On Tuesday, I flew to Atlanta to visit the new Flock HQ, which feels like a CB2 showroom met a high-end health-membership club. It has the open-floor, reserve-a-desk hallmarks of a Silicon Valley office. There were just a few dozen employees around. The remote-first firm moved to this space at the end of June, and they want the two-story office to be customer-forward: About a fifth of the space is taken up by classrooms with Apple Store-type screens meant to teach clients about Flock products. On the second floor, I saw a disconnected Flock camera, painted in gold, bearing a dozen or so signatures. “Every million dollars of revenue, we would do a camera,” Langley says, referring to the memento. “Now we do more like a million a day.”
It’s a few minutes past 10 a.m., and he’s fresh off of a Fox & Friends appearance when he arrives to join his cofounder and Flock’s chief people officer, Paige Todd, 41, in the conference room between their two offices. It’s their first-ever joint interview with a publication.
“I think the mistake we’ve made over the last nine years is not banging the table of every success story,” Langley, the son of two salespeople, tells me. Across our hour-plus conversation, he peppered in stories illustrating the virtue of Flock cameras. These examples end on good notes, but they’re also, well, horribly dark: One case concerned parents fleeing a welfare check in Arkansas with their children only to be caught by Flock cameras in Texas.
Langley has a Flock-savior complex of sorts, and the cofounders’ superpowers become clear just a few minutes in. They each possess an unrelenting, high-school-debate-champion eagerness to go mano a mano on criticism, but it’s mixed with the Southern charm of two Georgia natives.
One story driving Flock’s villain era is a series of news reports on how police officers have used the technology to stalk their past romantic partners. But “I think it’s very rare that someone just wakes up and becomes a stalker because of Flock,” says Todd. “I think they probably were before, but now our tool is actually making it very clear that that’s happening.”
In most cases, Flock launches aren’t put to a direct vote in local communities. But “the way the system is designed, the last 250 years, is that the person who’s democratically elected makes decisions on your behalf,” Langley told me. “So I would argue people do have a choice, and if you don’t like the decisions that a certain mayor or city council makes, you vote differently four years later.”
