day plan for every new employee was during the interview process. So literally The beginning of every quarter, when we do uh, my co founder Paige and I review every single 90 day plan. And that's how we decide what roles actually get open.
I don't, I trust my CFO James keep us honest on like budget, but Paige and I look at like, are people actually gonna make an impact? Is the plan actionable? And what that does. Is it drives this deep level of alignment between a new employee and their Because you're effectively telling them this is how i'm going to keep score as your and like so few jobs actually most jobs are like, oh, I mean maybe in your line of work It's like quite invest in good companies You still have like a what five year delay on whether or not you made a good decision
Logan: would say it's actually quite hard because there's so many different people that do it very differently. And so there's no like pattern matching that you could do of how to practice the
Garrett: No, no, and so like for us we just say look we're a very unique culture We expect people to come out of the gate very fast We expect people to make an impact within their first 30 days And at the end of 90 days, if you're not like super happy and want to still be here, you because this will never show up on your resume.
No one will look down upon it. And like you're in and out, it's like very little loss. And as a hiring manager, you're also going like, can't make an impact at this company within your first 90 days, there's zero reason to believe you ever And that's okay. Like, let's do this now. Let's not wait.
And so I view it as a two way thing. Um, because we're, I think there are a lot of great companies. We run ours very specifically and it's not for everyone and that's okay. Uh, but we found it to be really effective. It's like an awesome tool. It also is just a, we've now noticed as we've got employees get into their third, fourth, fifth year at the company.
that we use that same tool pretty, pretty often. Um, so now it's like, if you have a new manager, you have to have a 90 day plan. If you have a new responsibility in the company, you get a new 90 day If you just feel like you're lacking alignment with your [01:02:00] manager, like as a, as an employee, you can tell your manager, like, I want a 90 day Like, I want to know how you're tracking my Uh, and we see like our best people tend to ask for it the most, because those people want to be on the steepest career trajectory. And the easiest way to get more responsibility is like, tell me how you're keeping score because I want to go one step above Like if that's what you think success is, then like, great, I'm going to add four more bullets and go do these two. Uh, and it's been, it's been a really, really impactful
Logan: Your mission is such that, um, I assume it draws people that are in particular, uh, uh, feel motivated and empowered to help, uh, solve crime and, and believe in what you guys are doing. I think one of the tensions that ultimately exists when you have a very mission driven organization Uh, company is that, um, people are going to be on different lines of, uh, of, uh, the spectrum, uh, uh, when it comes to different considerations and debates and things, things like that.
Uh, and it's not always going to be. Consistent and people are going to view it as something more than just a job. Uh, it's it's it's viewed as, you know, some some level of total fulfillment because they're there for something beyond just the ability to make money. Um, I guess one, you do. Do you agree with that?
And two, when those situations present themselves like, How do you lead to resolution, uh, when a lot of these things, maybe you're opaque or there's, there's often two sides of the coin, uh, that, that both could be true, but you need to ultimately come up with one side.
Garrett: Yeah, it's, so we do this, we do this thing. Paige and I do this thing every Friday for new employees. We've got like our cultural norms. We walk through. And more detail, like what you're expecting, how you're expected to And one of the topics is mission versus because a lot of our employees, I'd say the majority of them [01:04:00] would work for free at Flock, maybe not forever, but as long as they could, because they just, they, they didn't necessarily have the desire to carry a gun and a badge, but they had a desire to impact And most of our employees are a lot of our employees career point where they've had a lot of success. They've kind of hit a point and they're now looking for more. They want more than just compensation. They want fulfillment in their career, and we give that to people, but it creates this challenge, right?
Because we're not a nonprofit to be very clear. Every one of our employees has equity in the business, their owners, and like businesses generally are measured by some discounted cashflow. So like we got to make money. Uh, and what we try to remind people, what I try to remind people if you look at the the biggest companies actually tend to be the ones that have the biggest impact on the world.
And you look at someone like Apple, and it was a good company, but it has reached trillion dollar status because of the iPhone, which makes sense. The iPhone has like changed the world. You look at Google and it's like, literally as a verb, like it should be a massive company. It's changed the way we access information.
And so the point I try to make to the team is like, The worst thing we could actually do is go out of business. If we don't charge our customers, if we don't make money, we will go out of business. And that could be, that is the worst So we try to find that balance of like, we, the best thing we can do is succeed, solve crime, make money, build a big business.
