Garrett Langley of Flock Safety on building technology to solve crime

Bullish:

• $FLOCKSAFETY - Flock Safety has grown from zero to $500M ARR in 7 years, deployed in 6,000+ cities covering 50% of US population, with strong network effects and expanding into drones and enterprise markets.

  • “the business has gone from zero to about $500,000,000 in ARR in the last seven years, building cameras, drones, and selling them to the government, which is like three strikes are out.”

    Garrett·10:16

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

    Garrett·9:52

  • “North of $100,000,000 of AR. So like it's real, probably fastest growing segment.”

    Garrett·44:07

  • “the core business now is profitable, which is great. Like we'll generate free cash flow, hundreds of millions of dollars of operating cash flow this year.”

    Garrett·1:10:29
• $GOVTECH - Government technology market is underserved with massive inefficiencies, creating opportunities for modernization as legacy systems like CSV files and FTP servers still run critical infrastructure.

  • “It will take twenty four hours to make it to the FBI hot list. And that's a CSV file that gets sent around on FTP servers across The US.”

    Garrett·17:06

  • “Today when you call 911 in San Francisco, you get about 3,000,000 911 calls a year. A human picks up every single time. A human manually listens, manually types in information. Imagine if you were running Stripe and every single lead you received was human routed. You'd say, This is crazy.”

    Garrett·6:44

  • “The cloud was only recently made legal in Florida as recently as 2022. So if you were a law enforcement agency, you could not host your data in the cloud until 2022. Maryland was 2023.”

    Garrett·11:50
• $DRONES - Drones are becoming critical infrastructure for law enforcement and security, replacing expensive helicopters and enabling new capabilities at dramatically lower costs.

  • “Their average response time to a 911 call is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in sixty eight seconds. Just like a better quality of service. And the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer.”

    Garrett·1:03:10

  • “for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they in pursuits, they don't pursue anymore. Just send the drone. Way better. Yeah. It's way safer.”

    Garrett·1:03:53

  • “Not every city has a helicopter. The cities that do, it's a very expensive proposition.”

    Garrett·1:05:40

Bearish:

• $RETAIL - Organized retail crime has shifted from stores to distribution facilities with sophisticated criminal operations stealing millions in single operations, threatening supply chain integrity.

  • “organized resale crime in stores was really hot during COVID and right after COVID. That's why you saw CVS lock their stuff up. You saw places like In N Out, leave Oakland.”

    Garrett·41:14

  • “where the criminals have moved is to the distribution facilities. It's safer and bigger loads.”

    Garrett·41:54

  • “They went and bought a legal, like well running freight broker. They now own this asset, and they bid on all these low bid on all these projects, show up with real paperwork, fill up a 20 foot with product, drive away, dissolve the company. Dollars 7,000,000 in a single day.”

    Garrett·42:06
• $MOT - Motorola Solutions faces disruption as their expensive land mobile radio systems are overpriced for edge cases while new entrants like Flock offer better value propositions.

  • “the thing they buy too much of is, and not to pick on Motorola, things that only matter in the 0.001% case.”

    Garrett·1:25:17

  • “you look at like a land mass radio contract and it's gonna cost someone like San Francisco County, you know, 200,000,000.”

    Garrett·1:25:37

  • “And you go, Well, I get it. Like, if there's an earthquake and every single cell tower goes down, law enforcement definitely needs a way to communicate. Man, is really the only way? Yeah. Like, could you guys just like have your own tower? There's got to be something.”

    Garrett·1:25:54
• $CHINATECH - Chinese surveillance technology companies like Hikvision face increasing regulatory headwinds and trust issues despite being subsidized and undercutting Western competitors on price.

  • “it was us versus Hikvision. Hikvision is a Chinese camera manufacturer, arguably a subsidiary of the CCP. And we were almost 10 times the price.”

    Garrett·49:31

  • “It's very clear this is being subsidized for the Mexican government to make this purchase decision, of which case they will most likely be giving away real time feeds to another government”

    Garrett·49:55

  • “we should go walk around a strip mall, and I could probably point out 80% of the cameras are Chinese manufactured.”

    Garrett·51:24