SPEAKER_00: the rumor the reporting is that open ai is going to buy windsurf around 3 billion a pretty big check we're kind of waiting for that news to drop to be honest i'm kind of confused why that deal hasn't wrapped up uh but in the meantime windsurf which has previously used at least in part ai models from the anthropic claude family uh got cut off with less than one week notice well maybe

SPEAKER_03: if the deal doesn't go through anthropic we'll be like ah never mind come back to claude i think if

SPEAKER_00: you kick someone out of your house the relationship's over yeah you know it's it's tough to go back on that yeah we come back with like your basket of clothes like oh i'm just gonna move back in no you're you know once once you sever certain relationships i don't think they really come

SPEAKER_10: back um i feel like a heartfelt apology an edible arrangement it goes a long way this week in

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SPEAKER_16: hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups my name is alex and i'm joined today by

SPEAKER_00: lon harris as you said earlier on the live show our dear leader jason is a bit jet-lagged and therefore not here today so we are going to forge ahead without him because there's just too much news to throw to our bank to twist 500 interviews we have to get through it lon how are you how's the week

SPEAKER_03: over in austin i'm doing great it's a it's a good week in austin i joined tick tock this week so i'm actively i'm i'm working the tick tock angles i'm trying to go viral over there so follow me up look up uh lon harris 69 on tick tock not i did not choose that tick tock chose that yes and if you want

SPEAKER_00: to see my now excellent two tick tocks you can find me i'm alex wilhelm uh 9999 there you go for

SPEAKER_23: whatever reason that's us we're trying we're trying to be young and it's going about as well

SPEAKER_25: as you would think i can't believe there's 9998 other alex wilhelms already on uh tick tock that's

SPEAKER_26: amazing i mean to that point i can't believe there's 68 other lon harris's i do think these

SPEAKER_25: might be randomly generated numbers or rng everybody gets 69 9999 or 420. i tried to get 420 so that

SPEAKER_00: would be you know humorous because i'm also 12 years old but um it didn't let me for some reason anyways look enough with our babbling uh let's let's dive into the news today first up a macro comment for everybody adp the kind of third party payroll service that everyone uses or has used in the past at some point dropped their may employment report lawn and it said there only were 37 000 new jobs created here in the us now adp data comes out before the official government data but it is directionally interesting and i do think that number is scary to a couple folks it hit the stock market people are worried about an economic slowdown um actually you're in austin which is going through a kind of interesting economic times lawn what do you think about the employment numbers i mean i think

SPEAKER_25: that we're we're in this all year i've been seeing there's a lot of articles there's a lot of posts i

SPEAKER_03: think there was just one that went up the other day that was like how many jobs is ai really taking

SPEAKER_25: and i feel like we're all we've all been reading the the trends and the think pieces around this and so yeah i mean it's tempting to say now that we have some real world data that seems to be suggesting

SPEAKER_03: hiring is slowing down employment is like growing but much slower than it has been in the last few

SPEAKER_25: years i think it's very tempting to make that connection like well we're here it is it's arrived

SPEAKER_03: we're losing jobs to ai but i haven't seen like we don't have the hard data yet like i don't think there's proof all of these jobs are going to computers i think it's just like tempting to

SPEAKER_26: link these two stories yeah yeah no i think it's a good point actually i'm going up to boston tomorrow

SPEAKER_00: to take part in a panel that memory serves v2 communications is putting on anyways i agreed because it's a non-show day so i can just go up there quickly and do a chat but uh i was talking to a friend of mine who's going to be on the panel with me and we were discussing this exact thing how will ai impact jobs we were talking about it from a journalistic context but then we were like hey we're going up to this panel i wonder what's going to happen to junior level pr people in an ai automation era and i think the answer is we don't know yet but pr was a place where a lot of new college grads went and got kind of early entry stage work and then worked them at the ladder but yet again an example of a place where we could see i think job loss to automation um much like we've seen in and around our own industries so the adp number bad but maybe not indicative yet of uh of ai taking

SPEAKER_25: everyone's gigs it's just interesting that we don't really know we're all kind of like waiting on tenterhooks for this moment to arrive when we can definitively say yeah oh that job went to a

SPEAKER_03: i mean they were even uh they were even debating this on all in this past week where jason was saying he thinks a lot of these management like he thinks microsoft laid off some management level people because they're thinking that those jobs can be taken by ai it led to a big back and forth on all in but it's just we're in this interesting moment where it's been purely theoretical for so long i think we're all excited slash terrified of this moment when it crosses that barrier from being

SPEAKER_41: theoretical to like our daily lived in reality and it's just like but is it here yet or is it next year is it the year after that it's just sort of tariff impact or economic concerns about europe

SPEAKER_05: or other things there's a million variables yeah it's not a good number why do startups care well it

SPEAKER_00: could mean that the fed cuts rates sooner that lowers the price of money it makes investments like venture capital from the lp perspective more interesting it'll ding fintech startups they're currently eating off of a net interest margin like perhaps chime or perhaps i don't know uh coinbase could probably be in that bucket as well so keep an eye on it but it's just a macro point lawn i think i think we should go ahead and start with circle's ipo because that is the the news that i'm most excited about so for everyone out there we've talked about it here on twist quite a lot circle is the company behind the usdc stablecoin a private market startup that uh almost been public lawn via a spac years ago and it's now making a real run at the public markets the latest as we wait for it to price later today is that it's 25 times over subscribed and i think that is probably indicative of some positive sentiment around it but we don't want to take yeah i don't want to give it too much credit because i always feel like every ipo is like oh we're oversubscribed yeah but lon i do think

SPEAKER_12: that as we watch this fintech company list it's a nice early indicator that at least some people care

SPEAKER_46: yeah some some people definitely i mean i'm i'm so curious about in general with stable coins like

SPEAKER_25: what percentage of the u.s population really gets this and and and not just gets what a stable coin is because i think that's that's not so complicated but gets like why would you invest in a stable coin like how do you make money from stable coins like it took me a few days to like grok this i feel like

SPEAKER_03: and like i'm somebody who talks about crypto at work every day so i feel like i've got a little

SPEAKER_25: bit of an edge and like i don't know like i see i see stuff like this and and the the micro strategy stuff we've been talking about and it's like these investment vehicles are out there for everybody in the public and like these are the same people that could not follow and or when i was watching that along with them on social media so it's like do they really all get what they're buying or is it just this sounds good donald trump is talking excitedly about stable coins like i worry

SPEAKER_41: that there's a lot of kind of amateur investors that are going to get sucked into these kinds of schemes without fully understanding what they're buying i appreciate that perspective i want to

SPEAKER_26: disaggregate it slightly though because i don't think people buy stable coins expecting the types of returns they might get from buying i don't know dogecoin and hoping it goes up or buying and holding

SPEAKER_00: bitcoin for example it's more of like a like a shovel that really kind of translates between the you know traditional fiat world and the crypto world and that to me is interesting because i don't

SPEAKER_26: think you actually need to understand it i think you just need to use products that use stables so i think we're going to see these become kind of a de facto way of companies handling some of their own internal accounting and movements of money and i think it's going to open up doors for people in other countries to access services they wouldn't be able to otherwise again not really an