But I do think that business model aside, let's assume we fast forward 10 years from now and crime is largely gone and it's because of us. It's like hard to imagine a world where we're not a hundred plus billion dollar That's at least my belief. I hope, I hope, I hope that comes true, but I just think those two are actually like pretty correlated and you don't have to give one without the
Logan: You're a self professed, um, micromanager, uh, or, or, uh, I don't know if that's the term you would use, but [01:06:00] very in the details of, of, of things. How do you think about that as part of your job versus the other thing of, um, I don't know, autonomy, empowerment, all, whatever the, the other side of, of that, uh, coin would be, uh, and your responsibility as CEO.
Garrett: Yeah. I do think, and this might be a, uh, Southern thing or a Georgia thing. Like I, I, everyone in the company eventually reports to And so this, newer concept that I shouldn't care about every detail of what you do really weird to me because like it is my job to care about what you're doing.
It is my job to give you direction. It is my job to sweat the details. And it, it's like, it, it just is weird to me that not every CEO and every employee Um, cause like, we're not a democracy There's, it's a pyramid, like, uh, I sit at the top, which means I'm also ultimately responsible.
Like every quarter my board sits around the table and says, is Garrett still the best CEO to run this company? They sit above me. Uh, and at some point they might decide I'm not, and then I'm out. Um, and I guess the way I look at it I think about my job in three functions. Um, some days I'm, I'm my direct reports manager and I'm deep in their Um, and I want to get into every single detail and it makes, makes people very uncomfortable. Um, but people assume falsely that it is a trust issue. Like, I don't trust you. So I want to micromanage and say, no, I actually, I actually want to help you be successful and in an environment that at least I'm in now and in a company, that's about a thousand people fully distributed.
I don't know how else to make good decisions without access to And that looks like micromanaging, but it's really like, I don't know how else to make Second part of my job is to be [01:08:00] right? So it's like, how are we making decisions together? And the third job I actually do is like, how do I work for you?
And so if you think about like my, my, our CRO, I'm on the road every single week visiting with customers on our biggest deals. I'm working for him to help him hit his Now, when I'm also there, I'm assessing the quality of our demos? What's the quality of the relationships we have with these prospects?
Like, how are we progressing this deal? And so I guess for me, like I expect my team to do the exact same thing. And I just don't believe that the right management hire smart people and let them run. I think that's crazy. Uh, it's like, how will they know where to run? It's your job as a manager to force that alignment.
And I think, uh, one of my board members once described it as, uh, It often feels like you have the eye of Sauron, you know, from like the Lord of the Rings. Uh, because it seems like wherever we put our energy behind things get better. And at least that's what I've noticed is the places I tend to direct my energy tend to get better a lot faster.
Uh, and so, you know, on a quarterly basis, monthly basis, that energy tends to shift. And people get a little bit uncomfortable, but people come out of the other end of it quite happy because they got the force of the company behind them. Because if it's truly a problem, it's unlikely a performance most likely a lack of resources. Like I love it. We have this one prominent company today and it's like, it's kind of on the side. It wasn't a big deal. Started seeing customer data come back with the people, our customers really frustrated. And I dig in and I'm like, is just a staffing issue.
Like I think we're literally understaffed by three X. just, we just didn't, we didn't design this right. And then was able to immediately open up budget to go triple the And so that person, the person was like really uncomfortable for about a month because She was like, man, Garrett's like really digging I'm not used to this level of scrutiny, but then you [01:10:00] walk out of it. And it's like, no, I think you're doing a great job. Let's go hire. Let's go hire 12 more people. Like now, excited. So I don't know, I guess for me, I've just always been a person that just loves to be in the details and loves to see raw progress and work in progress.
And I hate Hate this idea that as a CEO, like I only get delivered polished goods. It's just like, that's boring. I don't know. Like, I don't want to just sit here and get presentations all day of like, how good we're doing and all the things that are going well, but it's like, I don't know, I don't work at a company that's a hundred years old, that's generating lots of cashflow.
Like I work at a company that's growing like a weed where we have only problems. So I just want to go solve those
Logan: Speaking of growing like a weed, uh, so, so you're, you said you're roughly a thousand people today. Is
Garrett: Yeah, about a thousand people. Yeah,
Logan: Uh, and what, what were you, I don't know, two years ago or three years ago?
Garrett: probably three or four hundred, three hundred.
Logan: Okay. So,
Garrett: We doubled headcount year over year for a while, and I think we grew headcount by about forty
Logan: so, so doubling health count year over year, uh, means that you're, uh, you know, uh, counting some, some attrition, then that means that, uh, you know, usually when you look around a room, um, half or more than half of the people have been there for less than, less than 12 months. Right. Uh, so how do you think about the balance or how have you been able to balance, um, scaling?
A team as fast as you have while making sure people are aligned and, you know, keeping a culture that is consistent across an organization when so many of the bodies are new at any given time.
