Flock CEO Garrett Langley on Controversy, "Surveillance State" Claims, and Privacy vs Safety

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All-In interview. This is where we find the people building the future, sometimes a politician, sometimes a CEO, sometimes an investor, all the time, an important discussion, and one of the most important discussions of the moment is balancing safety and privacy. And there is one company that is at the center of this, and we're so lucky to have Garrett from Flock here, Garrett Langley. Garrett, you and I spoke on This Week in Startups, my other podcast that I've been doing for 16 years. I don't know how many years ago, that was six or seven years ago.

**Garrett Langley** (0:33)
Six or seven years, yep.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:34)
And I've been following your company, full disclosure. I was like trying to invest at one point. I'm not a shareholder, but I've always been intrigued by what you're doing, on the margin sometimes concerned, and it seems like you've been so successful with Flock, which does safety cameras, license plate readers specifically, when you get into all the details today. But in the last year, because of the tremendous success of Flock, it has been adopted in many communities. We're going to get into that. And it's had a really great impact at reducing crime. We'll get into that. But there is now a group of people who maybe have privacy concerns. And you and I have talked over the years, and we're going to get into it. We're going to go right at the controversies and everything, and this grand debate we're going to have. How much privacy am I going to give up to get safety? And it's really interesting to me that there's been so much energy on this recently, because when I see that kind of energy as an investor or as a podcast host here, and the world's greatest moderator, TM, I know there's something at stake.
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Tell us a little bit about Flock Safety and how many communities you're in now. And then also the drone component, because people know the license plate readers, maybe they don't know the drones. So let's just get that footprint and build a mental model for the audience here.

**Garrett Langley** (2:33)
That's great. Yeah. Jason, thanks for having me. So I started the company nine years ago with a pretty simple mission, which is to live in a safer neighborhood. And that was our initial pitch. You know, if you look at our first two or three years in business, it was just neighborhoods. We sold the neighborhoods and we sold a license plate reading camera, which is pretty basic technology. A car drives by, we take a still image of a vehicle, we read the license plate, and the system has gotten more sophisticated with time. We can detect things like a roof rack or a bumper sticker or dent or damage. But that's at its core, what the technology does. And if you look at like last year, to your point, we've had a tremendous impact on the country. North of a million crimes solved using FLOC, north of 10,000 people found who were missing. And that's everything from our grandparents with dementia to our children. Like just last week in Atlanta, there was a stolen car that happened to have a two-year-old in the backseat. And thankfully, because of very hard work by Atlanta Police Department and our cameras, that little kid was safely returned within the hour.
I don't know what that would have happened without FLOC.
And that's one story, but that's my own city. Last week, and you look at July as a data point, last month, it was about 1,125 missing people and over 20,000 stolen cars. And those are the cars we use to drive our kids to school, to drive to work. And so we're in roughly just over 6,000 or so cities across the country.
And the consequence of being that consequential is people have a lot of questions. People have a lot of debates. And I think it's a worthwhile thing to talk about what kind of society do we want to live in? I want to live in one where we're safer. And I want to keep my privacy while I do it. But that is hard. To find that balance is not easy.