Garrett Langley of Flock Safety on building technology to solve crime

**John** (0:01)
Garrett Langley started Flock Safety in 2017 after a crime in his neighborhood went unsolved. Flock is now one of the most successful companies selling to law enforcement, known for their camera network across the roads, and even drones to support police officers. Cheers.

**Garrett Langley** (0:14)
Cheers. Likewise, thanks for having me.

**John** (0:18)
Okay. So, let's start by describing how does the Flock project work?

**Garrett Langley** (0:24)
Yeah. Maybe we go rewind all the way back, because it's evolved. So, eight years ago, living in Atlanta, and there's a fun fact, is if you're in a place like Atlanta or Memphis or pick a town in the Southeast, if you would just pull 10 F-150 door handles, some, let's call it three and it's in, will be unlocked, and one and it's in, will have a firearm in the glove box. Just like regardless of the firearm, your point of view on it, it's like you should keep it in a safe, not in a glove box. That's just really bad. But that's what people do. And so, if you're a gang member and you're trying to obtain a firearm, the easiest way is just to drive into a neighborhood, six kids, because they're kids, jump out, you start pulling door handles. You don't have anything breaking into the car, you're pulling door handles. So, this happened in my neighborhood. Someone got a gun, someone posted on Nextdoor like, oh my gosh, I forgot my gun in my car and it's now gone. And so, the Atlanta Police Department comes, and the major was fairly apathetic. Like, hey, sorry, good luck. Like, we're not going to, so to your boss thing, they're not going to fingerprint the vehicle. Like, no one's been hurt.

**John** (1:35)
Yeah.

**Garrett Langley** (1:35)
And for most major cities-

**John** (1:36)
There's no stakeout happening for this.

**Garrett Langley** (1:38)
There's no stakeout, there's no like, we're going to go do all these resources. So for most major cities, if a human is not physically hurt, the crime goes just to the bottom of the list. And I find that really frustrating. Because like, this should be really easy. Like, these people drove into our neighborhood, they stole a firearm, like, we should go after these people. And he was like, well, we don't have any information. Okay, what do you need? We need all these things. Okay, great. So I was an electrical engineer. So I called a buddy of mine who studied computer science with me at Georgia Tech. And I was like, we're going to go build this camera. So I would just like track license plates, that's it. That's what the Atlanta Police Department says. Okay, great. So we built this thing. And if you ever come to the Atlanta office, we still have the original camera like on pedestal. It looks like garbage. I'm not a mechanical engineer. We put it up and all it did was track every car that came into our neighborhood. But as you can imagine, like after 30 days, you start to be able to know like that person clearly lives here. They're in the neighborhood twice a day, four times a day. And so about two months later, another car gets broken into, another firearm stolen, the same major comes back. And I was like, oh, by the way, here's the only car that doesn't live in our neighborhood that was here last night. That car gets put on what we call like Ebola, like being a lookout for. Couple hours later, they find that vehicle, the gun's in the car, person goes to jail.
And what was really interesting is like the, we were like very proud of ourselves. This was not a business at the time, it's a project. And so, the five o'clock news would like do the story. So, I'm on the five o'clock news, and the next morning, like I had five emails from neighborhoods. And I think I might be the, we might be the only company that for the first, let's call it 20 or 30, 40 million of ARR, strictly driven off of five o'clock news. That was our only growth channel.

**John** (3:27)
Yeah, that actual media appearance did strike me.

**Garrett Langley** (3:30)
And every time we solved a crime, we'd be like, hey, do you want to cover the story at five o'clock? And they'd be like, we'd love to. We'd love talking about crime.

**John** (3:37)
Because this is local news. It's local news.

**Garrett Langley** (3:39)
We're not going to go to the New York Times. No one cares about like a stolen sofa or like a stolen dog. Okay, but that's interesting.

**John** (3:46)
Did you start with, because I associated Flock today with being plugged into the stolen car databases. But you started without that, just looking up suspicious stuff.