Garrett: yeah. Uh, I don't know if we do it well. I think we're definitely trying a few things that have worked well though. I mentioned this briefly, but I'll come back to it. Every new employee gets two touch points with Paige and myself in [01:12:00] their first Uh, and the first one is just like a. Uh, wide open, just like, let's just have a coffee chat, you know, it's on zoom, which is not ideal.
Um, and like that, that's really helpful. The more helpful one though is about four years ago when the business was really starting to scale. I got this advice from, Ben Horowitz that like, if you don't write your culture down, It is inherently weak. In the absence of like a written culture, you will, your culture will just fade away.
Garrett: And in a remote environment, even harder, right? Because you don't see these people, you don't interact with people. And so Paige and I looked around the room and said, who are best people? And why do we think they're the And what do they do? Like, how are they making decisions?
Garrett: So we started this document, And it evolves, right? It's continued to evolve, but we call it our cultural norms. And it is like, it is a representation of the best people on their best days. And no one's perfect. Like I fail all the time on this but like when I'm having my best day, I'm hitting all of these in it.
Garrett: And it is not the soft and fluffy, like be nice, you know, like it's like actual actionable Um, like, like one being, you know, responsiveness, like our best people are really, really responsive. I think that's common across a lot of companies, but like it's important to us. And so when we have our new employees. Paige and I sit down and we read this document together out loud and share stories. And every employee has to go through this and every employee exits saying, you've all read this.
You're all signing up that you will hold each other accountable And I think it works because like I can't be everywhere. Paige can't be everywhere. Matt can't be And we all then have this single kind of of like what it means to work at Flock and how we're going to live these values.
And Being responsive is one being mission oriented as one. Um, you can kind of go down this list of like things that are very uniquely flock that the other thing that I think has worked well is I'm just on the [01:14:00] Um, and when I'm on the road, I'm not only there to visit customers, I'm there to visit And so that gives me a chance to see our people kind of like in real life, not just like, Oh, let's grab dinner, but like, let's go visit a customer. Let's go do an install. Um, let's go do whatever it may be.
Garrett: And I just, I think that even in a hybrid company, you cannot remove the And so we have an expectation that every, every employee will get at least two in person touch points a one with their team and one with the whole company.
And so I guess I'd say like, we, we tend to be very designed about when are those touch points. Um, I think the general rule of thumb is like, you've got about 90 to 180 days before those touch points fade. And they lose the impact that kind of emotion and excitement. So I guess we try to be pretty thoughtful about how we do that.
Logan: One of the things that often, uh, happens and I I've talked to, uh, different folks on the podcast before about this, but, um, Sometimes you run into the issue that your, um, your senior leaders or people, uh, in the organization are better at, um, managing up in communicating than they are doing real substantive work.
And I think it's true of any organization. I, one of your board members told me that you had, um, maybe some interesting thoughts or frameworks about how you go about assessing if people are, uh, Full of shit, uh, and, and all talk are actually substantive in the work that they're doing.
Garrett: Yeah, I think the natural tendency for companies is to spend more time talking about work actually working, which is like kind of weird, but it starts to happen. Like it's a very, it's a very natural thing that I've noticed is even happening at Flock. And I think some of it is. if you have enough people, you just talk more is not desirable, but it happens for us.
The thing that I always look at is, like a lot of we do some variant of OKRs, [01:16:00] but what's different is for us is at the end of that process, we do it once a quarter. We look at, okay, across the executive what's the distribution of ownership. And like, generally for us, anyone below a director should never own an OKR because an output that the company cares about. So if it's like a. It's an IC that's now like a performance review and that's not the goal. So it should be a director. And I expect anyone pretty much VP and above to own at least one, if not two OKRs every And when I say own, I expect them actually putting like, not like, Oh yeah, I'll manage the team and I'll set the goals.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, like real actual work. Um, and one of the ways we're able to do that is like every two weeks. When we do a, like a check in, whoever is the owner is actually the one writing the update and it goes to the entire And it is very, very easy to smell because you notice that their updates aren't very detailed.
Their updates don't have any actual action And it's like, Oh, here's the update on the metric. It's like, yeah, but what, what did you do? Like, uh, what did you get done in the last Um, as an individual, um, and when that accountability is coming across their peers versus just me, it sets the bar pretty high.
Um, cause now whether it's the general counsel or it's this VP of sales, this VP of Inj, uh, that is really, really, I think better. It, we used to do it in a way that I was the one driving this. And now this kind of a peer accountability has leveled the expectations that no one, we're not a big enough company for pure people managers.
No one is allowed to just manage people, myself Um, I carry a bag. figure out what are the, you know, five or 10 deals I can line. What is the one or two products that I can help to production? Uh, and so for us, it's just critical part of who we are.