SPEAKER_00: investment context so i i wonder if much like most people don't understand derivatives or options contracts and yet robinhood's doing very well yeah right robinhood's crushing it so i wonder if the public needs to be that fully aware of it uh but we'll we'll get a lot more information because once they're public they will drop numbers every single quarter for us to dig into yeah which is great it's exciting oh i'm so i love it companies go public law i learn so much and then every quarter they have to literally come come up in front of the class and give a report and it's great because

SPEAKER_25: i get to constantly learn from them yeah it's a it's a look i understand it's a liquidity thing as

SPEAKER_03: as much as it is a personal investment vehicle thing it lets you move your crypto and your dollars

SPEAKER_26: around i i do yeah yeah um before we move on can you give me a quick update on the 2025 uh ipo class i'm curious about how the other debuts that we've had seen this year are doing all right

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SPEAKER_25: 52 dollars per share uh that was priced at 52 dollars per share as an ipo it is now worth uh 64.65 per share today so if you bought that uh you made 12 bucks per share you're you're you're doing all right core weave that debuted at 40 dollars per share it is worth strap in folks 156.60 per share

SPEAKER_03: today so if you bought core weave uh at its debut you're a very happy man today you know what's

SPEAKER_76: funny is uh you look like you have a spot did you buy core weave on its debut you look like a happy

SPEAKER_00: investor lon i'm a journalist so i just buy index funds um uh with one with with one caveat that i'm not allowed to talk about yet but anyways uh since we wrote these notes actually uh is up even further now it's holy it's at 163 to share so nearly 4x its ipo price uh why do we care about all that well investors that might be looking at future ipos that are coming out this year might be looking back at previous ipos from this year in and around the technology space and to see those two relatively high profile debuts perform well i think lawn provides a little bit of a tailwind to chime and

SPEAKER_84: therefore figma and hopefully i don't know um data breaks down the road and so forth so it's good discord

SPEAKER_03: perhaps uh yeah i i think uh the interesting thing here about core weave too is that was one that we were talking so much before the ipo about the skepticism around it because like oh they only

SPEAKER_88: have like a few big clients like microsoft is so such a prominent client like is there is this really

SPEAKER_03: as profitable a company and it's like looking back now like if you're one of those people it was it

SPEAKER_00: was a lot of worry over uh a lot of worry then open ai showed up and bought a bunch of their stuff they've lent things some other deals as well and people are just very bullish on the data center space it for context though for folks who who don't live and breathe this stuff quite as much as we do lawn it's funny to me to go back to the start of the year because deep seek r1 comes out everyone goes oh we're not going to need data centers and then everyone sold everything for like two weeks

SPEAKER_82: and then we move past that and now we're here again with market excitement about data center

SPEAKER_25: investment so we talk a lot about like the the trump 72 hour rule it's kind of like the whole world in 2025 has a 72 hour rule like don't freak out and overreact to anything the day it happens like wait a few days after the the excitement settles down like and and really see what the landscape looks

SPEAKER_03: like like at this point you shouldn't really trust anything the day you hear about it all right so some

SPEAKER_19: breaking news from today that everyone's talking about that is absolutely important that we're not going to wait even though lawn actually makes a pretty good point there uh okay so wait two days we'll

SPEAKER_00: talk about this on friday all right bye everybody it's been a great show uh no uh windsor keep in mind this is the startup previously known as codium we had him on the show last year they built the ide that is agentically ai infused and the whole idea is a bit like cursor it's going to help you write code faster now uh lon last on the show we talked about them because the rumor the reporting is that open ai is going to buy windsor for around three billion a pretty big check we're kind of waiting for that news to drop to be honest i'm kind of confused why that deal hasn't wrapped up uh but in the meantime windsurf which has previously used at least in part ai models from the anthropic claude family uh got cut off with less than one week notice so i believe the order of events here is uh anthropic goes oh you guys are going to sell to open ai well no more technology for you and then windsurf went no no no please please please and anthropic went roughly kind of thumbed their nose at them i'm blown away by this news really yeah and here's why yeah

SPEAKER_26: so let's unpack that okay on a competitive basis does it make sense for open ai to not want to be directly supporting a company that's going to be sold to its arch competitor and therefore seeding

SPEAKER_00: data and information about it yeah yeah why would anthropic not want to keep supporting windsurf well i i kind of get it but here's the thing that scares me ai foundation model companies in a sense have to be swiss they have to be a little bit like switzerland they have to be a little bit neutral because otherwise you're kind of taking on platform risk by using their models which makes them less attractive now any startup that uses anthropics models but gets too close to open ai or microsoft or google or meta or mistral or any other foundation model company i will have to ask are we at risk of being cut off and so it's it's it's it's a reason to use open source models i suppose but it's just more sharp elbowed from anthropic than i expected because now i think there's just developer and

SPEAKER_65: platform risk that wasn't there before and it's the first time i've seen this happen i think and also

SPEAKER_03: anthropic of all the big ai model companies so much of their branding and their theme is like we're the responsible safe choice that takes you and your data into account and like we're looking out for everybody like they're way less aggressive just in terms of the the marketing and the way they speak about their company than say the open ais of the world so it is kind of surprising to see them being

SPEAKER_41: like the toughest most aggressive player in this where they're like yes you're being cut off no more

SPEAKER_03: anthropic you can't hang out with claude stay away from me and my large son i think this actually makes

SPEAKER_65: the deal more likely to get done because now if you're windsurf suddenly one of the legs of your stool

SPEAKER_00: was cut off so you're going to be looking around trying to find who's going to help you out and did you know that open ais codex tool does some magenta coding work that might be a fine fit for what windsurf does i i just feel like they're almost saying this deal now has to get done or windsurf

SPEAKER_19: is going to really struggle because i think cursor still has access to anthropic models so a bit of

SPEAKER_03: a mess the deal doesn't go through anthropic we'll be like ah never mind come back to claude i think

SPEAKER_05: if you kick someone out of your house the relationship's over yeah you know it's it's tough

SPEAKER_00: to go back on that yeah we come back with like your basket of clothes like oh i'm just going to move back in no you're you know once once you sever certain relationships i don't think they really

SPEAKER_10: come back um i feel like a heartfelt apology an edible arrangement it goes a long way i want to add

SPEAKER_00: on to the anthropic discussion though and point out that the reason why i think anthropic is willing to

SPEAKER_26: burn these boats if you will is because they've just posted simply insanely fast growth so reuters reported um i think it was today or yesterday that anthropics uh revenue reached the three billion dollar annualized run rate metric by may of this year now three billion dollars in revenue for a

SPEAKER_00: foundation ai model company it's still smaller than open ai why do we care well it was two billion again

SPEAKER_26: according to reuters back in march and one billion in december and that means that they've gone from one to three in roughly a half year and that is the type of growth you would love to see from a seed

SPEAKER_23: stage company with a million dollars in arr not a billion dollars in annual run rate so it's a thousand

SPEAKER_00: x more impressive and i'm just blown away but if i was that strong growing that quickly i think i could have some pointy elbows to get people out of the way i just hope that this doesn't bite them in the uh

SPEAKER_26: in the back side as other people might go well we're not going to use claude because you guys are

