Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:05:15 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:05:15] S2: So not what did they do in their careers, but, like, how did they raise you that made you so comfortable with risk? [00:05:20] S0: I think that might be a born trait. But if I reflect now on it, you know, my father has never used a laptop in his entire life. He got an iPhone for the first time maybe two years ago. And so he starts to ask the question like, how did I wind up in technology? And what you would... What we kinda skip over is, I don't think I've ever met a single person that doesn't love my father. He is like the perfect definition of that old school sales guy that knows everyone on a first name basis, knows where their kids went to school, brings them a treat on Christmas or Thanksgiving or their birthday. And, like, he just loved people, and he was so good at it. And he spent his entire career in in sales and and a field model, you know, selling industrial rollers. So not necessarily the most glamorous job. But I learned through real osmosis, like, how you treat customers. And and I think now, like, looking back, I think earlier in my career, I don't I don't think I had that clarity. But I think about it now, and I'm like, man, I learned everything I know about managing a customer, managing an employee, managing relationships through him. And, you know, has that in the field of technology. I'd say that skill set is really hard earned, and I think a lot of my success stems from that ability.
00:06:45 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:06:45] S2: That's so great, and what a nice shout out. I wanna talk a little bit about Flock. And Flock is a company that the team here at Inspired, we've talked a lot about and just being one of the companies we really admire. And just a few quick stats for everybody. So in March 2025, just recently, you guys have raised $275,000,000 at a $7,500,000,000 valuation, making it one of the most highly valued safety tech companies in the world. And also, you know, your most successful venture to date. Can we just tell everybody, what does Flock Safety do? Like, in plain English, give us a lot of the detail of, like, what you guys are doing on a daily basis, and who are your customers?
00:07:28 · Garrett Langley
[00:07:28] S0: At the end of the day, Flock is a crime fighting company. We happen to fight crime with technology, and we have three types of customers. Kind of our core bread and butter is neighborhoods. I live in a neighborhood, you know, it's a 80 home cul de sac kind of classic plan to develop it. And there's hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods in America, and and we've got a nice portion of that. We then service businesses. Right? Whether it's a hospital or a retailer, every business wants to keep both their employees safe and their assets safe. And then the third customer is really the kind of linchpin of the equation is local law enforcement. At the end of the day, a neighborhood nor a business can actually solve crime. They can just help, and it's local law enforcement's job to solve for crime. And so the whole idea stemmed from this realization that, you know, it's just too easy to commit crime and get away with it in America. We have more crime than we should have, and that is because it's easy to get away with. You know? And so we kinda just kept picking at that, you know, a real onion peel of, like, let's go layer and layer deeper, and eventually got down to this is a very solvable problem. Just I think we can actually make a pretty big dent. And, you know, now when I think about... When I meet with the police chief or a mayor, and they're like, Garrett, you know, how do we know this is gonna be successful? How will we define it? And this is kind of maybe surprising, but I go job growth. It's actually all sent back to jobs. Because for a community to thrive, there needs to be economic growth, economic prosperity, a belief that your future's gonna be better than what it is today. And in an environment where crime is rampant, that future is dissolved. And so we've kinda try to build that bedrock of safety so that communities, whether they're big or small, have an ability to thrive.
00:09:20 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:09:20] S2: I love that. Just to give you a sense of how obviously profoundly widespread the platform is, you are in more than 5,000 communities working with almost 5,000 law enforcement agencies, 4,800, and tens and tens of thousands of businesses. What's the product? Like, let's pretend I'm a small business and I buy Flock Safety. What are we getting?
00:09:42 · Garrett Langley
[00:09:42] S0: Well, nowadays, we have about a half dozen products that you could buy. But I'll give you a good example. You know, we work with, on the business side, a lot of retailers. And so retailers, you know, when you pull into their parking lot, you might see one of our overt products like a trailer. It's got flashing lights. It's got a speaker that will talk down to it. It's got cameras that can pan, tilt, and zoom. That's a very overt station. So if you're looking to make a an astronomer presence, that's there. We also have, well, covert stations, like our license plate recognition cameras. And that allows the retailer to keep track of every vehicle coming off and on their properties. That might not seem that interesting, but if you look at one of the most pervasive crimes impacting retail, it's organized retail thefts. And this is a this is billions, tens of billions of dollars of theft on annual basis. This is not your 16 year old stealing the screwdriver. This is very organized games targeting, you know, our country's biggest and smallest retailers. And so being able to build that web of, okay. Well, this vehicle hit six different, you know, locations on the same day. That's fairly abnormal shopping behavior. And so that's not illegal. But if you were to to build an investigation, that's definitively something worth noting. And so it's a combination of both cameras, audio devices, and then and then kind of the software to pull that all together, which allows us to help... You know, I think we're gonna finish the year just around a million arrests on the system.
00:11:11 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:11:11] S2: A million arrests. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Actually, Garrett, just... Actually, Garrett, can you just give us a quick overview from your point of view of, like, what's crime look like in America today? Like, in your point of view, if you just summarize, you know, I live in New York City, so I have a sense of New York City crime. I I, you know, I don't keep tabs on crime elsewhere. It feels like things are getting more dangerous, not less. [00:11:36] S0: So, I mean, the good news is that generally speaking, crime is going down. [00:11:40] S2: Great.