Logan: One of the things I've heard you talk about is, um, the, the being a macro optimist, but micro pessimist within a, uh, within your business. Can you, can you, can you [01:18:00] speak to that? What does that mean? How do you internalize it? How do you go about actionable eyes again?
Garrett: Yeah. The, the, I, I like the same, I think it does describe how we act. What it looks like though, is it means we never as a business talk about it's working, why are we talking about it? Just let it go. Let it keep running. And so it gives an executive team, it can be depressing at times because we only talk about problems.
Uh, we only talk about the things that are failing because on a local level, on a, on a small time all we should be doing is being worried about the things that are going And, and the job, I think, as an executive is to hold two truths that can be opposite, which is I can be incredibly depressed and frustrated and focused These things that are broken.
Well, at the same time, like I just said, I do generally think that in 10 years from now, flock will have eliminated crime in America. No, a lot of problems. I gotta go solve it later today when we wrap up, but like in 10 years, I think we're going to do great. Uh, and like, that's because I generally am, optimistic for that longterm perspective, but I think that what founders in particular and executives have a problem of doing.
Is when you only present that optimistic perspective, you lose the confidence because they're living in the shit every single day of all the problems that Like they're living in this reality that like, well, this customer's mad and, and this, this new product is delayed. Or, and when you go on stage and in all hands and say like, we're a great company, they're like, well, maybe, but my world is a mess.
And so we've got to find that balance of saying like, you can be happy and optimistic while saying we have a lot of And like, here's the plan. And so our internal kind of cultural value is optimism, but with a it's okay to be but you do actually have to have a plan because most of the things we are working on are a problem and you can smile about it, but what we have seen people go off track on, I think I've worked with a [01:20:00] lot of founders as well, where it's like, they're optimistic so much so that they lack the plan.
And I'm like, Excited that you think you're going to 10X your business and revenue this year. Do you actually have the pipeline to do that? Do you actually have the headcount, the quota to do that? Like it's cool that you think you can do it. So it works out well.
Garrett: I'd say the downside to we tend to never celebrate milestones.
Like we got to a hundred million in ARR in just under four years from starting the company. And it was like, I sent a text to our CRO and I was like, nice, good job. And he's like, thanks. And then we had like a slide on all hands and like, then we just went back to work because it's like, yeah, it's, it's working.
And it's like, that's kind of a bummer. Cause I think that I, I think we could do a better job recognizing that, like, we're, we're working hard. It's generally working. It's a good company, but also like, I think is somewhat fact that we don't weigh on our success. And then we focus on things that are
Logan: Yeah. And also, uh, I think to hear you talk about it, and I assume for a lot of your employees, the financial, uh, metrics are, uh, validating of the, the, the mission, uh, but they're not the goal in and of themselves, right. As a standalone.
Garrett: I think the last time we checked the majority, super majority, Of our employees. This is the first ever venture backed company So like the finances don't even, they almost don't even believe it. Like when we tell them like, Oh, the company's worth X billions of dollars. They're like, I don't even know what that
Logan: yeah.
Garrett: like, that's an irrelevant, that's like irrelevant to me. Like we have to spend a lot of effort reminding could be financially like very, very, very lucrative for them. It just doesn't, it doesn't matter. They could go get better jobs that pay more
Logan: Yeah, it's fascinating.
Logan: I, um, one of the, [01:22:00] one of the employees that you've had and I guess you've worked with, uh, for, for a while, um, is actually your mother and, uh, and she is, uh, I guess I don't know what her official title is right now. She, is she your executive
Garrett: she is. That is her. That is her title.
Logan: Executive assistant to you. How, uh, one, how did that come to be?
Uh, what was that interview process like, and what is it like, uh, working with? I've, I've heard a lot of, uh, brother, sister combos, you know, uh, I guess, uh, father, son is a lot. I, I, I, I don't know if I know any examples where the, the mother, uh, is working for the son in that way. So definitely a unique first.
Garrett: I've actually, I've yet to meet anyone else that's in this dynamic. I'll leave it as a secret. should try it maybe more often. Uh, so I first started working with my when I was I had started a business, I say business as a gross exaggeration. I started fixing people's computers and getting paid to do it.
Um, and one of the challenges is that when I started doing that, I'd make people bring me their and then I'd work on it at my house and then call them and say, Hey, you know, your computer is now but not a lot of people want to drive their Oh, that's pretty annoying. And so my mom was actually like, Hey, you know, I could just drive you to these people's houses and just wait for And I was like, well, you know, like, yeah, but you have a job. Um, this would be taking away from hours. You can work like I should just pay you Uh, it was really weird. I remember we were like, yeah, I guess like logically this all makes sense. So she became my driver and she would drive me to people's houses and these small businesses and she'd wait for, wait in the car and I would do my thing.