SPEAKER_03: and claude already feels like it is in sort of like in terms of prominence outside of the i i talk about ai everyday world i feel like you're you're already a little bit a half step behind like an open ai a google gemini in terms of prominence you you want more companies and more platforms to start pulling in claude not the opposite you don't want to create a situation where they're like oh well we could just use chat gpt instead let's just go with that like chat gpt is already the brand name

SPEAKER_26: that you're trying to like move in on yeah well i mean i would say that they're kind of chasing different markets to a degree but i i do absolutely concur with you that when you ask people what is ai they go the the gpt thing right you know yeah i mean this is an old story but i told it a couple months ago i was at a poker table and the relatively non-techy blue collary slightly older group at the table were talking about ai and they just called it gpt yeah and i knew what they meant but that was impressive to me about how far that brand has gone uh claude definitely not that level of like yeah

SPEAKER_03: i mean if i was common person if i was if i was working at anthropic this would be something that's on my mind is like for the lay person because we were talking about this in terms of grok not long ago the fact that it's there embedded in every tweet makes it so much more visible so many more people already have the opportunity to be like oh grok this i'm gonna grok this or like at grok is this true which you see now after every single tweet on that platform it's become a meme right and like claude doesn't have that equivalent yet like i think it could i think claude i think claude is great i'm a big proponent of claude but i feel like there isn't that oh i'm gonna claude this use case and they

SPEAKER_25: want to do more to expand that not make people concerned about oh i don't know if i want to

SPEAKER_41: include claude because what if they then screw me in six months yeah anthropic just claude it does

SPEAKER_25: not it doesn't it doesn't work great but i do i think of all of the major we can move on after this

SPEAKER_03: but of all the major llms and ai models claude is by far like the most fun name for one where it's

SPEAKER_65: like oh i'm gonna ask claude about this like yeah versus i'm gonna ask gpt oh four mini gpt plus pro you know mega whatever it's terrible it's windows xp branding founders let's be real finding the

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SPEAKER_00: recall deal was accused by competitor rippling of essentially hiring a spy inside of rippling's operations exfiltrating information and essentially being very very poorly behaved and when this lawsuit dropped it was essentially i think the startup equivalent of like a bombing raid like it just

SPEAKER_26: was causing explosions all over the place people were like are you serious it read like really bad like james bond fan fiction inside the startup world like if you yeah it's like it's like a it's like a

SPEAKER_10: spy novel in there you know they're leaving secret messages but a bit more airplane than yeah you

SPEAKER_41: know like jack reacher like it yeah like inept guys trying to do a john le carre it's like a lawn

SPEAKER_23: and i tried to like break into google like you know we'd eventually get caught and people would say that we weren't very good at it okay so that's the groundwork here time has passed and now deal is

SPEAKER_00: trying to correct the narrative a little bit and i want your opinion about how good of a job they're doing so the ft reports that um a certain rippling employee a brett alexander johnson who was a quote competitive intelligence manager deal says posed as a customer and access details of its products and business practices over the course of about six months rippling responds and says these are allegations of a junior consultant who later became a full-time employee reviewing non-confidential materials available to thousands of deal customers quote we're looking into it this doesn't sound like

SPEAKER_148: anything like the same scale of bad behavior no so to me lon this doesn't actually change the scales

SPEAKER_03: very much like you know there's only a few ways to respond to like hey you purposefully sent a guy to spy on us and one of the things that you could argue that would maybe potentially get you out of that would be well they weren't stealing like confidential information they were just stealing stuff that you guys had lying around they're trying to be like hey these weren't really like top secret things no one could see these are things any of our customers could have stumbled upon if they were looking for

SPEAKER_25: them but what it doesn't address is the intentionality behind yes yes that regardless of what you stole you stole like they're like they're not denying the core allegation which is they had this employee pose as a customer take things from deal and then show them to rippling which they then use they're

SPEAKER_03: just like yeah but it wasn't like stuff you guys had locked up in a vault and it's like well okay i

SPEAKER_154: think you can make quite a big um mountain out of a mole here so i kind of disagree with you because

SPEAKER_26: if someone who was probably at the time a consultant which is why rippling pointed that out um went through

SPEAKER_00: the customer onboarding flow as a test got some stuff that said here's how to use deal and then gave that that that to me is so low grade i would say okay that ceo should buy the other ceo drick the deal spine the the rippling allegations about deal spine were a magnitude higher so to me i agree i agree

SPEAKER_86: i'm not saying these are equivalent cases okay but i do feel like it's still not really like a fully it's

SPEAKER_03: like it's like it's like two-thirds of an excuse it's like okay that excuses the worst of it but you're

SPEAKER_23: still admitting to the core alligator fine i'll i'll take that but i don't think that what deal has

SPEAKER_25: done we should make it clear both of these companies are making allegations about one another it's not just going one way that we didn't like fully set that up i feel like i i will say also we have seen

SPEAKER_26: today or in the past the the rippling suit i have not gotten my eyes yet on deals complaints so i haven't had a chance to read through the whole thing perhaps they're actually quite salacious from where i stand now it it does feel a bit like a bb versus a bazooka and that's what i'm trying to point out

SPEAKER_23: about the relative scale here now i said in the framing here that deal's trying to you know shift the narrative a bit accusing rippling of similar maybe behavior is one way to do that the timeline

SPEAKER_25: is rippling came out first with their very serious allegations and then deal is sort of doing that counter suit actually this goes both ways so that's that's the larger context we're talking right but

SPEAKER_26: deal puts out the suit people get their hands on it i presume the ft was sent a copy of it in some way

SPEAKER_00: and they also dropped some information so according to reuters deal crossed the one billion dollar annual revenue run rate milestone in the first quarter that's kind of a dated data point but still a very big milestone for the company it grew 75 in the 12-month period ending april 30th and had an ebitda margin that's earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization of 18 in the first quarter so what i think they're doing here is trying to muddy the waters by accusing rippling of some bad behavior and then going but by the way did you know how great we're doing as a business

SPEAKER_26: wouldn't it be great if everyone thought that we weren't a bad actor here the thing is is how has no one gotten fired yet i wanted to ask jason about this because i'm curious like who's

SPEAKER_00: who's responsible for looking a founder in the face and going you screwed up so badly that you have

SPEAKER_25: to go now because you're hurting the business i mean as long as the the back and forth the like your

SPEAKER_03: allegation stuff is going on like you don't want to fire anybody because that's an admission of guilt that's like this person did something wrong and so they've got to go and i feel like just from a pr marketing perspective you you know that's giving the game away like you like we didn't do anything

SPEAKER_72: wrong means nobody deserves to get fired okay but like the rippling suit yeah and you know i'm not a

SPEAKER_23: lawyer i've never tried a case i've never this is not my domain but a plain text reading of that suit to me indicates that there is if the allegations are correct a moral vacuum in the c-suite over a deal

SPEAKER_00: and i i i've talked to deal i i think about i think i've talked to alex over a deal back in

SPEAKER_166: my tech research deal handles my payroll for inside i get paid to do the inside streaming newsletter

SPEAKER_05: via deal hey don't mess with my money deal yeah no i'm just saying i they seem very trustworthy

SPEAKER_00: they seem very reliable i'm sure nearly everyone there is reliable and trustworthy but if you wanted to tell the world the core dna of a company you're going to trust with payroll and taking care of your people is solid i think a little house clean is in order unless the allegations are so wrong that rippling is you know liable to deal with a defamation suit which i don't think has been filed