And then just, you know, a piece of the revenue just went straight to her. This is like I'm 14, I'm in 5th grade. Um, sorry [01:24:00] not 5th grade, I'm grade. Uh, it's really strange in hindsight. Like I, I don't, we obviously have a very unique relationship. And then, um, she was working at another company when I started Flock.
And at the point that I felt like Flock was, No longer like a high risk of dying. Um, it's like around our series B series C when it's about things like really working. Uh, I called her and I was like, we should get the band back Um, like, uh, like I, I want this to be the last place you work. Um, and if you have young kids, And maybe I'm unique here.
The biggest stress I have in life is not my When my kids are sick, when something goes wrong at school, that's the deepest level of anxiety I exhibit. And so, while she's a great admin, managing my calendar is not complicated. She doesn't touch my email, she barely manages some calendar, but like the biggest thing that it provides is I now have a third parent in the Um, and I said before, I travel a lot, I'm gone almost every week. I have a third parent around that actually not only just loves my kids, but my kids love her. And so I, at least for me, you know, there's this more holistic approach of for me to be the best version of myself to the company, removing some of the stress from a personal life is actually the biggest gap she's able to do that and make it a traditional model.
That wouldn't work. Uh, but as my mother, it's like, yeah, so she's at my house every day. She works from my house to see her. And it's like, I think it's a, it's a better quality of life for everyone. it's pretty unique, but I think more people, more people should try it. More people should
Logan: uh, uh, I wonder my mom's listening right now. If she's going to have a request for a job at this point, but it's an interesting dynamic to have, have that set up. Um,
Garrett: review season is always a little tricky,
Logan: yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine. I, uh, I don't know how that would [01:26:00] play out for me, but it's a, uh, I've got, it's, it, it, listen, having, especially when the line blends between EA and PA and, you know, grandmother and, uh, you know, all of that stuff.
So I, um, yeah, it's a interesting setup, I'm sure, but, um,
Jacob: Hey guys, I'm Jacob Efron, a partner of Logan's at Redpoint. Wanted to take a quick break from the episode to let you know that Red Point's AI podcast, Unsupervised Learning, now has its own YouTube channel. We have an incredible set of guests really at the forefront of the AI revolution.
So if you're interested in what's happening in AI, what it means for businesses in the world, definitely subscribe. Now back to the show.
Logan: Hey, one of the things I heard you mention was that, uh, there's kind of this ethos in Silicon Valley of, of like the 19 year old or 20 year old or 22, whatever it is going and starting a company right away. And I think a lot of it's rooted in, uh, um, you have the level of scrappiness and you're less, uh, income can be kind of sticky and quality of life can be sticky.
And so as you get. more of the trappings of, uh, of, of some level of wealth, your ability to go back in time, uh, I think can be, can be difficult. Um, I, I had heard you mention that like one of the best experiences you had was actually Not starting a company right out of the gates, but instead joining a company in the very early days, but learning from people that had been there, done that.
Can you talk about that, that, um, yeah, that Silicon Valley ethos of like the Zuckerbergs and the Collison's and, uh, whoever it is that have been sort of the canonical examples of young entrepreneurs versus, um, gaining a little bit of experience and how that benefited you.
Garrett: Yeah.
So I think there's, there's two problems. I think starting a company when you're like 18 or uh, I think one, you just haven't had a lot of And so I think you tend to make pretty bad decisions. And I think there are some people clearly that muscle through it and are just incredibly smart, incredibly good [01:28:00] operators.
You think about someone like, Zuckerberg's easy examples. Like he just built a great team. He built a great product. Like he just, he figured it out fast enough. he is one in a billion. Uh, and I think there is a lot to learn from great leaders, great people. And you just wind up being, I think a better CEO or a better founder when you just have more life I think the second challenge too is you tend to pick pretty dumb ideas when you're that age, but you just haven't seen as much business. You haven't seen as much of the world. And so I think about one of my closest friends, uh, actually is a pretty young CEO, uh, he fits that bucket, uh, and he's now running a very successful company and it's awesome, but like he went through four years of working on totally the wrong idea to then do a massive pivot to a much better idea. And I think it worked out well for him, but I think that if he was, four years wiser, seven years wiser, he'd never would have gone after the dumb idea because it would have been clear to him that like, this is not that actually that interesting of a business to go start. And so I do feel, uh, maybe inappropriately strongly about it because it's my own personal experience where I got the benefit of working incredible people, watching them build a company.
I was the first employee, this company, we then went on to co found a company together. Um after that one so learned even more And by the time, you know flock came around it was the third company I co founded and I was like, I I feel really comfortable I'm, still a little bit uncomfortable running a company this size but like beginnings i'm like I know what we're working on is a big problem I know that if this is be a really really big And that to me, I don't know you don't Life isn't endless.
Like you only get so many shots on goal. And I just would, I would hate to waste it's, successful, right, you're going to go spend seven to 10 years working on something [01:30:00] like, God, I would hate to waste any moment on an idea that is actually not, isn't big enough for at least what I want to do.
Obviously people might have different goals, but I have always wanted to build a company that mattered, that I really mattered and to do that if 22,
Logan: How old were you when you started Flock?
Garrett: 30.
Logan: And so at that 30, you, you, you had had, uh, a couple, uh, exits, right? I think two, 200 million exits. And, and, uh, it sounds like you took some time off and maybe, uh, got your handicap down from a, a golf game standpoint. Like what, um, what.
Logan: That period of time. It's a weird thing.
I think to have success early and especially to have been through the, the mission of the company, right? You, the business had sold and you had, uh, you, you had been through a lot of, uh, of that, maybe that moment in time. And, um, I don't know, quarter life crisis or, uh, existential consideration. Did you, was that a, a moment of sort of reckoning, uh, of like, Hey, what, what am I going to do from here?
I've accomplished what I maybe. dreamed of far earlier than I expected. And what was that moment in time? Like,
Garrett: Uh, it's definitely uncomfortable in hindsight. Um, it was to your point. We, we, my wife and I had kind of accomplished the financial things we really wanted to do and professionally I'd accomplished know, at least partially the things I wanted to do and to your early question on like people versus team versus market, you know, the first business was in, you know, What would now be called FinTech second business was in, was in live events and sports built another business in automotive.
And what I had noticed is it was always with people that I liked And I guess what I kind of came down to the conclusion is like, there's only one thing I can actually is who I spend time And I want to go [01:32:00] spend time with people that I like working with. And the easiest way to do that is to go build a company.
Uh, sort of forces us to work together. And I think what I'd also come to a conclusion of was. Selling companies is great, but you do lose control of your company. And I get the question all the time from our employees. It's like, Oh, would you ever sell flock? And it's like, yeah, I mean, I get, you know, I have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, which is all of our employees, myself, our investors, man, it's really fun to run this company.
Logan: yeah.
Garrett: Like, and like, what would I do? Then just go start another
Logan: Yeah.
Garrett: Like, I like the people that I work with. Like I have built a really good team. I love my co founders. Uh, I love our customers. Like, well, what would I do next? Like, I don't know. I've got too many things that are unsolved And so I guess for me, like, it's been fun because at least in the last two companies, we sold them because we actually kind of achieved the mission.
Like we built the product, we got market share. were small in terms of revenue, but it wasn't as if we had 10 years of roadmap waiting to be built. Whereas at Flock, man, I have so many things I want to go do. And we're farther ahead in revenue where then I would say our impact, you know, like I, I think there's so much left undone.
And so for me, what I'm now realizing, in hindsight, it's like, this was a calling for me. And I have the right kind of DNA or makeup to do all the political stuff that has to be done to deal with local and state government and federal government and enough engineering prowess to like build the original product and like, Kind of Goldilocks type situation.
And also the skin these days that's thick enough to weather the hit pieces day after day after day. Um, knowing that we're doing better for the world. So yeah, it was a weird time. Uh, and really like [01:34:00] appreciative. I had a very supportive wife me in this direction. Um, I've eventually like, Hey, get off, get off your butt.
Stop playing golf and like go build Like you're a builder. Go build.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a, uh, uh, uh, uh, a good, um, critic and also a good, uh, nudge, uh, along the way. Uh, I think that, that we're all appreciative of, of her, her service to, uh, to doing that. Um, one of the things I think, uh, uh, that, that I had heard and we had discussed a little bit before we started recording was that you specifically didn't want to start.
I think dopey was the term that you used and maybe your uncle was the motivator. Uh, Behind, behind doing that. So in your mind, like, what does it actually mean not starting a dopey company and how did that, uh, how did that like help influence the decision to go after Flock?
Garrett: my uncle was my, my closest mentor and was always very, very good with and he coined the term for me of like, don't go build another dopey business calling the last three companies. I had started quite dopey, which, okay. And I would hit his point was, you know, he had built a black And while he loved the team and they had an incredible team, like love the people, the business was moving Adams, sorry, bits around making money, but like zero incremental value to the zero, maybe negative. And I think that weighed on him. Um, and his advice to me was like, You should go build something that you're really, really proud of.