SPEAKER_26: and so to me there's there was a pause of hoping this dies down and then a counter claim and then these milestones i i just think it just shows that not everyone is obsessed with doing business to the

SPEAKER_19: standards that i would personally demand for my service providers all right uh one more ai story

SPEAKER_00: today cohere is a company on the twist 500 they are a canadian ai foundation model startup co-founded by aiden gomez and if you don't know who aiden gomez is he's one of the people that was named as an author on the critical and seminal attention is all you need paper from google that actually kicked off the entire kind of llm era if you will so someone with a deep pedigree in the ai space the news here lon is that cohere is in talks according to i forget where this is from as i click finally ah once again the ft 500 million dollars perhaps at a flat valuation from their last round of 5.5 billion perhaps at a slight up valuation but what matters is another company is doing quite well in the ai foundation model space the the thing that i care about the most here more than just the fact they're going to raise another half billion dollars one year after they raised a half billion dollars is that the ft says the company quote doubled its annual recurring revenue in the last four months crossing 100 million last month that is incredibly impressive at in terms of scale and growth yet another fast

SPEAKER_25: growing company yeah i mean do you think that this sort of mad dash to put money into so many of these

SPEAKER_03: foundation model companies and startups is is that just it's so frothy everybody's so panicked to get into ai that they're putting money at anywhere they can or is it like we really do need all of these

SPEAKER_187: companies creating ai foundational models investors like me are not going to fund your business if it isn't structured properly this is something that occurs during due diligence we have a checklist one of

SPEAKER_189: the first things we look at on the checklist are is this company even incorporated and is it in good

Chamath Palihapitiya: standing and is it compliant if you don't get that stuff done we can't wire you the money we can't show you the money we can't ship you the money and that's where our friends at northwest registered agent come in for just 39 plus state fees they're going to handle all your paperwork keep you compliant and make sure investors see you as a serious business that is worthy of investment in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes your business is officially investor ready thousands of founders trust northwest because they keep businesses in good standing go to northwestregisteredagent.com twist and get your business investor ready today for just 39 plus state fees you can set up your company right away fast private and compliant go to northwest registeredagent.com twist today you know i think a year ago i would have answered that differently and

SPEAKER_00: i would have said it's hype it's just froth is people being silly with their money but i think we need to shut up and let them cook because if you're seeing companies add two billion dollars in revenue in six months if you're seeing open ai grow as fast as it has historically if we're seeing yet another company here reach nine figures of revenue and a really quick ramp i think actually right now we're seeing takeoff versus headwinds all right let's stop talking about ai for a bit because oh my god even i'm bored at this point all right uh let's go to space my absolute favorite startup market impulse space is the company we're talking about today and if you go back in time if you're a big twist fan

SPEAKER_26: you may recall that uh in march mid-march march 18th episode 2099 i interviewed the guys over at

SPEAKER_00: starfish space and the pitch there was essentially tugs like the boats in space they go around they move

SPEAKER_26: stuff well there's more than one company working on this and impulse space is a competitor and they just raised 300 million dollars in a series c that's a really big round for a space tech company even though they're building expensive things but what's really cool is that it seems to be going really well for impulse i love seeing a company succeed in in this area they do two things they have a product

SPEAKER_00: called mira which is an orbital transfer vehicle which is what we call a space tug and they also have helios which is well i'm going to show you in a second but first lon i want you to watch this video of one of their mira missions out in space and see if you can catch the the humorous moment that comes

SPEAKER_26: up if you're listening to the audio version it's a space the craft cruising around the planet looking

SPEAKER_00: pretty stationary and then the perspective changes in the video and suddenly we are shown a image that has a bit of text on i'm gonna have lon read it out for you guys once it comes up how is my orbital

SPEAKER_03: maneuvering go to impulse space like oh like one of those how's my driving bumper stickers yes yes but

SPEAKER_23: on a satellite which i think is just incredibly cool and cheeky in front of them uh they've done

SPEAKER_00: two mira missions uh helios is going to come next year in 2026 it's essentially just an engine that takes you up from lower orbit to a higher orbit sure uh but the company claims 30 signed contracts worth 200 million dollars for their space logistics company lawn apart from your luddite ism about going to space i'm curious what you think about our fine friends over at impulse oh i think this idea

SPEAKER_03: is great and has nothing to do with me going to space so i'm all for it i mean i think that to me what's interesting is uh only a few years ago we were reading all of this panic stuff about space debris there was all this like we're just launching stuff up there and then we've got no way to deal with it it just sits there in orbit and one day it could fall to earth and kill us all uh and i feel like

SPEAKER_25: we already have sort of innovated ourselves out of this dilemma it's like well now there's space tug boats that could push things out of the way and like it just even though even if this particular product is not designed for that it feels like we we are developing all of these answers to all of these questions in terms of spending more time in space managing humans in space building things in space and it's hard for our 20th century brains to really wrap our minds around that but a lot of very

SPEAKER_03: smart people are already figuring out like what you called space logistics which i think is sort of this exciting new idea that we actually do have the capacity now to like move things around independently in space and like operate there like we belong there more than you know we used to

SPEAKER_00: yeah all we need is a couple of billboards maybe a gas station or two and we're off to the races all right now helios i promise to show this i'm gonna live up to my word here this is a gift helios and lon as you'll see it's going to cycle through a number of setups here so what's going on well helios is this thing not this thing it is the engine that attaches itself to other people's space technology satellites whatever to push them into other orbits wow and um it's called the high energy kickstate which is one of the coolest uh categories i've heard of in some time and i'm hopeful that it goes well for them i just think that the space economy is now to the point at which it's lucrative

SPEAKER_26: enough to actually kind of a business versus a research project and that's what i've been waiting for as a a lifelong science fiction nerd like this is what i've wanted sure i want to go to space but really what i care about is is my species getting out of our gravity well and the answer is increasingly yes you know lower launch costs faster launch cadences better in orbit technology

SPEAKER_00: forward fueling and movement and you know we'll figure out the space trash problem that you alluded to but i'm just so freaking excited that we're figuring this out because what if you know what if we need to leave all right uh some breaking news before we jumped on today reddit everyone's favorite social network on the intertubes for discussing things with your niche community

SPEAKER_26: is suing anthropic i know this is kind of like the anthropic show sorry about that uh not intentional there's just a lot a lot going on but lon as you recall reddit has a deal with both google and open ai to share its data for their use and anthropic uh did not sign such a deal and after they had been told to stop according to a suit from reddit that i had not read in its

SPEAKER_00: entirety yet so don't yell at me essentially anthropic kept scraping reddit and now they're taking them to court this is to me a pretty big deal because it's going to help i think underscore the tensions between content owners and ai model companies and i don't think we've figured out those economics yet uh one last point before i let you talk is that there's a couple companies told that human native and um created by humans i think on the twist 500 all startups that are trying

SPEAKER_213: to bridge the gap between ip and ai and we'll see who wins there with a space that i care a lot about