Not a part of just the team because of course you'll build a great team. That's kind of like a requirement, but like one that if you left the team left, you'd be like, man, that mattered. And that was our only filter for Paige and Matt and I have like all the ideas we were building. It had to be one that [01:36:00] And we've shared a few stories together of some of the success block has had on the impact side. Like those are not Um, and every day we see those stories and not every company gets that. Um, you know, you think about a company I like to pick on Salesforce because they're wildly successful. If Salesforce disappeared tomorrow, who No one would care. We'd all switch to HubSpot or we'd switch to, you know, Whatever the next CRM winds up being but it's just it's just a CRM. That's it. piece of software And like it's very hard. I think once you've tasted something like flock to go back to that I think it's really hard because you realize that Your skills as a technologist whether you're an engineer or marketer and sales Or someone like yourself who deploys capital.
God, it is way more fun to be involved in a business that really changes people's lives. Like really does it not the like hand waving. That's one of the reasons why I think we've been successful fundraising to the end of the day. You're a human too. You're a dad, you're a husband, you're a partner, you've got grandparents and parents and friends.
And when you explain this crazy AI product that doesn't actually really do anything, but it's going to be a great investment. You're excited because that's your job. You do have to go LPs. But you're so much more proud and excited when the company you're partnering with or working with is actually easy to explain and makes an impact.
And that's, you know, one of the things that we hold very dearly.
Logan: It sounds like you, you all had a fairly serendipitous journey, uh, on fundraising, going to YC. See, and you know, you had good investors from the start. I think bedrock initialize a matrix, like a bunch of people initially. But there was this, um, point that I think almost every company goes through stripe is maybe the exception, uh, but almost every, every company has like a shitty fundraising round, uh, that they really struggle to get, get done.
Logan: I guess, can you, can you. [01:38:00] Talk through the circumstances around being three months away from running out of capital and the business doing well, but for the first time, like it may be coming a little more difficult to fundraise. Like what were the circumstances around that? And are there lessons that, um, can be extrapolated for the entrepreneur listening?
Garrett: Yeah.
Um, I always felt like I had a pretty good market and like how people perceive the business. I think what I got wrong is there are certain points in time where investor class changes. And with that perspective on a business changes. And I think series B and probably let's call it like pre IPO slash IPO, or there's two trigger points where like in a series B investment, I'm now learning this in hindsight, uh, it's not just the story anymore.
Like the, the metrics really matter because in a seed or series a investment, it's like pretty easy to, to underwrite to attend a hundred X return. Like everything about in my pitch to Gary and Alexis, I've initialized. They're like, do you think this thing can get to 100 million in ARR? I was like, yeah, let me show you why.
And it's like on a napkin. You can say, well, there's 400, 000 neighborhoods in America. I think they all probably like want to be safe. The average neighborhood spends 10, 000 with So like, yeah, I think I can get to 100 they're like, cool. Then this is an easy, then like, we, we love the story. This is, we can underwrite this really easily.
And I think even at series A, they're just looking for a little bit more traction, but it's the same pitch, which is like, Can this thing get to a hundred, 200 million in ARR? And therefore like, this is a good investment. What I noticed at least in series B is like, that wasn't Cause now you're talking about a price point on the business that you got to believe pretty significant revenue growth is still ahead of it.
Pretty significant, like moats in the business that like you can block [01:40:00] out competitors because if you're seeing success. Someone's going to come behind you. Uh, and so this, like the most memorable thing was we never really had like a right? Like we were very much emotional, triggered and investing.
You get people really excited about the product, the concept and the traction of the business and not a lot of and we were like laughed out of the room by these later stage investors. Who are like, your data is trash, you have nothing. Like, where's your NRR waterfall? It's like, what's an NRR It's like, we're growing fast. That's all I know. We went from a million to 6 million in ARR. In a year. And we went from 6 million to 17 million this year. Give me money. Like, like, I don't, I'm not worried about the details. Like, I just think we have a lot of And what I didn't realize is that my job was becoming the storyteller of how our TAM is growing, how our penetration, how our penetration in the markets that we're in is defensible.
Like my job had changed and I hadn't realized it. Uh, and I didn't pivot fast enough. And so to, to your point, we were down to about two, three months of runway. And only two of us in the company sky, John and when it was scary. cause like no one had any idea that like, we were at pretty big risk of not hitting payroll.
Uh, the investor community had given up on the Um, are, don't look fondly back on that period of time. Uh, we wound up having to do a kind of a mini riff layoff type thing. We had to like go all the way down to bare bottoms runway. And I had to call Gary back at initialized and say like, Hey, I, you know, I need, I need 20 million.