SPEAKER_03: yeah i mean we're i feel like we're so so many of these stories keep coming up and we're all just waiting like the courts are clearly gonna have to on some level decide this like we're hearing the ai industry is like look we have to beat china we have to win at all costs that means we get to take everybody's ip they're very clear on their point publishers and sites like reddit and all are very clear on like we don't want to give you our stuff for free you can license it from us for money or you can f off it's those are the two options and i just feel like we keep coming back to it everybody has their own opinion but none of our opinions matter it's whatever u.s district court judge ends up holding the gavel on this one is going to decide and we just keep we keep going over we keep having this fight everybody has their own take and it's just like can we just get the judge today like what are we do we have to wait years and years for one of these cases to finally make it to scotus or wherever like i just want to hear like what does john roberts think like this afternoon like somebody just call him and let's get an answer on this because so many of these companies and these suits and everything is like grinding to a halt because we can't decide if ai should just be allowed to

SPEAKER_219: steal everybody's everything or not trump can get to the supreme court like 23 minutes but it takes

SPEAKER_25: the rest of the world 23 years they're almost done deciding like was 60 minutes unfair to kamala harris or not already and it's like like this is much more important this is much more important than 60 minutes in kamala harris that election already happened like let's please decide if anthropic is allowed to steal reddit content or not because like it's crazy that we still don't know it's such

SPEAKER_223: an important decision i want to make a couple a couple of additional points here because lon i

SPEAKER_23: appreciate your fire i love it but this is even funnier than you could imagine uh in the suit which i have

SPEAKER_00: pulled up here actually you know what i'll just show everyone what i'm looking at here because why not share the love please this is a copy of the uretta anthropic lawsuit and very much pretty much on like page two uh when it's studying the facts of the case reddit writes anthropic is a late blooming artificial intelligence company that bills itself as the white knight of the industry it is anything but anthropic says often undoubtedly that it prioritizes honesty and is guided by unusually high

SPEAKER_65: trust these claims are empty marketing gimmicks wow it is it is the most like heady and nasty opening

SPEAKER_00: to a lawsuit that i can recall but reddit claims and i'm going to quote directly from reddit here uh despite repeated requests to stop anthropic has accessed or attempted to access reddit content more than 100 000 times wow months after saying publicly they wouldn't and yeah you know if you're gonna stand up and say everybody we are the people who have our morals in a row our ducks are crossed our eyes are dotted man then uh you kind of got to live up to it i'm i'm kind of curious if there's a technical answer to this like anthropic may have like not turned off the right service or whatever but no

SPEAKER_26: matter what if it's getting to the point of a public suit something broke in their conversations and it does not make anthropic look good or they just have this attitude that so many in the ai industry seem

SPEAKER_03: to have which is just like this is our natural right we're not stealing from you because we're just using it to train like like the thing you hear so much is well what's different than if you were just a person who read something in a book that you don't owe copyright you know infringement to that author and uh you know like i i think if that's how anthropic and anthropics executives really feel then yeah they're just treating reddit with cavalier disregard for their ip like you know like the jack dorsey tweet like these laws just shouldn't even exist anymore delete all ip law get rid of it you know and it's like i feel like that is the attitude of a lot of people in the ai industry and and maybe including anthropic and i get i get why reddit would feel a little salty and like my oh might bake that into their uh legal argument a little bit yes no i i think reddit i think reddit's probably in the right here uh can i read just like yeah it's like what we were saying about anthropic earlier which

SPEAKER_25: is like if you are billing yourselves and so much of your branding is we're the good guys like we're the

SPEAKER_03: heroic ai company then yeah you've got to actually practice what you preach anytime you get caught doing something underhanded it's going to be worse because you were yes virtue signaling so hard the

SPEAKER_235: other way yes it's like when uh when a religious leader is in in uh commits infidelity you're like

SPEAKER_00: well you were supposed to be the one who got it right right you're the one who made such a big thing

SPEAKER_26: out of it one last thing about this reddit does generate material revenue from its licensing business these deals with open ai and google i pulled their uh i think is their q i think it's the q1 earnings

SPEAKER_00: report and other revenue which is where i believe that stuff lands grew from 20.3 million in q1 24 to 33.7 million q125 that's 66 growth faster i believe in the company's overall growth rate and the company said that it had at the end of q1 remaining uh performance obligations of 224.5 million from its um long-term content licensing contracts so still a lot of revenue there and you got to protect it man because if if google is paying and anthropics not and they're getting the same thing

SPEAKER_03: right that's not that's not a successful business model you can't run it that way i also feel like if you're wondering why your ai so often gets facts wrong it's because it's scraping reddit comments

SPEAKER_00: now you know well all right so i'm just kidding i'm just wow while you say that like it's a bit like saying wikipedia is not trustworthy sure we all know that you should fact check wikipedia but when i pull up the wikipedia page do i read it yes and i feel like reddit's the same way with with human stuff like if i want to get recommendations for niche progressive metal recommendations it's kind of like reddit or nothing long it's been an absolute treat we will get jason out of the the time

SPEAKER_25: zone hell he's currently in he's awake he just texted me he did he did wake up during the show but he decided to let us run with it so thanks james well thanks jason uh we'll have him back on

SPEAKER_00: friday lawn as always an absolute treat to see you we're going to talk to flock safety now a twist 500 company that has been in the news lately for its technology my interview was done before the latest round of headlines but at the time i thought i was actually a little bit too skeptical and a little bit too privacy focused well maybe i was insufficiently privacy focused so let's see how this goes here's flock safety from the twist 500 and we'll see you guys live on friday bye bye bye so we have

SPEAKER_249: yet another excellent twist 500 interview coming your way this time i'm talking to a company called flock safety if you're not familiar with it you may actually have already seen this technology out there in the world it's growing like mad it's raised lots of money it's worth billions of dollars and it is one i think of the hottest private market companies in the united states today so please welcome the show it's garrett langley garrett how you doing i'm doing wonderful alex it's good to see you good to see you now you're down in atlanta which is actually where flock safety is headquartered i don't talk to too many founders from georgia so first of all just before we dive into flock uh why

SPEAKER_252: are you building down in the south yeah no it's it's a it's a good question so one i'm born here so that helps but you know we did yc at flock and if you look at the mission of the company like we exist to create thriving communities and my my co-founder matt and i had this debate of like oh should we stay in the bay area right because we had raised a seed round from gary tann and initialize and licensed hannon and then i go are you guys going to stay in sf and matt was like i i don't think we can if our whole

SPEAKER_256: mission is to like develop these thriving communities yet we're going to leave our not and i and pager well three of us are from atlanta where we can't leave atlanta behind so we came back you know took our suitcases and came home and said we're going to build this thing from atlanta all

SPEAKER_249: right so flock safety as you kind of alluded to with community safety is i think best known for its

SPEAKER_261: license plate reading software these are installed either on a permanent or non-permanent basis solar panels wireless connectivity all that good stuff you also are working on some cool drone stuff with your aerodrome project and provide software to things like 911 calls and so forth so tell me about why this was the right way to attack the safe communities point because i'm curious why this was

SPEAKER_262: where you guys decided to start yeah so there's some pretty i guess alarming statistics that that i didn't

SPEAKER_256: realize which is it's very easy to be a criminal it's really easy right so let's say hypothetically alex i steal your car sure on average in america i've got like a nine and ten chance of getting away

SPEAKER_252: from it getting away with it and let's say i do something like even more heinous let's let's say i

SPEAKER_256: i commit a violent crime against you sure 50 50 odds and that's the average right which means yeah 50 of cities is worse 50 of communities it's better and you you go around the country and you start to realize like you understand why people are really sad like mad and upset because they live in a community that isn't thriving in a community where crime is rampant it's easy to get away with it and so we ask the question why right like why it's like i don't think you want crime to happen in your neighborhood but it does and if you talk to law enforcement they say we don't want crime to exist

SPEAKER_252: what are we supposed to do and you realize it's a lack of evidence okay so it's the equivalent of

SPEAKER_270: let's say you're yelling at your bdr team for not building enough pipeline but like you're not giving

SPEAKER_256: them phone numbers you're not giving them emails you're giving them nothing to work off of they're not magicians and and cops aren't magicians either we don't want them to be we want them to use hard evidence to build an investigation that leads to an arrest and so we said that's where we need to start we start on hard evidence so we built the camera on my dining room table it tracks cars and

SPEAKER_252: needs license plates that was you know seven seven or so years ago coming up on eight it's been quite

SPEAKER_261: a journey since then so why is the evidence problem so cleanly solved or so helped by license plate reading

SPEAKER_258: technologies i presume people are driving around in cars but i'm presuming that i'm missing an element

SPEAKER_256: of what makes this so effective yeah i mean so the most honest answer is like i'm still surprised by the efficacy of the technology so we did the classic yc go talk to a lot of go talk to a lot of customers or potential customers because we knew the evidence piece was like you could go google that and develop a point of view when you talk to these chiefs like oh yeah we just need a license plate it's like but

SPEAKER_252: why and they're like i don't know it's it's just what we need and and now that i'm a bit farther along and there's a few things right one is it's incredibly objective right like a license

SPEAKER_256: flight is a license plate a vehicle is a vehicle there's no this or that it is hard evidence the

SPEAKER_270: second is it's incredibly actionable so if you do call 911 you say oh i just got in a hit and run and it was a you know a car with with black racing stripes like we can just go in this flock and say

SPEAKER_252: show me all the cars with black racing stripes that are in this area at this time great now have a license plate like you legally have to have a license plate to drive so we wind up being like

SPEAKER_256: not only is it objective which is good for policing writ large but also it's actionable and a lot of other forms of evidence like i have you know cameras at my house doorbell cameras and stuff it's not actionable if i have a grainy picture of a guy in a hoodie it's not actionable like there's there's no next step and so getting back to my bdr sdr example it's like you want a phone number

SPEAKER_252: you want an email a linkedin profile is interesting that's not a way to connect you know now you can obviously direct message on linkedin but i think my point being is like that picture is not enough you actually need to have something actionable one thing i was i was

SPEAKER_249: pleasantly surprised by which is how much the company has grown i think tc wrote that you guys

SPEAKER_261: crossed 300 million in ar last year 70 year-over-year growth when i think about selling to to neighborhoods to police stations to that that sort of group which i know is a big part of your customer base i think of like low budgets and slow sales cycles but it seems to be kind of the opposite

SPEAKER_249: that the company is scaling very very quickly and presumably efficiently so what's it like selling into the law enforcement and neighborhood space yeah i mean i think you know we went from 1 million to

SPEAKER_256: 100 million in ar in just over three years three and a half years which is like pretty fast i mean that's not a whiz but you know i'll take second place um you know or third place where everyone's at but it's but yeah i mean on the one hand it's you know i don't have a background in law enforcement i don't have a background selling local government and all of our investors and advisors right this is a horrible idea okay so i'm not crazy okay so it is right so it's a it's a three strikes are out right so we're based in lana so that's a strike we manufacture hardware that's a strike and we're now selling to local government three strikes your company will fail but what we didn't realize is that our product was not only 10 times better arguably 100 times better

SPEAKER_289: it was a fraction of the cost of existing solutions so that that's very interesting to me can we pause

SPEAKER_261: there because you guys offer cameras solar panels and connectivity which to me seems like the full stack package how can it be so much cheaper given that i can't really imagine a component you can take out and make these cameras work the way you want them to and have their data be accessible yes the the

SPEAKER_256: secret that's no longer a secret because obviously we're pretty at scale the secret then was realizing that the existing products were largely construction projects so if you were to buy uh incumbent solution 80 of the cost structure was the physical labor it wasn't the camera it wasn't the software it was i'm going to go conduit you know all this this uh electricity i got to go run fiber it's a big construction project on a right-of-way and like ai is not going to make that cheaper there's nothing that's going to make digging holes and tunnels maybe the born company but like outside of that it's really expensive to dig holes and so we realized that if you removed all of the construction cost and it was just a simple pole with a solar panel and effectively you know a smartphone as the camera yeah you could drive the bomb down dramatically you could drive the implementation down and so for us

SPEAKER_296: it went from on average anywhere from 80 to 120 000 camera to 3 000 camera and just for folks who are

SPEAKER_261: listening bomb bom bill of materials the the stuff that goes into the actual thing that's right yeah that's right that explains a lot of the growth because 3k versus 100 is an enormous savings this is a dumb question but when you describe the problem of digging holes in the ground cost thereof you know conduits connectivity that's wired and so forth it seems pretty stupid why wouldn't you put a solar panel in for electricity why wouldn't you use you know i'm not exactly sure which connectivity system you use but like wireless connectivity it seems like such kind of an obvious solution to this problem so why was the market blind and therefore left this huge door

SPEAKER_301: open for flock to become a huge company yeah well so the first thing i did was i don't have a hardware

SPEAKER_256: background either so i really was setting myself for hard more strikes yeah i know um and so the first thing i did was i think what anyone would do is like i got on a plane to china and went to shenzhen and was like i gotta find something to build this thing for me yeah and right so i spent a month in china going to all these all these uh cms or kind of manufacturers saying hey i have this i have this vision i want a camera that can read a license plate of a car traveling 100 miles an hour you know 200 feet away needs to run on the solar panel and needs to work in rhode island and it needs to work in arizona and then it needs to work in colorado so like really cold really hot really shady really sunny and every single person i met was like what you're describing is impossible why it cannot be built the when you balance off the power consumption with the computer vision on the edge with 4g or 5g connectivity like interesting the the intersecting circle the venn diagram had nothing in the middle and so we naively were just said maybe they're wrong and it took us a couple years like the camera was not performant stable a lot of things it wasn't pretty you can find maybe pictures are online of what the early prototype looks like but it did track for car it did read a license plate and now you fast forward we have you know the incumbents in the market have said okay wait a second flock and figure this out maybe we can figure it out and it took them five or six

SPEAKER_276: years to catch up but you know the that's been proven to be true but yeah but most of the world just assumed it was technically impossible well it turns out they were entirely wrong and i'm glad you

SPEAKER_261: guys persevered because i love to see incumbent solutions get knocked down by about 97 in terms of price yeah now you're not just doing license by reading cameras i want to just very briefly on the flock aerodrome project which essentially as far as i can tell uses drones as first responders essentially arrive on the site and get visibility into what's going on clearly a drone can't make an

SPEAKER_249: arrest or whatever but it gets eyes on the site very very quickly which you guys say actually reduces the need for police and so forth to show up in some cases yeah i mean so so i would actually