And he was like, I've got seven. I was like, well, well that's not, uh, that's like half, I took less than half of 20 Gary. Uh, he was like, yeah, but like, we're a seed stage investor. [01:42:00] this is already a bit of a stretch Uh, And to his credit, he believed when a lot of other people did it. Um, and he got a great price because I had no negotiating leverage at that point.
So I think he did, he did, uh, we were at about 16 million in ARR and he invested at a hundred million dollar and we had tripled the business the prior year and we wound up tripling the business again, which we said we were going to do. And everyone said, that's impossible. Uh, you're selling hardware.
This company is in a flat now. You don't, you don't know what you're doing. Uh, and we wound up proving everyone wrong. And I don't really even understand we put up another quarter of good results. And what was different is I then told John, who's in charge of our finance at the I was like, dude, we're going to run out of money.
So I chose. Even though Gary only gave me seven, I pretended like gave me spent it like he gave Uh, so I knew we were only going to have probably like three to six months of runway again, like where we would need to fundraise, like we were going to have to go back out to And I took the feedback from the investors like seriously, which was like your data room doesn't match the story.
Your data, the data you're giving us does not match what we're seeing on the top line. And so we spent a bunch of time redoing that and the business continued to put up good numbers. The business was scaling and felt like we were an entirely different
Logan: It in every round. I mean, since then, as, as I, uh, unfortunately, well, no, uh, has been very, uh, competitive and, uh, uh, you know, you, you, you've had more. Uh, interest than, uh, need for, for capital and it, was it really just the, the, the, I mean, there were some inflection point clearly you hit from a scale standpoint.
That was probably, uh, uh, [01:44:00] some whatever, uh, threshold, but was it really just the storytelling and the presentation of all of it? You just got crisper and that. And therefore, I mean, the venture of community can be sheep in a lot of ways of like sort of falling in line around stuff, but is there anything else around that?
Garrett: I think there's, there's a, there's a few things, right? Like, I think this is relevant to a lot of entrepreneurs if they're, if they're trying to serve a vertical that has not been attacked by venture successfully, although I had prior like in terms of the growth of the business, we got zero credit for future And the reason why I think it's fair, because like they're saying, well, who, who, who do you peer against? Who, who should I look to as an investor to see what's and every other company we were competing with, you know, like Axon was bootstrapped and it took Axon, 17 years to go public. And it's a 30 something year old company now.
And like, it's just like. It's a beautiful business, but man, it took almost 40 years to get That's not venture. It's a great business, but it's not venture. And you look at Motorola or other biggest competitor, and that's a hundred plus year old So as an investor, you're going like, I can't really underwrite your future goals because you're saying that, but who do I look to?
So I do think to your point at a certain point, People just started to believe me because I said, Hey, look, we're going to go from, 16, 17 million to 50 million in ARR. People were like, you're out of your freaking And I was like, ah, I think that's like, that's the plan. Like, I think we're going to hit this plan.
And you put up a quarter or two on that trajectory and everyone's like, he might be right. Like this actually, this actually might work. And his numbers do seem pretty high, but He seems to be hitting numbers. The company seems to be tracking. And so I think there was an inflection point where the investor community disagreeing with us and said, maybe these guys just actually deeply understand this market better than we [01:46:00] do.
It's bigger than we ever expected. And they've clearly figured out a way to attack it. Uh, and so every single fundraise, every single quarter, you know, I think as a business. It took six years to have our first ever quarter that wasn't net net larger and ARR growth, if that makes sense. Like we never have not a down quarter on ARR, like a down quarter on the velocity I think that was just the big, that was the other one is like the lack of a pattern to follow or like a proxy to look to. And even today as a, as a larger company, when we get the question of like, Oh, who, who do you view as? As public comps, it's kind of, we don't, Samsara, I guess, but like they serve a totally different vertical.
We have a lot of commonalities in terms of our, our metrics. And so I do think that that is. It hard to overcome until
Logan: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Logan: Well, Garrett, thank you for doing this. This was a really fun conversation and, uh, it's a, uh, incredible business. You're, you're building. I, uh, I would not. Categorize it as dopey. Uh,
Garrett: I appreciate that.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. Your uncle, uh, can be proud, uh, that, that he motivated you in a good direction here.
Garrett: I think so too. Um, well, I appreciate it. It's great to you for listening to this conversation with Garrett Langley, co founder and CEO of Flock Safety. Really impressive individual building a really important company. If you enjoyed this discussion with Garrett, please do share with anyone else. That you think might find it interesting. And please subscribe on whatever platform that you're listening on.
Each additional subscription helps us drive more listeners, which ultimately leads to our goal of bringing on better guests each subsequent week. And so your help is really appreciated. You'll hear another great guest here next week, and we look forward to seeing you back on the Logan Bartlett [01:48:00] show.