SPEAKER_256: expand on that and say look at the the acronym we sell on it's dfr so drone is a first responder and people jump to the tv version of that which is let's go chase bad guys with in fast cars right and that's it that's a that's totally agree high speed pursuits are one of the most dangerous things that police officers do for both citizens and suspects it's just it's they're dangerous it's bad it's bad so like yes we replace that but like thankfully in most places they're not there isn't a high speed pursuit every single day there is fires we use the drones to go to fires first because how often is there a fire alarm unless a false alarm and yet you roll out a truck

SPEAKER_314: a fire truck which is very expensive very people and do you run two of them do you run three of them

SPEAKER_296: well a drone can get there in 30 to 45 seconds and now you can immediately provide that live video to

SPEAKER_252: fire i'll give you another great example i was meeting with one of our customers yesterday and it's a

SPEAKER_256: it's a large college university right so it can't it's a couple square mile campus they use the drones to provide aerial escorts to students at night so just i don't know if you i don't remember you went to college oxon went to college in a fairly urban environment and it was a known thing that if you were walking home by yourself at night you could call 9-1-1

SPEAKER_252: and the local pd that you know i was georgia tech and gtpd would escort you home yep same thing at university of chicago same idea yep and it's a great service well not every single police department's fully staffed anymore and so now this agency uses our drones but if you call 911 say hey i need to escort the drone walks you home now clearly the drone can't stop you know something bad happening but it gives that situational awareness and in this case you know you've got one officer managing three drones at once so now we can do three escorts at once from the comforts of you know a desk and so it's more

SPEAKER_319: of that force multiplication where as a city you're just getting more efficiency than you would have

SPEAKER_261: otherwise that really tracks me and i would presume that i would be probably 90 as safe as i would be

SPEAKER_249: if i had was like you know being driven by a police officer if i had the drone overhead because who wants to mug the person who's literally being watched by the cops like it just seems yeah yeah

SPEAKER_261: because the drone can then peel off for me and follow bob or whomever decided to take my lunch money you're a parent i'm a parent we have between us a nearly half dozen children and i can from the perspective of me wanting to keep my little girls safe and secure this makes a lot of sense to me the whole the whole package makes sense to me but also i am you know a little bit worried about overall degradation of personal privacy here in the states and i'm sitting here really absolutely torn between the practical of you guys talk about solving oh what was the last number of 5 000 crimes a day or helping to solve that many which is an enormous amount of crime so yeah yeah legitimate applause but i also know that police officers aren't always um behaving in a manner that we would consider to be conducive to the public good they're humans too they're humans too and we were giving a lot of data to law enforcement and i think you guys have a reasonable approach to this you know delete after 30 days encryption not sharing willy-nilly all the stuff that i could kind of hope that you would have in place for a solution like this so straight up points but if you're someone like me who's a little bit skeptical of turning over this much information to law enforcement uh how do you balance the concern of of misuse on the official side or even just a busybody hoa person tracking someone's boyfriend's car like i the human element here worries me quite a lot about how this could be misused so i just wanted to pose that and just kind of hear your philosophy as a company because you guys have a

SPEAKER_270: lot of cameras out there and i'm sure you have data on me yeah do you use google maps uh did daily yeah you're comfortable i guess with google know your exact location at all times no but i don't see an

SPEAKER_256: alternative but you make that trade-off though right oh yeah and i think that's the beauty of our country which is flocks not going in and installing cameras without permission from our democratically elected officials on a broad sense and whether that's your neighborhood because you voted for your hoa president to be president and make this decision on behalf of your community or your mayor who you voted to be the mayor of your city and that person can get rejected if they make bad decisions

SPEAKER_304: and that's the beauty of the system so on the one hand you know i'd answer that which is like no one's

SPEAKER_249: uh we're not forcing this on anyone can i can i nitpick at that because i feel like i get to individually opt into using google maps and on my iphone i can say you can use my location when i'm using the app only not at all that's useless etc but i do have some individual control over this whereas you know yeah hoas are not famed for being the easiest to control democratic institutions you

SPEAKER_82: might say consensus and so i feel like i don't have as much of a say although i i will fully admit gary that your point is good that i do vote for my mayor and if they make a choice that's reasonable

SPEAKER_304: yeah no and i think you're right because it's it's not a democracy right that's not how our country

SPEAKER_256: works it's democratically elected people that make decisions and my guess is in the case of rhode island and in your hometown and providence you probably disagree with a lot both the governor and the mayor do but hopefully in general you approve of most of the things they do if that's who you voted for so there's that piece right but let's actually move into how the technology works which is also i think important yeah hit me one of the coolest things about flock is we thought through

SPEAKER_252: what are all of the potential negative side effects of this technology and how do we empower the other elected officials or the customers to move those levers to best fit their community and so the implementation of this product is dramatically different city by city state by state and i'll give you some really good examples okay california there's a state law called sp34 okay and it

SPEAKER_275: dictates that this technology cannot be used to enforce immigration straight does it the federal law

SPEAKER_252: does not apply in california it's illegal so our customers do not use our products to force immigration guess what in texas they do yes in texas that's societally accepted and you go down this list of talk about data retention in austin texas they stored the data for seven days that's what their elected body decided was appropriate for their community but in dallas texas it's 90 days garrett floc ceo was not elected president of america or the police chief of america so i'm going to build the tools to let those who were elected to make these decisions move it up and down same on transparency most of our customers in california have public transparency portals that we develop for them take some of the people in california and you can see where the cameras are you can see why searches are being done you can see you can see an incredible amount of information it's up to piedmont california it's not up to me and so state by state we do that and then i think what we are a big advocate of is like we

SPEAKER_256: actually believe in regulation i think technology like flock should be regulated and so you look at somewhere like virginia and i wrote an op-ed recently in virginia on this topic there was the flock surveillance bill that the governor finally signed into place i don't agree with every single detail of it but i think i broadly applaud the fact that the governor said we need to we need to regulate this stuff we should have an opinion as a state of how this technology is used ramifications if you abuse it and all that and i think that's great because i think for me alex maybe the the the more disappointing part is when people simply take a stance of something like flock shouldn't exist

SPEAKER_252: and i'm like come on that's like there's a problem in this country crime is a problem like we we helped return over a thousand missing people in the last year at flock you're gonna tell

SPEAKER_256: me that's like not good we could debate maybe how it's used but for me i live in the real world where like problems need to be solved and we welcome criticism of like whether it's data retention or

SPEAKER_252: data sharing like let's find this balance but same with you and using google maps you're making an accurate decision that you would like to get to your destination faster you're going to make this trade-off if you didn't trust google you'd maybe use apple if you didn't like trust apple you'd use the next product but i think is paper maps at that point you're getting down the list pretty quick

SPEAKER_249: right is that still around i think it was part of aol i used to work there all that sounds pretty

SPEAKER_261: reasonable and i don't have a compelling argument for why my heebie-jeebies still get picked up i think there's maybe even something that oddly american about like the idea you can get in your car and drive and kind of be anonymous and that does seem to be eroded but i also kind of argue with myself about this because the technology to capture images and store the information and analyze it is out there so people are going to do it and flock did not invent the idea of license plate scanning and so i i'm at once kind of like my inner child libertarian is butting up against my adult mature need for public safety and it's it's an interesting kind of like the thing that i deal with but i think a thousand people brought back five thousand crowns a day i think i'm gonna land on your side here

SPEAKER_349: even though i'm like 60 40 versus like 90 10. here's what i would challenge you and it is like

SPEAKER_256: regardless of where you land the right answer is like even if you land against it then go build a better version well i don't think you can well that's the debate right like because if you're a mayor and look at look at cities across the us as they decreased their investment in public safety

SPEAKER_252: they all got the boot because as a citizen i want to be safe like it the bedrock of a thriving community is safety property rights yeah and absent that safety you have chaos yeah and so like for me i'm obviously quite passionate about it there is an american way to do this and like that's the way i think we're doing it and i think luckily we have a great legal team constitutional attorneys every product we build alex like from the whiteboard yeah we have our legal team in the room because there's a lot of stuff you could go build that we just aren't ever going to build because we don't think it's a good idea for america it might work in other countries for america and i think that's one of the unique things about flock that now that we're at scale you know we can afford to have

SPEAKER_256: these highly educated attorneys you know sit in the room and give us this feedback before it hits you know production which i think is a better way to do it absolutely and i i don't want to sound

SPEAKER_261: overly antagonistic here because again i'm very sympathetic to what you're working on and i'm also very impressed by the business results i just my my faith in the integrity of public officials even here in my local polity is is pretty minimal just given how they behave a lot of the time but but that's not your fault it's not your fault that police officers like to turn off their body cameras and so forth i mean that is entirely separate and so i shouldn't ding you for it we're also giving tools to people that i wouldn't trust to take care of my dogs and that's that's what i began to their fret a little bit but but i'm glad you brought that up though because like that

SPEAKER_256: to me is actually the root the root issue which is um there was we got criticism at some point that was related to someone's distrust of the federal government and my my comment back to them was well you realize the issue is that you don't trust the federal government that that's the actual issue the issue isn't what you what i'm doing at flock and i'm maybe i'm getting the ramification of that

SPEAKER_360: it should be like you should question whether like what you should be doing differently in your life to

SPEAKER_261: not have that distrust yeah well i mean we're gonna have well that's that's reforming politics and the government and the governance of our nation and its states and communities is not not your problem uh there is something cool you guys built though which is called a flock safety safe list and this is for neighborhoods hoas that have flock so you can essentially mark yourself as a resident i live here why why do we need that and also alternatively why can't we have that on a city-wide basis i know

SPEAKER_304: the answer but i'm curious yeah so i mean getting back to it we had enough customers ask for it so we

SPEAKER_256: built it that's the most like honest honest answer i can't knock that i would love to say that there's some broader stroking future point no we built that uh a long long time ago um and from a city perspective i don't think there's anything technically stopping us from doing that but

SPEAKER_304: it only there's a single city that has ever asked to turn that on because criminals would immediately

SPEAKER_261: then opt out themselves and yeah yeah i uh i just wish that i could do it though yeah i'll never

SPEAKER_270: forget one of the first conversations we had um someone was asking me a similar questions alex

SPEAKER_252: and i i pulled up you know just google their name and i was like oh how how was your beach vacation last week with your grandkids and they're like what are you talking about i'm like you literally posted public photos of your vacation on facebook with your grandkids faces just like feels crazy to me um because

SPEAKER_296: legally speaking if you're on a public road you have no expectation of privacy you're using government

SPEAKER_256: property yes and the license plate is the property of the state of which it's registered in so we're

SPEAKER_252: not putting cameras in your house we're putting cameras on public roads to drive a public need

SPEAKER_261: around safety i think that's the most compelling argument that you can make which is it's state property twice it's a state road it's a state license plates you are literally using government approval to drive on this you have to follow certain rules if you don't like it tough i'll just say this gary talking to you today is the first time i think we've spoken and yeah you seem very very thoughtful about this and so i am to a large degree a swaged or swage um in my concerns and i appreciate the level of care you're taking on this front but let's put all this beside us and go to the future what have customers asked for you to build next oh great question so one of the things that

SPEAKER_270: i didn't realize was just like how much laborious effort it is to run a police department it's it's

SPEAKER_252: crazy so i'll give you a great example we were talking about 9-1-1 what if i told you that when you call 9-1-1 there's typically anywhere from a one to three minute lag before officers actually

SPEAKER_289: know you've called 9-1-1 that would not surprise me that sounds quick compared to what i would think for local government services yeah but think about how wild that is right there could literally

SPEAKER_252: be a cop a block away oh and it's going to take three minutes for them to even know you've called 9-1-1 i'm on board now that's crazy not yet and so for many people their first interaction with with public safety with law enforcement is calling 9-1-1 and it typically leads a pretty bad taste in their mouth um it's a largely antiquated system you have really hard working dispatchers you have a lot of people that want to do to do well and so you know for looking at something like flock 9-1-1 now that 9-1-1 call is live trans transcribed and posted to the nearest officer so that officer is a block away and you think about the level of ai we can apply to that use case of now in some cities like in atlanta there's a lot of calls for service it would be overwhelming for an officer to see everything coming through we can now use ai to say actually here are the the predicted cases you should go respond hey there is a there's a word of a victim there's a word of it this isn't about a pothole this is about someone's been hurt go faster to that so if i look across the board

SPEAKER_256: from dispatch to patrol across the board there's so many opportunities to bring ai into public safety and that's probably where we're spending most of our time right now do you think that'll include more drones yeah i mean i think if you look at the drone use case today we've got three drones that we build different use cases i think drones are largely you know cameras that can fly and so we sell lots of different types of cameras there's lots of cameras out there drones are gonna be the same way

SPEAKER_360: i think we'll wake up in a day and most cities will have quite a fleet of drones yeah i think that's

SPEAKER_261: right i also i just very much don't want to be like i'm worried about a feature in which drones are pervasive and then toss that onto flock because that's not really fair we care a lot about that too

SPEAKER_256: like everyone most of our team lives in america i live in atlanta i care deeply about how this technology rolls out and it's like i'm a citizen too i have a family too and so i were a big advocate of preventative regulation around how new technology can be used and because i think for better for worse and i think larger for the better we hold our local governments to a higher standard than we do our businesses like they are expected to operate differently yes by a huge margin if yeah if you call we're talking about aerial airlines earlier if you call delta and you get the 100 number and it's all ai and it like hallucinates something weird you're going to laugh it off and like you know call back oh that's kind of weird yeah because you're just booking a flight if you call 9-1-1 that's a very different expectation of service and when a law enforcement officer to your point shows up we hold that industry to a higher standard and that's great we should it also means that as technology providers we also have to hold ourselves to a higher standard and as you know the classical you know move fast and break things type approach in silica valley like doesn't work in law enforcement

SPEAKER_252: you know our customers drive ford f-150s they don't drive teslas i leave a lot of things in your hands

SPEAKER_297: to manage well and i'm very glad that you're so thoughtful about it flock safety.com and with

SPEAKER_249: aor being where it is and growth i'm presuming ipo in early 2027 yeah we'll see we'll see yeah all right i really appreciate you i appreciate you engaging at all points and uh let's get some more drones up in the air all right sounds good have a good one alex